Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is doctor Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a podcaster. From personal dramas to scientific uproars, it's been a wild year for the biggest health and fitness podcaster in the world. And today we get to discover his biggest new insights about life, relationships and protocols. Expect to learn whether you actually should drink coffee within 90 minutes of waking up. How to get the best sleep of your life according to the latest science. How to become a morning person. What Andrew has learned about the perils of fame and public scrutiny. What new research says on the world of longevity supplements, why you should always do your research when testing with peptides and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome doctor Andrew Hubermande. There's been a lot of controversy over the last few months. The Internet's been ablaze with speculation. I think it's important to get it up top. What is happening with the state of the adenosine system? Research within the first 90 minutes of the day.

Adenosine is an incredibly interesting molecule. It exists in the brain and body. It accumulates with the number of hours that you're awake. So the longer you're awake, the more adenosine accumulates. It does many things in the brain and body. One of the most important things that it does is to give us the subjective experience of feeling sleepy and the objective feeling of our body being fatigued, of feeling literally heavier, requiring more energy to move ourselves when we sleep and when we allow ourselves to go into states of deep rest that are similar to sleep, we can talk about this. The adenosine system is adjusted so that there's less effective adenosine circulating or bound to adenosine receptors. Okay, so this sort of adenosine 101, there's a lot more to it, but that's sufficient for what we need to talk about for now. The drug, the most commonly used drug, the drug we're using now and that we're on right now, caffeine, which is consumed by, it's estimated more than 90% of the world's adult population, effectively works by blocking the adenosine receptor. There's some nuance there, but we can think of it that way for simplicity's sake.

And in doing so, it prevents the sleepiness inducing actions of adenosine. However, when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that was around trying to bind to those receptors is still around. In fact, it's accumulated even more, which at least partially explains the so called caffeine crash or the dip in energy, the fatigue, that is, that we experience maybe three or 4 hours after consuming caffeine. Okay. As I mentioned before, when we go to sleep at night, adenosine is cleared from our system. There was a lot of debate over the years about why we sleep. In fact, the great Matt Walker wrote the book why we sleep. And a lot of that has to do with the cell biology of regulating potassium and other ions that are in neurons. And for those that are interested in the cell biology, it's about readjusting the amount of potassium inside and outside the cells, which is happening on an ongoing basis. But you could think of the time that we sleep as doing many things, but one of the most important things is to bring those adenosine levels down, whatever adenosine has accumulated to bring it back down, such that when we wake up in the morning, we feel alert.

Okay. There are a lot of reasons why we feel alert. Some of them we can call pro alertness mechanisms, like the release of cortisol. Some of them are about removing the brake on wakefulness, like reducing adenosine. Here we're talking about removing the break on wakefulness by reducing adenosine. So let's say, what time do you go to sleep at night? Typically, if you add your way, 10:00. 10:00 and what time do you typically wake up feeling great with no alarm clock?

636 45.

Great. So let's say you go to sleep at 1030 and you wake up at your usual time. Chances are you will have cleared a lot. But not all the adenosine that's required for you to wake up feeling very alert. Let's say you stay up a little bit later. Maybe you stay up until eleven. Maybe you wake up twice that night to use the restroom. For whatever reason, you consumed a bit more fluid. Maybe it takes an extra ten minutes for you to fall back asleep the second time. And then you wake up in the morning and you didn't get the total amount of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep that you're used to getting. Without question, your levels of adenosine upon waking are going to be slightly higher than they normally would. Okay. Once you understand what adenosine does, you think about that scenario. It's kind of an obvious thing. However, most people don't sleep until they naturally wake up feeling refreshed. Most people are using an alarm clock. Most people are not going to sleep as early as they need to, or sleeping as late as they need to, or both. So as a consequence, when you wake up in the morning, your adenosine levels are not zeroed out to the place where you would be maximally awake.

There is a lot of or some residual adenosine present. What do people typically do? Typically, people get out of bed, they might look at their phone as, you know, I encourage them to go find sunlight, if the sun isn't out, to turn on bright lights and then get outside and get sunlight in their eyes as soon as they can. But chances are they're going to grab some caffeine, they're going to pour themselves a cup of coffee, or they're going to have some, if you're me or Brahmate, they're going to perhaps have an energy drink. All fine and good, but now think about what we just said, which is that what you're doing then is blocking the adenosine receptors effectively. And whatever residual adenosine was there because you didn't sleep enough to clear it out persists. Plus, you're now starting to accumulate more adenosine, such that by mid morning that adenosine has accumulated, the caffeine has worn off, and maybe by early afternoon, especially after a meal. Many, not all people experience an afternoon crash in energy somewhere between 01:00 p.m. typically and 04:00 p.m. somewhere in there. For me, the trough in my natural energy levels in the afternoon is consistently between two and 03:00 p.m. regardless of how well I slept the night before.

Many people also find a consistently placed trough in their energy independent of all this. Okay, so what can we do? Some years back, I started suggesting that people consider if they have an afternoon crash in energy, that they delay their morning caffeine intake for 90 minutes after waking. Some years after that, an academic review was published saying, well, there's really no evidence that that specific practice is necessary, but I still think, and I stand by the fact that it can be very useful for those that experience an afternoon crash. Why? Why? Well, two things. First of all, by delaying caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, there's an interesting phenomenon whereby even though you are out of bed and walking around, you're not asleep. If you don't block those adenosine receptors, there's still clearance of adenosine occurring in.

Part because of residual rest.

You're sort of still asleep.

Wow.

The other thing that works remarkably well to clear out residual adenosine is upon waking, if you don't feel rested enough to do something. I've talked also a lot about which is another one of these zero cost tools that has a growing amount of impressive science to support it, which is non sleep depressed, or NSDR, also called yoga Nidra, which is its proper name. The ancient practice is yoga Nidra. So we want to be fair to its proper naming. A ten or 20 or 30 minutes yoga Nidra, or NSDR, if you prefer, done upon waking, but before getting out of bed. Or maybe you go into the living room and put on your headphones or listen to an NSDR script. They're available all over the Internet. Done by me, done by a woman named Kelly Boys, who has a really lovely voice. If you prefer a woman's voice, it's actually the one I typically use. You will emerge from that feeling much more rested now, Doctor Matt Walker himself and I are collaborating on a project to evaluate how NSDR impacts brain states to see if it actually mimics sleep. There's some beautiful studies already published out of Scandinavia showing that longer yoga nidra type practices non sleep.

Deep rest can replenish dopamine stores in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which prepares you for mental and physical action. So this is a very well established tool from the sort of yogic perspective. It's a tool that's gaining increasing scientific evidence, and it, for everybody I know that has tried this, who reports back to me about it, it's a remarkably energetically replenishing exercise that requires no payment, no nothing, just 1020 or 30 minutes, NSTR. Now, what could be happening in that state? In that state, the body is still, the mind is active, which mimics very closely rapid eye movement sleep. So the test that Matt Walker and I are doing with the experiment is to see, is having your body completely still, but your mind active, able to clear adenosine stores in the same way that being deeply asleep is. My guess is that it's not the same, but that it might be a midway effect. That's the hypothesis. We could be wrong. I look forward to seeing the results. So, by delaying your caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, but making sure that you hydrate, get your electrolytes, you know, something like element, which we both, both enjoy and make good use of, you are clearing out the adenosine that is residual in your system.

Now, why do I also keep harping on this idea of going out and getting bright light in your eyes? Ideally sunlight, but if, especially on cloudy days, but if it's not out yet, you can turn on bright lights. Well, when one does that you actually amplify the naturally occurring peak in cortisol that occurs soon after waking. So about 30 minutes before waking, your cortisol starts to rise. It's part of the mechanism that wakes you up without an alarm clock. As soon as you get out of bed and you start moving around, that cortisol increases further. Your body temperature, by the way, is increasing in parallel when you view bright light, and these are very well established studies in humans as well as animal models. But in humans, when you view bright light, 10,000 lux indoor light, if you're using a seasonal affective disorder treatment lamp, or getting outside, even on a cloudy day, and looking toward the sun, looking east in the morning without sunglasses, eyeglasses and contacts, fine, you induce a near 50% increase in the height of that cortisol peak. That might sound like a bad thing because everyone's afraid of cortisol, but that's not a bad thing.

It prepares your day, prepares you for a day where your immune system is bolstered, your energy and alertness is bolstered, and your ability to learn and your mood, I maybe said mood twice, forgive me, are bolstered. In addition to that, there are interactions between light and the adenosine system. Light impacts the functional availability of the adenosine receptor in very interesting ways. Light increases. Bright light that is viewed by the eyes increases the height of that cortisol peak. And then the cortisol peak also helps to counteract the adenosine system. Now, in addition to that, when you get sleepy at night, part of that effect is due to the increase in melatonin, which is released from the pineal gland, a pea sized gland deep in the vestiges of your brain. When you view bright light at night or during the day, and especially in the morning, it quashes those melatonin levels. So when you wake up in the morning and you haven't slept enough, or even if you have, your adenosine levels are still not to zero. Your melatonin levels are still not to zero, and your cortisol is rising. So you've got a pro wakefulness system, cortisol, that you can accelerate or amplify.

Rather, by viewing brightly light, you've got a anti wakefulness system in the form of melatonin and adenosine that are pushing back on your wakefulness. You're in this kind of like grogginess, and you can further suppress those systems without caffeine by viewing bright light. So viewing bright light both increases the pro wakefulness systems in the brain and body and suppresses the anti wakefulness systems in the brain and body, both pushing down on the accelerator of wakefulness and mood and alertness and reducing the brake. Right. Otherwise you're sort of trying to drive with the emergency brake on. Then if 16 to 90 minutes later, you ingest caffeine, now you're blocking the adenosine receptor. Sure, that's fine. I love caffeine. I certainly drink a lot of caffeine and enjoy it for all its effects. And you're now in a position where the arc of your wakefulness is going to be in nice concert with the also increase in adenosine that's naturally going to accumulate throughout the day. And again, there's no requirement to delay your caffeine 60 to 90 minutes after waking. But for people that experience a market afternoon crashed, it's an incredibly effective way to offset partially or eliminate that afternoon crash.

That's pretty much everybody who doesn't get tired in the middle of the afternoon. Tell you what I've done.

Jaco Willink doesn't get tired ever.

Do you think he's got that genetic mutation?

I don't know. You know, I went down to visit him after his podcast. I actually did a sauna session with his family and some of their family friends, and they had heard that I've been pushing the heat in the sauna a bit more. And by the way, I don't recommend this unless you're very heat adapted. I'm not great at the cold. I put my cold plunge at about 48, 45 degrees. Rogan and other people make fun of me for this. Um, Lex is russian, so he doesn't have to cold plunge. He was born into the cold of Siberia. Um, there's a photo of this actually on the Internet. I, um. From the time he was young, they were cold conditioning him. That's why he has such a warm heart. Um, but in terms of the heat, I can, I'm pretty heat tolerant. So I've been cranking my sauna, traditional sauna, to about 210, 220, but, um, mostly 2210. I went down there and Jaco challenged me to what he calls the factory reset protocol, which is 30 minutes at 225 brutal. And it, and we had about eight or nine bodies in that sauna.

So it was probably claustrophobic.

It was probably hotter than that. I was the one guy down on the floor. All the others, it's men and women were sitting up there laughing at me, and I almost tapped out. And then they do a five minute cold plunge and they go back and forth three times I did one round with them, so I don't recommend it because if you're not heat conditioned, you can give yourself brain damage. Um, by the way, for people that don't know, if you put a towel over your head or you wear one of these banya hats, it actually insulates your brain so you're able to stay in longer. People think, oh, it must be, must be that much. But you're actually insulating the brain from the heat. So, um, yeah, so Jaco, um, you know, he's obviously tough. He's, you know, legitimately battle tested. Um, you know, and at the same time, it's remarkable to me how much energy he has. He finished dinner, so we did the sauna, we did a four hour podcast, then we did the sauna cold thing I just described. Then we did dinner, and then he went off to see a chromag show starting at like 10:00 and then the next morning, of course, he posted his watch.

So he does seem to have more energy, or he just forces himself to ignore whatever fatigue chronically.

That seems so unlikely to be able to continue to do that, just sheer will that it feels like your body would eventually come in. And perhaps I'm not accounting for the will of Jocko, but, yeah, there's. What is it? It's a very small number of people, but there is a genetic mutation that allows certain cohorts to exist on between sort of three and 5 hours sleep. And that's just where they're at.

Yeah. Very rare. Probably. They have very fast adenosine clearance systems. Viewed differently, perhaps they don't accumulate as much adenosine during the day.

Someone test jocko, get his blood, get his. I imagine that when you try and get him with the needle, it just, you know, bends.

I've talked about some of these before, but the. The comments on YouTube about Jaco are the best. The, uh, like, when Jaco is born, the doctor looked at his, um, parents and said, it's a man.

When he does a push up, he doesn't lift himself. He pushes the world away.

He doesn't do push ups. He does earth downs. That's. I've seen that one. And, uh, there are a bunch of other ones that are. That are really amusing.

He's the new Chuck Norris.

Yeah, but I think those guys are selected for the teams in part through their ability to, you know, cognitively and physically push aside fatigue. I think for most people, you know, they need six to 8 hours of sleep per night, unless growing teen years battling some illness that sort of thing. Um, you know, if. If ever you're tip, you're used to going to sleep at 10:00 p.m. or something, and suddenly at 07:00 p.m. you feel incredibly tired, you're probably battling something and you should go to sleep. Um, you know, I. I need about six to 8 hours, but the other night I got nine. I rarely get nine.

Felt like a superhuman.

Yeah. Typically for me it's about 7 hours. And then I do this ten to 20 minutes non sleep deep rest. On the drive over here, I did a ten minute non sleep depth.

Have you ever seen that meme where it talks about the different hours of sleep that you have and it's got a sort of face of a guy and it's zero. His sort of face is falling off, 1 hour. His face is falling off and it really accurately represents exactly how it feels. 6 hours, face falling off 7 hours. Face falling off eight. Great. But for some reason, and I totally agree with this, 2 hours. The guy's fucking superhuman, the dudes. And what is it about that period? It just seems like maybe it's a 90 minutes up and down. It allows you to really align that one sleep cycle and you're like, well, okay. If you're sleeping 2 hours, you know that you're going to feel like shit. You know that this is just. Okay. I'm in. I'm in sort of war mode.

Yeah.

But thinking about the teams, guys, jocko and.

Well, sorry. Just what I think you're seeing in that somebody sleeps just 2 hours every once in a while and feels really great. You'll notice that they get hyper verbal. It's a mild form of mania before the crash.

No way.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, we don't talk about this terribly much because rapid eye movement sleep is critical for removing the emotional load of previous day and previous day memories and experiences. But rapid eye movement sleep has also been used as a clinical treatment for depression. Right. Which is kind of odd because one of the primary symptoms of depression is waking up at three or four in the morning and not being able to fall back asleep again. So, you know, there's a. There's a kind of a mystery in the relationship between sleep and mood. But I think it's fair to say that on average, you need to get sufficient amount of sleep for you. And for most people, that means six to 8 hours plus or -2 hours, right. Depending on your age and what else you're dealing with in life. And I think it's also fair to say that if ever you had to stay up all night or you only get 2 hours of sleep, you will probably experience some sort of hypermania for you and then or hypo excuse me, hypomania. Talking a lot, feeling really energetic and then boom.

You're going to get smashed. Yeah, I mean I've tracked my sleep in one form or another for a decade. Sleep cycle the app on mobile. Really great by the way if anyone's sort of on the road and needs to use an alarm. Sleep cycle is fantastic if you pay for the premium. I'm not a partner, no way affiliated.

I just want to give it a try.

I've used that thing for probably a decade. I'm not a fan of using your phone as an alarm clock but if you're on the road, I've been in hotels a lot recently. It's a good it automatically triggers recordings when you begin to snore when you begin to sleep, speak in your sleep and you can play those back and it just records them and puts them on the cloud for the rest of time. So I have a couple of friends who have full sentences, entire conversations. A very well known podcaster and previous guests of this show has entire debates in his sleep.

People should post them. We should do the actual sleep.

Im trying to get him to put them online because they are so funny. But I love sleep cycle and thats great. I think ive averaged over a decade about 6 hours 45 of active sleep. But I was a club promoter for a long time. That 6 hours 45 was closer to probably six and now 730. So I'm kind of splitting the difference from my previous life to my new one. One of my favorite tweets from you is don't ask people how they are doing, ask how they are sleeping. You'll learn a lot more.

Yeah, you get a window into what's really going on for them because we have this throwaway response to how are you doing? I'm like, I'm okay or I'm great or I'm fine. When you ask how people are sleeping, it speaks to a bunch of previous day and week experiences and how they're integrating all that. The mighty Rick Rubin always asks, how are you feeling? Which I really love. I'll get these texts like how are you feeling? And I'm like, that's interesting. I started responding. It forces you to think a little bit. You know, when we are emotionally troubled, we sleep less well, obviously. I mean, I feel like there are a lot of us, myself included, that would like to just take a long nap until after this upcoming election.

A three month nap.

I mean, it's really important to see what's going on back and forth, but sometimes it just feels so emotionally distracting. And I think I definitely chart my sleep. I use the tracker inside of eight sleep. Um, you know, uh, have you got.

That new thing that lifts your head up?

I do, because I. I have a snoring issue. I didn't know I had a snoring issue. Yeah, I mean, it's not terrible, but I, um. I didn't know I had a snoring issue. And then I started using the. The nose strips.

That helps me.

Yeah. But then I made the mistake of taking one of those off far too quickly, and I had a nice, like, linear size strip remove my nose. That was good. Um, they can help. They actually can really help because it reduced the percentage of my night that I was snoring from something like 22% down to, like, 11%.

Was that based what the eight sleep report was?

Yeah. But now with the new eight sleep, it tilts you up, and that really helps. That really helps.

Intake, make great nose strips. So there's a hard piece of plastic. It's a molded piece of plastic. And then you put two magnets either side of your nose, pulling your nose, and this shit locks you in. And then Alex Hormozi, who has two deviated separate.

Is that why he always wears that?

Correct.

I was wondering why he wears it in the daytime.

He can't breathe really very well without it. It's like one's 100% blocked and the other's something else. And he's found some other thing that goes inside your nose and opens it out from there. He says he can only use it two nights in a row or else it starts to sort of cut away at the inner lining of his. Like those two nights. Really, really good breathing.

Yeah. Getting a lot of oxygen to your brain during sleep is part of the. Part, is part of the optimal sleep routine. It's just that sometimes the number of different things that one needs, you know, earplugs, eye masks, you know, it can get to be a bit much whenever I'm on the road. I know some. The most important thing for me in hotels is to try and get a hotel where the window faces east in the morning and the window opens. I have this weird kind of morning anxiety if I can't get fresh air. So you can always go downstairs and go outside, but the little things make a big difference. I think this is one of the things that's so dreadful about being on a plane for many hours, is that you can't. It's all the, you know, the short wavelength light, the blue light, plus you can't open the window. Then you're in an airport, then you're in an Uber. And really think about just how unhealthy that is. So, as I, you know, I'm 49 next month, and, um, I feel pretty good. Uh, probably haven't been getting as much sleep as I should have this last year, but getting more fresh air, just that simple.

I can't even call it a biohack. Right. Just getting more fresh air and sunshine has made an enormous difference in my nighttime sleep.

The sort of advice that your mom would have given you. Just get more fresh air.

Yeah. She used to kick us out of the house. We come home, we're watching cartoons or something, and then she just say, like, all right, you're. You're leaving. Like, you're. We're kick. I'm kicking you out. For her own peace of mind. And then, you know, traveling should be.

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That's nomatic.com modernwisdom and MW 20 at checkout. Just sort of related to what we've spoken about there. How can people become a morning person or learn to get up early more easily and more regularly?

Yeah, three days of pain. The rest is easy. So it takes about three days to shift the biological mechanisms to make you a morning person. Now, if you are a very strongly genetically determined night owl, that's a thing. That's a thing. So there are genetic mutations. They call them polymorphisms that make some people night owls. They feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about one, two, or 03:00 a.m. and waking up somewhere around, you know, 10:11 a.m. or noon. That exists not just during development or teen years, but that exists not just for social reasons. Other people are true morning people. They feel absolutely best going to sleep around 08:00 p.m. or 09:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m. would be late for them, and they feel great waking up at four, five, or 06:00 a.m. okay, most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between ten and midnight and waking up somewhere between 06:00 a.m. and 08:00 a.m. or so, maybe 530 to 08:00 a.m. okay, so those are three bins of the night owl, the morning person, and then the more typical schedule. But it's heavily weighted toward that typical schedule if you look at the general population.

So if somebody wants to get up earlier, you need to stack the four primary, what are called zeitgebers, or timekeepers, so named because some of the early chronobiologists that discovered this stuff. And the underlying mechanisms were germane, as it were. So the number one zeitgeber, the number one way to shift your circadian clock, which is this cluster of neurons that sits a few centimeters above the roof of your mouth, is to view bright light at a time when you want to be awake, aka the morning. Okay? So that's why I say, get outside. Look at the sun toward the sun. Don't force yourself to stare at it. Don't damage your eyes. Blink as needed. No sunglasses. Glasses, corrective lenses, and contacts are absolutely fine, even if they have uv protection. Okay? However, if you combine that with another zeitgeber, the second most powerful zeitgeber is exercise or movement. So if you do some jumping jacks, you skip some rope, or even just take a walk while facing the sun. Now you're starting to stack different zeitgebers, and I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment. If you then also add caffeine. Now, this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes ago, but if you were to add caffeine, you can entrain, as it's called, the circadian clock.

To be alert at that time a bit more. And I'll be honest, if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning, I need caffeine. I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes. If I need to jump right into exercise, I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking, 3 hours after waking, or 11 hours after waking. And a lot of people find that the same. But of course, exercise when you can, because it's that important. But if you want to, quote, unquote, optimize your energy levels for exercise, typically people will notice that has to do with your temperature rhythm. Okay, so we've got sunlight, we've got exercise or movement of any kind. It could be jumping jacks, could be walking. You don't have to do a full workout and then caffeine and in some cases, food. I'm not big on eating first thing in the morning. I don't like to eat until 11:00 a.m. or noon. That's when my first meal arrives for me, just naturally. That's when I get hungry. It's all caffeine and hydration prior to that. But if you were to eat something first thing in the morning, that's part of the way you entrain your circadian clock to wake up, to essentially wake you up earlier.

And then the fourth one is a social rhythm. If you're interacting with other people, you are going to entrain your clock to that as well.

No way.

Yes. So there's a socially, there's a social component to it, circadian entrainment. Now, the pathways for these are from the eye, in the case of viewing light, to the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the case of caffeine, it's more general. In the case of exercise, there's literally a brainstem to circadian clock connection, a big superhighway of neuronal connections that then so called entrains your circadian clock. Remember, your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24 hours rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light, you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap. It just is what would call free run. It would drift a little later each day. This is what happens when you go to Vegas. This is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the day, the sunlight rising and setting cycle, sunlight, exercise, caffeine, and eating and social interactions bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeitgebers. So when I said it takes three days, if tomorrow you want to start beginning the process of becoming an early riser, you'd set your alarm for 05:00 a.m. no matter what time you went to sleep the night before.

You're going to get up and you're going to do the four things that I describe. Maybe leave out food if you don't want to eat. Maybe leave out caffeine. If you want to delay by 90 minutes, it's going to hurt. And then by the early afternoon, you'll be dragging a bit. And you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine, which will then cause you to fall asleep later. Then you want to go to sleep at your now, naturally, slightly earlier sleep time. The next day, you'll notice you'll, it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine I just described. And by the third day, you ought to be waking up with or before the alarm by a few minutes or moments because your circadian clock has phase shifted. Okay, it's phase advanced, as we say. Your circadian clock intrinsic to you generates a 24.2 or a 24.3 hours rhythm. It's not perfectly 24 hours, and that we believe, we don't know. But the just so story is that it's, that it's such that you're able to then shift that clock in, in one or the other direction. You can phase advance.

You wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier. You can phase delay. How do you phase delay? Well, you're probably doing this already. Everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not so strict criteria of shift work, which is are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after 09:00 p.m. are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 09:30 p.m. most people would say yes. So the diabolical thing about the circadian timing system is that it requires a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, but a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person. But it requires just a little bit of bright light, even from an artificial source, after the hours of about 09:30 p.m. till 04:00 a.m. to quash your melatonin and make it difficult to sleep, or if you sleep, to make that sleep not as effective. There's a simple remedy, however, which is, and this is a beautiful study published in Science Reports in 2022. If you view sunlight in the afternoon, even for five minutes or so, could be late afternoon, could be sunset. Take off your sunglasses, look in the direction of the sun.

So now, looking west, you adjust the sensitivity of your retina, the neurons in the back of your eye, such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to suppress melatonin, and it reduces the melatonin suppressive effects by about 50% or offsets those. So I think of this afternoon viewing as well. First of all, its nice to look at a sunset if youre indoors in an environment like this, even if there are bright lights on, get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets. This is especially important in winter, even if you cant see the sun as an object. Get some sunlight in your eyes and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night. Partially. And I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation. So that that night you can be on your phone or watch Netflix and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much, but it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat. But let's, you know, unless like, Rick Rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses. I've started doing that as well. But if you don't do that, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening.

He's very attached, for good scientific reasons to the sunlight thing. But these are little things that take just moments, right? Essentially zero cost that can really improve your sleep. But that's how you become a morning person. If you want to become a night person, you do the opposite. You view bright light between the hours of 04:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. and then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way, your circadian clock making you want to wake up later the next morning.

I wonder if dogs count as social interaction.

Absolutely. And they have all of the same mechanisms we just described.

So I just think, how can we stack that everything first thing in the morning? Morning walk. Yeah, you. If you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high north dog.

Yep.

Social interaction, moving around and then caffeine if you do, or if you don't, if you don't want it.

But if you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run.

You're gonna have to chase.

If you have an english bulldog like I did, you'd be lucky if you.

Get out of there a little bit. Yeah, you're in.

Their eyes are droopy. They don't, and they don't like to move. But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun. And people always ask, do dogs have the same mechanisms? Absolutely. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, the one that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian entrainment to sunlight, are present, as far as we know, in every extant mammalian species, every mammalian species that's alive today. And this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opsins, the light absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye. It's a very primordial system. It's organized very differently anatomically in the retina. And to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in all of us. In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat, you're never gonna biohack away, is circadian biology. This 24 hours fluctuation in energy and focus. You know, some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms. And, you know, it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest. Neuroplasticity occurs during sleep. It pushes down adenosine, you know, takes us through these natural ebbs and cycles of cognition.

I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep, you know, the conscious mind obviously is not in control. The unconscious mind can geyser up thoughts. The brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols. Time and space are very organized very differently in dreams. And there's a lot of information to be gleaned from dreams. It's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean. The kind of classic freudian, jungian interpretations are certainly not going to be complete. But I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep. And I think, thanks to the great Matt Walker, we now understand that the whole thing about sleep, when I'm dead, is a really dumb mindset. And my team at the Huberman Lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping. When we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to get rest. Get rest. We really prioritize sleep. It's so essential.

One of the best little cliches there, which is too much of a generalization, but I think works, is there's no such thing as being overworked, only under rested.

I like that. I like that a lot. I also think that we know a lot about the different stages of sleep. We know less about the different stages of wakefulness. I've recently started embracing my natural, cognitive and physical cycles. And I've come to realize, and I think Ed Milet says he does this, but he does it. He thinks of his day as consisting of three days, which is awesome from the productivity standpoint. I noticed that also because he mentioned these time blocks. So I just want.

Yeah, you've got a new daily routine.

Yeah.

What's your routine?

Yeah. So I came to realize by observation, I didn't force this. So this is something I observed in myself, which is that from 06:00 a.m. until noon, my brain is very capable, my body is very capable of doing certain things far more easily than at other times of the 24 hours cycle. So I consider that sort of the first phase of my day. Sometimes I'm up by six, sometimes it's seven. Sometimes it's eight. Usually it's about 06:00, 630. So I consider that one opportunity block. The second opportunity block is between noon or because I eat lunch typically around noon, between one and 06:00 p.m. or noon and 06:00 p.m. so, second opportunity block, and then the third is between 06:00 p.m. and bedtime, which for me typically is 1030, but sometimes late. I'm half argentine. Sometimes I go to bed at midnight and I just all take a nap the next day. I mean, you have to live. I mean, come on. So what I started to realize is that I can do really focused work in two, but not three of those blocks consistently. I also noticed that if I exercise early in the first block, like between 06:00 a.m. and before 09:00 a.m. i have more energy all day long.

This is what I observed experimentally on myself. But if I exercise starting at nine or starting at ten, sort of halfway through that block, the second opportunity block is diminished. I'm kind of dragging. Maybe it's related to when I eat, but that wasn't changing when I eat or what I eat. So I do think that people could benefit tremendously, not necessarily by following the schedule that I follow, but by paying attention to their natural cognitive and physical rhythms. And so as a consequence, what I now do is I take a look at the day. Like, for instance, this is afternoon. We sat down together here at one. I think we're probably somewhere around 02:00 p.m. i don't know, somewhere around there. But I realized, okay, I could work before I got here in this early day block or this evening. What I chose to do this morning was kind of more procedural things took care of some posting for our Monday episode, took care of some phone calls, I took a walk, made, took care of some email, made sure I ate some food before I came here. On the way here, I did a brief ten minute NSDR because I didn't sleep quite as much last night as I would have liked.

But I walked in feeling great. And I don't get paid to endorse, but I, nor did we have any kind of arrangement to say this, but this new tonic energy drink I'm loving, it's also got an eye on it. I'm hyped, love it, really tasty, it tastes so good. So I can work two or of these three blocks and then the third one ends up being kind of a mishmash of procedural stuff. So today, the early part of the day, the 06:00 a.m. to noon block, was kind of like handled doing non it's work, but it's not like focused work stuff. And I didn't train today because I trained yesterday and today was a day off. In any case, hopefully we'll do some sauna cold tonight. So now we're working, I'm focused, and I imagine that two, three, 4 hours of this and my brain will have expended some pretty serious cognitive effort. And then ill take a little bit of, ill expect a sort of dip in energy. I wont force it. And then this evening ill get some work done and then hopefully well do some sauna cold. So im very aware of the fact that I get two opportunities from these three blocks.

Now, my ideal schedule would be to work in the first two blocks really, really hard, still eat, still train. Train early. So it'd be train early. Work in the first block. So get it. Get the training done by 08:00 a.m. no later. Work. Super focused work, then eat something. Super focused work in the second block, maybe do an NSDR to recover my mental and physical vigor.

And then in the evening, social time.

Social time. Relax. I've been watching a lot of documentary.

What have you been watching?

I watched Anthony bourdain documentary yesterday. I'm nothing. I obviously knew who he was. We have friends in common. Sadly passed away, but took his own life, which is tragic. But I was aware that because Joe's talked about him a lot, David Cho, the artist, has talked about him a lot and is in that documentary. He also was part of the New York City, seventies, 80 punk rock scene. So the Ramones. I'm a huge Ramones fan. Joe Strummer, kind of. Of that ilk. And the documentary is called Roadrunner. And it's very, very good. And it's also very interesting to see how he was such a sensation seeker. You could almost feel him veering toward something. And then, you know.

And I've never watched any of his documentaries.

Yeah, very, very good. And very, very good.

Have you seen. Just to interject, have you seen World War two from the front lines?

No.

So. So this is Netflix. Netflix have done at least two or three colorized World War two documentaries. In fact, there's one that's World War one.

I saw that one, yes.

So at least three world War two in color, World War the great war in color, and something else. All of these will be available on Netflix. Watching archive footage, there's something distancing about seeing it in black and white, and it sort of reminds you that it's not now. And they've used a combination of AI and manual recolourers to be able to sharpen the image. Everything's four k. The facial appearance of everyone, the emotions that you can see on their face, the smiles, their teeth, and now in color as well, to me, just drives home that story in a manner that I'd never. I've never watched a documentary about something from that era and felt so emotionally connected to it, which is interesting. So I've really been enjoying that.

Shane, World War two from the. From the front lines.

Yes.

Okay. Because the World War one doc I really liked, I read alt squad on the western front, of course, when I was in school, I fascinated by World War one. Yeah. Documentary. It's kind of an obsession. I love the Oliver sacks documentary. I've seen some others recently about true crime.

You're a true crime guy.

I used to watch that. That stuff when I was living alone, and I was like, then you're kind of like you checking closets and stuff. I don't know if it's good for me to watch that stuff. It can be interesting. The one that they did about Richard Ramirez, the Night stalker.

Fucking brilliant.

Terrifying. Terrifying. Especially given that it's in Los Angeles and just that the brazen nature of.

His, of his new one I just watched called american nightmare.

Yeah. I don't want to see this, man. Oh, yeah.

It's really, really interesting and harrowing, but I. Shane Gillis warns that watching World War two documentaries is early on set. Republican. That's what he refers to. Having an obsession with world War two documentaries as early onset Republican. So you just need to track that in your mind if you start shouting maga in your sleep and your sleep cycle picks it up.

Yeah unlikely. But I'll look at it in an unbiased way. How's that?

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That's drinklmnt.com modernwisdom. We're in an election year at the moment. I think as much as you might want to fall asleep for the next three months.

And I was just sort of joking. I mean I. The political process is critical. It's just. It's just been. It's been a lot.

I don't think that it's unfair to say that. I don't think. I think a lot of people holds this sort of cognitive superposition which is I understand the future of the country is very important and I as a person with a vote need to be an active participant. That's the whole reason for doing it. And also this is exhausting and it's sapping an awful lot of my will to live and I feel kind of overloaded. Have you looked at any strategies spoken to anybody that has any psychological tools to be able to deal with with a rapid media cycle? Sort of very activating stories basically. How can people psychologically manage this upcoming period? What would you suggest?

Yeah, I actually hosted a guest who is expert on the psychology of politics. It was super interesting. And we looked at all of this through the lens, a completely nonpartisan lens, because we have listeners on both sides of the aisle and probably some who are undecided. First of all, the fervor around this upcoming election, the intensity of everything certainly convinced me that I'm never going to run for office, despite some speculation out there from friends and family and some occasional calls from reporters. No, it's not my arena, but it's obviously a very important one. And one of my concerns is that if the intensity around all of this continues to increase as much as it.

I can guarantee you it's going to.

Yeah. That young people who would consider running for office out of a genuine desire to serve might be dissuaded because you hear these things like, oh, it's impossible to get anything done, or in order to be effective, you have to be that, the other kind of person. And that's a terrible message. It might be true, but it's a terrible message because I think ultimately, what you want in any field, right, whether or not you're talking about music or sport, I mean, we're seeing this at the recent Olympics or podcasting. You want a big pool of people funneling into it so that you can discover the incredible talents and virtuosos and, you know, and so that's what you need is a bigger feed, a bigger applicant pool. Right, to reveal talent and for a field to progress. Okay, enough editorializing. I think the best thing that one can do to navigate this whole cycle is to pay careful attention to what draws attention. And what I learned from this expert. Is it political science professor? Is that what you're listening for? And what people are orient towards, orienting towards is dominance language. But the dominance language over others is far less effective, believe it or not, in shifting people's minds than the dominance language associated with expressing one's true beliefs.

So their argument was, if you look historically at presidential and other forms of election, and by the way, I'm paraphrasing now, that you could predict who was going to win based on who told you what they really think and believe, as opposed to telling people what they want to hear. Like, I think that we have a censor for when we're being told what people think we want us to hear versus what somebody really believes, even if we disagree with them. And this probably gets to our origins as an old world primate species, but we tend to put leaders into office who can communicate either through their words or through the, you know, timbre of their voice or through their gestures or a combination of things. Maybe it's redundancy and how often they hammer on a message what they really believe as opposed to flip flopping, you know, according to what the polls say.

Or blowing with the wind.

Right. So I think we hear the words dominance language and we default to, oh, it's about one person kind of, you know, dominating the other person. Now, ultimately, it's a, it's a, it's a competition between mostly two people. We have a third party in this country, but it seems to be boiling down to two at this moment. And so this thing about dominance language is often couched as dominance over the other in a given scenario, over a given topic, in separate venues at one gathering versus another. But what this I consider brilliant political science professor was explaining is that the dominance has really exerted and impacts voting at the level of one or the other candidate, perhaps both expressing what they really believe about something in clear terms, with conviction, with conviction. And it, and it being true, I think this is the sort of thing that they can't fake, ultimately. And that where people lose faith in a candidate is when that candidate, you know, says, well, at one point, you know, I said this, but now I'm saying this. And they don't give a reason that feels legitimate beliefs or they don't address it.

Right? Or they don't address it, or they simply focus on the beliefs of the other candidate. So my strategy in this current election is to put, as I do for many, not all things in life, much to the dismay of people in my life, a neuroscience lens, a psychology lens, a science based lens on what's happening around me. And I'm listening for does that sound true in the sense, does it really sound like that candidate really believes that? Or does it sound like they're trying to tell me this, or are they spending more time talking about what the other candidate believes or doesn't believe in an effort to sway me? Because ultimately, yes, there does seem to be some, and this guest pointed it out as well, that there is a tendency to orient towards people that we recognize that feel similar to people we grew up around. But that's not actually the thing that impacts voting in the end, that ultimately the people who are undecided, because there is always going to be a group of people who are voting against the other party, period. Like, they're just literally voting against one party. But I do think that there's this group in the middle.

What, you know, and I didn't coin this term, but Doctor Paul Conti, who was on my podcast, psychiatrist and yours talks about the league of reasonable People, which has nothing to do with politics per se, but this is a group of people who are really evaluating evidence on the basis of what they see and what they feel and what they heard of and trying to move away.

Silence middle.

The silence middle that, you know, and so people that are trying to evaluate evidence and are really paying attention to, does this person feel genuine? Do they really believe this? Do they, or are they telling me this because it's what I want to hear? I think that's the way I plan to navigate this time.

And how will that help with psychological health using that, you know, you're still going to be peppered with the story and the worry and the concern and, oh, here's a new, and I've got to forget the last thing, but it's still in my mind. And there's a new thing, and I got to spin all of these different news stories.

Yeah, great question. In a very Paul contian way, it gives you agency, it gives you a sense of control over the fire hose, of information that's coming at you. You can say, okay, I'm going to, there's nothing, there's nothing I can do about the fire hose. There's nothing I can do about getting just blasted back with all this information. But I'm going to apply a very specific filter to try and hear what people are saying about specific issues that matter and paying attention to whether or not they're telling me what they really believe. You can disagree with them and vote against them or you can vote for them. But ultimately the data show, as I understand, that people ultimately are voting for the candidate that they believe has the greatest conviction. And what I think has been lacking, frankly, in the political discussion. I say this as a citizen, not as a political scientist, but as a citizen who votes, has been a clear picture of what the future could look like if a given candidate wins. I want a vivid picture of the world they imagine. I don't want this surface level stuff like, imagine a day when this, they start each sentence correctly and then it just kind of goes to.

And as a scientist and somebody who's a public health, public science communicator, I'm constantly under the scrutiny of, like, wait, what exactly is the protocol? What exactly justifies the protocol? Okay, delay caffeine 90 minutes after waking. If you crash in the afternoon, well, what's the randomized controlled trial? I'll be the first to tell you. There isn't one. I'll also tell you the mechanisms that support my statement. Now, if you talk to doctor Elaine Norton, someone who I respect tremendously, he's been on my podcast twice. I have tremendous respect for him. He'll tell you, unless it's a randomized controlled trial that doesn't meet his threshold. And I'll tell you, well, you know, I don't eat seed oils. I avoid them most of the time because I like olive oil and butter. I'm not afraid of them them. But, you know, it's not based on a randomized controlled trial. I just feel better when I don't. So I'll tell you my reasons for believing strongly why I suggest a or b or what I do. Does it meet the same standard that lane requires? No. But I'll tell you exactly what I'm grounding my statements on. And what I want as a scientist, what I want as a citizen, is for the candidates, presidential candidates, all candidates.

Just tell me. Tell me what you believe. Tell me the rationale. The rationale could be, listen, they're telling me to say this, but just tell me what you believe and why. And when you do that for somebody, certainly when that's done for me, I just feel an immense relief and an immense trust that the person actually understands their own process. They're letting us look at the underlying mechanics, and I also want to know what they envision for the future. Right now, I'm hearing very little about that. I'm hearing a lot of aspirational things on the one side that are very vague, and I'm hearing a lot of kind of, like, dogmatic language on the other side, also pretty vague. And so I want to know, I want a list. Like, send me the one page PDF. I want to know, like, what are your protocols for making this a better country?

I think it's.

So that's my threshold, and I do get worked up about this, but not enough to run for office.

I found this really interesting study that's been done recently. Stories don't care about your statistics. In controlled experiments, researchers documented a pronounced story statistic gap in memory. The average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73% over the course of a day. The impact of a story fades by only 32%. So that's 73% average impact of statistics on beliefs, 32% on a story. So, in short, people's beliefs are more durably impacted by stories than statistics. Huge implications for how voters believe can be more easily swayed during the upcoming elections.

Yeah. Part of the reason I love you, I really mean that. Like you, you are, you have an unbelievable ability to find studies that are relevant that I would never find. Here's why I believe stories are more impactful than just citing statistics. The reason is that the brain organizes memories of all kinds in beginning, middle, and end. And a graph has a structure, but it doesn't really have a beginning, middle, and end. Now, it can be a time course plot. It can be a time course plot. There are all sorts of caveats to this, right? And the scientist in me always has to mention all the caveats. But we, from the time that we are little children, we organize things in terms of beginning, middle, and end. The best example of this is the abcs. When you learn the ABCs, you don't do Abcdefghl, MMP qrs three, wxyc. For a moment there, I was worried I wouldn't remember. But I'm so far so good, and I've been drinking my new tonic, so flying. But how do, how do children learn the abcs? So the brain is learning the inflections. It's learning what's prosody, right? The inflections, the lilt and fall of voice.

And we know that this is one of the ways that we organize information. My friends, who are like world class musicians who sing, I always say, like, I remember lyrics really well, and I always say, oh, what about that lyric? And they go, oh, like I can't remember. Like, and then they'll start with the first line, and then all of a sudden they remember the whole song sequence. That's right. It's. That's the way memories are organized. They sort of peel back. You know, like, some people are very good at memorizing lists where acronyms can help us, but in general, we sequence our life on the basis of a beginning, middle, end type structure. So, you know, I think when people now, the exception to this would be flashbulb memories. Like, for instance, about a month ago, right, one of the presidential candidates, there was an assassination attempt on his life. I think that was the first time since 911 that I recall everyone in the country being tuned into the same event online.

Wild.

I mean, there may have been intervening things, but wild. You know, there was an earthquake this morning in Los Angeles. Did you feel it?

I was busy preparing, and I had my airpods in. All right. Everybody else went.

I was a little one, but I grew up in California. This one was kind of a. It was a ripple, not a rumble. So usually if it's a big, bigger one, you'll hear it like a train coming through the environment. In any case, not a flashbulb memory. Right, obviously. But you remember what you were doing. But, you know, a few weeks ago, we had. About a month ago, during that assassination attempt, we had a flashbulb memory. I can recall it was a Saturday. I was sitting on the couch. You know how my girlfriend and I were talking, and then all of a sudden, I was like, oh, my goodness. She's like, no. Oh, my goodness. And all of a sudden, we were on our phone. Right, exactly. You know, flashbulb memories are an exception to what we're talking about, and they grab all the context around them.

I remember when my mom picked me up on 911 from school, and I remember listening to it in the radio. My memory. I know yours. I really want to get into this later on about. You have a very self identified, very good memory of life experiences going quite a way back into your youth.

Yeah, for better or worse.

Yeah, for better or worse. I'm the opposite. But I remember that one light bulb memory, like, in a big, important event. But, yeah, the story thing's so interesting. And I think, by the way, sorry.

I don't mean to interrupt, but you know that the origin of flashbulb memory is adrenaline. You know, it's adrenaline released from the adrenals and in the locus coeruleus, sort of a quote unquote alertness center. Although my neuroscience colleagues are like, there he goes, calling brain structures by the function. But, you know, it releases epinephrine into the brain in kind of a sprinklering fashion. We know. And there's a beautiful review by James McGaugh, one of the leading researchers in memory about this, that dating back to medieval times, if they wanted kids to remember something. I'm not making this up. It's an annual review of neuroscience. Starts off by describing. They would take kids, they give them a tutorial. Typically, it was a religious tutorial back then. They'd throw them into cold water. So you get a spike in adrenaline, and then you remember what you. You had heard prior. So it's, you know, when you have a spike in adrenaline, the brain, the nervous system, knows something's different. It cues the memory system.

So just to think about why that might be adaptive, ancestrally, any dump of adrenaline of that kind of size would probably be indicative of such an important strategic learning moment. Opportunity. Do not go near that cave that happened to have that bear in it again.

Right.

Will make sure that you actually hold. Is that the.

Yeah, so much so that there's what's called condition, place aversion. So, in fact, if you see a drawing of that cave, or you go back to that cave, you start to experience some of the same somatic stuff. What is the same somatic stuff? Well, the nervous system is fairly nuanced, but it's also crude. You're releasing some adrenaline. It's the increase in heart rate, the increase in breathing. It's like, oh, that cave. Now the issue becomes it's not nuanced enough that such that some people, then they see any cave, and then they think that could represent danger. So, you know, the adrenaline system is a way to obviously cue alertness very fast, milliseconds fast, but also to change the chemical milieu of the brain so that whatever memories or experiences were being charted in the brain now are locked into your memory. So, for instance, let's say we were to walk out of here, we walk out to the car, and we're not thinking about something bad that could happen, and all of a sudden, and someone gets shot right in front of us. Whoa, okay. Now, you know, all sorts of things are going to happen.

Okay, hopefully no one's heard it. Let's say it's a bad, tragic incident. Now, the adrenaline released into your system grabbed and consolidated the memories of this house, of the lawn, of walking out there. This is why people who experience trauma oftentimes have kind of odd recollect, like, seemingly odd or unrelated recollections about the things leading up to an event. Okay, so, because ultimately, what did you need to learn? Not to avoid streets, not to avoid this street, necessarily, but, like, what were you doing?

Your brain. Your brain is trying to grab something.

What brought you to that location? What things brought you to that instance? And of course, some people dump these experiences more readily than others. You know, part of the logic behind a lot of not all, but a lot of trauma therapies is to literally bring the brain and body back into a state of high intensity and then to rescript the story. Others are designed to bring you back into the story but keep you calm. So there's sort of two general approaches, just as there are approaches to treating depression that involve, you know, bringing a lot of salience and emotion to the surface. The cathartic approach. These are tested and some work very well, as well as the use of drugs like ketamine, you know, FDA approved drug for dissociating your emotions while in the presence of MDMA, or MDMA, which just recently, a day before yesterday, did fail to pass approval by the FDA for the treatment of PTSD.

I didn't know about that.

Yeah, big deal in the community, the psychiatric community. This could be summarized as very impressive. Clinical trials showing up to 67%, even remission of PTSD, or significant reduction in PTSD from people that did two sessions of MDMA with a qualified therapist in a clinical setting. But the FDA had a number of different stated reasons, including lack of control group. It's very hard to have a control in the sense that people can take no MDA, MDMA, excuse me, methylene dioxy, methamphetamine. But then they knew that they were in the control group. It's this whole business of, how do you blind people to the drug?

And, you know, if you've taken MDMA, you know it.

Yeah. And then there were some other issues, sadly, that seemed, at least by my read, not unique to MDMA therapies, but that, unfortunately, it happened during the course of the trials, which made the results not satisfactory enough for the FDA. So I think that the effort needs to continue crack at this.

Will they get another one submit again?

Yeah, one hopes. But there are a lot of people out there with PTSD and intractable types of stress disorders that now are tractable with treatments like MDMA, providing you have the right therapeutic support. And that's the issue is, you know, these drugs, without the proper therapeutic support, can send people down bad trajectories. And so this is the big. This is the big thing. And you can tell I'm kind of agonizing over this, because, you know, we need to, like, the way these things move forward is we need to be very objective and say, okay, why did the FDA say no? Why? We. We can. We can kick and scream about it, but that's not going to do any good. Why did they say no and then address those issues like a scientist. You get a paper back, you think it's the greatest paper in the world, you get the reviews, and they have issues with certain things. You go, well, wait, but, but, and you just. You have to go systematically until those issues are dealt with.

You're gonna get the same result, you're.

Gonna get the same results. So we need to be very objective about this. And, you know, I look forward to a day when the FDA is satisfied based on the best criteria. Yeah, yeah. I'm not being political there. I just, like, I think these drugs can really help people in the right circumstances, but it's been. It's been a slog for the community of people trying to get these drugs through.

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Yeah.

One of my friends, her husband has suffered with PTSD with alcoholism. Oh, yeah, get the switching out flavors. Wild citrus.

You know what's weird is I study the visual system. I have an appointment in ophthalmology after all, and I can see great at a distance. I can read small text, but I'm actually running into trouble seeing things up close recently. Like, if I put it here, I'm blind to it.

I told you last time about my laser, right? And I can see absolutely everything. Ancestral trauma at 500 yards. I'm like, Tim Kennedy.

I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at. I'm not laughing at Tim Kennedy. Lord knows I'm not laughing at Tim Kennedy. Tim, don't hurt me. I'm a fan. I'm just. The fact that you could see trauma at 500 yards, that's a high acuity vision. Thank goodness.

Like Tim, he will come and find you. I've got a story. I'll tell you a story that he told me about him and Brian Callan. One's good. Too good. Happy days. So Brian went over to the UK with them. He was going to go surfing. They were doing some sort of adventure in the UK. And Brian arrived late and Tim said, we're going to go swimming in the morning. He's like, no, Tim, I just got in my flight. You've been here for a little bit longer. And. No. Grabbed him by the arm like that and said, no, no, we're going swimming in the morning. Looked him in the eyes and Brian was like, oh, Tim, I don't want to. I'm going to be tired. I'm going to be. Whatever. Anyway, Tim made the threat sufficiently plain that he wasn't joking. So six in the morning, Brian hears this little knock on his door.

Six in the morning, Brian.

So Brian pretends to be asleep. Brian's an actor. Brian's been in Hollywood movies, big Hollywood movies.

Comedian, too, right?

Comedian and actor, yeah. And he said he channeled every single ounce of acting ability that he had. So he laid on one side and even so, give a. Gave a little snort here and there and he heard the door open and then he felt the bed move one side to the other like that. It sort of rocked from left to right. And then Tim's face came down to his ear and he said, brian, do you know how many terrorists I've stood over when they pretended to be asleep?

Next thing you know, he's in the water swimming. Correct.

And sure enough that, you know, you're talking about the cortisol spike.

Yeah.

That is a reliable way to give. That would be the, that's the ultimate alarm, the Tim Kennedy alarm. Forget using sleep cycle, forget everything that I said. Just pay Tim Kennedy to come and pretend that you're a terrorist.

Yeah. It actually raises an interesting and relevant biological point, which is that, you know, if you wake up at five in the morning and you glance at your phone, something I don't recommend doing, and you see a troubling text message, you'll be wide awake in a moment. And that's adrenaline. Epinephrine. In the brain we call it epinephrine. In the body we call it adrenaline for uninteresting reasons. But that structure of neurons that cluster in the, in the brainstem called the sort of back of the brain area. Let's just stay with broad nomenclature. The locus coeruleus has, there's a cluster of neurons that do many different things there, but some of them provide these wire like axonal inputs, as we call them, in a kind of sprinkler fashion to the brain. And when there's something that alerts us that we need, it's triggering to us, if you will. It just sprinkles the brain? Yeah, it sprinklers the brain with epinephrine, adrenaline, and boom. The brain wakes up and then in parallel, your adrenals release adrenaline and within a couple hundred milliseconds, you're up, you're able to move and you're not thinking about fatigue and adenosine doesn't mean anything.

And sometimes I think that earlier we were only half joking, Jocko, about Jocko Willinks and the 04:30 a.m. thing and waking up. You can train these systems. Earlier we were talking about in training the circadian clock to different stimuli to become an early riser or a late shifted person, as it were. All of these neural circuits are subject to kind of conditional plasticity, right? So, like, the alarm. Boom. Like, you can be wide awake, or in my case, you're like, hit the snooze, right? Nothing's like the sleep that you get during a snooze. It's so good, it's so good. But, you know, you can be conditioned to. You can condition these locus coeruleus systems, the adrenaline system. In fact, we were talking about a minute ago in the context of. Of PTSD, in the context of fear, in the context of non nuanced alertness, on the basis of a broad stimulus. Like, you know, you know, if something terrible happened to you in a garage, we're in this beautiful garage with all these vintage cars around, but if something bad happened to you in a garage, it doesn't have to be that garage, it can just be garages.

The smell of metal, you know, different sensory cues get embedded in those memories and then can feed into these alertness systems. And this is why I, you know, it's such a challenge to undo, to unpeel a trauma or chronic anxieties. You have to sort of get to the combination of things. That is the combination lock that lets you undo it.

That was one of the most interesting things I learned from Paul Conti. I told him a story when I was 20. I was in a head on collision with a snowplow at 60 miles an hour on the main artery motorway of the UK going up to Scotland.

So they were driving the snowplow and.

They sort of listed gently across into our lane, only clipped.

You're driving a little mg or something?

It was a Ford Focus with my business partner in.

Yeah.

And they only clipped maybe about a foot or so into the car. But for him, what we think happened was he was probably looking at something, not looking like Bink, and what was that? And just kept on going. Didn't even notice. For us, all hell broke loose. And I said to Paul, you know, I had a little bit of travel anxiety for a short while after that, and it dissipated about six weeks or so. I was uncomfortable with contraflow traffic, so I didn't like being on that lane. I would always be on the or on the other side of the road in the UK, so on the other, I would want to be on the outside lane, not the inside lane. And he said, one of the interesting things about the way that trauma can re pattern memories, old memories, is that you could have convinced yourself, well, I've never liked driving, I've always been uncomfortable of this. You can forget that there was ever a time before the incident, interesting, when you felt differently. And this is where I think, first off, our brains aren't always necessarily our best friends. And secondly, the story.

What's the story that you're telling yourself? What's the story that your brain is telling yourself about these memories? Paul was adamantous, said, you absolutely could have begun telling yourself, because I love driving. I miss not having a car in the US. I finally did get a car at the start of this year, and I really enjoy being back on the road to the time where I get to listen to podcasts and I can't use my phone, and I really like it. But he said, had it been a more significant issue, or had you dealt with it in a different way, you could have convinced yourself, I know I've always been a nervous driver, I've never enjoyed driving. And then one, how sort of infectious and pernicious is that kind of a memory, these individual instances, which I think are why it is so important to connect with those emotions, to look at the things that are driving you. What are your unspoken assumptions about the world?

Oh, man. So I'm just wrapped with attention as you're talking. So I have this notebook, I like these bound notebooks. And I started writing kind of journal format, but then recently I started just jotting things down. Sometimes it's podcast notes, but the other day I had this thought, it's gonna seem very, oh, this is a funny one. You wanna hear a funny one?

I do.

So I. A long time ago, I used to make a joke, but I decided to just script it out. There's only three word entry. It said, you know, my goal in life has been to go from like oi to oi to just peace. So I have oi, no, I have oi and then I know I have oi and then I have boy, and then I have just like peace like that. Like, basically, aside from sleep, like, these are the three states that I can be in, right? So in any case, idiot aggression.

Chill.

Yeah. So, assumptions about the world. So the one that I woke up the other day, well, I spent a lot of time the other day explaining to a friend that because they were going through something that was really unfair, and we were parse. I'll get back to this. But we were parsing the difference between mistakes, misunderstandings, and betrayals and how some people respond to mistakes and misunderstandings as if they were betrayals. And some people mix these up, you know? So that was an interesting one. But to me, anyway. But the thing that you said, assumptions about the world. I know it's in here someplace. I wrote it down, and it felt so true. This is it. This was the other morning I woke up, and I was like, I don't feel right. Like, I don't feel right. Like, I got all this stuff to do, like, something just. And I was like, I can't remember a time. This is why I. What you just said cued me. I can't remember a time when I woke up just feeling like there was nothing bearing down on me that day ever. But now, based on what you're telling me, perhaps there was a time, and I just don't remember.

But then I was lying in bed, as I do, keeping my eyes closed. Rick Rubin taught me this trick. Not in the same bed, but he taught me this trick. He said, if you wake up and you're having a dream right before you wake up and you want to remember the dream or you want to stay in a mental state, keep your eyes closed and stay completely, completely still. However, if you're having a nightmare or you don't like the way that you feel, move your body.

There's something about the movement that dispels it.

Absolutely. And if you think about rapid eye movement sleep, which is the most dream rich sleep, your body is paralyzed and the mind is active. So I've started doing this, and it's made it very easy for me to remember my dream. So Rick, who's not formally trained in science, but is, Rick gave me that tool, and it works exceptionally well in my experience. But I woke up and I said, you know, maybe the illusion is the pain. Maybe the illusion is the pain, maybe the mental anguish I feel, maybe the challenge of life, maybe that's the illusion, right? Because we hear so much about how the pleasures are the illusions. Now, dopamine's a real thing, and chasing dopamine is a real thing at its extremes. It can be addiction at its less extremes. It can be compulsions, and it can also be a joyful life. But I was thinking to myself, maybe pain is the illusion, right? Maybe the idea that there's all this, like, challenge and discussion, maybe that's the thing that we're supposed to remove. And then I thought back to something that a friend who's a very, very talented trauma therapist, his name is Ryan Suave.

He's out in Florida, runs a trauma treatment center out there, once told me, he said, yeah, you know, in some of the buddhist traditions, they talk about. About your work in this life is, in part, not completely, is to burn down, I think they call them. I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong, but someone will tell us in the comments, the scumsaras, like burning down to the roots, like the weeds of life, like your misperceptions about what things are. And I started thinking about this, especially after Martha Beck was on my podcast, who I really love. She said, you're not here to suffer. And I thought, I'm not. She was like, you know, you're not here to suffer. You know, I've endured a lot of suffering in my life, more than some, less than others. But I think we all endure a lot of suffering, largely as a consequence of what happens between our ears, unfortunately, some of us also, because of things that actually happen to our bodies, but we're self induced or otherwise. But, you know, maybe we're not here to suffer. Maybe a lot of the suffering that we experience is this illusion that we create.

And so I started real. I wrote it down. Maybe the illusion is the pain. And so maybe we need to challenge this. Like, maybe it's okay to be joyful. A little more joyful.

Dude, I have so much.

Is that it's great.

And I wishy washy. No, not at all. I have so much to tell you. So overthinking creates more problems than it solves.

Definitely. And unless you're solving a really hard problem. Correct.

But on average, as everything is. Joe Hudson, do you know who he is?

I don't.

Art of accomplishment. Phenomenal guy. Really, really interesting dude. Came on the. And he has this very unique definition of efficiency, and he thinks of joy as efficiency. So efficiency is how much you get out for how much you put in. What is the return, what is the output that you get for the input that you've had to expend. And if you do something which is joyful, you have to expend less. And. And on the other side, you get out more. That's like, what a lovely redefinition. So joy, enjoyment for him is the ultimate version of efficiency, that if you're using your passion, if you're doing something which you find enlivening, you are by definition, helping to make your system more efficient. So his question while we were doing this podcast, it was a virtual one. And he said this is one of his favorite little cues that he asked, because he says, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable?

I love that. What's the guy's name again?

Joe Hudson.

And I wrote down, joy is efficiency. Joe Hudson.

Joe Hudson, yeah.

Not that it matters, but what's his training? Is he a psychologist?

It's very lengthy. So what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable? And that is a cue 10% achievable. And what he said there. So I'll notice when I said that just now, I sort of shifted in my seat a little bit because my back, so my t shirt was a little creased under my lower back. So I'd move that and maybe I'll get a little drink. I'll, you know, look after myself, I'll look after my body. Maybe I'll allow the peripheries of my gaze to just sort of open out a bit, or maybe I'll take a little slightly deeper breath and I'll oxygenate a little bit more.

I'm having fun right now, but we can have 10%.

10% just temps it more enjoyable.

What would loosen the bolts? 10%.

So that's one thing. The other thing, an insight that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Things are not what they are. Things are what we think they are. For instance, doing a hard workout gives you a signature feeling. You're late on the floor, panting, heart rate at 180, sweating from everywhere, with the taste of metal in your mouth. This is oddly enjoyable. But if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while you were sat in traffic, you'd call the ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack. Framing is everything. This is a quote from Rory Sutherland. Do you know who that is? One of the greatest living advertisers on the planet. Vice chairman of Ogilvy Advertising. He's the only man I've ever heard swear in a TED talk. And this is a direct quote from his TED talk. He says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. The problem is, when you're not smoking and staring out of the window, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.

The power of reframing things cannot be overstated. It's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them, rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy. That's like alchemy. It's kind of alchemy.

I like that. I'm both taking notes and listening very carefully. Yeah. I think people exist on a continuum of bias toward more joy or bias toward more pain. And I agree that we have a lot of cognitive control over the middle range. Right. Because, of course, there are experiences that are awful, traumatic, unequivocally. Unequivocally excellent or terrible. There's no question about that.

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I turned 49 next month. Trying to think about, like, what I've learned, where I'm headed. And I have, unfortunately, at times. But also fortunately, my memory is very good. My memory is very, very good.

How good? What's good?

I mean, I can close my eyes and hear conversations that I had with people with a fair degree of accuracy, I believe.

How far does that go back?

Oh, I can remember walks I took with my dad when I was five or six years old. I can remember the layout of my room to find detail when I was a kid. Faces. I have a strong recollection of faces and facial recognition. I don't track time. Well, as a professor, we get some leeway. I perpetually run late. I don't track time. And until recently, I didn't really have a sense of death. I mean, I knew it existed. I've had people close to me die. All three of my academic advisors died. Suicide. Cancer. Cancer. The joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you.

I was going to say nominee.

Yeah. And for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city or military, I've had quite a few friends die. Drug overdoses, suicides. It's kind of hard to know if it's a, on average, more or less. I was a teen in the late eighties, early nineties, and there werent a lot of people doing therapy. There were no psychological meds for the treatment of different conditions. Maybe thats it, who knows? In any case, if I spend any amount of time thinking about anything of the past, I can easily drift into it. In fact, until very recently, very, very recently, much of my cognition each day was a battle between trying to anchor in the present and thinking forward and being pulled into memories of the past. Kind of orienting toward the past.

Such a rich opportunity to ruminate.

Yeah. And just. Or seeing even music from the past acting as a cue to the past. Something happened in the last eight, nine months where I feel hyper focused on the present. Very, very little focus on the past. Very little. I have exquisite memory of the past, but very little. In fact, one of my journal entries was, I was trying to think of, and this is somewhat embarrassing because it's not the way I would have scripted it, but I was thinking about from the time, as early back as I could remember, the different animals that I felt like I sort of related to or embodied. When I was a kid, I had the same voice I have now. They called me froggy because I was the kid from the little rascals is a show that most people now don't know. The kid talk like this. And I had, my Adams apple was out when I was a little kid, I had hair on my Adam's apple. It's like there's a, I have a, I'm a heterozygote for a certain genetic mutation. I overproduce androgen from my adrenals. Um, if you have two copies, it can make you infertile.

Fortunately, I don't. I have one copy. Um, and it doesn't result in any other, um, like, bodily differences or anything like that. I'm very fortunate in that way. And I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm aware I can reproduce. Let's just leave it at that. Okay, so. But then, you know, there were different animals at different stages of my life. As I grew and matured and experienced different things, I was, like, at one stage of my life, I felt very oriented towards the mustelids, and then at other times, towards, like, a certain species of cat. And, like, I just identified with them in a number of ways. And then recently, I was on this long run. I do these long Sunday rucks and runs, and I was seeing myself, like, where am I at right now? And all of a sudden, I just went, oh, shit. This is about the least exciting animal I could think about. And I realized, like, right now, at this stage of my life, I don't know how long this will last. I'm. And this is very personal, but whatever effort, like, lately, I'm just kind of opening up on podcasts, my own and others, I realized and know it has nothing to do with butterflies.

I realize I'm in total caterpillar mode, and it has nothing to do with becoming a butterfly. Not that that would be a bad thing. It's that I'm able to orient towards the tasks of the day. The day divided into three parts. I basically have vision about this far in front of me. Despite what I said a few minutes ago, I can think about what I need to do. I know where I'm headed. I can move forward, not backward, but I can't seem to bring my thinking any further than that. And it's such a new place for me. I can't think. I have to consciously try and think into the past. I'm like, that was yesterday. I can't do it now. I'm not in denial. I can do it if I need to. But for me, this is a very functional way to be at this point in my life because of the enormous number of tasks in my life, fortunately, the enormous number of people that I love and that I want to spend time with and make time for, but somehow I have just like. So I drew it out. I was like, friggin caterpillar, you know?

And we'll see what happens and, you know, and where this goes. But, you know, the other animals in here, there was a rhinoceros phase that was interesting, moving very slowly, but with a lot of force on anything that was in my way. At one stage there's been times when I've felt like a raptor where I was just placed and really observant. I spent an entire year speaking very little. Believe it or not, people in my life will be like, what year was that? I didn't talk to you that year. Exactly. You didn't talk to me that year and I didn't talk to you. If you're wondering where I was right now, by sort of identifying with the kind of mode of caterpillar vision and movement, everything is in small increments. I even feel it in the way that I talk and the way I parse ideas. I'm writing the bonus chapters from my book, which comes out in April of next year. Everything is line by line, everything is iterative. And I am not oriented toward the past. It's there if I need it. It's like a book on a shelf. I can go grab and look things up.

But I until now have existed very much. In thinking about the losses of past, the winds of past. Identifying with that. I don't know what caused this. I can't point to one single psychedelic journey. Not that I've been doing a lot of psychedelics. We could talk about that. I was involved in some psychedelic trials, but I don't think that's it. I think it's that I've matured. I think the brain matures your whole life. I don't think we have childhood and adulthood and then death. I think we have a developmental arc that starts when we're born, probably before we're born. I mean, after all, we were embryos with who knows if we have consciousness? But we were alive, right? Born, and then we have a developmental arc. And the great psychologist Erickson talked about at every stage of life, from birth until death until one's eighties and nineties. You're working out some core conflicts of agency versus autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do. And I forget the stages off the top of my head because it's not my area of expertise. But look at my dad, who's turning 81 in November, who fortunately, God willing, is going to live another 2025 years with immense vigor.

And he's still cognitively super sharp. And he's working out whatever it is you work out when you're 80. I'm working out whatever it is now, but right now it's like caterpillar vision. And as a consequence, the past, while important and informs a lot of who I am and what I do. It's not like it's not in my consciousness at all. And I must say it's a great place to be because throughout my thirties I felt very stricken, very like pulled in different directions based on past, present and efforts toward the future. So if anyone's. I say this in part because if you're struggling, like, kind of feeling stuck in your life story, there's great advantage to just letting some time.

Getting older.

Just getting older is the best. As long as you train with weights three times a week, run three times a week, long, medium and short, it runs. And you take a cold shower and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods and you try and get sleep and you limit your alcohol and you deal with any addictions you might have and you work on your traumas. Like, you're going to have a great freaking life. You know, you're going to be healthier than 90% of people in the world, right? Are you going to take gold at the olympics? Are you going to be Cole Hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final 100 meters of the 15 hundreds? No, unless you're Cole Hawker. But like, you can still have an amazing life. And so I think there have been so many years where I've just been like, God, like, this just feels like a battle. This just feels like, you know, and I can't complain. I've been given so many opportunities and gifts and like trying to make the best of those and share, but like, I just feel like, listen, it's freaking caterpillar.

It's a caterpillar. And then I got back from that run and I was thinking to myself, oh, no, now I gotta like, think about the butterfly thing. And like, this is turning out pretty, I thought, hey, well, that's pretty cool. So I started researching caterpillars because this is me. So I started reading about caterpillars. They are amazing. Like, some of them have adapted different poisons so that the birds that eat them don't die, but literally survive and transmit the discomfort by feeding their young. And then the young are like, ugh. And they actually know they form a permanent memory not to eat those caterpillars. So I now look at caterpillars completely differently. I spent a lot of time drawing caterpillars. I haven't yet watched a documentary about caterpillars.

Sure you'll find.

But anyway, I'll avoid going down this hole any more than I already have. But I think there's great wisdom in trying to think about different animals and how we orient toward them as people I certainly look at other people and think, what dog are they? Etcetera. In part because I think that other animals, in the absence of their self awareness, are shown. They're displaying to us how different the biases of different components of the nervous system. So, like, dogs that move their tails a lot and have a lot of spontaneous movement, right? Like the pit bull breeds versus a bulldog, which doesn't move unless it has to. They. They have different spontaneous temperaments. And then you look at people, I have a colleague. He's hungarian, he has a blab in Switzerland. And the guy is all staccato movements, and he's like this thin and has, like, 5% body fat, naturally. Right? And then I have other colleagues who, like more resemble melted candles. They don't move so much, and they need to exercise more because I love them. And you don't see many overweight 80 year olds, so it'd be nice to have you around longer.

So three times a week, resistance training and cardio.

Thinking about the last few months for you, probably one of the most difficult periods that you've gone through.

I will say not to undercut where I think we're going. Definitely a challenging time based on what I perceive as a lot of misunderstanding. But fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I've been through a lot of hard times. More than some, less than others. But, hey, it's all in reference to our own nervous system. But definitely hard. But not the hardest time. Certainly not the hardest time. The hardest time was probably years earlier, when I had had so much less agency and my community wasn't as established, but definitely not a joyful time. Yeah.

Talk to me about what you learned about yourself and your own psychology and the motivations and sort of dynamics of public scrutiny and pressure like that.

Yeah. If I may, I'll lave into this from a bunch of perspectives. And this is usually the point of discussion like this, where audiences are like, oh, this is where he prepares the diplomatic. Look, I've done a number of sessions talking about this kind of stuff publicly and privately since then, so I'm just showing up to this, how it feels and my read with the understanding that language is sometimes deficient at conveying what's really going on. But I'll do my best. I learned a couple things at a kind of basic factual level. I learned that while there are wonderful aspects to media, there are also a lot of lies in the media. I actually didn't know that or believe that before you hear about it, but I didn't really understand that stories literally, fiction can be woven from lack of context or from outright lies. And that for me was an eye opener. It was like, whoa, no, that's not true. That actually didn't happen that way. Or. Well, yeah, but you left off the second half of that sentence, which would put it all in context and make this seem completely different. I mean, for a scientist it was extremely, extremely jarring because it was like I could see what they were doing.

But if you tried to do that in a scientific paper or in a talk, you wouldn't be giving that scientific paper or talk. You wouldn't make it 10ft into the business, because that's called cherry picking. It's data selection. It's not what we do, doesn't mean people don't have biases of conclusion, biases of interpretation. But you reveal those biases again, as we talked about earlier, you reveal the origins of your thinking and decisions. You state your motivations. It woke me up to that. And that was a bit of a, oh man. Like really? Like, that sucks. Like, I wanted to believe that all media was wholesome in its intentions. I also learned that if you have a, you know, this is hard to say with, you know, you know, I say this with humility, but if your face and name clicks, then you're a target.

What's that mean?

It just means that if the bigger your platform, the more attention your name or face draws, and therefore your name and face is leveraged for clicks, people are making money off of you. It's a profit driven business. Okay. I also learned that many people are very reasonable and they can see through b's. They can see that the tawdry efforts or the attempt to spin a narrative that just isn't right, isn't true. And what I'm saying there is. Whereas I definitely had to face stuff where I felt I was being badly misconstrued or misunderstood. Our audience, the podcast audience and people outside that audience reached out in droves, and supporters at all levels reached out in droves to say, listen, we see what this is, we love what you're doing, we get it, not a problem. And that was great. It also brought forward my friends and people in the community, both podcasters and academics, family and friends. I mean, basically the essence of it was when my dad and I, who in the past, we've had some challenges in our relationship, but now are really good, when he called me and said, they tried to pit us against each other, and I'm like, yeah.

And he was like, I can't believe it. I mean, he, at 80, he couldn't believe it. And he's a very smart guy, okay? He's a theoretical physicist by training. He's a first generation immigrant. He's not here on accident. He had to work his ass off to get here. And he worked very, very hard to provide for us as kids. So he was like, he was like, I can't believe that they would do that. I was like, well, this is apparently what they do. And, you know, and he said, I'll never forget what he said. He said, well, he's very logical, his physicist, after all. He said, one trial learning, one month, one trial learning, meaning we're not gonna make that mistake again. So that was sort of the media side of it. And then I also want to acknowledge that there are people in media and there are both journalists and news platforms that I think really are well intentioned. It also provided this amazing contrast for me. And then I'll get into the more personal aspect, I promise. It made me realize why podcasting and podcasters like you and Joe and Lex and Whitney and David Senra and Tim Ferriss and Richroll and on and on are so amazing.

Rick Rubin. It's real. Like, we're not pretending to be somebody else. We're not doing this to get click. Sure, you want the success of your platform, but you're being you. I'm being me. Lex is being Lex. Joe is being Joe. And that's why it works. And it's been so interesting to compare that and contrast that to traditional media, which has its merits, certainly, but for which, like, it's become this kind of senator of a thing where you're not sure what the motivations are. And, like, why would they go after you? You said this in a clip. Like, why would they go after you? Well, you generate clicks, but they're going after you because you actually, you have two, three, 4510 x their reach. Why? Because people know when something's real, if somebody's being genuine, even if they disagree with that person. And we like realness. We like authenticity. We love that as humans. We want that. It's the artistic expression. And it made me realize that, like, the obvious, which is that we're in the golden age of podcasting right now. Now. And never before in my life have I sort of been in the golden age of something, you know, came up early.

I want to be involved in skateboarding. Friends made as professional skateboards. I didn't. Okay, I wasn't talented enough. Fine. Got into neuroscience, caught the wave in neuroscience, meaning at a time when you could, I would always funded my lab with grants. I even still have some grant money, you know, and even though I still teach teaching again next spring, you know, I've definitely shrunk my lab down. You know, the media said, oh, you know, he doesn't have a lab. Yeah, I shrunk my lab.

What's that mean?

It just means I got my students in postdocs jobs. We published two papers, including a clinical trial in 2023. But I've shrunk my lab down. So I teach, and I'm still tenured at Stanford.

Your lab is still going well.

I have grant funds in a new department where we're doing some human clinical trials, but I no longer run experiments on animals. That was a very personal choice for me. And also, when you have students and postdocs, you need to be able to give them a certain amount of time in order to nourish their. Their development. And then they all. All of them, every one of my students and postdocs has gone on to jobs or positions they wanted. So I took care of my academic children. I think they would say that if they don't, I'll hear from them. But they're doing phenomenally well, and I'm very proud of them. They deserve the credit. So it made me realize that, okay, I'm still a neuroscientist. I still read papers. I'm still on editorial boards. And yet, right now, we're in the golden age of podcasting. This new form of media of people being themselves. It's not like radio. It's like radio, but different. It's not like television. It's like television, but different. In fact, this arc might be of interest to you. I watched this documentary about game shows recently hosted by Alex Trebek. The documentary, frankly, is far too long, but it goes like this.

During the World Series, when DiMaggio was making effort towards the home run record, was the first commercial, okay, to sell a product, and it was designed to grab the housewives and people that purchase things for the home. Okay? Back then. Then came eventually game shows. And game shows were just an excuse to sell products, but they eventually found that the human narrative in the game shows, the price is right host kissing the contestants, something that would never happen nowadays, okay? Things have changed, matured. Eventually, it was the human story. Then it became reality tv shows, right? And then now I see social media media as the reality tv show that we're all casting ourselves in on a daily basis. And then podcasts are sort of the. The umbrella around and within social media. Right? I mean, I think Elon sitting down with Trump today. Right? Exactly.

We didn't mention that. Just to really track back, just in case you thought that things were going to calm down. Trump's back on Twitter, right?

I know they released his account. Has he tweeted anything?

Yep. Today for the first time. Mugshot.

What did he tweet?

A couple of videos, one mocking Kamala, one bigging himself up, and two announcements saying, I'm going live at 08:00 p.m. tonight with Elon on X. I wonder.

If they'll correct the Rogan narrative, because over the weekend there was this narrative that Rogan had endorsed RFK and it turned out not to be true.

No, he just said that he liked him, which he said a million times before. And then Trump posed socialed truths, I don't know what you call it, posted on truth social. I wonder how much Joe Rogan's going to get booed the next time he goes to the UFC. That may be fact check false. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that that's that. But I mean, that's a tone deaf.

Rogan is the hero of the UFC.

Yeah, it's Dana White. It's like small Dana white and big Danae away.

Happy birthday, Joe. His birthday was over the weekend. So I guess the point is this, that the, you know, the fans, the listeners of a podcast are part of the podcast in a way that no medium has existed before because they can comment and give feedback in a way that has not been available before. Now that's the media side. So gave me tremendous appreciation for all of that.

The personal side, how do you personally deal with a few roles, the one that you went, and also, im particularly interested in the lessons that youve learned longer term. But what does it feel like to wake up that day? You understand the neurochemicals, you understand the hormonal response, but youve got this just flood of phenomena going through you.

Yeah, I think one of the hardest things is being misunderstood and then understanding the motivations of the media or the motivations of the people that gave stories to the media, the blatant lies. Although there was a portion of what was said that was absolutely true, and that's the part that I was overly doting on my bulldog. That is absolutely true. That's absolutely true. But, well, what I decided to do is what I've done at numerous times in my life when things felt potentially overwhelming, which was to get a committee of people around me that I really trust and rely on their optics when I couldn't rely on my own. So that meant my podcast producer, Rob Moore, that meant other people, including my family, were amazing people from my high school. You know, it was interesting because they interviewed many people from my high school but discarded with those narratives because they were positive. They interviewed many former girlfriends of mine who I was in touch with regularly and still am, who were very positive, and they discarded with those narratives. And you're not looking for, yes, people, but you're looking for people that can really help steer you through something and help you see where, hey, maybe you need to pay attention to this aspect of your life a bit more or that a little bit more.

But you know what? No, there's a thick black line here, and that's simply false. Lex Friedman literally showed up in my home. Home showed up. I just looked up. There's Lex jacket and Ty. Hey, what's up, brother? He's there. So my home during that week and the weeks following, the weeks following consisted of many people coming to stay. I recall very clearly one day walking out into the yard, I take a little nap and must have been 15 or 20 people there, including my good friend Tim Armstrong. Other people there supporting me, just being there, there. Right. We also continued to work in that time. We released solo episodes, we released posts, we released podcasts. We were not going to stop working.

How are you able to get yourself into the right mode of mind? Are you not? Have you not got split brain problem there? Half of you is over here. The other half is trying to be professional.

I learned in that time, but I took some tools from prior to prior experiences to take five to ten minutes, take the first couple of minutes and meditate. Concentrate on one's breath. Try and get as present as possible. Your mind is always flitting to these other things that are trying to distract it, realizing every time you can hold on to your present cognition, bringing things present for a millisecond longer, you're doing that much better. Ratcheting back and then getting into action, doing generative work, work teaching science and health information. Because that's why the people that listen to the Huberman Lab podcast, I don't think they listen to it to hear anything about my personal life or attempts to malign my past story. I will also say there were some things that infused a focus and energy into me that I didn't anticipate that were very beautiful. For instance, one of the narratives that was getting spun out there is that my backstory about growing up in the skateboarding thing, getting into fights, that maybe that had been constructed, which is categorically false. Those are true stories, in other words. And Steve Ruge, the guy who was my team manager at Thunder and Spitfire skateboard companies back then, wrote to me, and he said, yeah, I got this outreach from reporters, and they kept kind of trying to pull and get me to change my account of you calling me from being locked up and saying, hey, Steve, I'm in this place.

And me saying, you're the most normal person I know. And that whole thing. And he's like, and I don't understand why they're doing that. Like, I don't know either. And he's like, well, I told them the truth. I told them exactly what happened. You called me. I remember where I was at the deluxe office. He, okay, fine. And then he goes, and I told him that I had put you on thunder and spitfire. And I was like, do you realize what you just did for me? From the time I was 14 years old, I was still uncertain whether or not you had put me on the team. And I was too embarrassed to ask. And he's like, of course you are on the team. And I was like, oh, man, I waited my whole life to hear that. 30 years plus. I. So there was like, you know, these things that had kind of vexed me for years. Like, was I really part of that or was I not part of that team? Like, so what ended up happening is people from my past showed up, not just my family. Jim Thibault from the world skateboarding, Steve Rugey, people from my past, people from my present.

And then I just got outreach from men and women in droves. Some very high profile people. Very, very high profile people. Some lesser profile, some no profile. Reaching out by email, by phone, by text, showing up at my home, and encouraging me, encouraging me to continue on the mission. And at that point, I was buoyed by the fact that I'm like, okay, people can see. They can see the truth. They understand context being warped. They understand lies versus truth, and they understand that a single sided story is never, ever, ever the right way to resolve issues. And so it was amazing to see. And then what happened was we started growing. And I was like, oh, my goodness. You hear about this, you're going to grow from this. I always thought that just meant psychologically and internally, but then it was like, we grew. Then the next thing I know, I'm on Jimmy Fallon. Okay. Some people might have thought that came about before. Oh, next thing you know, we're a jeopardy question. Like, all of a sudden, like, things started growing. And then I started realizing, let's just get back to work.

Is that the fastest period in the show's growth history among.

I don't know, because I don't track the numbers that closely. I decided early on to remove my dopamine circuits from the numbers. I do my own Instagram, I do my own Twitter, and I manage. I don't have someone manage my comments, I manage all of that myself. So, yes, if I say thank you, you in the DM's, that's me. But it was definitely among the sharpest inflections I've ever experienced.

I think Joe said something similar about the CNN horse paced dewormer scenario, that although, you know, it might feel back, he had a sort of a one two punch. He had his infamous n word video and the CNN thing within six months of each other. But he said the quickest period that they've ever had was the CNN thing. So if you were, one of the sensations I imagine you must have is indignation. This isn't true, and I want to correct the record. As you said, one of the worst things is being misunderstood. Was it a strategic decision to not issue a statement? Here we go. Here's the four hour long breakdown. You know, you've got the tools, you've got the platform, you've got the followers. Why not get it out there?

Yeah, well, I certainly was tempted at times, but the consultation I got and what I eventually arrived at was that no matter what, I would say that, well, first of all, there were elements to some of that that needed to remain private to protect other people. So in that sense, there were a few things I had to take on the chin to protect other people lives. Not their actual lives, but their well being. The other piece was that it was made very clear to me, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the media will cherry pick statements and kludge together things. They're still doing it in order to spin a narrative, right, that makes it such that no matter what you say, it won't be understood the way you want it to be understood. And that was extremely frustrating to me. Extremely frustrating to me. In fact, last night, late at night, I had a conversation with a male friend and colleague with whom we had a misunderstanding. This gets to something I mentioned a little bit earlier. Not a betrayal, not a mistake, a misunderstanding. And we actually didn't speak to one another for about a month and a half.

And it was very frustrating for me and for them. And then he and I, I wouldn't even say, hashed it out last night. We just brought to the table, I said, listen, I think there was a misunderstanding, not a mistake, not a betrayal. I own my part and I'm sorry, and I've learned. You say you're sorry. That was it. You say you're sorry. And he said the same thing. He goes, I think I overreacted. And I said, I didn't say no, you didn't or anything, even though I have my feelings about it. And he said, I'm sorry. And I said, we're good. We're good. We had done the work internally. Right now, unfortunately, when things are done at scale, you don't get that opportunity. You don't get a media scale. And I think also personally, obviously, I'm human. There was the need for reflection on the things past and present that I wish I had done differently, and that you make the change and you move forward. I'll also say, and people can roll their eyes if they want, or they can come up with any theories they want. But prayer was extremely grounding for me in that time.

Just to. Not meditation, not seeking approval, validation and support of others. Although support from others was critical, as was constructive critique. But prayer, to just spend time in prayer, listening to any messages that I needed to hear about what needed changing in me, in my personal life, in my family life, in my work life, in my public facing life. And that was honestly the cornerstone. That was the center of it all. That was the piece that allowed me to go, okay, you know what? This sucks. There's silver linings. There's misunderstanding, outright lies, lack of. And you know what? I see all that. I see the changes that need to be made. I see where I also draw a thick black line and say, no, that's not that. And we're not going to pretend it is. And prayer was the thing that helped me calibrate my compass ten times a day. And it wasn't just praying like, oh, please, make this stop. Or anything like that. You know, please. It was more, help me see with clarity that this is the way I would do it. And again, people can decide what they want. I'm not telling anyone what to believe.

It was like, you know, literally on my knees. God, please help me see and feel and think with the kind of clarity that's going to allow me to make the best decisions now and going forward. Let me get through this morning making the best possible decisions given what's happening. I'm turning over all control and agency over the things I can't control to you. And I'm going to put every ounce of effort I can into trying to continue teaching people about science and health and becoming a better person as I go. And that's still my prayer, among other things. Before I go to sleep at night night I'm on my knees at the side of the bread prayer kind of guy since the new year, since just before the new year. Before that, it was kind of in my head a little bit, kind of here or there. And before every podcast I just went in the bathroom now and prayed before this, I go there for privacy now because it's the bathroom, but. And I know for people thinking, okay, this is a scientist, or now he's kind of claiming the God thing. I'm not claiming anything.

Like for me, this has been the most powerful thing that I've ever experienced, because it's just given me peace and a compass and a rudder forward. Even if I have to be at caterpillar levels of horizon view this far out in front of me, inching forward, I'm just grateful to God. I'm grateful to God for the chance to keep going forward.

What would be your advice to somebody who's going through an emotionally intense period? It seems to me like if I was to try and deconstruct, not to make protocols out of a nightmare scenario, but social cohesion groups around you not being on your own too much.

Yeah. And if you. I'm blessed to have a huge network, but I'll say this, I have that network because I put work into that network. Yeah, some of these people I work with. But Jim Thibo didn't show up at my house because I'm a podcaster. He showed up there the same way he did two years before when I got slammed to the concrete in life. He showed up when I was 14 and I was a depressed kid sitting at the embarcadero with a busted foot because I couldn't skateboard. And he just sat with me and gave me a book to read and encouraged me to write. I took what Jim did for me and did it for other people. So I like to think perhaps it was God returning the energy, returning the favor. You build your support system in good times, and when they're down, you support them and you don't do it because you might hit bad times, you will hit bad times, and that's one reason to do it. You just do it. So there's that. So if you're up, build your support network. Doesn't have to be huge, but make it strong.

Make it strong by doing the right thing, setting examples. And if it's medium, fine, if it's huge, fine. I definitely use tools. The physiological side works to limit stress. Get sleep. I didnt rely on pharmacology to get sleep. I know some people need to. I just didnt want to go that route once. Months earlier, I took a little, it was prescribed to me. I took a half Xanax to try and sleep, and the sleep I got felt like crap. I woke up and I was like, im not doing that again. I use breathing tools, I use NSDR, I use some supplementation to solve sleep. But sleep is key. You win by sleeping. That was one of our mottos during that time and all times when we're out on the road doing lives, it's like we're going from one city to the next, and we're podcasting and we're doing Ama's and we're busy and we're talking all day and go, go, go. We're like, we're sleeping and we don't drink and we're serious, like professional athletes, right? So there's that training.

Hot, cold.

Definitely did some hot cold in really stressful times. I'll pare back on training a bit. Um, I train as preparation. So for me, lifting three times a week, I love training. You know, I do my legs, I do my torso, I do my arms and calves and neck. Okay, sure. I do my long run, I do my medium run, I do my sprint day, I do the cold and heat, but I do that not as a means. I do that in part as a means to an end. So that when it's time to sprint for the airplane, when it's time to take a week and just lean all your physical and mental energy into a crisis, you can do that. And then I go back to training.

I think I would have struggled. I think I would have struggled to regulate without training each day.

Listen, taking a walk, getting a good shower, getting your hair cut, these things make a difference. The other thing is, I learned to be able to call on people to pick up the phone and say, hey, listen, I'm spinning here. I can't make sense of this strategy or that strategy. What do you think? And then writing down what that person said, taking a few things and then just going inward. There is this tendency, especially with texts, to constantly be increasing the size of your committee. I'll say this was interesting. Some people came to me immediately and said, you should do blank. And I was like, really? And they're like, absolutely. Do blank. And then I didn't do blank, and then a week later, they're like, oh, you absolutely did the right thing. You should do exactly the opposite of blank. And then I realized I was like, oh, goodness. Like, not that I'm never going to listen to advice from that person again, but they were just saying stuff. So you need to be a selective filter, and it can be very hard. And I will say anyone going through a crisis of any kind, any kind, you need a committee, however big or small.

And if you don't have people, you need people in books, you need people in podcasts. And, you know, I'm not a recruiter, but, but you might give prayer a try because there's real peace at the center there. And from that peace, you can see the right decision, and from that right decision, you can make the right decision for that circumstance. And there are just too many circumstances to say you should always say this or you should never say anything. And this kind of thing. What I do know is that, God forbid if they come for you, Chris or anyone, like, we got you. Like, I don't know what the best advice will be in those circumstances, but we got you. Like, and we got you because you're a truly good person with your heart out there being you. Right up until now, you've just been being you, and that's why you're successful. And, yeah, I mean, I got calls from, you know, people can guess the names and there were some names also. I couldn't believe it. I was like, these are people with enormous stature that I thought were probably would fall on the opposite end of the spectrum would be calling me to yell at me.

And in fact, we're like, you're doing all the right things. Don't let it get to you. Keep going. Think about X, Y and Z. And I was like, whoa. So what you will find in hard times like those, God willing, they won't happen to you, is that, that you'll find your inner resolve. The world will come to you and show you who your real friends are, who your real supporters are. And I wasn't counting off who stuck their neck out for me and who wasn't. It was beautiful to see people who did and the ones who didn't, I get it. Like, they have their own incentives. They needed to do whatever it is they needed to do.

I think I regretted not messaging me that day. And the reason that I didn't was it's kind of like when somebody birthday and you think, does he really need an additional thing? So I texted Rob instead. Rob can be the filter and he.

Passed it to me. And thank you, and listen, it's also a felt thing. And you raise a very important point that goes, and I hope people hearing this can understand that the reason to have this discussion is not about me. It's that we all are going to go through these sorts of things at different scales and in different contexts, is that it's like when somebody dies, everyone's like, my condolences. So sorry, so sorry. The time to reach out to them is also afterwards. And again, call me nonscientific. Fine. I have enough science under my belt to be totally confident in what I'm about to say, which is like, last night in my prayers, I prayed for somebody who had posted something about losing their mom. I actually didn't know his mom, but I just, it came to me. I was like, we all flooded in and there, condolences, thoughts and prayers. But he's probably hurting like crazy right now. And so you pray for that person. Now you say, well, how does that prayer impact them? I don't know, but I believe in that. And you reach out to somebody by text, they just checking in.

And this is the beauty of what you do, and it's the beauty of what podcasters do in general, which is you're creating things in perpetuity. The AI is going to be trained on these conversations. You know, your great grandchildren will be able to glean knowledge from things that you've shared. And I think that putting that out into the world in a way that other people can benefit from is nothing short of spectacular. You know, when I was a junior professor, I'd listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast. At that time, it was just that. And like, I remember thinking like he this podcast is like my friend in a city where I don't know anyone, you know, now I'm fortunate to call Tim a friend, right? I could actually call on Tim, but I think that the lone, the loneliness and isolation that people feel, especially people that are striving and don't have a big network, can sometimes feel so overwhelming. But I was that guy, I was that kid who didn't have anyone to call, or I was confused about something that was happening and I didn't have the network of people to call. You build that over time.

But podcasts and what people being themselves out there in the world, mainly podcasts. It's like, I really care. I hope that if bullet bus or cancer takes me out tomorrow, that some of the things that I've shared, hopefully many of the things I've shared could help people now and going forward, that's a real thing. It's not about selling us advertisement or a supplement that's incidental. It's about the material. So I'm kind of spooling now, but within me I feel immense gratitude. I wouldn't change the experience of the last year for anything. I don't want to experience it, you know, for its own sake. But what it brought me was huge gifts. And yeah, it grew us like crazy, but shit, I mean, if I could have done it a different way, I would. But, you know, God served up this meal just the way he did, you know?

Have I ever told you my idea of the lonely chapter? I told you about this.

No, but I feel like I've had a few of those.

Yeah. So I learned this with Alex Hormozi last year. And the lonely chapter describes a time in which you're growing, you're changing as a person, and you're now so different that you can no longer resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not sufficiently developed that you've got the new set of friends that you're going to grow into. And this is the lonely chapter. And the problem with it is that you're always. The desire to sort of regress back to where you were is always going to be there, and you're going to have. You're going to have uncertainty. There's not even the promise of glory or success or triumph when you get through the other side. What am I pushing toward? You're telling me that I'm not going to go out on this night out with my friends, which I've done for the last five years or ten years in the town that I grew up in or went to university or whatever. You tell me that I'm not going to do that because I'm going to get up and I'm going to meditate or read. Who even knows if meditation works right? You've got all of these questions in your mind, and all of your friends and all of the dynamics and the temptations pull you back toward that.

It pulls you back toward the old version of life. So this lonely chapter is a period through which I think everybody needs to squeeze. Anybody that decides to go from a place they are to a place that they want to be is going to have to let go of people who can't go there with them. And this isn't a value judgment about the people that are doing the personal growth thing are better than the people that are already fine as they are and are happy leading a different sort of life. It's that if you know that there is something that you're meant to do, if you know that there's something that you're meant to change, you will have to let certain groups, friends, routines, places, activities, recreations that you do, you're going to have to let those go. And there is this. You know, the rocky cutscene lasts for 90 seconds in the movie, but it can last for five years in your life, and you have no idea whether or not it's even going to work. That's the bit that always got to me. The bit that always got to me was I didn't even know if there was going to be any glory on the other side.

It's like ordering an Uber and never knowing if it's going to arrive or not. You think, well, I'm just stood here doing the thing thing, but I don't know if it's going to come out on the other side. And I can promise you, anybody that has done anything, moved from any place they were to any place that they want to be has gone through this lonely chapter. And I think about personal growth, like the velocity of a rocket that's taking off. So you've got people moving, and as you start to take off, you can begin to move a little bit more quickly. And as you start to pull away from people, there's a tension between the two of you, because sometimes your behavior, especially if it's positive and you're moving yourself in a more developed direction and can throw into harsh contrast the behavior of the people who maybe aren't doing that. And then you start to sort of become friends with someone that's above you. And then the worst, or one of the really difficult sensations is if you then do that and you go past somebody who previously you were with. And there's this sort of sense, well, I'm on the journey, too, but maybe I'm not moving in the same kind of way that you are.

And I came up with this idea of personal growth guilt, like survivor guilt. You know, somebody comes back from war and they were sat in the back of the Humvee, and the piece of shrapnel that was supposed to kill them and killed all of their buddies hit the engine block, and they come back and they feel like they should still be back there, but they're not. And it's almost the same with the personal growth stuff that I feel like I'm almost sort of betraying this older version of me, this past version of my life that I should be there. And there's this scene in the Matrix that Alix talks about where Neo doesn't know if he wants to move forward, he doesn't know if he wants to take the journey that he's called to. And he opens the door and Trinity says, you've already been down that road, Neo. You know where it takes you and you know that's not where you want to go back to. And I think about that. I think about that a lot, that lonely chapter. And for me it lasted for a good amount of time, transitioning from being a guy in his twenties that does the reality tv thing, does the, the party boy thing, and then goes, okay, I decided to stop drinking, which ten years ago was revolutionary, especially as a club promoter.

It's now very common to do low and no, but pretty different back then. And all of the incentives were for me to go back to partying. Why are you doing that? You're going to be boring on a night out. I realized that if you need to drink to be around your friends, you don't have friends, you have drinking partners. Most. If the only way that you can bear to be around your friends is to drink, then you really need to find yourself about a social network. All of the things. I used to leave the front door of a nightclub and I would sit and I would wedge my phone into the top of the steering wheel. So I have a party with 1500 people there. It's my party, my company. And I would leave to go watch Alain de Botton School of life philosophy videos. And it was evident that I just had this odd sort of discordance in my mind. I was being ripped away from where I was to where I am. And yeah, I think the lonely chapter is one of the most important insights that has come out of the show over the last 18 months, because it's reassuring to, I think, a huge portion of podcast listeners.

Why is it that people resonate and have this parasocial relationship with some bloke that's on the other side of the planet? And I think it's because while they're struggling to resonate with any of the blokes that or girls that are around them where they live, and you end up finding solace in this person that speaks to you because you struggle to find solace, sort of personally. So yeah, the overarching lesson is just keep going. The lonely chapter is a feature, not a bug of personal growth. It is a. It's the cost of doing business if you want to develop yourself.

Yeah, I love that. I recall in high school when getting hurt skateboarding, realizing I didn't have a future there, which fortunately was a good thing for me. It was God, again, intervening, saying, nope, you're gonna get broke off again, you're not gonna. This is not gonna be your path. Following a high school girlfriend to college and then realizing after the first year that drinking and getting in fights was not a good path, and get my life in order, and then studying a lot at a school where at that time weren't terribly studious, and it was incredibly isolating. I even lived alone, lived with my girlfriend, or I lived alone and being very isolated, and then in graduate school, felt more social connection. But then, as a junior professor, there are boundaries between you and the people you work with, and those are important boundaries. And so not having many male friends, and fortunately, at the time, my romantic partner, who I'm still good friends with, was a great source of family and support, but feeling cut off from friends of other types, and then again, in this more recent iteration of entering the podcast world, but then you find your community.

I also think, while I totally agree, you can look to podcasters, to books, also to people who are no longer alive, mentors like the great Oliver Sacks, who I've never met, but I've reached out to people that knew him and that have given me information about him, given me, you know, gotten me through many hard times based on his life experience. His biography is autobiography is why I like biography and autobiography so much. You can feel a kinship with people.

That's why David Senra's show is so great.

That's one of the reasons Founders podcast is so great. I just got to meet Senra himself recently. Is it just amazing? Amazing podcast. He's amazing. Highly recommend that podcast. Rick Rubin's been a great source of support. Tim Armstrong has been an enormous source of support. Jim Thiebo has been an enormous source of support. Joe Rogan's been an enormous source of support. Lex Friedman's been a big source of support. You've been a great source of support. Whitney Cummings and on and on, and people showing up and people from entirely other industries, investors, people in. Let's just. I want to, because it's only fair to protect their identities, people in media that are not of the podcasting ilk, for instance, people who I never thought I would meet, you know, explaining the commonalities of their experience. And if you're wondering, okay, well, then those are all these people, but who's going to come for me. Well, I'm going to, and Chris is going to. When you're coming up and you're in your thing, like, reach out. Right. I mean, it's kind of incredible the way that humans will move in to support one another when they need it.

Good humans.

Good humans. And it's kind of incredible how good humans help lift each other up even when we don't know each other. Right. And I don't want to get into it here because it's not appropriate for here. But where I look at people that have really just disappeared, not, not always, but a lot of times, it's like their motivations weren't right in the first place. Something happened to them and they're gone, and you go, what happened to them? And it's like, you know, again, there are exceptions to this, but I don't know. Their heart probably wasn't in it. Their heart probably wasn't in it. Or, you know, there was enough of a terrible circumstance there that it had to go that way. But I think it's just a. I heard from a former postdoc of mine recently and another one, both of whom are professors now, and through the philanthropy arm of my podcast and some donors, I'm able to support scientific research. We do this. We don't do it for public recognition. We do it because I want to support the best science, and we're able to do that. And I can't tell you the, the joy, just pure joy that it brings me to hear about them and their students that they're mentoring.

Like, there's a passage of this stuff over time. And, look, none of us live forever except Brian Johnson. Just kidding. And by the way, if you want to know my take on Brian, I've known Brian for a long time. We go way back, and I think it's wonderful that he's doing what he's doing. And I think he's, you know, I don't know him well enough to say, like, people always want to know, like, what's Heddeendeze? You know, I think it's great that somebody's exploring the field of longevity from the perspective he is and other perspectives. So for that, I got to give.

You my take on Brian. I was at a. I've seen Brian in person maybe two or three times. I was at roatan, an island off Honduras with him.

Okay.

At the start of this year. And then I did a jeffersonian dinner, breakfast with him.

Very Bay Area, to do a jeffersonian dinner.

Yeah. Well, he brought some of the Bay area over and I had some of his nutty pudding, and I had to sit down with him. And the way that I think of Brian is kind of like a scout in an army. So it wouldn't do to have an entire army filled with scouts. It would be a pretty shitty army. But I'm more than happy to have that one guy, who apparently is built to be a scout, go up that really dangerous hill over there that maybe the view's beautiful, or maybe slip and a catastrophe occurs at some, and come back and tell us what he found. I love that. Thank you.

He's a bit of an astronaut, correct?

Yeah. You expend time and effort and resources and all of that finding out stuff. I'm all for him doing that, and I'll take the top 20% or whatever that gives the 80% of the insights from him.

He's part of this incredible tapestry that's being built of public facing health and science information. Never before in human history has health and I science information been dispersed in the way that it is now, through podcasts, through traditional media, from physicians, from scientists, from ancient wisdom stuff. I mean, I can sit back from all of it. See Brian, see my position in the field, see the lane Norton, see the people that attack us, see the FDA, see the NIH. And I can look at. I mean, listen, I was on a grants review panel until a little over twelve months ago. I was a regular member on there. I've reviewed grants, written grants, fortunately gotten many grants funded. Plenty of grants didn't get funded, too. I understand the process, and I understand people's different orientation, and realize that we're all after the same thing. We all want to live longer, healthier lives with more vitality. We're all after the same thing. And what I'm interested in is the overlap in the Venn diagrams. So if you call it yoga, Nidra or NSDR, if you're talking about rem sleep and the dynamics of spindle waves in the brain, or you're talking just about your dreams and you're doing a dream journal, ultimately, I'm interested in the practices that are true now, that have always been true, and that can evolve through technology that are going to allow us all to be healthier, mentally, physically, etcetera.

That's the mission. So you nailed it. You want a Brian Johnson on the mission, you want a lane Norton on the mission. I like to think you want an Andrew Huberman on the mission. You want Chris on the mission, you want all these people on the mission and the FDA and the NIH. And you want the arguments. What you don't want want, and what I see is incredibly counterproductive, is people taking the stance that only their view is the appropriate one. As long as people voice their motivations and their logic for proposing what they propose, it's mostly all good, except the stuff that's dangerously bad. Okay, that's not good. But listen, I chuckle at the idea that any one of these perspectives is going to be the perspective. And in fact, I throw my head back and laugh, because if you look historically, all you have to do, if you really are having trouble sleeping, or if you really want a dense book, the Prince of Medicine is a beautiful book that talks about Galen and how our understanding of the human body in medicine really evolved from, really people being allowed to do more and more in terms of human dissection and analyzing the human body, something that wasn't allowed prior because of rules about dissecting human bodies and the understanding that government.

Government bodies plus funding, plus curiosity have all been these competing forces, and that the acceleration of science and medicine is now taking place at a rate that is unprecedented. CRISPR brain machine interface. And yes, I'll say it, psychedelics and supplementation, they're just compounds. People go supplements. None of that's regulated. Yeah, and you could also have a conversation about SSRI's, which have huge value, but can also do huge damage. So any qualified psychiatrist will tell you that. So right now, we are on an accelerated path. And I think the challenge for most people is they're drinking from the fire hose and they don't know which filters to put up. And so all I can say is, it's super exciting. Right? It's super, super exciting. But you want to argue about these different orientations about as much as you want to argue about what genre of music is best. There's just no answer. Answer. Right. Most people love Taylor Swift, and there are people that also love other forms of music, and you're always going to find outliers at the extremes. So unless something is dangerous, right. I think that most of the ideas I see out there warrant further exploration, and some are just really darn good.

So I'm glad that Brian came up, because I think he represents one spoke on the wheel, and it's an important one. In his absence of, I think the field will progress less quickly. I just wish that people would look at things through these lenses. I also think for the generation coming up that were weaned on social media, it's very important that they realize something that David Goggins has said. I just feel like it's appropriate to say this right now, right now, because most of what's happening online is a consumer based environment, I think he said, easier than ever to become extraordinary now that it's hard to overstate the power of putting away the phone and doing some writing, or putting away the phone and doing some musical training or putting away the like it's. And then using social media as a place to put your efforts out into the world, as opposed to place your efforts while standing there obliviously in the real world. Like the people that realize that the direction of flow needs to be from real world into electronic world and out, as opposed to the other way, are going to be the ones that are going to succeed in life.

Barring some accident or injury, you're almost guaranteed success relative to your peers. It's that simple.

I remember, and we've spoken about this before, but I remember when NMN Rapamycin nad sublingual, mix it into yogurt, do all of this stuff. I remember when that was going to make us all live to 150. And what is the state of the world of longevity drug supplements now? What's happening with that?

Yeah, I just did an episode with Peter Attia. So here's the deal. As I understand it, Peter is pretty bullish on rapamycin. Remember that mtor, which is expressed at very high levels in essentially all cells of the brain and body during development, declines across the lifespan. MTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin, that's named after the drug that targets that receptor. Rapamycin, targets the mTOr, and in some sense mimics fasting. Okay, this is broadly speaking. Keep in mind that the studies showing extension of life in different species, including mice, show that being fairly dramatically sub maintenance caloric extends lifespan. But you're also potentially sub happiness when you're that sub caloric. Potentially pretty weak immunologically too. Potentially, potentially physically weak. So yes, starving yourself within reason can extend your lifespan, but you also starve yourself of joy and vigor, right? I mean, at some point you are sub caloric enough that testosterone levels plummet in men and women. Libido plummets, fertility plummets in men and women. So, you know, it's a trade off. Um, I don't take rapamycin. I don't take metformin. I don't even take berberine, which is poor man's metformin. It makes me very hypoglycemic for reasons that make total sense based on the mechanisms of metformin and berberine.

I do take sublingual NMN, but it's very important. But I don't take it to extend my lifespan. I take sublingual NMN. And by the way, I have no affiliation to any supplement company that sells NMN. I take it because it has for me, in my experience. Again, this is not a randomized control trial. This would not meet nor tean criteria, Lane Nortian criteria. It causes my hair to grow very, very fast, which is odd. But other people I know who've taken it report the same effect. Nails very thick and gives me a lot of morning energy.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. So that's the reason I take it. But I don't expect it to make me live longer. Now, the history around NMN is worth paying attention to. It was David Sinclair that popularized NMN. Remember, NMN is a precursor to naddemen. NR is the precursor to NMN. So there's a phosphate group that gets removed. People that are not David Sinclair are fairly bullish about NR being preferable to NMN. But the people who are proponents of NR, true niagen associated folks, et cetera, tend to focus more on the anti inflammation effects of NR and point to the fact that NR has been shown to convert to naddemen in cells more readily than NMN. Now, all I know is that when I take sublingual NMN, my hair grows faster, my nails grow thicker and faster. Two effects that I wasn't seeking, but that I'm okay with, and I have more morning energy. I've also taken NR, and I didn't notice any tangible effect. I don't take it because it's very expensive relative to NMN. And even though I probably could afford it, I didn't subjectively feel much. Which is not to say it isn't worthwhile. People might be interested in taking it.

The NMN was popularized because David Sinclair started talking about it on various podcasts, and then he started a company that is evaluating it as a drug in a clinical trial. Therefore, the FDA said the NMN could not be sold as a supplement. That's the way the laws work. But then supplement manufacturers continue to do so, and it does not seem like the FDA is clamping down on it, at least not hard, because you can go on Amazon, or you can go to any one of these different companies and buy NMN if you wish. So that's the story there in terms of other things to oh, and why don't I take rapamycin? Not enough human data. And honestly, my goal is to live to be 100 or 110 with vigor. And I'm not so interested in living to be 150.

Metformin.

No. Not interested in plummeting my blood sugar Berberine. Not interested in plummeting my blood sugar gives me headaches unless I'm eating a lot of carbohydrates with it. The only time I've taken Berberine and I might take it again is I used to do cheat days. I don't any longer where I could eat a dozen donuts. If I take 500 milligrams of berberine first, I feel fine. Otherwise. I feel like my eyes get blurry and I want to pass out. That's kind of fun to do every once in a while. But if I don't eat a lot of carbohydrates or sugar with berberine, then I get a massive hypoglycemic headache, and I feel like. It almost feels like my head is made of stone. It's very strange feeling. Feeling. I don't like it. Um, other things for longevity, taking good care, don't get hit in the head. Um, avoid excessive stress. You know, all the. All the basic kind of, like, uh, things that we all know. So the longevity field is a peculiar one. I mean, it could be that Brian is onto something with the exosomes and with the. Again, I don't want to throw out things that I'm not aware that he's doing.

I think it's some PRP exosomes. I do. Red light. I think there's enough data for red light therapy. Whole body red light. Um, you know. Yep. Naked in front of the panel. Ten minutes, five minutes. Facing five minutes from behind or facing away, as it were, for sake of eye health. The data from Glenn Jeffries lab showing that red light therapy, especially in the early part of the day, may offset some age related vision decline. This is my colleague Glenn Jeffrey at University College London. Beautiful studies. He might be a fun person for you to talk to. He's been in the game a long, long time. Red light therapy for mitochondrial health, these sorts of things. And then dosing with stress appropriately, but not overdoing stress, making sure to get enough sleep, having a joyful life. I love this. Joy is efficiency and longevity, perhaps as well. Im bolstered by observing my dad, who might have a glass of wine every once in a while, but never drank very much, who exercises but never overdid it, who always works, worked nine to five, and then would put down the pen. And he's a theoretical physicist, after all, and would focus on walks and getting sunlight and thinking.

He would often take walks and think about science, he would tell me, but didn't overwork himself, but was very, very consistent. I think he just filed, he's in excess of 70 patents and he's going strong. He was also somebody that moved to the United States in the era of the 1960s, told stories about people passing joints, and he was like, no, I worked my butt off to get out of a country where they didn't support science. He had this opportunity from the Navy to come here and study on scholarship and decided he's sort of like all drugs, bad kind of guy. Whereas I think nowadays I and others have a kind of a more adapted, nuanced view of things like cannabis. Probably okay for some, probably good for others, and probably terrible for others. So I think that moderation goes a long way, including in exercise. I mean, if you look at people who marathon and ultra, they dont age as well as, in my opinion, as people, certainly better than people that are sedentary. But when you look at, for instance, people who are very heavily muscled, they dont age very well. You look at people who do a ton of ultra endurance, they dont age terribly well.

You look at some of the older sprinters out there, older gymnast. I'll pass you a clip of this guy. He's 98 years old. I sent this to Rick Rubin the other day, and we were just blown away. The guy doing two fingers of each hand, doing a pull up, I think the guy's Chinese. And then doing a skin the cat. So rolling his feet in, you know, shoulder extension, skin the cat, then back out, and then a chin up, and then walking away from it. Now he looks 98 at the level of his skin sag and his face and his, and his gait. But holy moly, does he have grip strength and flexibility. And I want to be that guy at 98. I don't know what he's doing in the other domains of his life, but I'm pretty sure it's impressive.

What is the reason for the concern on ultra athletes is that free radicals, I've heard that. I don't even know what they are.

It's just stress, right? I mean, and I think it's. And, you know, I went up to the Olympic track and field trials in Oregon, and it was amazing. And I met some of the best marathoners in the world. And I know Cam Haynes well, as you do, and he, you know, and Cam pushes himself hard. I think that, again, better than that than to be sedentary. I think for Cam. I can't speak for him, but I don't think he has a choice but to push himself that way. But, and he's pretty.

I don't think he's pushing. He's being pulled.

He's being pulled. Yeah. Well. And he's got it up. I think he's. It's all coming through him. I know, I know. Probably some people are like, oh, God, here we go again with that whole thing. But there's something about when you access these sources of guidance and energy that are outside you, that feel bigger than you and are bigger than you. If nothing else, we can agree on that. Cam carries a fair amount of muscle as well, which I think is protective against some of the muscle wasting that occurs when people are running really far, really long over and over and over. It's stressful.

That ran the entire length of afro.

No, but that's super impressive.

World first. World first guy.

The.

Yeah. From the north, south, Cape, Cape Town, you know, the absolute bottom to turkey.

And it can't be a huge jungle.

He run for a year. Run for a year.

This is some forest gump kind of stuff.

Correct. And Ross edge. Lee, do you remember Ross? He swam around the UK. Was the first man to ever swim around the UK.

Yeah.

So he's just completed. He would be great. I'm going to try and twiddle the dials on Rob to see if you guys want to speak. He's just completed the world's longest single distance nonstop swim.

How far?

300 miles without touching land, without stopping, without sleeping. It was 50, over 50 hours. Eating in the water, pooping in the water. The first time he had to go to fish. The first time he had to go to the bathroom. He's got, like, a buttfish flap on his thing. He missed the butt flap. So then just churned his poop for the next 50 hours. As he did this swim, apparently they cut him out of it and there was this sort of gray dust inside of him, which is what if you churn your own feces for long enough? Probably that happens. But Ross, he was the first man to swim around the UK.

Amazing.

So he did 6 hours on, 6 hours off for six months. 6 hours on, 6 hours off for six months.

The human, you know, that the human spirit is like one of these things I just marvel in. I'm curious, Chris, what, what do you see as your long arc? Have you thought, are you like, I'm in caterpillar mode. I'm thinking. I'm thinking about the microplastics episode that I'm preparing. Like what? Well, now I'm focused on where we are right now, but, you know, in a book and some other things in the, in the not too distant future. But like, do you, how old are you?

36.

Man, you're young. I mean, you look young, but so do you. Do you have aspirations for politics? Are you great?

No, no, no. Very flatteringly. Rogan and campaigns said that they would vote for me if I run for president, but they can't because he's british. No, none of that.

You could run in the UK.

Yeah, I'm sure that, I mean, the UK is a whole other challenge at the moment that I dont intend on stepping foot into. One of the interesting things that ive learned, I think, over the last two and a half years since moving to America is if theres ever a period of rapid growth or development, optionality in life opens up so rapidly and the potential universes branch so quickly that any real long term plan is kind of pointless. This is maybe a cope because I struggle with long term planning. I know that the way that you're supposed to live the most fulfilling life from my productivity bro background is to write your obituary. And then you're in 25 year eons, and then you're in seven year phases, and then you're in one year sprints and you're in 90 day blocks and you've got your daily actions which contribute to you, so on and so forth. I've never been able to really think more than about six months ahead. And the last two years, I would have never thought two and a half years ago that I would have been living in America, that I would have been doing this sort of a thing, that the show would have been where it was, that would have had the opportunities I would.

And especially if the things that you want to have happen start to happen to you. The pace is so unimaginable that you need to learn to develop the skill to say no to things, that you would have only dreamt to have had the opportunity, to have been in the room, to have pitched, to have said yes to six months ago. And it's like reverse hedonic adaptation. You're permanently having to reset your baseline of what you should expect from yourself, from your life, from the way that you show up, and the challenges completely change. So I know that I want to have a family. I know that I want to be a dad. I'm very excited about that. I know that I love learning and having these sorts of conversations. I know that it's incredibly gratifying to be seen as a peer by people that you also admire and that you aspire to emulate. That's unbelievably cool. I think that especially I grew up in a town in the UK famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rate rating in England, and then it lost that. So it didn't really even have that. That's the name of the town, Stockton on tees.

And it's just, you know, classic northern working town. Nothing spectacular there, apart from the railway, was actually invented there. But when I was growing up, I didn't have a massive number of role models like the person I wanted to be like, but I had a lot of people like the person I didn't want to be like. So I came up with this idea of the reverse role model, which is if you are in a kind of a role model desert, we hear about food deserts. If you're in a role model desert, that's not great. But I think more people's lives are sideswiped by making errors than by expediting success. And it meant that I was able to grow up and say, well, I don't want his relationship with his family, and I don't want the way that he uses alcohol to cope with this problems. And I don't want his issue that he's got with gambling. And it creates these sort of way markers in the ground, not ones that you go to, but ones that you avoid. Sort of helps you to map out the minesweeper territory.

Can I just one thing that's extraordinary about what you're saying is deserving of a neuroscience analogy. I started off as a developmental neurobiologist, so I teach embryology and brain development to medical students and graduate students, among other things, in neuroscience. And one of the things that we learned over the last 2030 years is that the brain, the nervous system, it's a brain and spinal cord, without question, the most complex and incredible object in the entire universe. Without question, right. I mean, just think about what human brains have created in terms of other technologies. Those are all the product of the brain, right? Elon's rockets, x this podcast, everything here, these cars, like, are the product of this object, this, you know, you know, two and a half pounds or whatever, you know, depending on the size of someones head and brain. The nervous system starts off from, you know, you have sperm meets egg. What happens before that is it varies, but it has certain required elements. Sperm eats egg, and then theres duplications of the cells and some of those cells become limbs, and some of the cells become fingernails, etcetera. But a certain number of those cells become designated as nervous system.

And then you have literally trillions of neurons, nerve cells that are independent of one another, little spheres that need to connect to one another in immensely precise ways in order for you to be able to see the world around you, to smell the world around you, to make sense of when milk is coming and when food is coming, to form traumas and to have dopamine related reward experience. A big mystery in the field of brain development for over a century was how is it that the neurons find the right connections, given the exquisite precision that allows for all these incredible abilities of the brain, the most magnificent object in the universe? And for a long time, it was thought that, oh, there would be what are called chemo attractants. There would be things that would lead the neurons to steer in the right direction and wire up. And indeed, those chemotractants exist. They go by the names of things like netrin, which means to guide, or ephraim or et cetera. But far and away, I would say, by an order of magnitude. Most wiring in the nervous system occurs by selective repulsion, in other words, by neurons growing out, looking for something to connect to, and chemical labels saying, not here, not here.

Nope, not here. And neurons trying so hard to form connections wherever they can. And these, as they're called, repellent, not repulsive, because repulsive seems like. But repellent forces corridoring them into progressively more precise and more precise and more precise connections, so that by time, a baby is born after nine months or so, also the wiring of the brain and spinal cord is such that they're ready for life. And then more wiring occurs. And most of the wiring that occurs after we're born, the so called neuroplasticity, is a selective removal of connections as opposed to the formation of new connections.

Pruning.

And so, as you're describing your experience of growing up in this town, whose name I can't remember right now.

Stockton.

Stockton. The origin of the train. You describe all these repellent forces. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like that. And it highlights such a key principle, which is that we think of a really good life as being the consequence of selective decisions for running toward, not away from type decisions. But I think what you raise is incredibly important and is not discussed enough, which is that so much of a good life, a right life, an incredibly successful life, life involves the. No, definitely not that. Definitely not that. And a selective pruning and a selective repellent mechanism away from the wrong territory. And so forgive me for waxing poetic on brain development in relevance to your life experience, because your life experience is far more, you know, rich in terms of what it means. But I think that if ever there was an analogy for how you've emerged and the trajectory that you've taken, it's the wiring of the central nervous system.

Yeah. I think avoiding catastrophe is significantly more profitable than trying to expedite success. There's.

Amen to that.

There's this idea from mathematics, which is never multiplied by zero. So if you take 20, multiplied by three. Multiplied by 400,000, multiplied by 1.3, multiplied by zero, you get zero. So you can do all of the good work in the world, you can avoid eating seed oils, and you don't put any fucking sun lotion on your testicles, and you get all of your light in the morning.

Some sunscreens are safe, despite what the Internet says. I believe in some sunscreens. I lost friends for saying that.

What was your thing about people will lose so much sleep and friends over debating seed oils?

Oh, goodness. Seed oils are the sunscreen thing. Look, mineral based sunscreens. Everyone agrees they're safe, except the few people that don't like sunscreen at all. But I'm not one of those people. I believe in sunscreen. I wear zinc oxide sunscreen. But according to the Internet, you find all sorts of lies about the opposite anyway.

Yet. So you. And you multiply. Bye, zero. You've done all of this stuff. You've been resistance training three times a week, listen to the human lab pod, even subscribed on whatever your thing is, podcast thing, and got the additional ama. And then you decide one day to just drive without a seatbelt on.

Or what happened to me two weeks ago, heading to the podcast. I've got to get my run in. I love running. I'm going to take a quick run. I run down my street and live on a hill. I run into the park nearby. I run into a podcast fan. We hang out for a little bit, jog together. I split off and head home. And I'm heading home and I'm thinking, how am I going to get home, do my five minutes meditation shower and get ready and make it to the podcast studio in time? I'll just do my meditation now. Brilliant idea, Professor Huberman. So I close my eyes while you're running. Yeah. And I'm striding up the hill and it's a big wide street and I'm thinking and all of a sudden brack and I go right into a box truck and I'm thinking ah, now I've been hit before. I boxed a little bit. Skateboarder. I've hit my head. I'm not tough but I've hit my head, you know, I reach up, I'm like ok and there's enough blood on my hand, I'm like oh boy, it's a big one, it's a big one.

And then I feel it gape. I'm like oh boy. So it turned out it was like ocular bone exposed, not good. No bueno. Ran right into a parked box truck. Truck. Okay. Hey, I'm the absentminded professor at times. Um, meditate when you get home folks. Fortunately I have a friend who I know through training and friend, common friends. His name is Jason diamond and he's one of the world's best facial plastic surgeons. I didn't care so much about a scar but he assured me we can do this without a scar. He said you have to get in and get it stitched up within 6 hours.

You're kidding.

So I go to his clinic. Fortunately they flushed it out, he wasn't there that day.

Meanwhile, Rob's waiting at the studio with.

The guest from Stanford, amazing, amazing professor named Jamil zaki who's brilliant, um and they put a couple injections in. Novocaine suits your me up. And you know a week later I'm, I'm pretty good.

That little bit of week ago.

Yeah. Jason and his clinic are absolute phenoms. Yeah.

Did he, did he explain to you the importance of the 6 hours to avoid infection?

To avoid infection. It's the infection that gets in there. Are they um, you know flushed it, put some local antibiotic. All I put on it was a little bit of neosporin, polysporin after it was stitched, got the stitch out. Stitches out. So it's been, it's been a week and four days. Yeah.

You're like wolverine.

Yeah. Normally I don't heal that well. Now I will say this for the record, I've been experimenting with BPC 157 for which there are basically zero human data, tons of animal data, and anyone thats taken BBC 157 by the way, you dont want to take it continuously and if youre going to take it get it from a compounding pharmacy and get it prescribed by a doctor because theres a lot of contaminated versions out there. I would never take an oral version. It can cause it does cause angiogenesis, growth of blood vessels. So if you have a tumor, you could cause angiogenesis of the tumor. So, um, but I do take. I was taking it, um, sub q. And I do heal noticeably faster when taking BBC 157. Um, but were I not to have had that injury and I had a little bit of a calf thing I was trying to repair, I would not take BPC 157 continuously just to take it.

Yep.

And nowadays I hear about a lot of young guys just taking it the same way. They just take testosterone cypionate, which is just foolish.

Yeah, two stories. I ruptured my Achilles three, four years ago. I took TB 500 and BPC 157 for the six weeks after that.

So you tore your achilles.

Complete detachment. Yeah, full rupture. I mean, you can even. You can even see if you lean over there, you can just.

Oh, he's not lying. That thing looks like I've got the scar.

It looks like a zipper scar to show it.

How did you do that?

Playing cricket the most british way.

Oh, yeah. That's a confusing sport.

Yeah. So I did that. TB 500, BPC 157, six weeks, and the recovery was very good. It was also during a pandemic. I had nothing else to do and I was beyond military psychotic, like, probably 95% to 98% compliance with sets, reps, recover everything. Everything else.

Are you curious? Because there's no clinical studies on this. So when I talk to Peter Attia about BBC 157, he's like, no clinical data. But then you talk to, let's just say, x game athletes, or let's say you're me and you talk to Olympic athletes.

BPC is still people, right? I don't know.

I don't think it's allowed in the Olympics. I will tell you that many, many athletes used and used BPC 157 to recover from injury more quickly.

TB 500 is very restricted, but BPC 157 seems to be less. Less restricted.

Yeah. I worry about any conversation about this only if people think, oh, I'm just gonna take this so I can, like.

Grow, recover bigger biceps.

Like, don't. Like, just cancer is nothing you want.

So that's the second. This is the second thing I want to tell you about. So Chase, who isn't here today, a lead strategist for us, he had started to hear about some of the great effects that you get from BPC 157. I think that he took an oral version of it.

Yeah, those are out there.

Have you heard about this anthymia response, where it just creates a persistent feeling of hopelessness that is inescapable no, but that sounds horrible.

Don't do it, folks. Taking BPC 157 or injecting testosterone, sipping it because you just want more gains and recover in the gym is absolutely foolish. You know, I've talked about these things before. You know, I was 45 before I touched anything. And you need to bank sperm if you want kids, you need to take HCG. If you want to maintain sperm production, you need to keep dosages low. I also did an experiment where I went on and then went off. I would not take these things continuously unless you're working with a physician and they say you need it. I'm living proof that you don't need to do it continuously. And I would also say that when it comes to BPC 157, the angiogenic effects are really the most concerning. Again, you could get vascularization of tumors. The one peptide.

Sorry, is that mediated? Whether you take it orally or sub q, nobody knows.

So I was going to ask, did you inject it locally into the. Because I wasn't injecting my eye, no.

So I was shooting your typical sort of love handle spots, TB 500 just because I was trying to get it as close. So it was sort of the fat on the inside of your calf. I was shooting it in there just in case. It may be some sort of.

There's probably some local effect. Here's what we know about BPC 157. It's from the animal studies. It seems able to detect injury in some very interesting way and lead to fibroblast, a certain kind of cell type relevant to tendon, et cetera.

It's actual Achilles tendon ruptures in the mice or the rats that they use.

That's right.

So I thought, well, God, if it's ever going to work for anything.

And sciatic nerve as well. And what's also interesting is there are a couple peptides that I think are going to be discussed more and more. BBC 157 and ozempic are the ones you hear the most about. Those are, after all both peptides, as is insulin, by the way, for sleep. Pinealin, which is related to regeneration in support of the pineal gland. Very interesting. Maybe we talk about this in a year or so when there's more data, things that are relevant to the trek one pathway and can accelerate nerve growth, not track tract receptors. BDNf, not that pathway, but trek one. There's a lot of interest now, Brian Johnson very interested and others interested in cerebral, which is sold in Europe but not the US.

I'm taking cerebral lysine at the moment.

Are you?

Yeah.

How does it. How do you feel?

I've only shot it once, so that's im.

So you're taking cerebral isin?

Yeah.

Okay.

I've taken once.

I've never tried it.

No. So I've used it once. I need to shoot again. I have to say, I just get nervous with Im injections. Generally. It's a fucking big old needle to be shooting in, and it's a no use.

Why use a big needle?

Because it's a pretty hefty dose. It's five mil.

Five mils?

Five mil.

Oh, my goodness.

You're not going to put that through an insulin pen unless you're going to draw it up each time. Five individual injections.

That reminds me of takes. We didn't close the hatch on NAD. Have you ever done an NAD infusion?

Yes. Number of times.

Yeah. And it feels like an elephant is stepping on your legs. I mean, and you're getting kicked in the groin.

Have you tried that with. What's the stuff that stops you from one Zulfran?

Yeah. I don't like taking medication if I can avoid it, so I just.

You did without the Zulfrian?

I did. I do it, but I don't. I didn't infuse it that fast. Now, I will say this. I've done nad infusions. You feel horrible while it's going in. You feel better afterwards. But it's always hard to dissociate from the, you know, saline that you're bringing into your system because a saline could be. We don't know.

So I. There's a place in Austin Cooya, which I go to, which is really great, great sauna.

It's coldplay. The salt baths are great, too, the flotation tanks.

So they do the nad infusions and they'll do it with Zolfran. So I'm there with James newtonic guy, my housemate Zach, and she says, do you want the thing to stop you feeling? So. Yeah, of course. And classic. Three guys in a row. We just start opening up the taps on this thing to the point where it's just pouring in.

Yeah. The idea here that Chris is referring to is that when you do an nad infusion, they'll offer to give it to you over the course of 3 hours, 2 hours, 1 hour. I heard. And this is just lore that Rogan does it in like 30 minutes.

I think he does.

The faster you go in, you put it in in. The faster you infuse, the more painful it is. And if you don't take the Zoltran. It's called something like that. The anti nausea medication. You feel like you want to vomit, you feel irritable, but then when it's done, the moment it's done, it's off. You definitely feel better. I just don't know what the source of the effect is. But the rationale there is that unlike NR, NR, NMN, which need to be converted. Which need to be converted, excuse me, to naddemen, the direct infusion of NAD, either by some lingual electrophoretic patch or by, you know, iv infusion is supposed to get into your cells more readily. But again, and it tends to be pretty expensive, it's not, it's a couple hundred bucks or more. Yeah. I haven't been doing nad infusions consistently. You know, these days I'm back to real basics. I mean, I still do the basics.

I will give you my review on what I'm doing at the moment. But right now, BPC 157, Thymus and Alpha. Are you injured? Thymus and beta.

What's the rationale?

I'm doing this mold detox. Very aggressive mold detox.

So mold detox. Yeah, I've heard this like that. People who are like a number of people that I know from Austin claim.

Particularly a bad thing in Austin. So I haven't spoken about this.

A damp, damp nights, hot.

Yeah, I haven't spoken about this on the show yet. We're kind of tracking everything thing and I'll bring it up at some point. But that cerebralysin, Motsi, so I've got a peptides is a very important part. I'm also doing ozone therapy. Have you ever tried that?

No.

So half a pint of blood is taken out of you put into a bag with an anticoagulant and then a antimicrobial gas is pushed into the bag so it almost looks like it's carbonating your blood.

Sci-fi oh, this is.

I've got everything. I'm doing 25 grams iv.

And you don't even live in Los Angeles?

No, no, but there's places alive and well in Austin. It's phenomenal for this. Glutathione, iv, phosphacetyl, choline, red light therapy, lymph massage, everything to try and fix. I've got my brain fog at the moment.

You look healthy.

Thank you. Very sharp. I don't feel it, but it's working along one thing that I did want to loop back to that you mentioned earlier on you're teaching an undergraduate course. How, how is that not going to be the most over subscribed cues out of the, I mean, like, people go to see you do talks in Australia. How are you able to organize a course at a university? Is surely that's just going to be. Everybody in their sister is going to come along.

Yeah, we'll see what happens. You know, I've taught consistently. I've never taken a sabbatical, a formal sabbatical. I have sabbatical time accrued where I could not teach. But during the pandemic, we were mostly remote teaching. I was directing our course in neuroanatomy for medical students and teaching. I did some in person lectures last year. I did a remote lecture because my main appointment is in the medical school. You know, you either have to teach or do research in order to fulfill your obligation. So at Stanford, we have the option to teach undergraduate courses. And I spoke to my chair, my new chair. I'm in three different departments now, but the chair I'm currently under. And we decided I would teach an undergraduate course in neuroscience and health in particular. It's also going to have some guest lectures, and we're going to make it a big course. So anywhere from 400 to 600 students. I've taught lectures that big before when I was.

You've got theaters of that size?

Oh, yeah, yeah. They're, you know, they're not really amphitheater, but yeah, certainly big enough. When I was. Before I was at Stanford, my lab, I trained at Stanford as a postdoc, but then when I was a junior professor, meaning before I got tenure, I was at UC San Diego, and I taught a course called neural circuits and health and disease. Evening course started as 50 students and very quickly grew to 400 students. So I'm familiar with this kind of format. We read papers, we evaluate papers, we have guest lectures. I'm also getting some help from the students.

I was going to say, how many tas are you going to have?

Probably going to need somewhere between six and eight tas. And what's interesting is that it's a fucking platoon.

It's like SEAL team six.

Yeah. And the tas are amazing. They handle so much of the work related to the mechanics, but obviously as an instructor, you need to coordinate that. And when I directed the neuroanatomy course, I had tas in there. There was a laboratory component as well, where they dissect brains and things of that sort. Again, all made more difficult by the pandemic situation. It was really complicated, but they're phenomenal. So it worked out. I've reached out to some of the students who are helping me devise the curriculum, which is going to be a lot of fun, you know, learning from the students, like, what are the things that you really want to understand? And they are phenomenal. I mean, obviously Stanford students as our students elsewhere, just like phenomenal.

What age will these be?

So undergraduates, I suppose when I went to college, I'm a fall baby, so I was born late September. So when I went off to college, I was still 17. I turned 18 my first month in school because we're on the quarter system, as is Stanford. So they're going to be somewhere between 18 and 22. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to get people in from computer science and AI. We're going to get people in from obviously, neuroscience, bioengineering, chemistry, psychology. You should come up for a lecture. It's going to be a little bit of a challenge. We are definitely going to be checking ids at the door.

I was going to say like a fucking capacity problem. People are going to be sneaking in. You're going to have to have a turnstile.

We. Well, I don't want to give away too much about this, but we will have a format by which enrolled students will be like, it'll be clear who those are, but we're not going to announce the location of the course, like each day or anything, so. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. And people often want to know, like, can I come to Stanford and see your space? And this and, you know, unfortunately that can't happen. I heard a rumor, but these are going to be filmed. I should say that very likely Stanford media is going to put these out there separate from the podcast.

If they ever wanted to get some free plays on YouTube, that's a pretty easy way to do it.

Bob Sapolsky's lectures at Stanford are some of the most popular.

The number of times that you see introduction to evolutionary biology, that one famous photo of him in front of the board. Yeah. How compatible have you found? The life of a influencer, very well known podcaster with being a sort of responsible and in depth researcher. Is that challenging to navigate those two things?

Yeah. So keep in mind, just to give people an orientation of how this went. You know, in 2019, I started posting clips to Instagram, just cuz in 2020 I started going on podcasts. I think I went on close to 30 podcasts in 2020, including Rogan and Rich Roll and Lex Friedman's podcast, Whitney Cummings podcast. And then we launched the podcast the Huberman Lab podcast in January of 2021. From the time I've been 19 years old, I've been a student and working in a laboratory. I started my laboratory as an assistant professor when I was 35. I got tenure when I was 40, and I've been at Stanford since I was 40. I'm 49, tenured there, and I ran my laboratory to pretty big capacity at one point. I had a lot of students and postdocs and technicians and things of that sort. During the pandemic, I definitely shrunk the size of my research laboratory. In part, that was related to the pandemic. In part it was related to the fact that I was doing more and more public facing work. The Huberman lab as a research lab still exists, but we do human clinical trials, and we published a paper in 2023 with my collaborator David Spiegel, who's in the department of psychiatry, where we started doing those experiments remotely, people wearing whoop bands and other devices to monitor their sleep, and hrv, etcetera, while they were doing specific practices to mitigate stress.

Currently, I'm involved in the generation of experiments in humans to evaluate non sleep deep rest as it relates to patterns of activity in the human brain. Those are experiments that are spinning up with Matt Walker. They'll be done at Berkeley, as well as studies at Stanford through the Department of Ophthalmology and some other departments looking at visual repair. This is a longstanding interest of mine, trying to understand and cure glaucoma, the second leading cause of blindness in the world, second only to cataract. So I still have research funds. And so the Huberman lab exists now in that realm, working with clinicians. So gone are the days we now only recently sleep might read, but gone are the days now where you can walk into my laboratory and see mice that express green fluorescent protein and glow. That was not long ago where that was true. Or we had brain bone mice that glowed twelve different colors, not developed by me, but developed by others. But we use those tools where people were recording from neurons using extracellular electrodes. We've recorded from human brain in collaboration with Doctor Eddie Chang at UCSF, recording from the human insula while people are in VR looking at great white sharks that I filmed while doing so, I've been involved in a number of different styles of research, and I still am very much interested in research.

I'm still on advisory, excuse me, editorial committees and so forth. These days, because of the demands of the podcast and the fact that we're soon launching, in addition to the standard podcast 30 minutes, what we call essentials, 30 minutes versions of the podcast, in addition to the long form. Okay, because I'm also writing the bonus chapters on my book, which is out next April, because I am going on podcasts and still very much involved in science philanthropy through Scicom, my company, and through a bunch of other venues. And I'm very much interested in lobbying for advancing treatments for the PTSD and other psychiatric challenges, because I spread over a lot of things. I'm basically restricted to doing one or two studies per year or two, and I'm fortunate to have excellent collaborators and clinicians and postdocs that can carry that work. But we still have to look at data and analyze data and write papers. So, you know, I think one of the people who's been very important as an example, but also a mentor, I've never said this out loud, was from an early stage. The doctor, Robert Sapolsky, has been very generous with advice about how to navigate these sorts of things, about being public facing and transitions from laboratory and teaching, et cetera.

And I must say that Stanford has been wonderful in their support of the podcast. They've been wonderful in support of me evolving this new course curriculum. They've been wonderful in terms of embracing these new types of philanthropy to bring laboratories other than mine the kind of financial support that allows them to do really cutting edge science. So one of my missions, and this wasn't discussed much publicly, but it should have been, is during the Obama administration, there was the brain initiative. It infused over $100 million into brain research. During the Trump administration that followed, that funding was maintained, although it changed names just this last year or so, the brain initiative was cut. The budget was cut by approximately 40%. And as a consequence, a lot of neuroscience laboratories were not able, and are not able to do the important work that they need to do to develop treatments for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for eating disorders, for addiction, and on and on, autism, etcetera. So a big part of my effort these days is to raise awareness and money from donors, but also from Scicom, my company, the parent company of the HLP, to bring money to researchers so they can do that work.

And I'm very passionate about this, because as somebody who wrote grants for years, as somebody who ran a laboratory for years and still does, although in a more minor extent, the academic has to work two jobs. They have to work like a demon to raise the money, to be even begin to do the work. And oftentimes the best work takes years to evolve. And many granting agencies, sadly, will not fund work until it's already basically done, believe it or not. So I've become very, very passionate about raising more money for the best science. And one of the things I love about doing science philanthropy, is that I can direct money to laboratories very quickly. In fact, I have one rule for giving funds to a laboratory. First of all, right now we're only funding human work, not animal work. Second, of course, the work has to be of excellent value and quality, but the grant application has to be one sentence and no more. You write me two sentences, you're not getting the money. I don't want to budget. I trust the best researchers to do excellent work, and then we give them the funds and they are unrestricted, meaning they have to spend them on research, but they can do the great work they want to do.

What's the coolest sentence that you've received?

Oh, we've given money to Joanna Steinglass's laboratory at Columbia University School of Medicine, and her stated goal is to find a cure for anorexia nervosa, the most deadly of all psychiatric illnesses, period. Now, that's a grant application, and it's one that I was happy to fund and that we're going to be happy to continue to fund. And it's been marvelous to see these billionaire donors and hundreds of million dollars in worth. Donors put their money into the pot. They've now forexed our initial contributions from SCICOM, and it's continuing to grow, and it's just all, the ecosystem's perfect.

Where can people go if they want to throw some money at this?

Yeah, so we fund it in part through our premium channel, which I do these AMA's. If people want to give to psychom philanthropy directly, they can. If people have money that they want to put towards science and they want to bypass all of that, they could do that by contacting. Let me give the proper name. It would be Ian with two Ms scicommedia.com dot. This is not money that I'm seeking for my own laboratory. This is me acting as a hub to distribute money to excellent laboratories. This is very important mission in my life, because I can tell you as a researcher who wrote grants for years, that the amount of time and energy that talented researchers put into raising money to be able to do their work is extraordinary. And it's not that with money you can do successful science necessarily, but you can afford a lot more risk taking, healthy risk taking in science, and you just get more time to develop and analyze data. And we have a dearth of funding in this country. There's more funding for research than anywhere else in the world. The UK is pretty good as well, Germany is pretty good as well, Switzerland as well.

There are other countries, but the more money that goes into research, the faster cures are found. We know this. We know this from every disease that's ever been looked at. Where there's time, energy, a healthy dose of emotion and money, you get cures for the most challenging diseases. This is absolute fact.

Ive been thinking about this. A little bit of a juxtaposition that I see happening with you, maybe recently, or maybe its always been there, but burbling below the surface, which is between cerebral horsepower, sort of cognition, rational material science and intuition. Something which is a little bit more sort of ephemeral, its kind of embodied.

There's no language for good instinct.

In a way. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about thinking, thinking about science and how it works, what is your advice for people on how to follow intuition more? How to blend the cognitive with the intuitive?

Yeah, yeah. I can feel ideas in my body and it's like I can remember driving as a graduate student to visit friends in San Francisco because I was in graduate school north of San Francisco, and feeling in my left arm, so weird feeling in my left arm that I was going to do something new. And I ended up doing some writing for some music, right, about music for a skateboarding magazine. That led to a set of ideas that eventually led to this. The podcast, philanthropy and so on. The nervous system, because it includes the brain and body, I think has a more ancient form of response and acts as more of a rudder in our somatic awareness, in our body. Our thinking obviously can be very structured and I indeed try and train up both. Here's the exercise that I think is very useful, useful and its going to seem really squishy and new agey. But it was given to me by the great Martha Beck, whos triple degreed from Harvard, who then developed a bunch of self help personal development tools to figure out right path, right life for whoever you are listening to this.

And the exercise that I did based on one of her books years ago was you sit quietly and you, you imagine something terrible, something really terrible, and you observe and feel how your body responds to that, the feeling of contraction that precedes the movement of your limbs or covering up. Then you relax it a bit, you shake that off and maybe at a different time, maybe a few minutes later. So you do that several times, maybe for 510 minutes, set a timer, then you do the opposite. You start imagining things that are absolutely, absolutely. The word that comes to mind is very Martha, Becky and delicious to you, things that just feel so good. Right. And don't limit yourself. And you experience in a way, preceding any bodily movement, how your body, your face, your nervous system responds to that. And what you're doing is you're tapping into the more, in some sense, crude, more broad, but in other ways more sensitive aspects, effects of your nervous system to detect yes versus no. So many of the circuits of the brain work in a yum, yuck, meh kind of fashion where you either want to move towards things, yum, away from things, what we call aversion, yuck or meh, kind of neutral.

Right. Ambivalence. The body has the option to move toward, to remain where it's at or to move away and paying attention to the signals that precede those, those intuitive decisions and practicing them through these. You know, she has this perfect day exercise which has been very, very useful to me. I've started doing it again where you take ten minutes and you just, no limits. You just go, perfect day. What is your perfect day? And you just allow that to come up. What is the bed you wake up in, where you look around the room, what's there, allowing surprise and unanticipated things to enter the room. You know, maybe you wake up alone, maybe with one person, maybe with two people. Maybe you have a dog, maybe you have a cat, maybe you have a fish. But you let some of that geyser up from your unconscious mind. As Paul Conti would say, the unconscious mind carries a wisdom based on your prior experience, maybe even the experience of people before you that your conscious mind can work with, but you need to be able to access it, sometimes through dreams. But this perfect day exercise that Martha talks about allows this emergence of whats inside you and the directions that are really right for you.

Okay, theres, theres no limits on this. Now what youre watching for in these different exercises is again, how your nervous system responds before the action that you would take. So youre withholding action. So youre not going, oh, that feels terrible, and youre not going, oh, that feels great. Youre paying attention to the neural signals that precede the impulse to do that. And you're playing with it. And I would say this is a great way to build your intuition and to learn to respond to it when you're conscious and moving through space. The other day I was on a phone call, and I was just, all of a sudden I realized, like I don't want to be on this phone call. I don't know what's happening. I don't want to be on it. I thought, yeah, Andrew, like, quit being such a wuss. Like. Like, don't be so emotional. And I realized I was like, this is very energy draining to me. And I got off the phone call. Other than things moving toward, I think, that intuition in science. My dad talks a lot about this. When we talked, Einstein talked a lot about this.

Not to put us in the same bin at all, but there's a story about Einstein I know because my dad talks about him all the time, where someone gave him a picture to sign an autograph, a picture of Einstein. And Einstein put an arrow to his nose and said, the source of all my ideas, he could sense where things were. You need to develop. Everyone needs to develop a sense for themselves of what steers them in a particular direction. What are the somatic signals again? The somatic signals, the signals of the body are more crude in the sense that they are more divorced from language, but they are more sensitive. It reminds me of the neural retina. We have two systems of vision in the retina as humans. One that is the rod system, which is very sensitive. It's the one you use at dusk and at night to sense if there's anything in your environment. It's very sensitive. It can detect one photon, one photon, but it has very poor acuity. It's not very nuanced at the level of seeing boundaries or edges, but it will tell you if something is moving from behind a tree to get you.

The cone system, as we call it, is far less sensitive. The cone system, in contrast, is far less sensitive. It can't detect such subtle differences in luminosity, but it is exquisitely good at deciphering boundaries and color. In fact, it's the system that allows for trichromacy, which is what allows us to see this as yellow, and dogs see this probably as kind of a blunted orange or a burnt orange, because they are dichromats, not trichromats. So I think I know that within the body, we have a sense of intuition that we can learn to listen to. The signals are very, very sensitive. You're like a tuning fork to your environment. Most people learn to suppress this, and we override it with thinking and cognition. People that can combine thinking and cognition with this more coarse language of the body are able to parse their life experience in the direction they're going to go in with exquisite sensitivity. And when you read shit you don't even need to read. You can just listen to something Rick Rubin says, or you could do better and read his book. What you realize is that Rick is somebody who, he's like a censor for music.

When he talks about his taste, he's able, I mean, he has this incredible ability to really let things waft over him and experience them and go, yes, more of that and less of that. He's a conductor, and he can say more of that, do more of that. But what's so unbelievable about Rick, so spectacular, is that when he steps away from that experience, he's boundaried. He's still himself. So it's kind of like empathy, but he can engage and disengage it in a very adaptive way, which is why he can create ll cool J, Beastie boys, Slayer there. Rick, I mentioned Slayer because he gives me a hard time about not listening to Slayer. Right. You know, Adele and on and on. He's able to sense what is good, what is extra good, and that's what taste is. In the same way that you know somebody who is expert in wines. How you pronounce sommelier?

What do you mean, sommelier?

Sommelier. The sommelier or the chef or the food taster or the neurosurgeon. They know the precise movements. They know the chemistry and the ingredients. That's part of their training. But ultimately, it's the Gestalt. It's the whole picture that's taken in. You sip the wine. Right. You have to understand how the cut that you make in a neural circuit leads to changes network wide, brain wide, body wide. And so being able to straddle those two levels of analysis is really the essence of being a virtuoso. Right. And I'm not calling myself that. I'm referring to these other people that way. Right. A virtuoso is somebody that can embrace all the levels of granularity in an exploration, all the details, but also the macroscopic picture, and then combine those in a way that's really unique. And I think that the basic training of anything is a layering up of formal training. I do believe that, that most people need a formal training. And then at some point, you get to a level of expertise where your intuition is guiding you because it's grounded in all that knowledge. It just, it comes forward in what look like very simple blocks.

But those simple blocks are built on incredible depth of knowledge and understanding. And for myself, you know, I spent a lifetime exploring biology in the nervous system. That's where my depth of expertise exists. But why are we now soon going to do, in addition to long episodes, shorter episodes? Well, some people only have 30 minutes, and they want to know how to sleep better, and they don't want to have to listen to four episodes at 4 hours long. I want them to know the basic things to do. So I think having the offering and the understanding of different levels of granularity is key. And you do this, Chris, listen, three years ago, I said to rob, I go, in addition to all the podcasters that are already doing phenomenally well, I said, David Senra, Founders podcast, and, Chris, they're the ones that are going to be next, next level in a year. And I'm not saying I have a crystal ball, but, boom, you guys are killing it. And I know that you're pointed at the sun, and you're just going to continue along this trajectory. It's a felt thing, because I can tell by the number of different topics, the number of different venues, the emphasis that you put on production, how you treat your team, the nuance that you put, the way that you articulate, the emphasis that you put on the details of, you know, what's in your energy drink down into, like, the milligrams of.

This is like when you meet someone who runs a laboratory. They know at the beginning where everything is placed. At some point, they don't even know where the antibodies are, because it's not their job to know. It's the student's job to know. But they knew how to know that when they needed to. And so I don't care if you're talking about yo yo ma, rick rubin, you, rogan lacks. It's all the same thing. And what you need to. What people need to understand is that you have to get the formal, rigorous training, or if there's no degree in what you do, it's just hour upon hour upon hour upon hour. And then eventually, it starts to look like a kind of shorthand and just natural. But that's built on deep, deep, deep expertise.

If you never learn the rules of the game, there's no such thing as breaking the rules. You're just playing the wrong sport.

That's right.

So you have to have that grounding. Yeah. I mean, you know, my background in nightlife, we always wanted our guys to come up from being a guest lister. That's what we did. We gave out wristbands in the rain, in the cold, asking people, where are you going tonight, darling? And after six months, then you get to stand on the front door, and then after you stand on the front door, you get to work out how the tills work, and then after you've done that and you work all the way up. And I think that there's something very reassuring about hearing somebody, maybe they don't know as much as the audio engineer or is the director of photography or as the producer, as the whatever, but they can hold the conversation. They go, I was there when it was at a lower resolution, and now you're beyond my skillset. But I can hold the conversation all the way up. And there's a kind of respect that that commands, and I really like that. I've always wanted to sort of embody that and develop that in myself. And I guess there's some disadvantages, many disadvantages to kind of being obsessive and very attentive and very vigilante.

Vigilant. But there's a ton of advantages as well.

Huge advantages. I mean, my friend Eddie Chang is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. Okay? He's one of, if not the best neurosurgeon in the world, at least in the top three. He's constantly evolving his craft, as is Joe. You know, and this might seem as if it's some sort of promotional thing, but I just want to point out, you know, because it's relevant to the conversation we're in. And some of the things that have surfaced, you know, like in terms of, like, sponsors that I'll work with. No, I didn't say you can go from a two to a seven. That was AI. You know, I didn't promote that company. You know, there's a lot of AI and bullshit out there using our face, name and likeness. But the sponsors that I work with, whether or not it's ag one eight sleep element, these sponsors. The reason I work with those sponsors is, yes, I use those products ag since 2012. But in addition, in particular, with ag one and eight sleep, they are constantly improving the product they're making. It's very interesting to see how the companies that are doing best are the ones that come under the most scrutiny and are also the companies that are doing the most innovative iteration year after year after year after year.

Why? Because they've been in the game a long time and they continue to iterate on more or less the same thing over and over and over. Now, some people would say, okay, creatine monohydrate, right? I'm not involved in any company that promotes creatine monohydrate. I take creatine monohydrate. I have since I was 17 years old at that time. Everyone said it was going to blow out your kidneys or whatever. But anyway, I read about it in a mm 2000 issue, for those of you that remember, I was like, whoa, this stuff really works. Turns out it doesn't destroy your kidneys, okay. It's also good for cognition, it turns out, but, you know, does creatine monohydrate need to be evolved? No, it's a single ingredient type of formulation that some people might find and benefit from. No requirement to take it. I'm not selling it anyway. But when it comes to things that are blends of things, or it comes to a sleep technology. So, like ag one, like eight sleep. And again, people might think, oh, this is just a, you know, an ad in disguise. No, I will only work with companies that are telling me, yes, we're constantly working to make the purity better and better and better.

99.9% isn't good enough. We're constantly trying to make a cooling bed better. It's now going to help you offset snoring. Boring. Amazing. The sleep tracker on eight sleep is exquisitely good. It's laboratory grade sleep. Tracking the companies that succeed over time, like Apple. I mean, I'm from the Bay area, after all. Like Apple, or we see YouTube. I mean, they're constantly updating things, constantly updating the algorithms, Instagram, constantly. Meta and X is evolving. And so I am an absolute fanatic about anything that mimics the scientific process is you come up with a hypothesis, you develop something or you develop a technology, and you're constantly trying to improve on that technology over and over and over, which is why I use these things, why I know they're going to continue to get better, and why I already believe in their value now. And this is, I think, something that's often lost in the discussion about, oh, does this really work? Does it? Yes. And the point is that you want to surround yourself with colleagues, with sponsors if you need them, or use them with people in your life that are. That are really, you know, we hear the word optimization, but that are optimizing for the now.

That also includes a balanced life. Right. And it's reasonable about, you know, what you can do in a given day and that are constantly trying to do better. These are the things and products and people that evolve health, that evolve science, that evolve creative activities. And, you know, I can even look to Rick as somebody or my friend Tim Armstrong. Tim. Tim writes a song every day. He had platinum records back when he doesn't need to do that. But people who are just obsessive about their craft and lead balanced lives. End our healthy. These are the people that we need to look to. Joe, too. I mean, four, three or four three hour podcasts per week. Okay. Plus UFC, plus stand up, plus he has a family, plus he's a healthy guy. And he just did the special. The special was super entertaining. I could feel the catharsis in some of that. And you can be sure he works like a demon. Yes, he does the cold plunge. Yes, he does his training. I know you do. I know Rick does. I know I do. I know Whitney does. I know Senra does. I know there are many other examples, and so forgive me for not naming Jay Shetty works extremely hard, hard to make their craft better and better and better.

And so for people coming up, it doesn't mean you have to devote 12 hours a day to it or 100 hours a week, but you gotta put in, you gotta, you know, chop wood, carry water.

I think everybody needs to pay the entry price at some point.

Chop would carry water. Everyone's gotta do it.

Yeah. And there are no. There are very few shortcuts to the top. Is that not what it says on the steps of the mothership going up to the main stage? Have you ever been backstage yet? Okay. I think it says it's a long way to the top if you're going to do something, but I think it's.

From the AC DC song.

It's a long way, maybe. Probably. I mean, it's on brand with everything else. Andrew Kiebman, ladies and gentlemen. Dudes, I really appreciate you. I love getting to catch up. It's so interesting, sort of seeing where all of this is going. What you're doing with Andy Galpin's show, what you're doing with Matt Walker, what you're doing with Rob, the book. I. My prediction is that you're gonna do something. I know that your mom does kids books.

There's definitely good. Yeah. Good intuition. There's definitely some kids content and ideas. I've had a longstanding interest in animation and puppets, and that's about all I can say about that right now. Because it's poorly formed. I'm not being cryptic. It still needs iterating. But I've had outreach preached from some amazing puppeteers and some amazing animators, and I'm super excited. I also just want to say I'm both extremely grateful to you, and I kid you not, I am extremely in awe of what you've done and what you continue to do. You showed up like a force and you are doing it. And I feel a little bit.

I've said this before. You know how in an Indiana Jones movie, big sort of ceiling is coming down, and it's. He's gonna get crushed underneath. Sprinting, sprinting, sprinting. So it does a little slide underneath my feeling.

Grabs his hat.

Yeah. And then gets the hat. I feel like me and that hat are kind of just sneaking in at the last thing, and then now we're. We're moving under our own steam.

Well, whatever you're doing, it's awesome. And I really appreciate you having me here today. Every time you pop up on my screen, I'm like, yes. Like, I'm gonna learn something from you. I'm gonna learn something. It's your openness and also the fact that you have this razor like mind to be able to pull things out. I wish I was as succinct. I can't even say the word. I wish I was as succinct as you. And I agree with those other guys. I wish you could run for president, but since you can't, you're just going to have to keep podcasting for us. So thank you so much for doing it.

I appreciate you. Mandez.