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, a 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
Stood, 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 were using now. And then we're on right now. Caffeine, which is consumed by Testa. Mated 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 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 four 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 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
As 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 brake on wakefulness by reducing adenosine. So let's say what time do you go to sleep at night typically if you had your way,
10:00 10:00. And what time do you typically wake up in feeling? Great with no alarm. Clock,
6:30, 6:45,
great. So let's say, you go to sleep at 10:30 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 stay up until 11:00, maybe wake up twice, that night to use the restroom for whatever reason, you consumed a bit more fluid, maybe takes an extra 10 minutes for you to fall back asleep. This
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. It's 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
Take there is a lot of or some residual adenosine present. What do people typically do? Typically people get out of bed, 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 some light 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 your mate, they're going to perhaps have an energy drink, all finding good. But now think about what we just
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? Persist 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 1 p.m. typically and for
Somewhere in there, for me, the trough in my natural energy levels, in the afternoon is consistently between 2:00 and 3:00 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 and energy that they delay their morning, caffeine intake for 90 minutes after waking some years after that an
Review was published saying 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 experienced 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 your 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 talked to 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, deep raster and SD are also called Yoga Nidra, which is its proper name. The ancient
Yoga Nidra. So we want to be fair to its proper naming a 10, or 20, or 30 minute, Yoga Nidra, or NSD are, 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 NST, R 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 woman's voice, it's actually the one I typically use you will emerge from that feeling. Much more rested. Now dr. Matt. Walker himself. And
I are collaborating on a project to evaluate how NS TR 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 and on 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, it's a tool that's gaining increasing scientific.
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 10, 20 or 30 minute, and NST R. 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 the experiment is to see is having your body completely.
Lately still, but your mind active able to clear adenosine stores in the same way that being deeply asleep as 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, 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 her
Being 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, we're getting outside, even on a cloudy day and looking toward the sun looking East in the morning without sunglasses eye glasses and contacts fine. You induce a near 50% increase in the height of that cortisol,
All Peak. That might sound like, a bad thing because everyone is 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. And 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 we, 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. Mid-weight, you sort of deep in the the stitches 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 20, your melatonin levels are still not 20 and your cortisol is rising. So you've got a Pro wakefulness System, cortisol that you can accelerate or amplify rather by viewing bright 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 Lights of 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 and accept pushing down on the accelerator of wakefulness and mood and alertness and reducing the break, right? Otherwise, you're sort of trying to drive with the emergency brake on. Then if 60 to 90 minutes later, you ingest caffeine. Now you're blocking the
Dennis in 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 a 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 crash, it's an incredibly effective
Effective way to offset partially or eliminate that afternoon
crash. Let's pretty much everybody who doesn't get tired in the middle of the afternoon. See what I've done
with Chaco willing, doesn't get tired every it ever, right. 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 heated, apted I'm not great at the cold. I put my cold Plunge in about
Forty eight, Forty Five Degrees Rogan, and other people. Make fun of me for this. Lex is Russia. And so he doesn't have to cold plunge. He was born into the cold of Siberia. There's a photo of this actually on the internet. I, from the time, he was young, they were cold conditioning him. That's why he has such a warm heart, but in terms of the heat, I can, I'm pretty heat tolerant. So I've been cranking my song out traditional sauna to about 210 220 but mostly to 10, I went down there and Jocko challenged me to what he calls the factory reset.
Set protocol which is 30 minutes at 225 brutal and it and we had about eight or nine bodies in that sauna. So is problems for phobic 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 5-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 condition, you can give yourself brain damage by the way for people that don't know if you put a towel over your head or
Are one of these Banya hats. It actually insulates your brain. So you're able to stay in longer, people think, oh, we must speak must be. That make me Alma, but you're actually insulating the brain from the heat. So, yeah. So Jocko, you know, he's obviously tough, he's, you know, legitimately battle-tested, you know, and at the same time, it's remarkable to me how much energy has he finished dinner. So we did the sauna we did up for our podcast. Then we did the Sonic old thing I just did.
Scribe, then we did dinner and then he went off to see a kromaggs 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 cheer. Well that it feels like your body would eventually come in. Perhaps I'm not counting 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 five hours sleep. And that's just where they're at.
Yeah, very rare. Probably they have very fast adenosine clearance systems view 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, Ben's
I've talked about some of these before, but the the comments on YouTube about jock or the best the like when jock was born, the doctor,
At his 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 it. I've seen that one and they're a bunch of other ones that are that are really
amazing about. You, can you Chuck
Norris? 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 eight hours of sleep per night unless growing teen years battling.
Illness that sort of thing. You know, if ever your tip, you're used to going to sleep at 10 p.m. or something. And suddenly at 7 p.m. you feel incredibly tired, you're probably battling something you should go to sleep, you know, I I need about six to eight hours, but the other night I got nine. I rarely get
nine. But like I said, we're human.
Yeah. Typically for me, it's about seven hours. And then I do this 10 to 20-minute non sleep, deep. Rest on the drive over here, I did a ten-minute and honestly,
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, is sort of face is falling off one hour. His face is falling off and it really accurately represents exactly how it feels. Six hours face falling off seven hours face falling off. Eight great. But for some reason and I totally agree with this two hours the guys fucking superhuman the dudes and what is it about that period? It just seems like maybe it's a 90-minute like up and down. It allows you to really
Fine, that one sleep cycle and you're like, okay I if you're sleeping to, as you know, that you're gonna feel like shit, you know? That this is just okay. I mean I mean sort of War mode. Yeah but thinking about the team's guys Jocko and what?
Sorry, just doing what I think you're seeing in that somebody sleeps just two 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.
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 3 or 4 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 eight hours plus or minus two 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 two hours of sleep, you will probably experience some sort of hyper Mania for you. And then, or hypo, scuse me hypomania talking a lot feeling, really energetic and then,
boom, I'm gonna get smashed. Yeah, I'm gonna cry. Yeah, I mean, I've tracked my sleep in one form or another for a decade sleep cycle the
App on mobile to read and write. By the way, if anyone is sort of on the road and needs to use an alarm sleep cycles, fantastic, if you play pay for the premium, I'm not a partner. No way affiliated with. I just want to give it a try. I've used that thing for a date, probably a decade. Uh-huh. I'm not a fan of using your phone as an alarm clock, but if you're on the road, you're in, 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 in it. Just records them and put some on the cloud for the
A time. So I have a couple of friends who have full sentences entire conversations, very well-known, podcaster, and previous guests of this show has entire debates in his sleep.
People should post them. We should do the salute, the actual sleep
trying to get him to put them online because they are so funny. But I love sleep cycle and that's great. I think I've averaged over a decade about six hours, 45 of active sleep, but I was a club promoter for a long time. That's 6 hours. 45 is closer to probably,
Six and now 7:30, so I'm kind of splitting the difference from my previous life, to my, 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 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 damn fine when you ask how people are sleeping it speaks to a bunch of
Yes, day and week experiences and how they're integrating all that, you know, the mighty Rick Rubin always asks, how are you feeling? Which I really love. I'll get these like types, like how are you feeling? And I'm like, that's interesting. I service pot, you know, responding to 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.
Action
pretty month. You know?
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. You know,
we got that new thing that lets you head up. I do
because I have a snoring issue. I didn't know I had a sickness you. Yeah, I mean, it's not terrible but I didn't know I had a snoring issue and then I started using the nose strips that helps me. Yeah. But
I mean 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, they can help. They actually can really help because it reduced the percentage of my night that I was snoring from something like 22 percent down to like 11%. Was
that based on what the eight sleep report was?
Yeah, but now with the new age sleep, it tilts you up and that really helps. Wow. That really helped
intake, make great nose strips. So there's a hard piece of plastic to molded piece of
Stick and then you put two magnets either side of your nose, pulling your Nas and this ship locks you in and then Alex Hall Mosey who has to deviated set beliefs. That
was that why he always wears that correct? Because I was wondering why he wears it in the daytime. He
can't breathe really, very well without it. I was like ones, 100% blocked and the other something else. And he's found. Some other thing that goes inside your nose and opens it out from a says, you can only use it two nights in a row or else. It starts to sort of cut away at the inner lining of his goodness is like those
Knights really really good breathing.
You're getting a lot of oxygen to your brain. During sleep is part of the part of his part of the, the optimal sleep routine. It's just that sometimes the number of different things that one needs, you know, earplugs eye mask, you know knows it can get to be a bit much whenever I'm on the road. I noticed 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.
Oh, 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 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 I feel pretty good 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 call it a biohacker.
Just getting a more fresh air and sunshine has made an enormous difference in my
nighttime. Justly just sort of advice that your mom would have given. You just get more fresher.
Yeah. She's to kick us out of the house. We come home, we watching cartoons or something, and then, she just say like, all right, you're leaving like your kick. I'm kicking you out for her own, peace of mind and then, you know,
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Lee 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 makes some people night owls, they feel best psychologically, and physically going to sleep at about 1:00, 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and waking up somewhere around.
And, 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 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. 10 p.m. will be late for them and they feel great waking up at 4:00 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. Okay. Most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between 10:00 and midnight and waking up somewhere between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. or so maybe 5:30 to 8:00 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 zeit gaber's our timekeepers so named because some of the early Chrono biologists that discovered this stuff, and the underlying mechanisms were German as it were. So the number ones I gave her the number
Number one way to shift your circadian clock, which is this cluster of neurons. It's, it's 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. Eye glasses, corrective lenses and contacts are absolutely fine. Even if they have UV protection, okay,
However, if you combine that with another's, I gave her the second, most powerful, zai Gaber 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 a different site gaber's and I'll explain the mechanisms in the 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 in train 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 its 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 quit and go 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 got exercise or movement of any kind, it could be jumping, jacks could be.
Can 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 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, you that's part of the way you in train 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,
all 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 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, a superhighway of neuronal connections. That then so-called in trains your circadian clock, remember your circadian. Clock generates an
24-hour rhythms 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.
Ian clock into alignment with all of those zeit gaber's. 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 5:00 a.m. no matter what time you want to sleep the night before you're gonna get up and you're going to do the four things that I described 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 then 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.
Vance, does we say your circadian clock intrinsic to you? Generates a 24.2 or a 24.3, our 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 Advanced. You wake up early and go to sleep earlier. You can phase delay. How do you phase delay? While 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 9? P.m. are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 9:30 p.m. most people would say? Yes. So the 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 9:30,
30 p.m. till 4:00 a.m. to quash, your melatonin, 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 45 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 percent were offsets those. So, I think of this
Noon viewing as well. First of all it's nice to look at a sunset if you're indoors 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 can't 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 watching Netflix, and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much, but it will still disrupt your sleep.
Lets, you know, unless like Rick rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens classes, 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 there. 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.
In the hours of 4:00 p.m. and 10 p.m. and then, then you will phase delay or phase shift in Adelaide way your circadian clock making. You want to wake up later the next
morning. I wonder if dogs count as a 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
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 your even better off because it will force you to run, you're gonna have to show you have a bull. 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 and they don't and they don't like to move but it is the case that dogs will naturally Orient toward the sun you know and people
You always ask, you know, do dogs have the same mechanisms? Absolutely the 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 that's alive today. And, you know, this is a system that evolved from bacteria. That's very similar to the options. The light absorbing molecules that are in the insect. I, it's a very primordial system, it's organized.
Differently anatomically in the retina and to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in in all of us. In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat, you're never going to biohack away is circadian. Biology this this, you know, fluctuate, 24-hour 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. The pushdown 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, very organized, very differently and 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 you know, 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 am dead is a really dumb mindset and, you know, my team at the huberman live podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping. You know, when we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to like get rest, you know, get rest like we really prioritize sleep. It's so
essential. One of the best little cliche is 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 you know, 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 my let 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 I he mentioned these time block so I just want you even if you've got a new day
Lee routine. Yeah, what's your routine? Yeah. So I came to realize by observation, right? I didn't force this, this. So this is something I observed in myself, which is that from 6 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-hour 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 6:00 6:30.
So I consider that one opportunity block the second opportunity block is between noon or because I eat lunch typically around noon between 01 and 6 p.m. or noon and 6:00 p.m. So, second opportunity block and then the third is between 6 p.m. and bedtime, which for me, typically is 10:30. But sometimes late, I'm half Argentine. Sometimes I go to bed at midnight and I just go, I'll take a nap the next time you have to live. I mean, come on. So, what I started to realize is that I can do really
August work into, but not three of those blocks consistently. I also noticed that if I exercise early in the first block like between 6 a.m. and before 9 a.m. I have more energy all day long. This is what I observed experimentally on myself. But if I exercise starting at 9 or starting at tensor, 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
We not necessarily by following the schedule that ice 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 2 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.
All's I took a walk made took care of some email, make sure I ate some food before I came here on the way here. I did a brief 10-minute and Str 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 nor did we have any kind of arrangement to say this? But this new tonic energy drink, I'm loving it
flying's. I got an eye on it,
I'm hyped, love it, really tasty, they say it tastes so good so I can work two or three 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 6 a.m. to noon block was like handle 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 Sonic old tonight. So now we're working. I'm focused and I imagine that, you know, two, three, four hours of this. And my brain will have, you know, expended some pretty serious cognitive effort. And then, I'll take a little bit of all expect to sort of dip in.
E, I won't force it and then this evening, I'll get some work done and then hopefully we'll do some Sonic old. So I'm very aware of the fact that I get. So to 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 would be trained early work in the first block. So get it done. Get the training done by 8:00 a.m. no later work. Super Focus work then, eat something super focused work in the second block, maybe do an SDR to recover.
Mental, and physical Vigor. And then in the evening, social time, social time, relax and watching a lot of
documentary. What have you been watching?
I watched Anthony Bourdain documentary yesterday. I've not, I obviously knew who he was. We have friends in common, he, you know, he's a few, sadly passed away, but took his own life, which is tragic, but I was aware that, you know, because Joe's talked about him a lot.
Lat David choe. The artist has talked about him a lot and is in that documentary he also was part of the New York City, you know, 70s, 80, punk, rock scene. So the Ramones I'm a huge Ramones fan. Joe Strummer like kind of of that ilk and the documentary is called Road Runner 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
Very, very good and very, very good.
Have you seen just to interject if you seen a World War Two from the front lines? No, so this is Netflix. Netflix have done at least two or three colorized World War Two documentaries. In fact, is one that world war one. I saw that one. Yes. So at least three World War Two In Color, World War the great water in color and something else. All of these will be available on
efflux watching archive footage. Something there's something distancing about seeing it in black and white, it sort of reminds you that it's not now and they've used a combination of AI and manual, recolor has to be able to sharpen the image, everything's 4K, the facial appearance of everyone, the emotions that you can see on their face in the smiles, the teeth. And now in color as well to me, just drives home that story in a manner that I've never. I've never watched a
Mentary about something from that era and felt so emotionally connected to it which is interesting. So I've really been enjoying that shingle or
two from the from the front lawn. Yes. Okay. Because what the world war one doc I really liked. I read all squad on the Western Front. Of course, when I was in school I fascinated by World War one. Yeah documentary was kind of an obsession. I love the Oliver Sacks documentary. I've seen some others recently But True
Crime. You a true crime guy.
I used to watch
that stuff when I was living alone and then it's like, then you kind of like you you're checking on it posits 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 the Brazen nature of his of
his interview on a, just watched called American Nightmare.
Yeah, I don't want to see this man. Oh yeah, it's I
don't really, really interesting and harrowing but I Shane Gillis ones that watching
What two documentaries is early onset? Republican. That's what he refers to having an obsession with World War Two documentaries as early onset Republican. So, you know, you just need to track that. In your mind if you start sort of shouting magar in your sleep and your sleep cycle picks it up.
Yeah, an unlikely but but I'll look at it in an unbiased way. How's that
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Modern wisdom. 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 you
know, I was just sort of joking. I mean II the political process is critical. It's just it's just been. It's been a
lot of I think that's I don't think that it's unfair to say that. I don't think it. I think a lot of people hold 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 a active participant, that's the whole reason for doing it. And also, this is a
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 a rapid media cycle? Sort of very activating stories. This get 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
Ex was super interesting and we looked at all of this through the lens, a completely non partisan lens because we have listeners on both sides of the aisle and probably some who are undecided first of all, I the kind of the fervor around this upcoming election, the intensity of everything. Certainly convince 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
I know it's not my not my Arena but it's obviously a very important one, you know? 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, that young people who would consider running for office out of a genuine desire to serve might be dissuaded. You know, you know, because you hear these things like, oh,
Impossible get anything done. Or in order to be effective, you have to be this that and the other kind of person and, 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 with a not you're talking about music or sport. I mean we're seeing this as 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 toward orienting towards is dominance language. But the dominance language over others is far less effective. Believe it or not in shifting, people's minds, then 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. So,
That you could predict who is 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 sensor for when we're being told, what people think we want us to here versus what somebody really believes even if we disagree with them. And you know, this probably gets to our Origins as a Old World primates PCS, but we tend to put leaders into office who can communicate either through their words or through the Timbre of there?
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 in 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 to people or we have a third party in this country. But it seems
We boiling down to two at this moment. And so, this thing about dominance language is often couched his dominance over the other in a given scenario over a given Topic in separate. Venues, you know, at one Gathering versus another. But what this? I consider brilliant. Political science, Professor was explaining, is that it's really the dominance is 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. 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. They don't wrestle
believes or they don't address it right where 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? Is it 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 they this guess pointed it out as
Well, that there's a there is a tendency to orient towards people that we recognize that feels 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 a, they're just literally voting against one party, but there, I do think that there's this group in the middle. What, you know, and I didn't coin this term. But dr. Paul Conti, who was on my podcast on my psychiatrist and
There's talks about the league of reasonable people which are, which is 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 hear and trying to move away
Island Middle the
silence middle that, you know, and so people that are trying to evaluate evidence and a really paying attention to does this person feel genuine. Do they really believe this? Do they were they telling me this? Because it's what I want to hear how I think that's. I think that's the way I plan to navigate this time and I will
help with
psychological Health. Using that, you know, you're still going to be peppered with you. 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 poor kantian 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. It'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 I 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 imagined. I don't want this like like surface level stuff. Like imagine a day when this isn't like it's like they start each sentence correctly and then it just kind of goes to like this. It just kind of and you know as a scientist and somebody who's a public health public science Communicator, you know, I'm constantly under the scrutiny of like wait what?
Actually is the protocol. What exactly justifies the protocol? Kadel a caffeine 90 minutes after waking if you crash in the afternoon. Well what's the the randomized controlled trial? I'll be the first to tell you there isn't one also tell you the mechanisms that support my statement. Now if you talk to dr. Lane Norton, someone who I respect tremendously, he's been on my podcast twice, have tremendous respect for him. He'll tell you unless it's a randomized controlled trial, that doesn't mean 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 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.
So 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 for making this a better country. I think it's so that that's my threshold and I do get worked up about this but not enough to run for
all. I found this really interesting study that's been done recently stories, don't care about your statistics and controlled experiments. Researchers documented a pronounced story statistic Gap in memory. The average impact of statistics on beliefs Fades by 73% of the course.
Day. The impact of a story Fades by only 32% of our that 73 percent average impact of statistics on believes 32% on a story. So, in short people's beliefs are more durably impacted by stories than statistics. Huge implications for how voters beliefs can be more easily swayed during the upcoming elections.
I had 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 story.
These 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 structure, but it doesn't really have a beginning middle and an hour. Time course plot. It can be a time course plot. There are all sorts of caveats to this, right in 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
He's when you learn the ABCs, you don't do abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz for a moment there. I was worried, I wouldn't remember. Yeah, but I'm so far so good. And I've been drinking my new tonic. So it's so flying. But how do, how do children learn the
ABC ABCDE.
So the brain is learning the inflections. It's learning what's prosody, right? The inflections that the lilten lilten 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 sang, who I always say, like, like I Remember lyrics really well and I would say, oh, what about that layer to think of all, I can't remember, like and then they'll start with the first line. And then all the sudden, I remember, the whole song sequence, that's right. It's, that's the way memories are organized a 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, a few 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 9/11 that I recall everyone in the country being tuned into the same event online, wild. I mean there may have been intervening things but while, you know, there was an earthquake, this morning. Los Angeles. Did you feel it?
I was busy preparing and I had my app pods in. All right, everybody else.
Us went, huh? I was
a lil one. I've got, but I grew up in California. This one was It was kind of, it was a ripple, not a rumble. So usually if it's a bigger one, you'll hear it like a train coming through the environment in any case, not a flashbulb memory, right? Obviously we're not but you remember what you were doing but you know a few weeks ago we had or about a month ago during that assassination until we had a flashbulb memories as I can. Recall is a Saturday. I was sitting on the couch. Yep. You know how my girlfriend? I were talking and then all of a sudden I was like, oh my goodness. You know, she like no. Oh my goodness. You know, and all of a sudden we're on it again.
Only right. Exactly. So you know, flashbulb memories are an exception to what we're talking about and they grabbed all the context around,
though. I remember when my mom picked me up on 9/11 from school, I remember listening to it on 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 in here, you know, For Better or Worse. Yeah, I'm For Better or Worse. I'm the opposite but I remember that one light bulb.
Memory like in a big important event. Yeah but yeah I just story things so interesting and I think
by the way, sorry I don't mean to interrupt but you know that the origin of flashbulb memories, adrenaline, you know, it's adrenaline released from the adrenals and in the locus coeruleus Ed sort of a quote-unquote alertness center, although my aunt Neuroscience colleagues and be like there he goes, calling brain structures by the function but you know releases epinephrine into the brain and kind of a sprinkler ring fashion. You know that there's we know and there's a beautiful
You by James McGraw, 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, they would like can say it's an annual review of a neuroscience starts off by describing. They would take kids, they give them a tutorial. Typically was a religious tutorial back then they throw them into cold water so you get a spike in Adrenaline and then you remember what 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 accused 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 a important, Strategic Learning moment opportunity, do not go near that cave. That happen to have that they're in it again, right? We'll make sure that you actually hold. Is that the
right so much. So, yeah, it's so much, so that there's what's called condition place a version. 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
A mattock stuff. What is the same somatic stuff? Well, the nervous system is fairly nuanced but it's also crude you're releasing some adrenaline, is the increase in heart rate, increase in breathing to go with 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 Q alertness, very fast, Ms fast but also to change the chemical
Neil you of the brain. So that whatever memories were 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, crack crack crack 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. 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.
The lawn of walking out there. This is why people who experienced trauma. Often times 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 alert avoid this street necessarily, but like what were you
doing? Your right brain is trying to grab
something. What brought you to that location? What things brought you to that incident us and 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 Fleet high intensity. And then to re script 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.
Use of drugs like ketamine, you know, FDA approved drug for dissociating, your emotions, while in the presence of MDMA, right? Or MDMA, which just recently day before, yesterday did failed to pass approval by the FDA for the treatment of PTSD. I didn't know about the 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.
And PTSD from people that had 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, to very hard to have a control in the sense that people can take no MDA. Is it and MDMA? Scuse me methylenedioxypyrovalerone feta me or, but then they knew that they were in the control group. Write that P is this whole business of how do you blind people to the to the
drug, you know, if you've taken MDMA, you know it.
Yeah and then there were some other issues.
You. 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 are not satisfactory enough for the FDA. So I think that the effort can't needs to continue
to buy another rocket. This will they get another? Yeah one home it again.
Yeah, one hopes but you know there are a lot of people out there with PTSD and intractable types of stress disorders that now are tractable with treatments like MD mate. Provided 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 support. 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 can we can kick and scream about it but that's not gonna do any good. Why did they say no? And then address those issues like a scientist, you get a paperback. You think it's the greatest paper in the world you get
Reviews and they have issues with certain things. You go well, weight, but but, but and you just, you have to go systematically until those issues are dealt with. You're gonna get the same result and get the same result. 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
UNA T of people trying to get these drugs through
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One of my friends, her husband has suffered with PTSD with alcoholism. Oh yeah. Get the switching out flavors wild
Citrus. As 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 at this, but I'm actually running into trouble seeing things up close recently on. Like, if I put it here, I'm blind
to what I told you last time about my Lasik right and I can see absolutely everything ancestral trauma. 500 yards. I'm like, Tim Kennedy
Um
I'm not laughing at a. I'm not laughing at it at Tim Kennedy. Lord knows I'm not laughing at Tim. Kennedy timbi don't hurt me. I'm a fan. I'm just the fact that you could see trauma at 500 yards is that's high
Acuity
goodness. Like Tim
like he will come and find you I've gotten. So I've got a story huh. I'll tell you a story that he told me about him and Bryan. Callen, and it'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 knows him. I met, you know, I just got in like my flight. You've been here for a little bit longer and you can said we know grabbed him by the arm. Like that said, no, no, we're going swimming in the morning, looked him in the eyes and brain was like, I mean, I tell him, I don't want to. I'm going to be tired. I'm going to whatever anyway, Tim made.
A threat sufficiently plain that he wasn't joking. So, six in the morning. Brian. Here's this little knock on his door 6:00 in the morning, Brian. So, Brian pretends to be asleep. Brian's an actor Brian's been in Hollywood, Movies, Big Hollywood, comedian to write comedian and actor. Yeah, he and he said, he channeled every single ounce of acting ability that he had. So, he's laid on one side and even, so give a, I give it 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 and next thing you know he's in the waters were correct and sure enough that you know you're talking about the cortisol Spike. Yeah that is a reliable way to give that.
B, that's the old man alarm the Tim. Kennedy Alum forget using sleep cycle. Forget everything that I said, just hate em candy 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, you know, glance at your phone, something I don't recommend doing and you see a troubling text message, you'll be wide awake. Well, 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 brain stem called the back of the brain area. Let's just stick with the, you know, broad nomenclature the locus coeruleus has, there's cluster of neurons that do many different things there. But some of them provide, you know, these wire like external 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, you know, it's triggering to us if you will just push it sprinklers alien brain. Yeah it's sprinklers the brain with with epinephrine
Adrenaline and boom, the brain wakes up and then in parallel, your adrenals release adrenaline and within, you know, a couple hundred milliseconds, your you're up. That's you're able to move and you're not thinking about fatigue in the demoscene doesn't mean anything. And, you know, and sometimes I think that the, you know, earlier we were only half half, joking, choco about jakka willing seen the sort of 4:30 a.m. thing in waking up. You know, 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 shift.
Good 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 is 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. We in fact, we were talking about a minute ago in the context of PTSD and the context of fear in the context of non
Alertness. But on the basis of a broad stimulus, like, you know, you know, something terrible happened to you in a garage or in this beautiful garage with all these vintage cars around. But if something bad happened you in a garage it doesn't have to be that garage. You 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, you know, there's it's such a challenge to undo to unpeel a trauma or a or
Or a chronic anxiety is you have to sort of get to the combination of things that that 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 snow plow at 60 miles an hour, who 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 clip, you're
driving.
A little mg or something. It was a Ford Focus with my business partner and 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 pink 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 but six weeks or so, I was uncomfortable with a contraflow traffic, so I didn't like being on that lane, I would always be on the
The on the other side of the road in the UK. All right, so on the other, I would want to be on the outside Lane of the inside light and, um, he said, one of the interesting things about, the way that trauma can repattern memories old memories, is that you could have convinced yourself why 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 friend.
AIDS. And secondly, the story? What's the story that you're telling us up? What's the story that your brain is telling yourself about these memories? Paul was adamant, he said you absolutely could have begun telling us that. I like I love driving, I miss not having a car in the u.s. I finally did get a car at the start of this year and I really enjoy being back on the road to the time or I get to listen to podcast. I can't use my phone and I really like it and
But he said, you know, how did it been a most significant issue? I had you dealt with it in a different way or you could have convinced yourself. I know, I've always been a novice driver. I've never enjoyed driving. And then what, you know, how sort of infectious and pernicious is that kind of a memory, you know, 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, what Your unspoken assumptions about the world, what it
in as? So I'm just wrapped with attention and
His here, trying it. 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 and but the other day I had this thought it's going to seem very. Oh, this is a funny one. You want to hear a funny one? I do. So I long time ago, I used to make a joke but I decided to just ripped it out. It's his only three word entry and said you know my goal in life has been to go from like oh boy twoie to just peace. Joy. No, I have 0 and
I know I have a boy and then I boy and then I have just like piece like that like, basically aside from sleep, like these are the three states that I can be in. All right, so in any case
maybe it's aggression
chill. Yeah, so 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 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 in misunderstandings as if they were betrayals and some people mix these up, you know. So that was an interesting one but it's awesome. Me anyway, but the thing that you said some things 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 at something just and I was like I can't remember a time. This is why 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. I 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 still. However, if you have you're having a nightmare or you don't like the way that you feel move your body
with 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 in 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, the, like the challenge of life like maybe that's the illusion, right? Because we hear so much about how, you know, the the
Ears are the Illusions? These do you know that? Now, dopamine's a real thing and chasing dopamine is a real thing at its extremes. It's can be addiction at. It's less extremes. It can be compulsions, and it can also be a joyful life, but I was thinking myself, maybe pain is the illusion, right? Maybe the idea that there's all this like Challenge and just got 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 is name is
Ian 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 that your work in this life is in part. Not completely is to is to burn down, I think they call them. I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong with some Will Tell Us in the comments thus scum psarras like burning down to the, to the roots, like the, the weeds of life, like, your 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 know you're not here to suffer and I thought I'm not his. She's 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.
Jean 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 joy. I have, I have so much, is that? I mean, it's great. And I have wishy-washy. No, not at all. I have so much to tell you. So overthinking creates more problems than it solves. Definitely, and as you're solving a really hard problem correctly, but on average, yeah, as everything is. Yeah, Joe Hudson. Do you know who he is? I don't art of accomplishment phenomenal guy.
Really, really interesting to come on the Pod. 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, right? 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 on the other side, you get out.
More as 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 are doing something which you find enlivening, You Are by definition helping to make your system more efficient. So his question while we're doing this podcast is a virtual one and he said this is one of his favorite little cues that he asks he says, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable. Mmm,
I love that. What's this guy's name again, Joe Hudson.
Lynch wrote down Joy is efficiency, Joe Hudson. Joe Hudson, yard of a. Not that it
matters. But what's his training is he a
psychologist? I would, it's very lengthy. Okay. So what would this be like? If it's 10% more enjoyable? And that is a cue 10% achievable and what he said there. So, I'll notice when, when I said that just now I sort of shifted in my seat a little bit. It's my back. There's some, my t-shirt was a little crease under my lower back side. Move that, and maybe I'll get a little drink. I'll look after myself, I'll look after my body. Oh, maybe I'll allow the periphery.
With my gaze to just sort of open out about oh maybe I'll take a little bit slightly deeper breath and I'll oxygenate a little bit
more. We get like I'm having fun right now but we can have ten percent 10% just which attempts of more enjoyable. What was it? 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 your laid on the floor panting heart rate at 180 sweating from everywhere.
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 sat in traffic you call the ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack framing is everything. This is a quote, from Rory Sutherland, jihadism one of the greatest living advertisers on the planet vice-chairman of Ogilvy advertising. This is 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 anti-social 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, its kind of alchemy.
I like that. I'm about 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 politically unequivocally be? Yeah.
Excellent or terrible. There's no question about
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I turned 49 next month, China,
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, how good, what's good? I mean, I can close my eyes and hear conversations that I had with people in, with a fair degree of accuracy. I believe how fast I go back. Oh, I can remember walks. I took with my dad when I was 5 or 6 years old, I can remember the layout on my
Imminent to like fine detail. When I was a kid, I faces. I very strong recollection of faces and facial recognition. I don't track time. Well, you know, as a professor, we get some leeway, but I, you know, I'd perpetually run late. I don't track time and until recently, I didn't really have a sense of of death. I mean I knew it existed. I've had people close to me died, all three of my academic advisors died, you know, suicide cancer, cancer, the joke in my family.
Field is, you don't want me to work
for you. I was going to say I finally come the old
Amin are. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city or military I've had you know quite a few friends died, drug overdoses, suicides, you know, and it's kind of hard to know if it's on average more or less. You know I was a teen in the, you know, in the late 80s early 90s and there weren't a lot of people take doing therapy there. Were no psychological meds for the treatment of different conditions. Maybe that's it. Who knows? In any case.
If I spend any amount of time thinking about any thing 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, towards
the touch of Rich opportunity to ruminate.
Yeah. And just, and we're seeing in, you know, even music from the past acting as a cue to the Past, something happened and
In like 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 can remember, the different animals that I felt like, I sort of related to or embodied at, you know, when I was a kid, I had the same voice I have now.
They called me froggy, you know? Because I was like the kid from The Little Rascals as a show that most people. Now don't know. You'd like, the kid talk like this. And I had my Adam's Apple was out when I was a little kid, I had hair on my Adam's Apple. It's like there's a joy. I have a heterozygote for a certain genetic mutation. I overproduce Androgen from my adrenals. If you have two copies it can make you infertile. Fortunately, I don't I have one copy and it doesn't result in any other like bodily differences or anything like that. I'm very fortunate in that way.
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 that different stages of My Life As I Grew and matured and experience different things. I was like at one stage in my life. I felt very oriented towards the must have lives. And then another times towards like a certain species of cat and like I just I identified with them in a number of ways. And then recently, I was on this long run, I do these long Sunday, rocks 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 I whatever
F it like lately. I'm just kind of opening up on podcasts my own and others I realized. And no, 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 can basically 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 so it's such a new place for me. I can't think. And I have to consciously try and think into the past, but that was yesterday.
Because yesterday I can't do it. No, 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've just like so I drew it out. I was like, we're going 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 move.
Very slowly. But with a lot of force, you know, on anything that was in my way at one stage, you know it's it there's been times when I've Orient felt like a raptor where I was just kind of like placed in really observant. I spent an entire year speaking. Very little Believe It or Not people, my life will be like what year was that? I didn't talk to you that your exactly. You can talk to me that year and I and talk to you if you wondering where I was. So right now by sort of like identifying with this kind of mode of caterpillar vision and movement, everything is
In small increments, you know, I even filled in the way that I talk in the way I, parse idea is, I'm writing the bonus chapters from my book which comes out in April of next year, like, everything is line by line. Everything is iterative. And I am not oriented toward the past, it's there, if I need it like a book on a shelf, I can go grab and look things up. But until now I have existed very much in like sort of thinking about the losses of past the Winds of past, identifying with that. And I don't know what caused this, I can't point to one single
A delegate 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 were born. I mean, after all, you know, 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 12 80s and 90s. You're working out some core conflicts of agency versus, you know, autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do. And I forget the stages and 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, you know, God willing is going to live another 20, 25 years with immense Vigor, he 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 like 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 30s, 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 feelings,
Stuck in your life story. There's great advantage to just letting some time petiole de 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 yet take a cold shower and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods and you try and get sleep and you limit your alcohol on you deal with any addictions you might have and you work on your traumas. Like you're going to have a great looking life. You know, you're going to be healthier than 90% of people.
The world, right? Are you going to take gold at the Olympics? Are going to be Cole Hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final, 100 meters of the 1500 know unless you're col Hawker, but like, you can still have an amazing life. And so, I think there's been so many years where I've just felt 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 cow.
Caterpillar. It's a caterpillar and then I got back from that run. And I was seeing myself, I don't know. Now, I gotta like, think about the butterfly thing and like, this is turning out pretty saw and I thought, hey, well, that's pretty cool. So I started I started researching caterpillars because this is me. So some 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 oh, and they actually know.
Form a permanent memory not to eat those caterpillars. So I now look at caterpillars completely differently, that's Mel on time drawing caterpillars. I haven't yet watched a documentary about caterpillars, do you'll find? But anyway, I'll avoid going down this whole 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, you know like what dog are, they are cetera and in part because I think that
Other animals in the absence of their kind of 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 have a colleague. He's Hungarian. He has AB lab in Switzerland, and the guy is all staccato movements. And he's like this thin and has like five,
Percent body fat naturally, right? And then I have other colleagues who like more resemble melted candles they don't move so much, you know, and they need to exercise more because I love them and you don't see many overweight 80 year olds. So 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 and but definitely hard but but not the hardest time, certainly not the hardest time. Hardest time was probably years earlier when I had so much less
Agency and my community wasn't as established. But definitely not not, not a 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, so if I may, I'll lay the into this from a double bunch of perspectives, and this is usually the point of discussion like this where, like all
Audiences are like oh this is where he prepares the Diplomatic taught like look I've done a number of sessions talking about this kind of stuff publicly and privately since then. So like, I'm just, I'm just showing up to this how it feels and, and my read with the, with the understanding that, you know, language is sometimes deficient at it. Like conveying what's really going on? But I'll do my best. So
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 just didn't, I actually didn't know that or believe that before I 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. Like, 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 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 10 feet into the business because that's called cherry-picking, its 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
Regions of your thinking and decisions you state your motivations. So it woke me up to that and that was a bit of a 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 you're facing name clicks, then your
a Target. What's that mean? It just means that if you know the bigger your platform the more the more attention your name or face drawers 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 BS. They under, they can see that the like tawdry efforts or the the
You know, that attempt to spin a narrative that just isn't right isn't true. And what I'm saying there is, you know, where as 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.
Is like we love what you're doing, we get it, not a problem, you know, and that was great. It also brought forward my friends and people in the community both podcasters and academics family and friends, you know, I mean basically the the essence of it was when my dad and I who in the past we've had some challenges in our relationship and now are really good when he called me and said they tried to pit us against each other and I'm like, yeah, he's like I can't believe it.
He re T he couldn't believe it and he's a very smart guy, okay. He's a theoretical physicist by training as a first generation immigrant. He's not here on accent, 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, huh, one trial learning one want, one trial learning meaning? We're not.
Make that mistake again run. So so that was a sort of the media side of it. And then I also want to acknowledge that there are people in media and they're 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 but it made me realize why podcasting and podcasters like you and Joe and Lex and Whitney and David Sonora and Tim Ferriss and ritual 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 traditional media which has its merits certainly. But for which like, it's become this kind of Senate are 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 will you generate clicks? But they're going after you, because you actually have you have two, three, four, five, ten X, their reach y. Because people know when something is 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 it. Like the obvious, which is that we're in the Golden Age of
Casting right now and never before in my life, have I sort of been in the Golden Age of something, I, you know, came up early. I want to be involved in skateboarding, friends made his professional skaters. 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 would definitely shrunk my lab down. You know, the media said, oh, you know, he doesn't have a lap. Yeah, I shrunk my
AB down. Like, what's that mean? It just means, I might got my students and postdocs jobs. We published two papers, including a clinical trial in 2023, but I've shrunk my lab down, like so I teach and I'm still tenured, it stands
for the Opera, your last still
going. Well, I have Grant funds in a new department where we're doing some human, clinical trials, okay, 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 development. And then they all all of
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 hear from them, you know, 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 did this. I'm still a neuroscientist, I still read papers, I'm still on editorial boards. It's 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
Divisions like television, but different in fact, this, this Arc might be of interest to you. I watch 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 is making effort towards the homerun 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 show.
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, the contestants on The I would never happen nowadays. Okay? Things have changed matured, eventually was the human story. Then it became reality TV shows, right? And then now I see social 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? He did. I know they released his account. Has he tweeted anything?
Yep. Today, for the first time in my. What do you think shot? What did he to eat a couple of videos? One mocking, Kamala one.
Making himself up and two announcements saying I'm going live at 8 p.m. tonight with Ilan on x0. Calm, but I
wonder if they'll correct the Rogan narrative because over the weekend there was this narrative that Rogan had endorsed and then Arcane it turned out not to be true.
No I said that you liked him which he said a million times before I see and then
Trump pose
social truths of. 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 maybe fact. Check fault. I'm pretty. Well, I'm pretty sure that that's that. But I mean, that's a tone-deaf. Rogan is the hero he is UFC. Yeah, it's Dana White. It's like to keep like small, Dana White and big Dana White. Happy
birthday. Joe is birthday was
overly K.
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 that's the media side. So, yummy, tremendous
appreciation, for all of that the personal side. How do you personally deal with a funeral? Like yeah, the one that you were and also I'm particularly interested in
The lessons that you've learned longer-term book, what does it feel like to wake up that day? You know you understand the neurochemicals? You understand a hormonal response. But you've got this just flood of phenomena going through.
Yeah. So and I think, one of the hardest things is being misunderstood and then understanding, you know, the motivations of the media are the motivations of the people that gave stories to the media. The
that 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. It 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.
That meant other people including my family were amazing people from my high school, you know, is 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, like maybe
Need to pay attention to this aspect of your life, a bit more 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, showed up. I just looked up, there's relax, Jack and tie. Hey, it's a 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 and a walking out in the yard. I
Will nap and it's been 15 or 20 people there including my good friend Tim Armstrong other people there supporting me just being there, right? We also continue to work in that time we release solo episodes re-release posts. We release podcasts. We were not going to stop working.
Are you able to get yourself into the right mode of mind? You not, if you not got split brain problem though, you half of use over here, the adopts, trying to be professional.
I learned in that time.
I'm but I took some tools from prior to Prior experiences to Take 5 to 10 minutes. Take the first couple of minutes and meditate concentrate on one's breath. Try and get as present as possible. Your mind complete is always flitting to these other things that are trying to distract it. Realizing every time you can hold onto your present, cognition bringing things present for a millisecond longer you doing that much better, ratcheting back and then getting into action,
Doing generative work teaching science and health information because that's why the people listen to the huberman loud podcast. I don't think they'd 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. We're very beautiful for instance you know, one of the narratives that was getting spun out there is that my back story 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 is my team manager at Thunder and spitfire skateboard companies back then wrote to me and he said, yeah, you know, 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, like I'm in this place and me saying, you're the most normal person, I know. And, you know, that whole thing and he's like and I understand why they're doing that and I was 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's okay. Fine. And then he goes and I told them that I'd 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 would put me on the team and I was too embarrassed to ask and he's like course you are on the team and I was like oh man I waited my whole life to hear that 30
years why cell has a lining.
So there was like you know these things that it kind of vexed me for years like was I really part of that? Or was it not possible?
Out 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 ruge. 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 encourage me, encouraging me to continue on the mission. And at that point, I was buoyed by the fact that I'm like, okay, you know, 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 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. Aha, next thing you know we're Jeopardy question like all of a sudden like things started growing and then I started
Realizing, let's just get back to
where we thought the fastest period in the show's growths 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 managed, my comments, I manage all that myself. So, yes, if I say thank you in the DMS, that's me, but it was definitely among the sharpest inflections I've ever experienced. I
think Joe said something similar about the CNN.
Whole Space dewormer scenario that although you know, my feel back. So 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 pick. So, if you were one of the sensations, I imagine you must have his indignation where we did. Is this isn't true and I want to correct. The record is. He 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 break down. It'll let you know. You've got the tools. You've got the platform. You've got the the followers, why not? Yeah. 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's lives, not their actual lives. But their, their well-being, the other piece was that it was made very clear to me, and I told I wholeheartedly agree that the media will cherry-pick statements and Cluj.
Are 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 won'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, you know, I think I overreacted and I said, I didn't say no, you didn't or anything, even though I have my
Things 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 it like it, it media scale. And I think also,
Personally, I mean, obviously I'm human there was the need for reflection on the things that past and present that I wish I had done differently and that I, you know, you make the change, you know? 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, you know, 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 and my family life in my work life and my public facing life. And that was honestly, the Cornerstone. Now that was the center of it. All that, that was the piece that allowed me to go. Okay, you know what? This sucks.
There's Silver, Linings, there's a misunderstanding, outright lies, lack of content. You know what, I see all that. I see the changes that need to be made. I see where I also draw 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 10 times a day and it wasn't just praying like, oh, please make this stop or anything like their, you don't people. 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.
Word, 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 you 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, I'm on my knees at the side of the bread prayer. Kind of guy since the new year since
Before the new year before that it was kind of in my head a little bit kind of here there. And before every podcast, I just want 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 like okay this is a scientist or now he's he's kind of claiming the God thing claiming anything. Like, for me, this has been the most powerful
Thing that I've ever experienced because it's it's just given me peace and a compass and a Rudder forward. Even if I have to be a caterpillar levels of of, you know, Horizon View like this far out, in front of me, inching forward, you know, 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?
Through an emotionally intense period. It seems to me like if I was to try and deconstruct the 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 know I'm 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 you know Jim Thibault didn't show up at my house because
As 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 added depressed kid sitting at the Embarcadero with a busted foot because I couldn't skateboarding, just sat with me and gave me a book to read and encouraged me to write, you know, you know. I took what Jim did for me and did it for other people. So I like to think perhaps it was God going to returning the the energy returning the favor, you know.
No, people. 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 you just do it and 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 you know if it's medium fine, if it's huge fine.
Definitely, I definitely used tools, right? The physiological side Works to limit stress, get sleep. I didn't rely on pharmacology to get sleep. I know some people need to, I just didn't want to go that route once months earlier. I took a little it was prescribed to me, I took a half a Xanax to try and sleep in the sleep. I got felt like crap. I woke up. I was like, I'm not doing that again. My use breathing tools. I use NST r.
Our, I use some supplementation to sleep but sleep is key. You win by sleeping. That was one of our mottos during that time in all times when we're out on the road doing lives. Like we're going from one city to the next year and we're podcasting and we're doing a Mas and we're busy. And we're talking all day and go go. Go. Like, we were 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
Lee stressful times. I'll pair back on training a bit. I trained as preparation. So for me lifting three times a week, I love training. Yeah, I do my legs if you want or so do my arms and calves and neck. Okay, sure. I do my long run, I do my medium run. I do my Sprint day. 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 mean 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, you know, these things make a difference. The other thing is I learned to be able to call on people to pick up the phone, you know, and say Hey listen like 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
In a few things and then just going inward. Right? You there is this tendency especially with text to constantly be you know, 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, you know, like not that I'm never going to listen to advice from that person again but they
They were just saying stuff. So you need to be a selective filter and it can be very hard. And I would 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 you might give prayer a try.
Because there's real peace at the center there and from that piece you can see the right decision and from that right decision, you can make the right decision for that circumstance and they're just too many circumstances to say you should always say this or you should never say anything in 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.
Oh 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 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 name is also, I couldn't believe it. I was like, these are people with enormous stature that like I thought were probably would fall on the opposite. End of the spectrum, will 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 XY and Z but 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 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's stuck their neck out for me. And who wasn't it was beautiful to see people who did and the ones who
Who didn't I get it? Like, they have their own incentives, they needed to do whatever it is. They need to
do. I think why I regretted not messaging me that day. And the reason I didn't was it's kind of like when it's somebody's birthday and you think, does he really need an additional thing? It's I texted Rob instead of like Rob can be the filter and for the
asset to me and thank you and listen. It's also a felt thing and you raised 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
We all are going to go through these sorts of things at different scales and in different contexts is that, you know, 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, you know, again, call me non-scientific fine. I have enough signs under my belt and 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.
No his mom, but I just like it came to me. I was like, you know, like we all flooded in and their condolences thoughts and prayers, but like 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 B XA 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 shared. And I think that putting that out into the world in a way that other people can benefit from is 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 him.
A friend, right? I could actually call on Tim. But I think that the loan 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 her? 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 it bullet Buster cancer takes me out tomorrow, that some of the things that I've shared, hopefully many of the things that I've shared could help people now and going forward. That's a real thing. It's not, it's not about selling us advertisement or a supplement like that's incidental. It's about the material. So you know I'm kind of spooling it now but like within me I feel immense gratitude I wouldn't change the experience of the last year for anything.
Don't want to experience it, you know, for its own sake but what it brought me was huge gifts and yet, 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 didn't. You
know, if 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'll end this with Alex Hall mozi last year and
The longest chapter describes a time in which you're growing, you're changing as a person and your 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. He's always going to be there. And you're going to have one string. You're going to have uncertainty. There's not even the
Us of Glory or success or Triumph when you get through the other side, one of my pushing toward, you know, I 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 5 years or 10 years in the town that I grew up in or went to University and 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? Leo, you've got all of these questions in your mind and all of your friends and all of the Dynamics and the The Temptations? Pull you back toward that? It pulls you back to
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, a better than the people that are already fine as they are in a 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 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 last for 90 seconds in the movie. But it can last 45 years in your life and you have no idea whether or not even going to work. Now, that's the bit that always got to me. The bit, the always got to me was I didn't even know if it was 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 I'm just stood here doing the thing but I don't know if he'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 in his youth 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.
When you're moving yourself in a more developed Direction can throw into harsh, contrast the behavior of the people who maybe aren't doing that and then you start to sew become friends with some of the sad movie and then the worst or one of the really difficult Sensations is if you then do that. And you got past somebody who previously you were, where then there's this sort of sense. Well, I'm on the journey to 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
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 had. I feel like I'm almost sort of betraying this older version of me, there's past version of my life that I should be there. And there's this scene in The Matrix that Alex talks about were Nia 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 and lasted for a good amount of time. Transitioning from being, you know a guy in his 20s that does the reality TV thing does. The party boy thing and then goes, okay, I need to decide to stop drinking which 10 years ago as revolutionary as especially as a club promoter. It's now very common to do low and
but pretty different different back then. And all of the incentives were for me to go back to partying or why you're doing that, you're going to be boring on a nighter. I realized that you know if you need to drink to be around your friends, you don't have friends, you are drinking partners. And the 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 and all of the things I used to leave the front door of a nightclub. And I would sit now, add wedge my phone into the
Top of the steering wheel. So I have it, you know, party with 1,500 people that all, it's my party, my company, right. And I would leave to go watch a lan 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, you know, the lonely chapters, one of them 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 the 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 goals that are around them where they live and, you know, you end up finding solace in this person that speaks to you because you struggle to find solid sort of personally. So, yeah, the overarching lesson is just keep going. The lonely, chapter is a feature, not a bug.
As personal growth. It is a, it's the cost of doing business if you want to develop yourself.
Yeah, I love that. You know, 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. I'm it was God. Again, intervening saying no, you're going to get broke off again, you're not going to. This is not going to be your path. Following a high school girlfriend to college and then realizing after the first year that, you know, drinking and getting in fights was not a good pass.
Path and get my life in order. And then studying a lot at a school where at that time, people weren't terribly studious and it was incredibly isolating. I even lived alone lived in my girlfriend where I lived alone and being very isolated. And then in graduate, school, felt more social connection. But then, as a junior Professor, you know, their boundaries between you and the people you work with. And those are important boundaries. And so not having many male friends and you know my fortunately at the time, my romantic partner who I'm still good friends with
You know, was a great source of family and support but feeling cut off from Friends of other types and and then again, you know, in this more recent iteration of entering the podcast world but then you find your community. I also think while I totally agree we you can look to podcasters to books. Also to people who are no longer alive I that you know mentors like the great Oliver Sacks so I've never met but I've reached out to people that knew him and then
Given me information about him, that's given me, you know, gotten me through many hard times based on his life experiences biography as autobiography, is why I like biography and autobiography so much. You can feel a kinship with
peace. Why David Sunrise show so great.
That's one of the reasons. Founders podcast is so great. I just got to meet Senator himself recently. Is it just amazing? It's been amazing podcast, he's amazing. Highly recommend that podcast. You know Rick rubin's been a great source of support. Tim Armstrong has been an enormous source of support. Jim Thibault has been enormous source of
Support, Joe Rogan's been enormous source of support. Lex Friedman's been a big source of support. You've been a great source of support, Whitney Cummings at. Yeah 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 milk. For instance, people who I never thought I would meet, you know, explaining the commonalities of their experience.
You know, and if you're wondering okay well then you know those are all these people who's going to come for me. Well, I'm going to and Chris is going to, you know, when you're coming up and you're in your thing, like, reach out, right? I mean, it's, it's kind of incredible. The way that humans will move in to support one another, when they need it. Good, humans it. 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 all not always, but a lot of times it's like their motive, their motivations weren't right in the first place. Something happened to them and they're gone, and you go wow, happen 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, you know, I think it's just a, you know, I heard from a former postdoc of mine recently and a
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 like 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 joy, just pure joy. That it brings me to hear about them and their students that their mentoring. Like there's a passage of this stuff over time and look none of us live forever except Brian Johnson, just kidding. I am
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 he, you know, I think it's great. That somebody is exploring the field of longevity from the perspective, he is and other perspectives. So for that,
for just my, I got to give you my take on Bryant. I was it, I was at. I've seen Brian in person. Maybe two or three times. I was at Roatan. The an island off Honduras with him, okay?
At the start of this year and then I did a Jeffersonian dinner. Oh yeah. Breakfast with him.
Very Bay Area to do a Jeffersonian
dinner? Yeah. Well he brought he brought some of the Bay Area over and I had some of his nutty pudding and I had a 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 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 there's a views beautiful, or maybe slip and catastrophe occurs at something and come back and tell us what he found. I love that a yeah, thank you. The bit of an astronaut correct. Yeah, expend time and effort and resources and all of that finding out stuff. I'm, you know, I'm all I'm all for him doing that and I'll take the, you know, top twenty percent or whatever, that gives the 80% of the of the insights from him. Yeah.
He's
Part of this incredible tapestry. That's being built a public facing health and science information. Never before in human history has health and science information, been dispersed in the way that it is. Now through podcast, through traditional media, from Physicians from scientist, from ancient wisdom stuff, I mean I can sit back from all of its see Brian, see my position in the field ceiling the Lane Norton. See the people that attack us, see the the FDA, see the the NIH and I can look out and you know, I mean listen I was on a grant review panel until you know,
Little over 12 months ago, I had was a regular member on their of reviewed grants written grants. Fortunately got many grants, funded planning, grants didn't get funded to. I like, I understand the process. And I understand people's different orientation and realize that we're all after the same thing. We're all. We all want to live longer healthier lives with more Vitality like 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 and SDR, if you're talking about REM sleep in the Dynamics of spindle waves in the brain, or you're talking just about your dreams and you're doing a dream journal.
Lee. 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, Etc, that's the mission. So you you nailed it. You want a Brian Johnson on the mission? You want a Lane Norton on the mission? I like to thank 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 and what I see is incredibly counterproductive.
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 proposed, it's mostly all good. Except the stuff that's dangerously 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 and 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 bodies plus funding, plus curiosity, have all, you know, been these competing forces and that the acceleration of
Into medicine is now taking place at a rate that is unprecedented crisper brain machine interface and yes I'll say it psychedelics and supplementation. There's just compounds people go supplements. None of that's regulated. Yeah and you could also have a conversation about ssris which have huge value but it 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's 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, right? Most people love Taylor Swift and they're 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 most of the ideas I see out there warrant further,
Operation 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 and it's an important one in the in his absence. I think the field will progress less quickly, you know, 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 is 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. He, I think he said, it's 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 rap
A mycin NAD, sublingual mix it in the yogurt. Do all of the stuff. I remember when that was you know, 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 want an episode with Peter Tia. 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
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 and immunologically to it potentially potentially physically weak. Okay. So yes, starving yourself within reason can extend your lifespan but you also
Of yourself of joy and vigor, right? I mean, at some point, you are sub clerk enough that testosterone levels, plummeted, men and women, libido, plummets fertility, plummets, and men and women. So you know it's a trade-off. 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 life span. 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 Tian criteria lane or tea and criteria. It causes my hair to grow very, very fast, which is odd. But other people I know who
Takin 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 and a man is worth paying attention to. It was David Sinclair, that popularized NM n. Remember n MN is a precursor to NAD. + r is the precursor to nmn. So there's a phosphate group that gets removed people that are not David Sinclair,
Are fairly bullish about and are being preferable to nmn, but the people who are proponents of n are true, nyugen Associated. Folks at 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 NAD in cells, more readily than Anna men. Now, all I know is that when I take sublingual nmn, my hair grows faster, my my nails grow thicker, and faster to effects that I wasn't seeking, but that I'm
Okay, with and I have more morning energy. I've also taken an r 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 worth while 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
Reading 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 Law's 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 by nmn if you wish. So that's the story there in terms of other things too. Oh, and why don't I take rapamycin?
I'm 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 a hundred fifty and then Solomon, no, not interested in plummeting. My blood sugar berberine, not interesting 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. As I used to do cheat days, I don't any longer where I could eat a dozen donuts. If I take 500 mg of berberine first, I feel fine otherwise. I feel like my eyes get blurry and I want to
Sow different. It'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. They say it's very strange feeling. I don't like it. Other things for longevity taking good care. Don't get hit in the head, avoid excessive stress, you know, all the basic kind of like things that we all know. So the longevity field is a peculiar one. I mean, it could be that Brian is on to 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, the I think there's enough data for red light therapy whole body. Red light, you know. Yep. Naked in front of the panel 10 minutes, 5 minutes, facing five minutes from behind and facing away as it were for sake of Eye Health. With 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.
Klein. This is my colleague. Glenn Jeffrey 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, you know, these sorts of things and then, you know, dosing with stress appropriately but not overdoing stress. Making sure to get enough sleep. Having a joyful life. I love this joyous efficiency and Longevity, perhaps as well. You know, I'm bolstered by observing my
Dad, who, you know, might have a glass of wine every once in a while, but never drank very much who exercises but never over, did it, who always 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 like, like more. I use he's in excess of 70 patents and he's going.
Strong. You know, he was also somebody that in the moved to the United States in the era of the 1960s and told stories about people, you know, passing joints. And he was like, no, like I worked my butt off to get out of a, you know, a country where they didn't support science. He had this opportunity from the Navy to come here and study on scholarship and decided. You know, he sort of like all drugs bad kind of guy. We're as 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
Really terrible for others. So I think that moderation goes a long way, including an exercise. I mean, if you look at people who marathon and Ultra they don't age as well as in my opinion, as people certainly better than people that are sedentary. But when you look at, for instance, people are very heavily muscled, they don't age very well. You look at people who do a ton of ultra endurance, they don't 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 it to two fingers of each hand. Doing a pull-up. I think the guys 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, have a skin sag and his face in 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 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 at some in, 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 campaigns. Well as you do and he, you know, in Camp, pushes himself hard. I think that again, better, that, 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 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 do I think he's it's all coming through him. I know I don't probably some people like I got 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. Kim carries a fair amount of muscle as well, which I think it's protective against some of the muscle wasting that occurs when people are running really far really long, you know, over and over and over at stress stress,
is that guy that run the entire length of Africa? No. But that's super impressive.
The world first world, first guy, the get from the south cape Cape Town, you know, the absolute bottom to
Turkey and it can't be a
strong as a huge run for a year for a year. This is some Forrest Gump, kind of stuff, correct? And Ross Edge lead. Remember Ross, he swam around. The UK was the first man to ever swim around the UK. So he's just completed, who 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 non-stop swim,
how far
300 miles without touching land without stopping without sleeping. Just 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 butt flap on his thing, he missed the butt flap. So then just churned his poop for the, you know, next? 50 hours. As he did this swim apparently, they cut him out.
Of it. And he was it was like this sort of gray dust inside of him. Which is what if you churn your own feces for long enough, brownie that happens but Russ. Wahoo's first man to swim around the UK. Amazing. So he did six hours on six hours off for six months and they six hours on six hours off for six months.
The human, you know, that the human spirit is like one of these things, I just marvel and I'm curious. Chris them, what
What do you see as your long archive you thought, are you like, I'm in caterpillar mode I'm thinking I think about the microplastics episode that I'm preparing, like what? Well now I'm focused on where we are right now but but, you know, and a book and some other things in the in the not too distant future but they do you hold E36, 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 flattering Lee Rogan and campaign said that they would vote for me if I run for president, but they can't because he's British, no, none of that
Runnin in the UK.
But yeah, I'm sure that I'm in the UK is a whole of the whole other challenge at the moment that I don't intend on stepping foot into one of the interesting things that I've learned. I think over the last two and a half years since moving to America is
If there's ever a period of sort of rapid growth or development optionality in life, opens up, so rapidly and the potential universe is Branch so quickly that any real long-term plan is kind of pointless. This is maybe a coat because I struggle with long-term planning. I know that the way that you're supposed to live the most fulfilling life for my productivity bro, background is to write your obituary and then you know, you're in
5-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 is 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 I would have never thought to know 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. I 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 pitch to have said, yes to 6 months ago, and your 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 in 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. You know, that's unbelievably cool. I think that especially, because I grew up in, you know, a town in the UK famous only, for having the highest teen pregnancy rating.
In England and then it lost that. So didn't really even have that name of the town stockton-on-tees and it's just, you know, classic Northern working Town, nothing spectacular, that part from the railway was actually invented the, 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
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. Then by Expediting success and it meant that I was able to grow up and say, why don't want his relationship with his family. And I don't want the way that he uses alcohol to cope with his 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 one.
You go to but ones that you avoid sort of helps you to map out the Minesweeper territory. And
can I just say 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 20, 30 years, is that,
The brain, the nervous system, the 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 someone's 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 meets egg and then there's duplications of the cells and some of those cells become Limbs and some of the cells become fingernails Etc. 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, 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 that 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 chemoattractant that would be things that would lead the neurons to steer in the right direction and wire up and indeed those chemoattractant exist they go by the names of things like natural which means
to guide or Efren or Etc, but Far, and Away by 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. I'm 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 it. But repellent forces, core adoring them.
You progressively more precise and more precise and more precise connections. So that by time a baby is born after 9 months or so.
The wiring of the brain and spinal cord is such that they're ready for life and then more wiring occurs in most of the wiring that occurs after were born the. So called neuroplasticity is a selective removal of connections as opposed to the formation of new Kinect ruining. And so, as you're describing your experience of growing up in this town, whose name, I can't remember right now Captain Stockton the origin of the the train.
Yes.
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, you know, we think of a really good life as being the consequence of selective decisions for, you know, running toward not away from type decisions. But I think what you raised is incredibly important and is not discussed enough which is that. So much of a good life, a right life and Incredibly successful life involves
The no definitely not, that definitely not that in a selective pruning in 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 experiences as 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,
Ian. It's the wiring of the central nervous
system. Yeah, I think.
Avoiding catastrophe is significantly more profitable than trying to expedite success. This is meant to that because there's this idea from mathematics, which is never x 0. So if you take 20 x 3, x 4 hundred thousand multiplied by 1 Point 3, multiplied by 0, you get 0. So you can do all of the good work in the world. You can boom, avoid eating seeds.
Bills and you don't put any fucking sun lotion on your testicles and you get all of your light in the morning and some
sunscreens are safe despite what the internet says, I believe in some sunscreens. I lost friends for saying that
batter. What was your thing about? People will lose so much sleep and friends over debating seed
oils. Oh goodness, seed oils or the sunscreen thing. Look, mineral-based, sunscreens, everyone agrees are 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 a
Cording to the internet. You find all sorts
of lies about the opposite lane. So anyway yet so you and you multiply by zero, you've done all of this stuff, you've been resistance training three times a week, listen to the human lab part, 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.
My street and live on a hill. I run into the park nearby run into a podcast van, 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? That makes it the podcast studio and ton. I'll just do my meditation now. Brilliant idea Professor hubermann. 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, Rock and I go right into a box truck and I'm thinking, ah, now, I've been hit before I boxed a little bit skateboard, I've hit my head, I'm not tough, but I've hit my item, you know, I reach up like I'm gonna and there's enough blood on my hand, I'm like, oh boy, the 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, uh, actually bone exposed, not good, no bueno ran right into a parked box truck, okay. Hey, I'm not.
Absent-minded professor at times, 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, Robb's waiting at the stood with
Asked from Stanford amazing. Amazing. Professor named Joe Miyazaki Foose brilliant and they put a couple injections in novocaine suits, your me up and you know, week later, I'm pretty good. That little bit of week ago. Yeah, Jason and his Clinic are absolute phenoms. Yeah,
but did he did, he explain to you the importance of the six
hours to avoid infection?
To avoid infection. It's the infection that gets in there. Are they, 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 house, it's just out. We do it. So it's been, it's been a week and four days.
Yeah, like Wolverine. Yeah,
normally, I don't heal that. Well, now, I will say this, for the record, I've been experimenting with PPC 1574, which there are basically zero human data, tons of animal data. And anyone
That's taken BBC 157. By the way, you don't want to take it continuously. And if you're going to take it, get it from a compounding pharmacy and get it prescribed by a doctor, because there's a lot of contaminated versions out there. I would never take an oral version. It can cause in, it does cause angiogenesis growth of blood vessels. So if you have a tumor you could cause angiogenesis of the tumor. So but I do take. I was taking it Sub-Q. Yep. And I do he'll noticeably faster when taking BBC 157 but we're I not
Have had that injury and I had a little bit of a calf thing. I was trying to repair I would not take BBC 157 continuously just to take it you know and nowadays I hear about a lot of young guys just taking it the same way they just take testosterone sipping it which is attached. Just foolish.
Yeah two stories I ruptured my achilles 34 years ago I took T be 500 and BBC one point seven for the six weeks after that you tore your Achilles complete Detachment. Yeah. For rough terrain. You can even you can even see if you need other day. You can just
yeah, lying that thing looks
like it.
I've got the scars
I've got like it looks like a
zipper got to show it. So again do that playing Cricket the most British way.
Yeah that's a confusing sport.
Yeah so did that a TB 500 ippc 1576 weeks and the recovery was very good. It was also during a pandemic, add nothing else to do. And I was beyond Millet as psychotic like probably 95 to 98 percent compliance with sets reps record, everything,
everything, you curious.
Because there's no clinical studies on this. So, when I talked to Peter, RT about B, BT 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 talked to Olympic
athletes, PPC, still people are the drugs. It's got, I don'ti
gastrointestinal E. I don't think it's allowed in the Olympics. I will tell you that many, many athletes used and used B. BT 157 to recover from injury more quickly
to be 500, very restricted, but bpc 157.
Seems to be less less restricted. Yeah, yeah. I worry
about any conversation about this. Only if people think oh, I'm just going to take this so I can like grow. Let me cover bigger biceps, like don't like just cancers nothing you
want. So is this? That's the second. This is the second thing I want to tell you about. So Chase, who isn't here today? Lead strategist for us. He had started to hear about some of the great effect that you get from BBC 157. I think that he took an oral version of it. Yeah, those are out there. Have you heard
About this and find Mia response, where it just creates a persistent feeling of hopelessness that is inescapable.
No, but it sounds horrible. Don't do it. Folks taking BBC 157 or injecting testosterone sipping, a because you just want more games and recovering, 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 PC 157, the angiogenic effects are really the most concerning again, you could get vascularization of tumors, the one peptide that
sorry, is that mediated? What do you take it orally or
Sub-Q? Nobody
So I was going to ask, did you inject it locally into the because I wasn't injecting my
I know. So I was shooting your typical of Love Handle spots TV, 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 their science.
Probably some local effect. Here's what we know about bpc 157. It's from the animal studies. It seems able to detect injury and in some very interesting way
And lead to fibroblast to a certain kind of cell type relevant to tendon
Etc, actual Achilles tendon, ruptures in the mice, or the rats are they using? That's right. So I thought, what God, if the, if it's ever gonna work for anything
and sciatic nerve as well. Okay, and what's also interesting, is there a couple peptides that I think are going to be discussed more and more, you know, BBC 157 and hose em pick are the ones you hear the most about those are after all, both peptides as insulin, by the way.
For Sleep Pioneer Woman, which is related to Regeneration and support of the pineal gland. Very interesting. Maybe we talk about this in a year or so when there's more data cordage in things that are relevant to the Trek one pathway and can accelerate nerve growth, not track track receptors, bdnf, not that pathway, but Trek one, there's a lot of interest now. Brian Johnson, very interested in others interested in cerebral license, which is sold in Europe, but not the u.s.
taking cerebral. Ison of
Are you? Yeah, how does it how do you
feel? I've only shot it once. So that's, I am. So you're taking through bullosa. Yeah. Okay, I've taken one. I've never tried it, you know, so I've used it once, I need to shoot. Again, I have to say, I just get nervous with. I am injections generally to fucking big old needle to be shooting in, and it's a
is lit. What? Why, why use a big needle?
Because it's a pretty hefty dose. It's 5 ml 5 mils, five mouths. Oh my goodness, you're not going to put that through an insulin pen, you know, unless you're going to draw.
Roar it up each time. You know, five individual
injection. That reminds me. It takes we didn't close the hatch on NAD. Have you ever done an NAD infusion? Yes, number two. Yeah. And it feels like an elephant to stepping on your legs. I mean, and you're getting kicked in the groin.
Have you tried that with? What's this stuff that stops you from one Zofran?
Yeah, I don't like taking medication. If I can avoid it. So I just you did. Without this old friend, I did I do it but I don't in I didn't Infuse it that fast and I will say this. I've done any D. 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 the same, as you try to hide, right? He got could be, we don't
know. So we there's a place in Austin kuya, which I go to, which is really great.
You're great sauna, it's called. Welcome the salt baths are great to the flotation tanks.
So they do the NAD infusions and they'll do it with all front. So, I'm there with James new tonic guy, my house, my exact. And she says, you want the thing to stop you feeling. So 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 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 lower that Rogan does it in like 30 minutes. I
think it just fastest the
faster you go in, you put it in the faster, you infuse, the more painful it is, and if you don't take the zoltron it's called what? If something like that.
The 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, the rationale there is that unlike nrnr and a men, which need to be converted, which need to be converted, scuse me to NAD the direct infusion of NAD there by some lingual X Electro phoretic 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.
Pensive, it's not it's a, you know, a couple hundred bucks or more idiots. Yeah, I haven't been doing any tea infusions consistently, you know, these days, I'm back to real Basics. I'ma still
do, I'm the basics. I will give you my review on what I'm doing at the moment but right now, PPC 157, thymosin Alpha, you injured, thymosin beta. What's the rationale? I'm doing this mold detox. Very aggressive. Moldy toxo mold detox. Yeah, I've heard
it's like that people who are like,
Number of people that I know from Austin
claim to ticularly a bad thing in awe since I haven't spoken about this a
damp damp nights
hot fries yeah I haven't spoken about this on the show yet what kind of tracking everything and I'll bring it up at some point but that cerebral Ison motsi. So I've got a peptides is a very important part. I'm also doing ozone therapy. Ever tried that. No, so half a pint of blood is taken out if you put into a bag with an
Excellent. And then a antimicrobial gas is pushed into the bag. So it almost looks like it's carbonating your blood. It's and then looking sci-fi. This is I've got everything. I'm doing 25 gram IV and
you don't even live in Los
Angeles. No no. But this place is Alive and Well in Austin is phenomenal for this glutathione IV, phosphatidylcholine red light therapy, lymph, massage, everything to try and fix. I've got the my brain for your mom. You look healthy. Thank you. I'm very sure. I don't I
Don't feel it, but it's it's working. A long one thing that I did want to loop back to the you mentioned earlier on your teaching, an undergraduate course.
How, how is that? Not going to be the most, oversubscribed thank yous out of the, I mean, like people go to see, you do talks in Australia. How are you able to organize a corset University is surely, that's just going to be everybody in their sister is going to come
along. Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens. The, you know, I've taught consistently I've never taken a sabbatical 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, you know, at Stanford, we have the option to teach undergraduate courses, and I spoke to my chair, my new chair.
I mean three different departments now but the chair I'm currently under and we decided I would teach a 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, have taught lectures that big before when I was
got a theaters of that
size. Oh yeah yeah there are a you know, they're not really a theater 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 meeting before, I got tenure was at UC San Diego and I taught a course that called neural circuits in health and disease. Evening course, start as 50 students in very quickly, grew to 400 students. Some familiar with this, kind of format, we read papers, we evaluate papers, we have guest lecturers, I'm also getting some help from the students.
This is going to say the cta's. You gonna have for
probably going to need somewhere between six and eight Tas.
And what's interesting is that the
fucking pumpkin. It's like SEAL Team Six.
Yeah. And the Tas are amazing. I mean, that they handle so much of the work related to kind of the mechanics, but obviously, as an instructor, you need to coordinate that and when I directed, the neuroanatomy course, I had tears in their, 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
I reached out to some of the students who are helping me devise the curriculum, which is gonna 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
fun, all 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 turn 18. My first month in school because we're on the quarter system, as is Stanford,
So they're gonna be somewhere between 18 and 22. It's gonna 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'm
gonna say it's like a fucking capacity problem. People going to be sneaking and you're gonna 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 and, you know, but we're not going to announce the location of the course, like each day or anything. So yeah. Wow, but yeah, it's a lot of fun. And people often want to know like, you know, can I come to Stanford and see your your space and this and, you know, unfortunately, that can't happen.
I, um, I heard a rumor
but these are going to be filmed. I should say that, that very likely. Stanford media is going to put these out there separate from the
Pod coin. If they ever wanted to get some free plays on YouTube, that's a pretty high.
Uh, Bob sapolsky is lectures for at Stanford or some of the most popular
number of times. 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? Research showed is that challenging to navigate those two things.
Yeah, so keep in mind in it just to give people an orientation of how
How this went you know in 2019 I started posting Clips to Instagram just cuz in 2020 I started going on podcast. I think I went on close to 30 podcasts in 2020 including Rogan Rich Rolex Friedman's podcast, Whitney Cummings podcast and then we launched the podcast that you remember a podcast in January 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. I had 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
Doing more and more public facing work, the huberman lab as a research, lab still exist. But we do human clinical trials and we publish 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 Etc. 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 see 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. So, there's a long-standing 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,
Clinicians. So, Gone are the days we now only recently. So these might what year you might read, but gone are the days now where you can walk into my laboratory and see mice, that Express green, fluorescent protein in glow, that was not long ago where that was true or we had brainbow mice that glow, 12 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 dr. Eddie Chang at UCSF recording from the
Peninsula 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-minute, what we call Essentials 30-minute 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 day.
Because I am going on podcast and still very much involved in science philanthropy through sicom 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'm 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 has been very important as an example but also a mentor. I've never said this out loud was from an early stage, the dr. 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 Etc. 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 you know one of my missions and this wasn't discussed much publicly but it should have been as in you know, the during the Obama Administration, there was the brain initiative and Infused over a hundred million dollars in to bring research during the Trump Administration that followed
And 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 percent 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 Etc. So a big part of my effort these days is to raise awareness and money from donors but also
From sicom my company, the parent company the hlp to bring money to researchers so they can do that work. And you know 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 a 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 join us time. Glasses laboratory at Columbia University School of Medicine.
Ian 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 in that. We're going to be continued happy to continue to fund and it's been marvelous to see these billionaire donors and hundreds of million are hundreds of million dollars in worth donors. Put their money into the pot. They've now for X star initial contributions to from side.
And it's continuing to grow and it's like it's just all that. Like, the ecosystem is perfect. You know
what can people go if they want to throw some money at the?
Yeah. So we funded in part through our premium channel which I do these amas. If people want to give to sicom philanthropy directly they can if people are of have money that they want to put toward science and they want to bypass all of that they can, they could do that by contacting.
Let me give the proper name. It would be Ian at sicom with two M's sicom media.com. You know, that 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. And, you know, so this is a 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 you know 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's pretty good as well. Switzerland as well, there are other countries but you know the more money that goes into research the the faster cures are
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. I've been thinking
About this sort of a little bit of a juxtaposition that I see happening with you maybe recently or maybe it's always been there. But bubbling 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 in its there's no language for gut 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
Native with the intuitive. Yeah, yeah, I can feel ideas in my body and it's like I 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 a music, write about music for a skateboarding magazine that led and led to
Set of ideas that eventually led to this that it is a podcast philanthropy it 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 the, in our somatic, awareness in our body are thinking, obviously can be very structured and and I indeed try and train up both. Here's the exercise that I think is very useful.
Useful. And it's going to seem really squishy and new agey, but it was given to me by the Great Martha back. Whose triple disagreed 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 imagine something terrible. Something really terrible
Will and You observe and feel how your body responds to that the feeling of contraction that precise that precedes the movement of your limbs or covering up. Then you relax it a bit. You shake that off and maybe in a different time, maybe a few minutes later so you do that several times. Maybe for 5-10 minutes, set a timer then you do the opposite, you start imagining things that are absolutely the word that comes to mind is as very Martha Beck. Ian 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 response 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 of your nervous system to detect. Yes. Versus know, you know, so many of the circuits of the brain work in a, yum yuck met, kind of fashion.
Either want to move towards things, yum away from things, what we call a version yuck or met 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 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 10 minutes and you just no limits. You just go.
Perfect Day. What what is your perfect and you just allow that to come up? What is the bed you wake up in? Where you look around the room, what's their allowing surprise and unanticipated? Things to enter the room, you know. Maybe you wake up alone may be with one person. Maybe with two people, maybe you have a dog, maybe have a cat maybe of a fish but you let some of that geyser up from your unconscious mind the, 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 what's inside you in the directions that are really right for you. Okay, there's there's no limits on this. Now, what you're watching for in these different exercises is again how your nervous system responds before the action that you would take. So, you're with your withholding action. So, you're not going. Oh, that feels.
Is terrible and you're not going. Oh, that feels great. You're 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 great. Don't be so emotional. And I realized I was like, this is very energy-draining to me and I got off the phone.
And other things moving toward, I think that intuition in science. My dad talks a lot about this when we talk talked, Einstein talked a lot about this not to put us in the same bin at all. But, you know, there was once there's a story about, I know, because my dad talks about him all the time, where someone gave them 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 like his, you know, you could sense like where things were, but you
Need to develop a set. 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 1, 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. Okay, it can't detect such subtle differences in Luminosity but it is
Is Italy good at deciphering boundaries and color. In fact, it's the system that allows for tricone 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
In 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 in read his book. What you realize is that Rick is somebody who he's like a sensor for music when he talks about his
He's able and he has this incredible ability to get really let things waft over him and experience them and go. Yes, more of that, and less of that, he's like a, 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 boundary. 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 Slayer, right? You know, Adele and on and on he's able to 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 whines, how you pronounce, so many are somewhat, he's a milli, A Milli, a the sommelier, or the where the chef, where the food?
Taster, or the neurosurgeon, they know the precise movements, they know the chemistry in the ingredients, that's part of their training. But ultimately, it's the Gestalt, it's the whole picture that's taken in you sipped the wine, right? You have to understand how the cut that you make in a neural circuit leads to changes across 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
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 that's really unique. And I think that, you know, the basic training of anything is a 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
Added in all that knowledge just it comes forward. And in what look like very simple blocks but those simple blocks are built on incredible depth of knowledge and understanding. And for myself, he has spent a lifetime exploring biology in the nervous system. That's where my depth of expertise that 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 have to listen to four episodes at four hours long. So 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 Sandra Founders podcast.
And Cress.
They're the ones that are going to be next next level in a year and I'm not saying I I have a crystal ball but boom, you guys are killing it and I know, you know that you're pointed at the Sun and you're just going to continue along this trajectory. It's like it's a felt thing because I can tell by the number of different topics, the number of different venues that 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 like the details of like, you know, what's in your
G drink down to, like, the mg of this. 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 students 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 list. That's what we did. We gave out wristbands in the rain, in the cold asking people where we going tonight, darling. And after 6 months, then you get to stand on the front door. And then, after you've done in the front door, you get to work out how the tools 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
Or as the producer is the whatever but they can hold the conversation. The guy was there when it was at a lower resolution and now you're beyond my skill. So if I can hold the conversation at all the way up and there's a kind of respect 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 disadvantage of many disadvantages to kind of being obsessive and and very attentive and very Vigilant. But there's a ton of advantages as well
as disadvantages. I mean, my friend, Eddie Chang is the chair of neurosurgery at you.
CSF. 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 A2 to A7. That was a, I, 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 a G18 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 a G1 + 8 sleep, they are constantly
improving the product they're making, you know, it's very interesting to see how that 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.
Is 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, well this stuff really works. Turns out 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 benefit from no requirement to take it. I'm not selling it anyway but when it comes to things that are blends of things, where it comes to a sleep technology,
G. So like AG 1 like H 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, amazing, the sleep tracker on a Sleek is exquisitely. Good, it's laboratory-grade, sleep, tracking the, the
Ponies that succeed over time. A like apple. I mean, I'm from the Bay Area after all like, you know, like apple or you know, we see YouTube. I mean, they're constantly updating things constantly updating the algorithms, Instagram constantly meta. You know, an ax is evolving and so I am an absolute fanatic about anything. That mimics the scientific process which 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 believed in their value now and this is I think something that's often lost in the discussion about. 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. Write-ins reasonable about you know what you
Do in a given day and that are constantly trying to do better. These are the things and products and people that evolved hell that evolved science that evolved creative activities. And you know, I can even look to wreck as somebody or my friend. Tim Armstrong, Tim writes a song every day. He had platinum records back when he doesn't need to do that but he people who are just obsessive about their craft and Lead, balanced lives and are healthy. These are the people that we need to look to Joe to I mean for three or four three,
Our podcast per week, okay, plus u FC. Plus stand up, plus, he has a family plus, he's a healthy guy and you 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 Copeland's. Yes, he does his China, all it like I know you do I know Rick does, I know I do, I know Whitney does I know sendra does. I know
You know there are many other examples and so forgive me for not named Jay Shetty works extremely 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 got to put in you had a, you know, chop wood carry water
think everybody needs to pay the entry price at some point. You
know? Wood carry water. Everyone's
got to 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 of you ever been back stage yet. Okay, I think it says It's a Long Way to the Top If you're going to do something. But I think
to run their AC/DC song, that's all,
maybe it probably. I mean it's on. It's on brand with everything else. Andrew human ladies and gentlemen, dudes. I really appreciate you. I love getting to catch up. It's it's so interesting sort of seeing where all of this is going, what you're doing with Andy gal pins, show what you're doing with Matt Walker, you doing with.
The buck I my prediction is that you can do something. I know that your mom does kids
books. There's typically a good. Yeah good intuition. There's definitely some kids content and ideas. I've had a long-standing interest in animation and puppets and that's about all I can say about that right now, some because it's poorly formed, I'm not I'm not being cryptic, it's still needs iterating but I've had Outreach some from some amazing puppeteers and some amazing animators and
I'm super excited. I also just want to say, you know, 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 have a little bit. I've said this before, you know, how in an Indiana Jones movie, The Big sort of ceiling is coming down and it's, he's going to get crushed underneath it. Be sprinting Springs printing. Sort of does a little slide underneath my feet.
And grabs his hat. Yeah. And then get the Hat. I feel like me and that hat. A kind of just sneaking in at the last thing and then now 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 going to learn something from you. I'm going to 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 just 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 he can't you're just gonna have to keep podcasting for us. So thank you so much for doing it. I appreciate you man.
