#393 – Andrew Huberman: Relationships, Drama, Betrayal, Sex, and Love

The following is a conversation with my dear friend Andrew Heberman, his fourth time on this podcast. It's my birthday, so this is a special birthday episode of sorts. Andrew flew down to Austin just to wish me a happy birthday, and we decided to do a podcast last second. We literally talked for hours beforehand, and a long time after late into the night, he's one of my favorite human beings, brilliant scientists, incredible teacher, and a loyal friend.

I'm grateful for Andrew, I'm grateful for good friends, for all the support and love I've gotten over the past few years. I'm truly grateful for this life. For the years, the days, the minutes, the seconds I've gotten to live on this beautiful earth of ours. I really don't want to leave just yet. I think I'd really like to stick around. I love you all. Now, a quick few second mentionary sponsor, check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast.

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This shows brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I used to track biological data, as data that comes from my own body. It's really interesting to consider all the different signals that we send from our body, conscious to subconscious. There's something I talked to Andrew in this podcast about.

Of all the thoughts and ideas and memories, real, if advocated or morphed or modified, or recycled, that lurks somewhere in the unconscious, that one brought to the surface can bring a kind of relief or reinvigoration of the way we see the world around us. So, so many signals, in those little neurons firing together, to construct the experience of the reality we see around us. And that's not just the brain.

That is deeply rooted in all the different systems, including the immune system, the billions and billions and billions of organisms, half of which ourselves, the other half of bacteria, all working together to create this experience that we humans call life. And it's so interesting that by collecting that data, by listening to the signal that this entire gigantic complex biological system creates, we can start to try to figure out how to improve the functioning of it.

At first, top down, in a centralized manner, sort of listening to the music that the orchestra creates, and trying to maybe rewrite the music or adjust the music or edit the music. It's interesting, this whole journey we're on. And I'm glad there's people that turn that kind of journey into a company and try to help people by, you know, making the data from their body accessible and giving advice based on that data, making that advice accessible.

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It's a refuge from the fire that burns outside the castle. And that refuge for me is a biological one and a psychological one. It's kind of incredible, in terms of just energy, how much better you can feel after a nap, and it's also incredible, psychologically, in terms of the positivity, the joy you can rediscover after a good nap. Everything you can do, you should put behind great sleep and great naps, because it's just to magical things to your mind.

Books like Man Search for Meaning reveal that it is indeed in the mind, where the interpretation of the world's catastrophes lie. So you have to equip your mind with the best tools in order to interpret those catastrophes, those tragedies, those hardships correctly. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to athleap.com slash flex. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, and it's AG1 Drink. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

I've been drinking it every single day, twice a day, for as long as I remember when I'm traveling, when I'm home, it just makes me feel like I have my life together. Even when it feels like it is crumbling on the sides, or maybe shaken at the core, due to whatever things happen in life, I make it such a damn interesting roller coaster. Anyway, this is the one thing you can kind of control. It's the nutrition you put in your body.

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I love it when podcasts have merch, especially when they kind of celebrate the specific podcasts. And I can connect with people on the street by saying, I read that too, or I listen to that too. I love wearing Metallica shirts, but that's very recent. I can connect with people that, you know, have a similar love for Metallica as I do. And there's just endless number of band shirts that I love wearing because just for that, you can connect with people. They recognize it.

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That's NetSuite.com slash Lex for your own KPI checklist. This is the Lex treatment podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huber. Try new run a little bit more. He losing weight? I'm not trying to lose weight, but I always do the same fitness routine. After like 30 years, basically, lift three days a week, run three days a week. But one of the runs is the long run, one of them is medium, one of them is a sprint type thing.

So, what I've decided to do this year was just extend the duration of the long run. And I like being mobile. I never want to be so heavy that I can't move. Like, I want to be able to go out and run 10 miles if I have to. Sometimes I do, and I want to be able to sprint if I have to. Sometimes I do. And lifting in objects is feels good. It feels good to train like a lazy bear and just lift heavy objects. But I've also started training with lighter weights and higher repetitions.

And for three month cycles, and it gives your joints a rest. And yes, I probably, you know, I think it also is interesting to see how training differently changes your cognition. It's probably hormone related, you know, hormones downstream of training heavy versus hormones downstream of training a little bit lighter. I think my cognition is better when I'm doing more cardio and when the repetition ranges are a little bit higher, which is not to say that people who lift heavy are dumb.

But there is a, because there's real value in lifting heavy. There's a lot of angry people listening to this right now. No, no, no, but lifting heavy and then taking three to five minutes rest is far and away a different challenge than running hard for 90 minutes. That's a tough thing. Just like getting in an ice bath, people say, oh, well, how is that any different than working out? Well, there are a lot of differences.

But one of them is that it's very acute stress within one second, you're stressed. So I think subjecting the body to a bunch of different types of stressors in space and time is really valuable. So yeah, I've been playing with the variables in a pre-systematic way. I like long and slow for, like you said, the impact that has on my cognition.

The wordlessness of it, the way it puts you in a, the way it seems to clean out the clutter, you know, it can take away that hyper focus and put you more in a relaxed focus, for sure. Well, for me, it brings the clutter to the surface at first, like all these thoughts come in there and then they dissipate. I've been, because I got knee bar pretty hard. That's when somebody tries to break your knee. I was just, what's a knee bar? They try and break your knee. Oh, yeah. So you tap.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, hyper extend the knee, that direction. I got knee bar pretty hard. So in ways I don't understand, it kind of hurts to run. I don't understand what's happening behind there. I need to investigate this. It basically, this, the hamstring flex, like curling your leg hurts a little bit. And that results in this weird doll, but sometimes extremely sharp pain in the back of the knee. So I'm, I'm working, I'm working through this anyway. But walking doesn't hurt.

So I've been playing around with walking recently, like for two hours and thinking. I love it. Because I know a lot of like smart people throughout history have walked and thought. And you have to like, you know, play with things that have worked for others, not just to exercise, but to like integrate this very light kind of prolonged exercise into a productive life. So they do all their thinking while they walk. It's like a meditative type of walking. And it's really interesting.

It really works. Yeah. The, um, the practice I've been doing a lot more of lately is I walk while reading a book. And the yard, I'll just pace back and forth or walk in a circle. Audio book, are you talking about? No, hard, hard copy. Where are you just holding? I hold in the book and I'm walking in and reading. Yeah. And then I'm underlining.

I have this whole system like underlining stars, exclamation points, goes back to University of what things I'll go back to, um, which things I export to notes and that kind of thing. But from the beginning, when I opened my lab at that time in San Diego before I moved back to Stanford, um, I would have meetings with my students or postdocs by just walking in the field behind the lab. Um, you know, and I'd bring my Bulldog Costello, Bulldog Master at the time. And he was a slow walker.

So these were slow walks. But I can think much more clearly that way. There's a Nobel Prize winning, uh, Professor at Columbia University School of Medicine, Richard Axel, won the Nobel Prize, co won Nobel Prize with Linda Buck for the Discovery the Molecular Basis of Oph Action. And, um, he walks and voice dictates his papers. And now with Rev or these other, maybe there are better ones than Rev where you can convert audio files into text very quickly and then edit from there.

So I will often voice dictate, um, first drafts and things like that. And um, I totally agree on the long runs, the walks, the integrating that with cognitive work harder to do with sprints. Um, and then the gym, you know, are you, you wait train? You just seem naturally strong and like thicker jointed. It's true. Yeah. It's true. I, I, we did the one very beginner because I'm a very beginner of jujitsu class together.

Now, yeah, as I mentioned then, uh, what if people missed it, uh, Lex is freakishly strong. I think I was born genetically to hug people like Costello. Yeah, exactly. You guys have a certain similarity.

Yeah. He had wrists like, you know, it's like you and Jaco and Costello have these like wrists and elbows that are super thick, you know, and then you look around, you see tremendous variation, you know, some people have like the, the, um, wrist, uh, width of a, of a whip it or Woody Allen and then other people like you or Jaco or, you know, there's this one, uh, Jaco video or thing on GQ or something. Have you seen the comments on Jaco? These are the best.

No. The comments, I love the comments on YouTube because occasionally they're funny. Um, the best is, uh, when Jaco was born, the doctor looked at his, uh, parents and said, it's a man. It's like Chuck Norris type comments. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Those are great. Um, that's what I missed about Rogan being on YouTube with the full length episodes. Oh, that comment. So this is technically a birthday podcast. Uh, what do you love most about getting older?

Hmm. It's like a, it, the confirmation that comes from getting more and more data that which basically says, yeah, the first time you thought that thing, it was actually right because the second third and fourth and fifth time, um, it turned out the exact same way. In other words, um, there have been a few times in my life where I did not feel easy about something. I did, I felt a signal from my body. This is not good. Um, and I didn't trust it early on, but I knew it was there.

And then two or three bad experiences later, I'm able to say, ah, every single time there was a signal from the body informing my mind, this is not good. Now, the reverse has also been true that there've been a number of instances in which I feel sort of immediate delight and there's this kind of almost astonishingly simple experience of feeling comfortable with somebody or at peace with something or delighted at an experience.

And it turns out all literally all of those experiences and people turned out to be experiences and people that are still in my life and that I, um, still delight in every day. In other words, what's great about getting older is that you stop questioning, um, the signals that come from the, I think, deeper recesses of your nervous system to say, hey, this is not good. Or hey, this is great. More of this. Whereas I think in my teens, my 20s, my 30s, I'm 40, almost 48. I'll be 48 next month.

Um, I, I didn't trust. I didn't listen. I actually put a lot of work into overriding those signals and learning to fight through them, thinking that somehow that was making me tougher or somehow that was making me, um, smarter. When in fact, in the end, those people that you meet that are, you know, difficult to or, you know, their other names were it, you know, it's like, you're like, in the end, you're like, you're in the person's piece of shit, you know, or, um, this person is amazing.

And they're really wonderful. And I felt that from go. So you've learned to trust your gut versus like the, the influences of other people's opinions. Um, I've learned to trust my gut versus the, uh, the four brain over analysis, overriding the gut. Other people often in my life have had great optics, right? I've, I've benefited tremendously from an early age of being in a large community.

I've was been mostly guys by some close female friends and always have as well who will tell me that that's a bad decision or this person not so good or be careful or they're great or that's great. So oftentimes my community and the people around me have been more aligned with, uh, the correct choice than not really. Yes. Really when you were younger like, well, I was parents and so on. I don't recall ever really listening to my parents.

I, you know, I grew up in it, you know, we don't have to go back to my childhood thing, but my sense was that. I'm not injured. Thank you. I was mentally in a, in a, in a psilocybin journey. Um, my first, my first high dose psilocybin journey, which was. Um, welcome back. Done with the clinician. Thank you very much. Thank you. I was worried there for a second at one point. Am I not coming back? But in any event, um, yeah, I grew up with some wild kids.

You know, I would say about a third of my friends from childhood are dead or in jail, um, about a third have gone on to do tremendously impressive things. companies, excellent athletes, academics, scientists, and clinicians, and then about a third or living their lives as kind of more typical. I just mean that they are happy family people with jobs that they mainly serve the function to make money. They're not sort of career

into their career for a career sake. But so some of my friends early on gave me some bad ideas. Most of the time my bad ideas came from overriding the signals that I knew that my body and I would say my body N-brain were telling me to obey. And now I say body N-brain is that there's this brain region, the insula, which does many things, but it represents our sense of internal sensation and interception. And I was talking to Paul Conti about this, you know, as you know,

I respect tremendously. I think he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I think for different reasons, he and Mark and Dresden are some of the smartest people I've ever met. But Paul's level of insight into the human psyche is absolutely astounding. And he says the opposite of what most people say about the brain, which is most people say, oh, the supercomputer of the brain is the forbrain. It's like a monkey brain with an extra real estate

put on there. And the forbrain is what makes us human. And gives us our superpowers. Paul has said, and he's done a whole series on mental health that's coming out from our podcast in September. So this is not an attempt to plug that, but he'll elaborate on my mind to say. Wait, you're doing a thing with Paul. We already did. Yeah. So Paul, nice. Yeah. So Paul

Conti shot of we did he and I sat down needed four episode series on mental health. There's not mental illness, mental health about how to explore one's own subconscious, explore the self, build, and cultivate the generative drive. You'll learn more about what that is from him. He's far more eloquent and clear than I am. And he provides essentially a set of steps to explore the self that does not require that you work with a therapist. This is self exploration that that is rooted in

psychiatry. It's rooted in neuroscience. And I don't think this information exists anywhere else. I'm not aware that exists anywhere else. And he essentially distills it all down to one eight and a half by 11 sheep, which we provide for people. And he says there, I don't want to give too much away because I would detract from what he does so beautifully. But if I tried and I went to accomplish it anyway, but he said and I believe that the subconscious is the super computer

of the brain. All the stuff working underneath our conscious awareness that's driving our feelings and what we think are the decisions that we've thought through so carefully. And that only by exploring the subconscious and understanding it a little bit, can we actually improve ourselves over time. And I agree. I think that so that the mistake is to think that thinking can override

it all. It's a certain style of introspection and thinking that allows us to read the signals from our body, read the signals from our brain, integrate the knowledge that we're collecting about ourselves and to use all that in ways that are really adaptive and generative for us. What do you think is there in that subconscious? What do you think of the younging as shadow?

What's there? You know, there's this idea, as you're familiar with too, I'm sure that this youngy and idea that we all have all things inside of us, that all of us have the capacity to be evil, to be good, etc., but that some people express one or the other to greater extent. But he also mentioned that there's a unique category of people, maybe two to five percent of people, that don't just have all things inside of them, but they actually spend a lot of time exploring

a lot of those things. The darker recesses, the shadows, their own shadows. You know, I'm somebody who's drawn to goodness and to light and to joy and all those things like anybody else, but I think maybe it's part of how I grew up, maybe it was the crowd I was with, maybe, but then again, even when I started spending more time with academics and scientists,

I mean, you see shadows in other ways, right? You see pure ambition with no passion. I recall a colleague in San Diego who it was very clear to me, did not actually care about understanding the brain, but understanding the brain was just his avenue to exercise ambition. And if you gave him something else to work on, he'd work on that. In fact, he didn't. He left and he worked on something else. And I realized he has no passion for understanding the brain like all the,

I assumed all scientists do. Certainly why I went into it, but some people's just raw ambition. It's about winning. It doesn't even matter what they win. To which to me is crazy, but I think that's a shadow that some people explore, not when I have explored. I think the shadow parts of us are very important to come and understand and look, better to understand them and know that they're there and work with them than to not acknowledge their presence and have them surface

in the form of addictions or behaviors that damage us and other people. So one of the processes for achieving mental health is to bring those things to the surface. So fish, just subconscious mind. Yes. And he, Paul describes 10 cupboards that one can look into for exploring the self. There's the structure of self and the function of self. Again, this all be spelled out in the series in a lot of detail also in terms of its relational aspect between people, how to pick good partners

and good relationship. He gets really into this from a very different perspective. Yeah, fascinating stuff. I was just sitting there just, I will say this, that four episode series with Paul is at least to date the most important work I've ever been involved in in all of my career because it's very clear that we are not taught how to explore our subconscious.

Yeah. And that very few people actually understand how to do that. Even most psychiatrists, as if he mentioned something about psychiatrists, you know, if you're a cardiothoracic surgeon or something like that and 50% of your patients die, you're considered a bad cardiothoracic surgeon. But with no disrespect to psychiatrists, there are some excellent psychiatrists out there.

There are also a lot of terrible psychiatrists out there because unless all of those, all of their patients commit suicide or half commit suicide, they can treat for a long time without it becoming visible that they're not so good at their craft. Now, he's superb at his craft. And I think he would say that, yes, exploring some shadows, but also just understanding the self, like what, you know, really understanding like who am I? And what's important? What are my

ambitions? What are my strivings? Again, I'm lifting from some of the things that he'll describe exactly how to do this. People do not spend enough time addressing those questions. And as a consequence, they discover what resides in their subconscious through the sometimes bad, hopefully all also good, but manifestations of their actions. We are driven by this huge 90% of our real estate that is not visible to our conscious awareness. And we need to understand

that, you know, I've talked about this before. I've done therapy twice a week since I was a kid. I had to as a condition of being let back in school. I continued, I found a way to either through insurance or even when I didn't have insurance, I took an extra job writing for Thrash or magazine when I was a postdoc. So I could pay for therapy at a discount because I didn't make much money as a postdoc. I mean, I think for me, it's as important as going to the gym.

And people think it's just, you know, ruminating on problems or getting, no, no, no, if you work with somebody really good, they're forcing you to ask questions about who you really are, what you really want. It's not just about support, but there should be support, there should be rapport, but then it's also there should be insight, right? Most people who get therapy,

they're getting support, there's rapport, but insight is not easy to arrive at. And a really good psychologist or psychiatrist can help you arrive at deep insights that transform your entire life. Well, sometimes when I look inside and I do this often, you know, exploring who you truly are, you come to this question, do I accept, once you see parts, do I accept this or do I fix this? Is this a, is this who you are fundamentally? And it will always be this way or is this a problem

to be fixed? Like, for example, one of the things, especially recently, but in general, over time, I've discovered about myself, probably has roots in childhood, probably has roots in a lot of things, is that deeply value loyalty, maybe more than the average person. And so when there's distal loyalty, it can be painful to me. And so this is who I am. And so do I have to relax a bit,

do I have to fix this part or is this who you are? And there's a million, that's one like little, I think loyalty is a good thing to cling to, provided that when loyalty is broken, that it doesn't disrupt too many other areas of your life. But it depends also on who's disrupting that loyalty. If it's a coworker versus a romantic partner versus your exclusive romantic partner, depending on the structure of your romantic partner life, you know, I mean, I have always experienced

extreme joy and feelings of safety and trust in my friendships. Again, mostly male friendships, what female friendships do, which is only say that they were mostly male friendships. The female friendships have also been very loyal. So getting backstabbed is not something I'm familiar with. And yeah, love being crude up. You know, for sure. And I'm with you. And you know, you and I are very much have the same values on this. But you know, there's that's one little thing.

And then there's many other things like extremely self-critical. And you look at my, you know, I look at myself as I'm regularly very self-critical. There's a self-critical engine in my brain. And I talk to actually Paul about this. I think on the podcast, quite a bit. And he's saying, this is a really bad thing. Like you need to fix this. You need to be able to be regularly very positive about yourself. And I kept disagreeing with him. No, this is like who I am.

Like you, and it seems to work, don't mess with the thing that seems to be working. It's fine. Like I oscillate between being really grateful and really self-critical. But then you have to like figure out what is it? Maybe there's a deeper root thing. There's an, maybe there's an insecurity in there somewhere. That's to do with childhood. And then you're trying to prove something to somebody from your childhood, this kind of thing. Well, a couple of things that I think are

hopefully valuable for people here. One is, one way to destroy your life is to spend time trying to control your or somebody else's past. So much of our destructive behavior and thinking comes from wanting something that we saw or did or heard to not be true. Rather than really working with that and getting close to what it really was. And sometimes those things are even traumatic. And we need to really get close to them and for them to move through us. And that, you know, there are a bunch

of different ways to do that with support from others. And hopefully, but sometimes on our own as well, I don't think we can rewire our deep preferences and what we find despicable or joyful. I do think that it's really a question of what allows us peace. Like, can you be at peace with the fact that you're very self-critical and enjoy that, get some distance from it, have a sense of humor about it? Or is it driving you in a way that's keeping you awake at night and forcing you

back to the table to do work in a way that feels self-flagulating and doesn't feel good? Can you get that humility and awareness of how you're of your ones flaws? And I think that that can create, you know, this word space sounds very new agey. Like, get space from it. It's that, you know,

you can have a sense of humor about how how neurotic we can all be. I mean, you know, neurotic isn't actually a bad term in the classic sense of the psychologists and psychiatrists, the Freudians, so that, you know, the best case is to be neurotic, to actually see one's own issues and work with them, whereas psychotic is the other way to be, which is obviously not good. So I think the question whether or not to work on something or to just accept it as part of ourselves, I think really depends

if we feel like it's holding us back or not. And I think you're asking perhaps the most profound question about being a human, which is, you know, what do you do with your body? What do you do with your mind? I mean, if you, it's also a question we started off talking about fitness a little bit, which is for whatever reason. You know, do I need to run an ultra-marathon? I don't feel like I need to. David Goggins does and it does a whole lot more than that. So that for him, that's important.

For me, it's not important to do that. I don't think he does it just so he can run the outros. There's clearly something else in there for him and guys like Cam Haines and that tremendous respect for what they do and how they do it. Just one need to make their body more muscular, stronger, more endurance, more flexibility. Do you need to read harder books?

You need to, I think doing hard things feels good. I think it, I know it feels good. I know that the worst I feel, the worst way to feel is when I'm procrastinating and I don't do something and then whenever I do something and I complete it and I break through that point where it was hard and then I'm doing it. At the end, I actually feel like I was infused with some sort of superchemical and who knows if it's probably a cocktail of endogenously made chemicals. But I think it is good to

do hard things. But you have to be careful not to destroy your body, your mind, in the process. And I think it's about whether or not you can achieve peace. Can you sleep well at night? Stress isn't bad if you can sleep well at night. You can be stressed all day. Go, go, go, go, go, and it'll optimize your focus. But can you fall asleep and stay deep? Please sleep at night. Being in a hard relationship, something like Bill Zay, you know, that's not good. Other people

like it. Can you be at peace in that? And I think we all have different RPM. We all kind of idolate different RPM. And some people are big mellow costellos and others are kind of like, you know, need more friction in order to feel at peace. But I think ultimately what we want is to feel at peace. You have been through some really low points over the past couple of years. And I think the reason could be boiled down to the fact that I haven't been able to find a place

of peace, a place or people are moments that give deep inner peace. Yeah, I, you know, I think you put it really beautifully. It's, you have to figure out, given who you are, the various characteristics of your mind, all the things, all the contents of the cupboards had to, had to get space from it. And ultimately one good representation of that is to be able to laugh at all of it. Whatever, whatever is going on inside your mind to be able to step back

and just kind of chuckle at the, at the beauty and the absurdity of the whole thing. Yeah, and keep going. There's this beautiful, as I mentioned, seems like every podcast lately. I'm a huge rancid fan mostly because I just think Tim Armstrong's writing is pure poetry. And whether or not you like the music or not, you know, and he's written a music for a lot of other people too. He's not, doesn't advertise that much because he's humble. But I, and that by the way,

I went to a show of theirs like 20 years ago. Oh, yeah. I'm going to see them in Boston in September 18th. I'm literally flying there for, for, or I'll take the train up from New York. I'm going to meet a friend of mine named Jim Thiebo, who's a guy who owns a lot of companies, a skateboard industry. We're meaning they're like a couple little kids to go see them play. Amazing, amazing people, amazing music, very intense, very intense. And but embodies all the different emotions. That's

why I love it, right? They have some love songs, they have some hate songs, they have some, and, but you know, there's going back to what you said. I think there's a, there's a song, the first song on the indestructible album. I think it there's a, it's sort of he's just talking about like shock and disbelief of discovering things about people that were close to you. And you know, it's,

I won't, I won't sing it, but you know, at North, I wouldn't dare. But, um, but there's this one lyric where that's really stuck in my mind for ever since that album came out in 2003, which is, um, you know, that nothing's what it seems. So I just sit here laughing. I'm going to keep going on. I can't get distracted. There is this piece of like you got to learn how to push out the

disturbing stuff sometimes and go forward. And I mean, I remember hearing that lyric and then writing it down and, you know, that was a time where my undergraduate advisor who was like a a mentor and a father to me, you know, blew his head off in the bathtub, like three weeks before. And then my graduate advisor who I was working for at that time, who I loved and adored, was really like a mother to me. I knew her when she was pregnant with her two kids, died at 50 rest cancer.

And then my postdoc advisor, you know, first day of work at Stanford as a faculty member sitting across the table like this from him out of heart attack right in front of me, died at Penn Creative Cancer at the end of 2017. And I remember just thinking like, you know, going back to that song layer over and over like and where people would, um, you know, I haven't had many betrayals in life. I've had a few, but just thinking like we're seeing something or learning something about

something, you just like you can't believe it. And I, I, I, I mentioned that that lyric off that first song, indestructible on that album because it's this, the, like, just the raw emotion of like, I can't believe this. What I just saw is so disturbing. But I have to just keep going forward. There are certain things that we really do need to push not just into our periphery, but often to the gutter and keep going. And that's a hard thing to learn how to do.

But if you're going to be functional in life, you have to. And actually just to, to get at this issue of, do I change or do I embrace this aspect of self about six months? It was April. Um, of this last year, I did some intense work around some things that were really challenging to me. And I did it alone and it may have involved some medicine. And I expected to get peace through this. I was like, I'm gonna let go of that. And I spent 11 hours just getting more and

more frustrated and angry about this thing that I was trying to resolve. And I was so unbelievably disappointed that I couldn't get that relief. And I was like, what is this? Like, this is not how this is supposed to work. I'm supposed to be feel peace. The clouds are supposed to lift. And so a week went by. And then another half week went by. And then someone who I, who's opinion I trust very much, I explained this to them because I was getting a little concern like, what's going on?

This is worse not better. And they said, this is very simple. You have a giant blind spot, which is your sense of justice, Andrew, and your sense of anger are linked like an iron rod. And you need to relax it. And as they said that, I felt the anger dissipate. And so there was something that I think is, it is true. I have a very strong sense of justice. And my sense of anger, then at least, was very strongly linked to it. So it's great to have a sense of justice.

Right? I hate to see people wrong. I absolutely do. And I'm human. I'm sure I've wrong people in my life. I know I have. They told me I've tried to apologize and reconcile where possible. It's still a lot of work to do. But where I see injustice, it draws in my sense of anger in a way that I think is just eating me up. And but it was only in hearing that link that I wasn't aware of before. It was

in my subconscious. Obviously, did I feel the relaxation? It wasn't there's no amount of plant medicine or MDMA or any kind of, you know, chemical you can take that's naturally just going to dissipate what's hard for oneself. It needs if one embraces that or if one chooses to do it through just talk therapy or journaling or friends or introspection or all of the above, there needs to be an awareness

of the things that we're just not aware of. So I think the answer to your question, do you embrace or do you fight these aspects of self is I think you get in your subconscious through good work with somebody skilled or sometimes that involves the tools I just mentioned in various combinations. And you figure it out. You figure out if it's serving you. Obviously, it was not bringing me peace. It was

undermining my my sense of justice was undermining my sense of peace. And so in understanding this link beat now, I would say that the in understanding this link between justice and anger now, I think it's a little bit more of like, you know, it's not like a twizzler stick bendy, but it's at least it's not like an iron rod like, you know, when I see somebody wrong, I mean, it used to just like puff like immediately, but you're able to step back now that that's like to me, the ultimate

place to reach is laughter. I just sit here laughing exactly. That's that's the lyric. I like, I can't believe it. So I just sit here laughing like can't get distracted just you just at some point. But the but the problem I think is just laughing at something like that gives you distance. But the question is, does do you stop engaging with it at that point? Like I experienced this, I mean, recently I got to see how sometimes I'll see something that's like, what? Like this is crazy. So

I just laugh. But then I continue to engage in it. And it's taking me off course. And so there is a place where, you know, I mean, I get realized this is probably a kid show too. So I want to keep it, you know, G rated, but at some point for certain things, it makes sense to go, fuck that. But also laugh at yourself for saying, fuck that. Yeah. And then move on. So the question is, are you get stuck? Or do you move on? Sure. Sure. But like, there's a lightness of being that comes

with laughter. I mean, I've gotten sure, I guess you know, I spent the day with Elon today. He just gave me this burnt hair. Do you know what this is? I have no idea. I'm sure there's actually, there should be a human lab episode on this. It's a colon that's burnt hair. And it's like supposedly really intense smell. And it is. You smell it. Please. It's not going to leave your nose. That's okay. Well, that's okay. I'll take a gentle, I'll whiff it as if I were a chemical and you sell

because I don't know if you can. So I'm reading an amazing book called In a Mense World by Ed Young. He won a Pulitzer for We Contained Multitudes or something like that. I think it's the title of the other book. And the first chapter is all about olfaction and the incredible power that olfaction has. That smells terrible. I don't even leave you. For those listening, it doesn't quite smell terrible. It's just intense and it stays with you. This to me represents like just laughing at the

absurdity of it all. So I have to ask you were rolling to get to. Yeah, we're training to get to. Yeah. So is that fight between Elon and Zuck actually going to happen? I think Elon is a huge believer of this idea of the most entertaining outcomes the most likely. And he almost like there is almost the sense that there's not a free will. And the universe has a kind of deterministic gravitational field pulling towards the most fun. And he's just the player in that game. So from

that perspective, I think it seems like something like that is inevitable. Like a little scrap in the parking lot of Facebook or something like that. Sorry, meta. Yeah, but it looks like they're training for real. And Zuck has competed. Right. So I think he is approaching it as a sport. Yeah. Elon is approaching it as a spectacle. And I mean, the way he talks about it is a huge fan of history. He talks about all the warriors that I thought throughout history. If he looks, he wants

to really do it at the Colosseum. And you know, the Colosseum is for 400 years. I was just so many, so much great writing about this. I think over 400,000 people have died in the Colosseum gladiators. So this is this historic place that sheds so much blood, so much fear, so much anticipation

of battle, all of this. So he loves this kind of spectacle. And also the meme of it, the hilarious absurdity of it, the two tech CEOs are battling it out on sand in a place where gladiators fought to the death and then bears and lions, eight prisoners as part of the execution process. Well, it's also going to be an instance where Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk has changed bodily fluids. They bleed. There's one thing about fighting, you know. I think it was in that book.

It's great book, Fighters Heart, where he talks about, you know, the story of the intimacy of sparring. I have, I only rolled you just with you once, but there was a period of time where I boxed and which I don't recommend. I got hit. I hit some guys and you definitely got hit back. I spar on Wednesday nights when I lived on Cindy Ayo. And you know, when you spar with somebody, even if they hurt you, especially if they hurt you, you know, you see that person afterwards and

there's an intimacy, right? It was in that book, Fighters Heart, where he explains, you know, you're exchanging bodily fluids with a stranger, right? And there's a, you're in your primitive mind. And so there's an intimacy there that persists. So you go together through a process of fear, anxiety, like, yeah, when they get you, you know, I mean, you watch somebody like catch somebody, if, you know, not so much in professional fighting, but if people are sparring, they catch you,

you acknowledge that they caught you, like you got me there. And on the flip side of that, so we trained. And then after that, we played Diablo 4. I don't know what that is. I don't play video games, sorry, but it's a video game. So it's like, it's a, you know, pretty intense combat in the video, you know, you're fighting like demons. Okay. Last video game played with Mike Tyson's bunch out. There you go. That's pretty good. I met him recently. He went on his podcast. You want,

you want, wait, it hasn't come out yet? Oh, it hasn't come out yet. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I asked Mike, it's kids are great. They came in there. They're super smart kids. Goodness gracious. They ask great questions. I asked Mike what he did with the piece of a van der Zier that he bit off. Do you remember? Yeah. He's like, get back to him. Here you go. Sorry about that. He sells edibles that are in the shape of ears a little bite out of it. Yeah. His life has been incredible. He's, and I met, yeah,

he, his family, he, you get the sense that they're really a great family. They're really, um, Mike Tyson. That's the heck of a journey right there of a man. Yeah. My now friend Tim Armstrong, like I said, Lee Zierman from Ransy, he put it best. He said, you know, that Mike Tyson's life is, you know, Shakespearean, and you know, down, up, down, up, and just that the arcs of his

life are just like sort of an only in America kind of tale too, right? So speaking of Shakespeare, I recently gotten to know Neri Oksman, who's this incredible scientist that works at the intersection of nature and engineering. And she reminded me of this Anna Ahmad of a line. This is this great Soviet poet that I really love from a over a century ago that each of our lives is such a experience and drama race to the thousand degree. So I have to ask, why do you think humans are attracted to

this kind of Shakespearean drama? Is there some aspect we've been talking about the subconscious mind that pulls us towards the drama, even though the place of mental health is peace? Yes, and yes, do you have some of that draw towards drama? Yeah. If you look at the empirical data. Yes, I mean, it, right, if I look at the empirical data, I mean, I think about who I

chose to work for as an undergraduate, right? I was at, you know, barely finished high school, finally get to college, barely, I think this is really embarrassing and then not something to aspire to, you know, I was thrown out of the dorms for fighting. I barely passed my classes, you know, the girlfriend and I split up. I mean, I was living in a squad, I got into a big fight, was getting in trouble with the law. Then she got my act together, go back to school, start working

for somebody. Who do I choose to work for? A guy who's an ex-navy guy who smokes cigarettes in the fume hood, drinks coffee and we're injecting rats with MDMA. And, you know, I was drawn to it, like the personality, his energy, but I also, he was a great, he was a great scientist, worked out

a lot on a thermal regulation in the brain and more. You know, go to graduate school, I'm working for somebody and decide that, yeah, doing, working in her laboratory wasn't quite right for me, so I'm literally sneaking into the laboratory next door and working for the, well, my next door because I liked the relationships that she had to a certain set of questions and she was a, kind of a quirky person. So, you know, so you drawn to drama, but drawn to, I like characters,

I like people that have texture. And I'm not drawn to raw ambition. I'm drawn to people that seem to have a real passion for what they do and a uniqueness to them that I, you know, you can kind of, not kind of, I'll just say how it is, I can feel their heart for what they do and I'm drawn to that, like, and that can be good. The same reason I went to work for Ben Barris as a postdoc, it wasn't because he was the first transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences, that was just a

feature of who he was. I love how he loved Gleea. He would talk about these cells, like they were the most enchanting things that he'd ever seen in his life. And I was like, this is like the biggest nerd I've ever met and I love him. I think we're drawn to that. This is another thing that Conti makes, it elaborates on quite a bit more in the series on mental health coming out, but there are different drives within us. There's this, there are aggressive drives, not always for

fighting, but for intense interaction. I mean, look at Twitter, look at some of the, look at people clearly have an aggressive drive. There's also a pleasure drive. Some people also have a strong pleasure drive. They want to experience pleasure through food, through sex, through friendship, through adventure, you know. But I think the Shakespearean drama is the drama of the different drives in different ratios in different people. I know somebody and she's incredibly kind.

Has an extremely high pleasure drive. Love's taking great care of herself and people around her through food and through retreats and through all these things and makes spaces beautiful. Every where she goes and gives these things that are just so unbelievably feminine and incredible, these gifts to people and the kind and thoughtful about what they like. But I would say very little aggressive drive from my read. Then I know other people who just have a ton of aggressive drive and

very little pleasure drive. There's this alchemy that exists where people have these things in different ratios. And then you blend in, you know, the differences in the chromosomes and differences in hormones and differences in personal history and what you end up with is a species that creates incredible recipes of drama but also peace, also relief from drama contentment. I mean, I realize this isn't the exact topic of the question, but someone I know very dearly

actually an ex-girlfriend of mine, long-term partner, mine sent me something recently. I think it hit the nail on the head, which is that ideally for a man, they eventually settle where they find and feel peace. Are they feel peaceful? Where they can be themselves and feel peaceful? Now, I'm sure there's an equivalent or mirror image of that for women, but this particular post that she sent

was about men. And I totally agree. And so it isn't always that we're seeking friction, but for periods of our life we seek friction, drama, adventure, excitement, fights, you know, and doing hard, hard things. And then I think at some point, I'm certainly coming to this point now where it's like, yeah, that's all great. And checked a lot of boxes, but had a lot of close calls, flew really close to the sun on a lot of things with life and limb and part and spirit. And

some of, you know, people close to us didn't make it. And sometimes not making it means they're the career they wanted went off a cliff or the their health went off a cliff or their life went off a cliff. But I think that there's also the Shakespearean drama of the characters that exit the play and are living their lives happily in the backdrop. It just doesn't make for as much

entertainment. That's one other thing that's a benefit. You could say it's a benefit of a getting older is finding the Shakespearean drama less appealing or finding the joy in the piece. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that I think there's real peace with age. I think the other thing is this notion of checking boxes is a real thing for me anyway. I have a morning meditation that I do. Well, I wake up now and get my sunlight. I hydrate. He's about to do all the things

that I talk about. I've started to practice a prayer in the last year, which is new-ish for me, which is we could talk about in the morning. Yeah. Can you talk about it a little bit? Sure. Yeah. And then I have a meditation that I do that actually is where I think through with the different roles that I play. So I start very basic. I say, I'm an animal. We are biologically animals, right? Human. I'm a man. I'm a scientist. I'm a teacher. I'm a friend. I'm a brother. I'm

a son. I go through this list and I think about the different roles that I have and the roles that I still want in my life going forward that I haven't yet fulfilled. It just takes me, it's sort of an inventory of where I've been, where I'm at, and where I'm going, as they say. I don't know why I do it, but I started doing it this last year. I think because it helps me understand just how many different contexts I have to exist in and remind myself that there's still more that I haven't

done than I'm excited about. So within each of those contexts, there's things that you want to accomplish to define that. Yeah. I'm ambitious. I think I'm a brother. I have an older sister and I love her tremendously. I want to be the best brother I can be to her, which means maybe a call, maybe just, we do an annual trip together for our birthdays or birthdays or close together. We always go to New York for our birthdays and we've gone for the last three or four years.

Really reminding myself of that role, not because I'll forget, but because I have all these other roles I'll get pulled in. I say the first one I'm an animal because I have to remember that I have a body that needs care. Like any of us, I need sleep, I need food, I need hydration, I need that I'm human that the brain of a human is marvelously complex but also marvelously self-defeating

at times. So I've been thinking about these things in the context of the different roles and the whole thing takes about four or five minutes and I just find it brings me a certain amount of clarity that then allows me to ratchet into the day. The prayer piece, yeah, I think I've been reluctant to talk about until now because I don't believe in pushing religion on people and I think that and I'm not, it's a highly individual thing and I do believe that one can be an atheist and still

pray or agnostic and still pray. But for me, it really came about through understanding that there are certain aspects of myself that I just couldn't resolve on my own and no matter how much therapy, no matter how much and I haven't done a lot of it but no matter how much plant medicine or other forms of medicine or exercise or podcasting or science or friendship or any of that, I was just not going to resolve. And so I started this because someone close to me

said, a male friend said, you know, prayer is powerful and I said, well, how? And I don't know how but if you can allow you to get outside yourself, let you give up control and at the same time, take control. I don't even like saying take control but the whole notion is that, again, forgiving but there's no other way to say it. The whole notion is that God works through us, whatever God is to you, he, he, him, her, whatever life force, whatever it is to you,

right, that it works through us. And so I do a prayer, I'll just describe it where I ask, I make an ask to help remove my defects, my character defects, I pray to God to help remove my character defects so that I can show up better in all the roles of my life and do good work, like to which for me is learning and teaching, learning and teaching. And so you might say,

well, how is that different than a meditation? Well, I'm acknowledging that there is something that bigger than me, bigger than nature as I understand it, that I cannot understand or control nor do I want to. And I'm just giving over to that. And does that make me less of a scientist? I assure, I sell hope not. I certainly know I, there's the head of our neurosciences at Stanford until recently. I, you should talk to him directly about a Bill Newsom has talked about his religious

life. For me, it's really a way of getting outside myself and then understanding how I fit into this bigger picture. And it's, and the character defects part is real, right? I'm a human, I have defects like, I got a lot of flaws in me like anybody, but and trying to acknowledge them and asking for help in removing them, not magically, but through right action, through my right action. So I do that every morning. And I have to say that it's helped, it's helped a lot, it's helped me

be better to myself, be better to other people. I still make mistakes. But it's a, it's becoming a bigger, bigger part of my life. And I never thought I'd talk like this. But I think it's clear to me that if we don't believe in something, again, doesn't have to be traditional standardized religion. But if we don't believe in something bigger than ourselves, we at some level will self-destruct. I really, I really think so. And it's powerful in a way that all the other stuff, meditation and

all the tools, is not because it's really operating at a much deeper and bigger level. And you know, yeah, I think that's all I can talk about it. Most of because I'm still working out, you know, the scientists in me wants to understand how it works and I want to understand. And the point is to just go, you know, there's some, there's, you know, for lack of a better language for it, there's higher power than me. And what I can control, I'm giving up control on certain

things. And somehow that restores a sense of agency for, for right action, better action. I think perhaps a part of that is just a humility that comes with acknowledging there's something bigger and more powerful than you. And then you can't control everything. It's, I mean, that you go through life as a hard driving person, you know, forward center of mass. I remember being

that way since I was little. It's like in Legos. I'm like, all the Legos. I was like on the weekends, you know, learning about medieval weapons and then giving lectures about it in class, one of the five or six years old, we're learning about tropical fish and, you know, cataloging all of them at the store and then organizing it and making my, you know, my dad drive me or my mom driving me in some fish store and then spending all my time there until they throw me out,

you know, all of that. But I also remember my entire life, I would secretly pray. When things were good and things weren't good, but mostly when things weren't good, because it's important to pray for me, it's important to pray each morning regardless. But when things weren't right, I couldn't make sense of them. I would secretly pray, but I felt kind of ashamed of that for whatever reason. And then it was once in college, I distinctly remember. I was having

a hard time with a number of things and I took a run down to San speech as you see San Barbara. And I remember I just, I was like, I don't know if I even have the right to do this, but I'm just praying, and I just prayed for the ability to be as brutally honest with myself and with other people's, I possibly could be about a particular situation I was in at that time. I mean, I think now it's

probably safe to say that I'd gone off to college because of a high school girlfriend. We'd, essentially, she was my family more, frankly, more than my biological family was at a certain stage of life. And we'd reach a point where we were diverging and it was incredibly painful. It was like losing everything I had. And it's like, what do I do? How do I manage this? Do I, you know, I was ready to quit and join the fire service just to support us so that we could move

forward. And, and, you know, it's just, but praying just saying, I can't figure this out on my own. It's sort of like, I can't figure this out on my own. And how frustrating that is, no number of friends could tell me or an inner wisdom couldn't tell me and eventually it led me to the right answers. And she and I are friendly friends to this day. She's happily married with a child and wrong good terms. But I think, you know, it's, it's a, it's a scary thing, but it's the best thing

when you can't control all this and asking for help, I think is also the piece. You're not asking for some magic hand to come down and take care of it. You're asking for the help to come through you. Right. So that your body is used to do these right works, right action. Isn't it interesting that this secret thing that you're almost embarrassed by that you did it as a child is something you, it's another thing you do is you get older as you realize, like those things are part of you.

And it's actually a beautiful thing. A lot of the content of the podcast is, you know, deep apocalyptic content and we talk about everything from, you know, in disorders to bipolar disorder to depression, you know, a lot of different topics. But the tools are the protocols as we say, right? The sunlight viewing all the rest. You know, a lot of that stuff is just stuff I wish I had known

when I was in graduate school. If I had known to go outside every once in a while and get some sunlight, not just stay in the lab, I would, you know, I might not have hit a, like a really tough round of depression when I was a postdoc and working twice as hard. And you know, when my body would break down or I'd get sick a lot, I don't get sick much anymore occasion. That once every 18 months to two years, I get, you know, I get something. But, um, you know, I used to break my foot, skateboarding

all the time. I couldn't understand what's wrong with my body. I'm getting injured. I can't do what everyone else can. Now I developed more slowly at a long arc of puberty. Um, but I, so that was part of it. I was still developing. But, you know, how to get your body stronger, how to build endurance. No one told me the information wasn't there. So a lot of what I put out there is the information that I wish I had had. Because once I had it, I was like, wow, like A, this stuff

really works. B, it's grounded in something real. You know, sometimes certain protocols are a combination of, you know, animal human and animal and human studies, sometimes clinical trials, sometimes there's some mechanistic conjecture for some, not all I always make clear which. But in the end, like figuring out how things work so that we can be happier, healthy, or more productive suffer less, like reduce the suffering of the world. Um, and I think that,

well, I'll just say thank you and, um, for asking about the prayer piece. Um, again, I'm not pushing or even encouraging it on anyone. I've just found it to be tremendously useful for me. You know, I mean, about prayer in general, you said information and figuring out how to get stronger, healthier, smarter, all those kinds of things. Part of me believes that deeply, you know, you can gain a lot of knowledge and wisdom through learning. But a part of me believes

that all the wisdom I need was old, was there when I was 11 and 12 years old. And then it got cluttered over. Well, listen, I can't wait for you in conti to talk again because when he gets going about the subconscious and the amount of this that sits below the surface like an iceberg and, and I, and the fact that when we're kids, we're not obscuring a lot of that subconscious as much. And sometimes I can look a little more primitive.

I mean, I mean, the kid that's disappointed will let you know. The kid that's excited will let you know. And you feel that raw exuberance or that raw dismail. And I think that as we grow older, we learn to cover that stuff up. We wear masks and we have to be functional. And I don't think we all want to go around just being completely raw. But as you said, as you get older, you also, you get to this point where you're going to go, you know, what are we really trying to protect

anyway? I mean, I have this theory that, you know, certainly my experience has taught me that a lot of people, but I'll talk about men because that's what I know best, whether or not they show up strong or not, that they're really afraid of being weak. Like, they're just afraid, like sometimes the strength is even a way to try and not be weak, right, which is different than being strong for its own sake. I'm not just talking about physical strength. I'm talking about intellectual strength.

I'm talking about money. I'm talking about expressing drive. I've been watching this series a little bit of chimp empire. Oh, yeah. So chimp empire is amazing, right? They have the head chimp, they're not the head chimp, but the the alpha and the group. And he's getting older. And so what does he do every once in a while? He goes on these vigor displays. He goes and he grabs branch. He starts breaking, he starts thrashing him, and he's incredibly strong. They're all kind of like

watching. I mean, you know, I immediately think of people like they're deadlifting on Instagram. And I just think the displays of vigor. This is just the primate telling that displays the vigor. Now what's interesting is that he's doing that specifically to say, hey, I still have what it takes to lead this troop. Okay. Then there are the the ones that are subordinate to him, but not so not so far behind. It seems to be that there's a very clear like numerical ranking. There is like

it's clear who's the number two number three. Yeah. I mean, probably who gets to mate first who gets to eat first. This exists in other animal societies too, but Bob Sapolsky would be a great person to talk about this with because he knows obviously tremendous amount about it. And I know just the top contour, but yes, so number two, three and four males are aware that he's doing these vigor displays, but they're also aware because in primate evolution, they got some extra four brain

too, not as much as us, but they got some. And they're aware that the vigor displays are displays that because they've done them as well in a different context might not just be displays of vigor, but might also be an insurance policy against people seeing weakness. Okay. So now they start using that prefrontal cortex to do some interesting things. So in in primate world, if a male is friendly with another male wants to affiliate with him and say, Hey, I'm backing you. They'll go

over and they'll they'll pick off the little parasites and eat them. And so the grooming is extremely important. In fact, if they want to ostracize or kill one of the members of their troop, they will just leave it alone. No one will groom it. And then there's actually a really disturbing sequence in that show of then the parasites start to eat away on their skin. They get infections. They have issues. No one will mate with them. No one they have other issues as well and can potentially die.

So the interesting thing is is number two and three start to line up a strategy to groom this guy. But they are actually thinking about overtaking the entire troop setting in a new alpha. But the current alpha did that to get where he is. So he knows that they're doing this grooming thing, but they're not might not be sincere about the grooming. So what does he do? He takes the whole troop on a raid to another troop and sees who will fight for him and who won't. This is advanced

contracting of behavior for species that normally we don't think of as as sophisticated as us. So it's very interesting and it gets to something that I hope we'll have an opportunity to talk about because it's something that I'm obsessed with lately is this notion of overt versus covert contracts. Right? There are overt contracts where you exchange work for money or you exchange any number of things in an overt way. But then there are covert contracts and those take on a very

different form and always lead to in my belief bad things. Well, how much of human and chimp relationships are overt versus covert? Well, here's one thing that we know is true. Dogs and humans, the dog to human relationship is 100% overt. They don't manipulate you. Now you could say they do in the sense that they learn that if they look a certain way or roll on their back, they get food. But there's no banking of that behavior for a future date where then they are going to undermine you

and take your position. So in that sense, dogs can be a little bit manipulative in some sense. But now, okay, so overt contract would be we both want to do some work together. We're going to make some money. You get x percentage, I get x percentage over covert contract, which is in my opinion, bad always bad would be we're going to do some work together. You're going to get a percentage of money. I'm going to get a percentage of money could look just like the overt contract. But

secretly, I'm resentful that I got the percentage I got. So what I start doing is covertly taking something else. What do I take? Maybe I take the opportunity to jab you verbally every once in a while. Maybe I take the opportunity to show up late. Maybe I take the opportunity to get to know one of your co-workers so that I might start a business with them. That's covert contracting.

And you see this sometimes in romantic relationships, one person, we won't set the male or female in any direction here and just say, it's I'll make you feel powerful if you make me feel desired. Okay, great. There's nothing explicitly wrong about that contract if they both know and they're both agree. But what if it's I'll do that, but I'll have kids with you. So you feel powerful. You'll have kids with me. So I feel desired, but secretly I don't want to do that. Or they one person says,

I don't want to do that. Or both don't. So what they end up doing is saying, okay, so I expect something else. I expect you to do certain things for me. Or I expect you to pay for certain things for me. Covert contracts are the signature of everything bad. Over-t contracts are the signature of all things good. Yeah. And I think about this a lot because I've seen a lot of examples of this.

I've like anyone we participate in these things, whether or not we want to or not. And the thing that gets transacted the most is, well, I should say the things that get transacted the most are the overt things. You'll see money, time, sex, property, whatever happens to be information. But what ends up happening is that when people I believe don't feel safe, they feel threatened in some way. Like it's they don't feel safe in a certain interaction. What they do is they start

taking something else while still engaging in the exchange. And I'll tell you, if there's one thing about human nature that's bad, it's that feature. Why that feature? Or is it a bugger feature as you engineers like to say? I think it's because we were allocated a certain extra amount of prefrontal cortex that makes us more sophisticated than a dog, more sophisticated than a chimpanzee, but they do it too. And it's because it's often harder to deal with in the short term, to deal with

the real sense of this is scary. This feels threatening. Then it is to play out all the iterations. It takes a lot of brain work. You're playing chess and go simultaneously trying to figure out where things are going to end up and we just don't know. So it's a way I think of creating a false sense of certainty. But I'll tell you, covert contracts, the only certainty is that it's going to end badly. The question is how badly? Conversely, overt contracts always end well.

Always. The problem with overt contracts is that you can't be certain that the other person is not engaging in the covert contract. You can only take responsibility for your own contract. Well, one of the challenges of being human is looking at another human being and figuring out the way, their way of being, their behavior, which of the two types of contracts it represents.

Because they look awfully the same on the surface. And one of the challenges of being human is that the decision we all make is, are you somebody that takes a leap of trust and trust other humans that are willing to take the hurt? Are you going to be cynical and skeptical and avoid most interactions until they're over a long period of time? I'll prove your trust. I never like the phrase history repeats itself when it comes to humans because it doesn't apply if the people

or the person is actively working to resolve their own flaws. I do think that if people are willing to do dedicated, introspective work, go into their subconscious, do the hard work, have hard conversations and get better at hard conversations, something that I'm constantly trying to get better at. I think people can change, but they have to want to change. It does seem like deep down,

we all can kind of tell the difference between overt and covert. We have a good sense. I think one of the benefits of having this characteristic of mind where I value loyalty, I've been extremely fortunate to spend most of my life in overt relationships. And I think that creates a really fulfilling life. But there's also this thing that maybe we're in this portion of the podcast now. But this is late at night. We're talking. That's right. Certainly late for me, but I'm two

hours I came in today on I'm still in California. And we should also say that you came here to wish me happy birthday. I did. I did. And the podcast is just like a fun last minute thing I suggested. Yeah, some close friends of yours have arranged a dinner that I'm really looking forward to. I won't say which night. It's the next couple of nights. You know, your circadian clock is one of the most robust features of your biology. I know you can be nocturnal or you can be diurnal.

We know you're mostly nocturnal. It's certain times the year lacks, but they're very, very few people can get away with no sleep. Very few people can get away with a chaotic sleep wake schedule. So you have to obey a 24 hour a.k.a. circadian rhythm. If you want to remain healthy of mind and body, we also have to acknowledge that it's aging is in linear. Right. So what do you mean? Well, I mean, you the degree of change between years 35 and 40 is not going to be the degree of change between

40 and 45. But I will say this, I'm 48 and I feel better in every aspect of my psychology and biology. Now, then I did when I was in my 20s. Yeah, sort of quality of thought, time spent, physically I can do what I did then, which is probably says more about what I could do then than what I can do now. But if you keep training, you can continue to get better. The kids do not get injured. And I've never trained super hard. I've trained hard, but I've been cautious

to not, for instance, wait, train more than two days in a row. I do a split or basically three days a week and the other days a run, take one full day off, take a week off every 12 to 16 weeks. I've not been the guy hurling the heaviest weights or running the furthest distance. But I have been the guy who's continuing to do it when a lot of my friends are talking about knee injuries. Hey, hey, hey, hey, but of course, with sport, you can't account for everything the same way

you can with fitness. And I have to acknowledge that, unless one is powerlifting, weightlifting and running, you can get hurt. But it's not like skateboarding where if you're going for it, you're going to get hurt. That's just you're landing on concrete. Which you just do, like, people are trying to hurt you so that you say stop. So with a sport, it's different. And these days, I don't really do a sport any longer. I work out, say, fit. I used to continue to do sports

by kept getting hurt. And frankly, now like a rolled ankle, I may put out a little small skateboard part in 2024 because people have been saying, we want to see the kick flip. They just say, well, I'll do a heel flip instead. But okay, I might put out a little part because some of the guys that work on our podcast are from DC. I think by now, I should at least do it just to show like I'm not making it up. And I probably will. But I think doing a sport is different. That's how you get hurt.

Overuse and doing an actual sport. And so, you know, a hat tip to those do an actual sport. And that's a difficult decision. Like, I, a lot of people have to make. I have to make, which is just for example, like if you just look empirically, I've trained really hard from all my life and grappling sports and fighting sports and all this kind of stuff. And I've avoided

injury for the most part. And I would say I would attribute that to training a lot. Sounds kind of intuitive, but training well and safely and correctly, keeping good form, saying no, when they need to say no, but training a lot and taking it seriously. Now when this training is kind of a side, really a side thing, I find that the injury is becomes a higher and higher

probability. But when you're just doing it every once in a while. Every once in a while. Yeah, that I think you said something really important that the saying no, I mean, the times I have gotten hurt training is when someone's like, Hey, let's hop on this workout together and it becomes a let's challenge each other to do something outrageous. Sometimes that can be fun though. I went up to camhains as Jim and he does these very high repetition weight workouts that are in circuit

form. I was sore for two weeks, but I learned a lot and didn't get injured and yes, we ate bohunted elk after a nice, but the injury has been a really difficult psychological thing for me because so I've injured my finger, pinky finger, injured my knee. Yeah, your kitchen is filled with splints. Splints. I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out. It's like if you look in like this kitchen, there's there's some really good snacks. I had some right before. He's very good

about keeping cold drinks in the fridge and all the water has element in it, which is great. I love that. But then there's a whole like hospitals worth splints. Yeah, I'm trying. I'm trying to figure out. So here's the thing you think I like pop out like this, right? pinky finger. I'm trying to figure out how do I splint in such a way that I can still program, still play guitar, but protect this kind of torque motion that creates a huge amount of pain.

That's what you do to injury. But it's not the kind of it's probably more like a skateboarding style injury, which is it's unexpected and a silly and a silly thing that happens in a second. I didn't break my foot doing anything important. Yeah, I broke my dipment, darple stepping off a curb. So it's that's why they're called accidents. If you get hurt doing something awesome, that's a trophy that you have to work through. It's part

of your payment to the universe. If you get hurt stepping off a curb or you know doing something stupid, it's called a stupid accident. Since we brought up champion pie, let me ask you about relationships. I think we talked about relationships. Yeah, I only date homo sapiens. The morning meditation, then night is still young. You are human. No, but you are also animal. Don't sell yourself short. No, I always say listen, any discussion on the human lab podcast about

sexual health or anything, we always be the critical for us. Concentral, age appropriate, context appropriate, species appropriate, species appropriate. Well, can I just tell you about sexual selection? I've been watching life and color with David Edinburgh. I've been watching a lot of nature documentaries talking about inner peace. It brings me so much peace to watch nature

at its worst and at its best. So life and color is a series on Netflix where it presents some of the most colorful animals on earth and kind of tells their story of how they got there through natural selection. So you know, you have the peacock with the feathers and it's just such incredible colors. Like the peacock has these tail feathers, the male. They're like gigantic and they're super colorful. They're these eyes on it. It's not eyes. It's like eye-like areas and they wiggle their

ass to show the tail. They wiggle the tails. The eye spots. The eye spots, yes. Thank you. You

know this probably way better than me. I'm just quoting it. David, I'm just continuing. But it was, it's just I'm watching this and then the female is as boring looking as pot like she has no colors or nothing, but she's standing there bored just seeing this entire display and I'm just wondering like the entirety of life on earth or not the entirety post bacteria is like in at least in part maybe in large part can be described through this process of natural selection of sexual selection.

So dude's fighting and then women selecting. It seems like just the entirety of that series shows some incredible birds and insects and shrimp. They're all beautiful and colorful. It's just a shrimp. Man, it's a shrimp. They're just they're incredible. And it's all about getting laid. It's fascinating. I just and there's nothing like watching that and chimp empire to make

you realize we humans that's the same thing. That's all we're doing and all the beautiful variety, all the bridges and the buildings and the rockets and the internet all of that is this kind is at least in part this kind of a product of this kind of showing off for each other and all the wars and all of this. Anyway, well, there's a well that shows. Right. Before you ask about relationships, I think what's clear is that every species it seems, animal species wants to make

more of itself and protect it's young. Well, the protect this young is non-obvious. So not destroy enough of itself that it can't get more to reproductive competent age. I mean, I think that you know, we have a natural, I mean, healthy people have a natural reflex to protect children. Well, I don't know that. And those that can't win, man, wait a minute, wait a minute, I've seen

enough animals that are murdering the children. Sure. There's even siblings side. First of all, I just want to say that I was delighted in your delight around animal kingdom stuff because this is a favorite theme of mine as well. But there's for instance, some fascinating data on for for those that grew up on farms, they'll be familiar with free martens, you know, about free

martens. This is their cows that have multiple calves inside them. And there's a situation in which the calves will secrete if there's more than one inside will secrete chemicals that will hormonally castrate the calf next to them so they can't reproduce. So already in the room, they are fighting for future resources. That's how really this stuff can start. So it's chemical warfare in the room against the siblings. Sometimes there's outright siblings side.

Siblings are born, they kill one another. This also becomes biblical stories, right? Right. There are instances of cuttlefish, beautiful cephalopods like octopuses, and that is the plural as we make the internet. Oh yeah, that became a meme or a little discussion. Yeah, there's a good pretty quick. Oh yeah. And now we just resurfaced it. That this may in your voice is so amusing. In any event that the male cuttlefish will disguise themselves as female cuttlefish, infiltrate the

female cuttlefish group and then mate with them. All sorts of types of covert operations. So I think that it's like a drinking game where every time we say covert in a contract in this episode, you have to take a shot of espresso. Please don't do that. You'd be dead by the end. So it actually is just a small tangent. It does make me wonder how much intelligence covert contracts require. It seems like not much. If you can do it in the animal kingdom,

there's some kind of instinctual, it is based perhaps in like fear. Yeah, it could be simple algorithm. If there's some ambiguity about numbers and I'm not with these guys and then flip to the alternate strategy. I actually have a story about this that I think is relevant. I used to have cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego. We went and got them from a guy out in the desert. We put them in a lab as amazing and they had a postdoc who was studying prey capture in cuttlefish.

They have a very ballistic, extremely rapid strike and grab of the shrimp and they, we were using high speed cameras to characterize all this. Looking at binocular, they normally have their eyes on the side of their head. When they see something they want to eat, the eyes translocate to the front, which allows them stereopsis, death perception allows them to strike. We were doing some unilateral eye removals. They would miss, etc. Okay. This has to do with

eye spots. This was during a government shutdown period where the ghost shrimp that they normally feed on that we would ship in from the gulf down here weren't available to us. We had to get different shrimp. What we noticed was the cuttlefish normally would just sneak up on the shrimp. We learned this by data collection. If the shrimp was facing them, they would do this thing with their tentacles of enchanting the shrimp. If the shrimp wasn't facing them, they wouldn't do it

and they would ballistically grab it and eat them. When we got these new shrimp, the new shrimp had eye spots on their tails. Then the cuttlefish would do this attempt to enchant, regardless of the position of the ghost shrimp. What does that mean? It means that there's some algorithm in the cuttlefish's mind that says, okay, if you see two spots, move your tentacles. It can be, as you pointed out, it can be a fairly simple operation, but it looks diabolical. It looks cunning, but all it

is is strategy B. Yeah, but it's still somehow emerged. I mean, I don't think that it's successful. Calling it an algorithm doesn't... I feel like... Well, there's a circuit there that gets implemented in a certain context, but that circuit had to evolve. You do realize a super-talented AI will look at us humans and we'll say the exact thing. There's a circuit in there that evolved to do this, the algorithm A and algorithm B, and it's trivial. To us, humans, it's fancy and beautiful

and ripotry about it, but it's... Because we don't understand the subconscious. Because they want that AI algorithm cannot see into what it can't see. It doesn't understand the underworkings of what allows all of this conversation stuff to manifest. And we can't even see it. How could AI see it? Maybe it will. Maybe AI will solve and give us access to our subconscious. Maybe your AI friend or coach, like I think Andrewson and others are going, is going to happen at some

point. It's going to say, hey, Lex, you're making decisions lately that are not good for you, but it's because of this algorithm that you picked up in childhood that if you don't state your explicit needs up front, you're not going to get what you want. So why do it? From now on, you need to actually make a list of every absolutely outrageous thing that you want, no matter how outrageous, and communicate that immediately, and that will work. We're talking about

codifical sexual selection, and then we went into some, where do we go? And you said you were excited. I was excited. Well, you were just saying what about these covert contracts, because in animals do them, I think it's simple contextual engagement of a neural circuit, which is not just nerd speak for saying they do a different strategy. It's saying that there has to be a circuit there, a hard-wired circuit, maybe learned, but probably hard-wired, that can be engaged. You

can't build neural machinery out of, in a moment, you need to build that circuit over time. What is building it over time? You select for it, the cuttlefish that did not have that alternate context-driven circuit didn't survive when there was a, when all the shrimp that they normally disappear in the ice-botted shrimp showed up, and there were a couple that had some miswiring. This is why mutation,

right? The X-Men stuff is real. They had a mutation that had some alternate wiring, and that wiring got selected for it became a mutation that was adaptive as opposed to mal-adaptive. This is something people don't often understand about genetics is that it only takes a few generations to devolve a trait, make it worse, but it takes a long time to evolve an adaptive trait. There are exceptions to that, but most often that's true. So a species needs a lot of generations.

We are hopefully still evolving as a species, and it takes a long time, but to evolve more adaptive traits, but doesn't take long to devolve adaptive traits so that you're getting sicker or you're not functioning as well. So choose your mate wisely, and that's perhaps the good segue into sexual selection. I could tell you, you're good at this. Why did I bring up sexual selection is the relationship? So sexual selection in humans. I don't think you've done an episode on relationships.

No, I did an episode on attachment, but not on relationships. The series with Conti includes one episode of the four that's all about relational understanding and how to select a mate based on matching of drives and all the demons inside the subconscious, how to match demons, and dance well together or what. And how generative two people are. What does that mean? It means how the way he explains it is how devoted to creating growth within the context of the family, the relationship

with work. Well, let me ask you about mating rituals and how to find such a relationship. I mean, you're really big on friendships, on the value of friendships. And that I think extends itself into one of the deepest kinds of friendships you can have, which is a romantic relationship. What mistakes, successes, and wisdom can you impart? Well, I've certainly made some mistakes. I've also made some good choices in this realm. First of all, we have to define what sort of relationship

we're talking about. If one is looking for a life partner, potentially somebody to establish family with, with or without kids, with or without pets, families can take different forms. I certainly experienced being a family in a prior relationship where it was the two of us in our two dogs. And then it was like, it was family. Like we had our little family. I think based on my experience and based on input from friends who themselves have very successful

relationships. I must say I've got friends who are in long-term, monogamous, very happy relationships where there seems to be a lot of love, a lot of laughter, a lot of challenge, and a lot of growth. And both people, it seems really want to be there and enjoy being there. Just to pause on that, one thing to do, I think, by way of advice, is listen to people who are in

long-term successful relationships. That seems dumb, but we both know in our friends with Joe Rogan, who's been in a long-term, really great relationship, and he's been an inspiration to me. So you take advice from that guy. Definitely. And several members of my podcast team are in excellent relationships. I think one of the things that rings true over and over again in the advice and in my experience is find someone who's really a great friend. Like build a really great

friendship with that person. Now obviously not just a friend if we're talking romantic relationship, but and of course sex is super important, but it should be a part of that particular relationship

alongside or meshed with the friendship. Can it be a majority of the positive exchange? I suppose it could, but I think the friendship piece is extremely important because what's required in a successful relationship clearly is joy in being together, trust, a desire to share experience, both mundane and more adventurous, support each other, acceptance, a real, maybe even admiration,

but certainly delight in being with the person. You know earlier we were talking about peace, and I think that that sense of peace comes from knowing that the person you're in friendship with or that you're in romantic relationship or ideally both, because let's assume healthy relationship, the best romantic relationship includes a friendship component with that person. It's like you just really delight in their presence, even if it's a quiet presence. And you delight in seeing them

delight in things, right? That's clear. The trust piece is huge, you know, and that's where people start, you know, we don't want to focus on what works, not what doesn't work, but that's where I think people start engaging these covert contracts. They're afraid of being betrayed, so they betray. They're afraid of giving up too much vulnerability, so they hide their vulnerability, or in the worst cases, they feign vulnerability. Again, that's a covert contract that just simply

undermines everything it becomes one, both one equals two minus one to infinity. Conversely, I think if people can have really hard conversations, this is something I've had to work really hard on in recent years, and that I'm still working hard on. But the friendship piece seems to be the thing that rises to the top when I talk to friends who are in these great relationships. They have so much

respect and love and joy in being with their friend. It's the person that they want to spend as much of their non-working, non-plotonic friendship time with, and the person that they want to experience things with and share things with. And it sounds so kind of canned and cliche nowadays, but I think if you step back and examine how most people go about finding a relationship, so I'm like, oh, like am I attracted? Of course, physical attraction is important in other forms of attraction too.

And they sort of enter through that portal, which makes sense. That's the mating dance, right? That's in the peacock situation. That's hopefully not the cuddle for situation. But I think that there seems to be a history of people close to me getting into great relationships where they were friends for a while first, or maybe didn't sleep together right away. That they actually intentionally deferred on that. This has not been my habit or my experience.

I've gone the more, I think, typical. There's an attraction like this person, there's an interest. You can explore all dimensions of relationship really quickly, except perhaps the moving in part and the having kids part, which is the bigger step harder to undo without more severe consequences. But I think that whole take it slow thing, I don't think is about getting to know someone slowly. I think it's about that physical piece because that does change the nature of the relationship.

And I think it's because it gets right into the more hardwired primitive circuitry around our feelings of safety, vulnerability. There's something about romantic and sexual interactions where it's almost like it's like assets and liabilities, right? Where people are trying to figure out how much to engage their time and their energy and multiple people. I'm talking about from both sides, male, female or whatever, it sides. But where it's assets and liabilities and that's where it starts

getting into those complicated contracts early on, I think. And so maybe that's why if a really great friendship and admiration is established first, even if people are romantically and sexually attracted to one another, that piece can be added in a little bit later in a way that really just seals up the whole thing. And then who knows? Maybe they spend 90% of their time having

sex. I don't know that that's not for me to say or decide, obviously. But there's something there about staying out of a certain amount of risk of having to engage covert contract in order to protect oneself. But I do think like I love it first sight. This kind of idea is in part realizing very quickly that you are great friends. Like I've had that experience of friendship recently. It's not really friendship, but like

oh, you get it, each other with humans, not romantic setting. Right, friendship. Yeah, just friendship. But dear, I say I felt that way about you when we met, right? But we all said this dude's cool and he's smart and he's funny and he's driven and he's giving and he's got an edge. And I want to learn from him, I want to hang out with him. Like that was the beginning of our friendship was essentially that set of internal realization. And a sharp dresser. Yeah, it just

looks great. Sure, it lists on a horseback. No, no, no, listen, I mean, despite what some people might see on the internet, it's a purely platonic friendship. Somebody said, somebody asked if Andrew human has a girlfriend. Somebody says, I think so. And then the third comment was this really like breaks my heart like that Alex and Andrew are not not an item. We are not we are great friends,

but we are not an item. Yeah, it's official. I hear over and over again from friends that had made great choices and awesome partners and have these fantastic relationships for long periods of time that seem to continue to thrive. At least that's what they tell me and that's what I observe. Established the friendship first and give it a bit of time before sex. And so you know, I think that's the feeling. That's the feeling. And these are we're talking

micro features and macro features. We're talking, you know, and this isn't about perfection. It's actually about the imperfections, which is kind of cool. I like quirky people. I like characters. I'll tell you where I've gone badly wrong where I see other people going badly wrong. If there is no rule that says that you have to be attracted to all attractive people by any means, it's very important to develop a sense of taste in romantic attractions. I believe

what you really like in terms of a certain style, you know, a certain way of being. And of course that includes sexuality and sex itself, the verb, but I think it also includes a general way of being. You know, and when you really adore somebody, you like the way they answer the phone. And when

they don't answer the phone, that way, you know something's off and you want to know. And so I think that the more you can tune up your powers of observation, not looking for things that you like, and the more that stuff just kind of washes over you, the more likely you are to quote-unquote fall and love as a mutual friend of ours said to me, you know, listen, when it comes to romantic

relationships, if it's not 100% in you, it ain't happening. And I've never seen a violation of that statement where it's like, yeah, it's mostly good in there, this is like the negotiations. Well, already you're doomed. And that doesn't mean someone has to be perfect. The relationship has

to be perfect, but it's got to feel 100% inside. Like yes, yes, and yes. I think Dyseroth, when he was on here, your podcast, mentioned something that, you know, like I think the words were, maybe it was in his book, I don't recall, but that love is one of these things that we story into with somebody. We create this idea of ourselves in the future and we look at our past time together and then you

story into it. I mean, the very few things like that, I can't story into, you know, building flying cars. I have to actually go do something. I mean, love is also retroactively constructed. I mean, anyone who's gone through a breakup understands the grief of knowing, ah, like this is something I really shouldn't be in for whatever reason. Because it only takes one if the other person doesn't want to be in it, they shouldn't be in it. But then missing so many things. And that's just the

attachment machinery really at work. I have to ask you a question that does somebody in our amazing team wanted to ask, he's happily married. And another like you mentioned, incredible relationship. Are they good friends? Are they amazing friends? There you go. But, oh, since I'm not saying who it is, so I can say some stuff, which is they, it started out as a great sexual connection. Oh, well, there you go. But then it became very close friends after that. Listen, there you go.

So speaking of sex. He has a wonderful son and he is wanting to have a second kid and he wanted to ask the great Andrew Huerman, is there, ah, like sexual positions or any kind of thing that can help maximize the chance that they have a girl versus a boy because they had a wonderful boy. They want a girl. Is there is there a way to control the gender? Well, this has been

debated for a long time. And I did a four and a half hour episode on fertility. And the reason I did a four and a half hour episode on fertility is that first of all, I find that that reproductive biology fascinating. And I wanted a resource for people that were thinking about or struggling with having kids for whatever reason. And it felt important to me to combine the male and female components in the same episode. It's all time stamp. So you don't have to listen to the whole thing.

We're talking about IVF and mutual fertilization. And we talk about natural pregnancy. Okay. The data on

position is very interesting. But let me just say a few things. There are a few clinics now, in particular, some out of the United States that are spinning down sperm and finding that they can separate out fractions, as they're called, you know, that can spin the sperm down at a given speed and they they'll separate out at different, um, sort of depths within the test tube that allow them to pull out the sperm on top or below and bias the probability towards male or female birth.

It's not perfect. It's not 100%. It's a very costly procedure. It's still very controversial. Now with in vitro fertilization, you can extract eggs. You can do, um, introduce a sperm directly by pipette. It's a process called XC or you can set up a sperm race in the dish. And if you get a number of different embryos, um, meaning the eggs get fertilized to duplicate and for start

form a blastasis, which is a ball of cells early embryo, then you can do carry a typing. So you can do look for XX or XY select the XY, which then would give rise to a male offspring and implant that one. So there is that kind of sex selection. Um, with respect to position, there's a lot of lower that, you know, if, um, the woman is on top or the woman's on the bottom or whether or not

the penetration is from behind, whether or not it's going to be male or female offspring. And frankly, the data, um, are not great, as you can imagine, because those, those would be interesting studies to run perhaps. Um, there is study. There is paper. There are some, there are, they're not, I guess, um, there's more lore than science. And there's a lot of, and there are a lot of other

variables that are hard to control. So for instance, if it, um, ejaculation during intermission, during, during sex penetration, et cetera, um, then you can't measure, for instance, sperm volume as opposed to when it's IVF, and they can actually measure how many milliliters, how many forward motiles sperm, it's hard to control for, for certain things. And, um, which is going to vary between individuals and even from one ejaculation to the next. And okay, so there's too many

variables. However, the position thing is interesting in the following way. Um, and then I'll answer whether or not you can bias towards a female. Um, as long as we're talking, as long as we're talking about sexual, other questions about sex. But as long as we're talking about sexual position.

All right. There are data that support the idea that in order to increase the probability of successful fertilization, that indeed the woman should not stand up right after sex and should, right after, right after the man is ejaculated inside her and should adjust her pelvis, say, 15 degrees upwards. I mean, you know, some of the fertility experts, M.Ds will say that's crazy, you know,

but others that I sought out and not specifically for this answer. But for researching that episode, it said that, yeah, you know, what you're talking about is trying to get the maximum number of sperm and it's contained in semen. And yes, the semen can leak out. And so keeping the pelvis tilted for about 15 degrees for about 15 minutes, obviously tilted in the direction that would have things

running upstream, not downstream. So to speak, would gravity, it's real. You know, so for maximizing, for realization, you know, the doctors, I spoke to you just said, look, given that if people are trying to get pregnant, what is spending 15 minutes on their back, you know, this sort of thing. Okay. So then with respect to, to female, getting a female offspring or exx, female offspring, selectively, there is the idea that as fathers get older, they're more likely

to have daughters as opposed to sons. That's a, from the papers I've read is a significant, but still mildly significant result. So with each passing year, this person increases the probability they're going to have a daughter and not a son. Look, so that's interesting. But the probability differences are probably tiny. I mean, it's, it's not, you know, it's a significant, it's not trivial. It's not a trivial difference. But if they want to ensure having a daughter, then they

should do IVF and select an exx embryo. And when you go through IVF, they genetically screen them for carry a type, which is exx, exy. And they look at mutations, genotypic mutations for things like, you know, trisamines and, and the employees, all the stuff you don't want. But there is a lot of lore. If you look on the internet, sure, different foods. So there's a lot of variables. There's a lot of air, but there haven't been systematic studies. So I think probably the best thing to do

unless they're going to do IVF is just, you know, roll the dice. And, you know, I think with each passing year, they increase the probability of getting a female offspring. And with, but of course, with each passing year, the egg ends sperm quality degrade. So, you know, get after it soon. So, I went down a rabbit hole. There's like, sexology. There's, there's journals. Oh yeah, on sex.

Sure. Okay. So, and some of them, some of them, not all, quite reputable. And some of them really pioneering in the sense that they've taken on topics that are, you know, considered, you know, outside the main frame of what people talk about, but they're very important.

We have episodes coming out soon with, for instance, the head of male urology, sexual health and reproductive health at Stanford, Michael Eisenberg, but also, you know, one with a female urologist, sexual health, reproductive health, Dr. Reenomolik, who's on, has a quite active YouTube presence. She does these really, like, dry,

like scientific presentation, but very nice. She has a lovely voice, and she, but she'll be talking about, you know, erections are squirting or like, all of a, like she does like very kind of internet type content. But she's a legitimate urologist, reproductive health expert. And in the podcast, we, we did talk about both male and female orgasm. We talked a lot about sexual function, dysfunction. We talked a lot about pelvic floor. One interesting factoid is that only three, only 3%

of sexual dysfunction is hormonal, endocrine in nature. It's more often related to some pelvic floor or vascular, blood flow related or other issue. And then when Eisenberg came on the podcast, he said that far less sexual dysfunction is psychogenic in origin. Then people believe that far more

of it is pelvic floor neuro and vascular. So, you know, there's, there are the myths of, I mean, it's not saying that it's, that psychogenic dysfunction doesn't exist, but that a lot of the sexual dysfunction that people assume is related to hormones or that is related to psychogenic issues are related to vascular or neural issues. And the good news is that there are great remedies for

those. And so those, both those episodes detail some of the more salient points about what those remedies are and could be, I mean, one of the kind of again, factoid, but it was interesting that a lot of people have pelvic floor issues and they think that their pelvic floors are, quote, unquote, messed up. So they go on the internet, they learn about kegels, kegels, you know, and it turns out that some people need kegels. They need to strengthen their pelvic floor. Guess what?

A huge number of people with sexual and urologic dysfunction have pelvic floors that are too tight and kegels are going to make them far worse and they actually need to learn to relax their pelvic floor. And so seeing a pelvic floor specialist is important. I think in the next five, 10 years, we're going to see a dramatic shift towards more discussion about sexual and reproductive health in a way that acknowledges that, yeah, the clitoris is comes from the same origin tissue as the

the penis. And in many ways, the the neural innervation of the two, well, clearly different, has some overlapping features that, you know, that there's going to be discussion around kind of anatomy and hormones and pelvic floors. And in a way that's going to, you know, erode some of the kind of, like cloaking of these topics, because they've been cloaked for a long time. And there's a lot of, like, let's just call what is there's a lot of bullshit out there about what's what.

And now the hormonal issues, by the way, just to clarify, can impact desire. So a lot of people who have lack of desire as opposed to lack of anatomical function, this can be male or female, that that can originate with either things like SSRIs or hormonal issues. And so we talk about that as well. So it's a pretty vast topic. Okay. You've, you're one of the most productive people. I know what's the secret to your productivity? How do you maximize the number of productive hours on a day?

You're a scientist, you're a teacher. You're a very prolific educator. Well, thanks for the kind words. I struggle like everybody else, but I've been pretty relentless about meeting deadlines. I miss them sometimes, but sometimes that means cramming, sometimes that means starting early. But has that been hard? Sorry to interrupt with the podcast. You, there's certain episodes. I mean, you're like taking just incredibly difficult topics.

And you know, they're going to be, there's going to be a lot of really good scientists listening to those with a very skeptical and careful eye. Like how do you struggle meeting at deadlines sometimes? Yes, we've pushed out episodes because I want more time with them. I also, I haven't advertised this, but I have another fully tenured professor that started checking my, my podcasts and helping me find papers, these close friend of mine, he's an incredible expert in neuroplasticity. And that's

been helpful, but I research all my, I do all the primary research for the episodes myself. Although my niece has been doing a summer internship with me and finding amazing papers. She did last summer as well. She's really good at it. Just sick that kid on the internet and she gets great stuff. Can I ask you just going on tangents here? What's the hardest finding the papers or understanding

what a paper is saying or finding the best papers? Yeah. Because you have to, you know, read a bunch of reviews, figure out who's getting cited, call people in a field, make sure that this is the stuff. I mean, you know, I did this episode recently on ketamine about ketamine. I wasn't on ketamine. And, and you know, there's this whole debate about S versus R ketamine, S R ketamine. And I

call two clinical experts at Stanford. I had a researcher at UCLA helped me. Even then, you know, if you people had gripes about it, I don't think they understood a section that I was perhaps could have been clear about. But yeah, you're always concerned that people won't either won't get it or I won't be clear. So that the researching is mainly about finding the best papers. And then I'm looking

for papers that establish a thoroughness of understanding that are interesting. Obviously, it's fun to get occasionally look at some of the otter or more progressive papers that are, you know, what's new in a field. And then where there are actionable takeaways to really export those with with a lot of thoughtfulness. I mean, I think that going back to the productivity thing, you know, I do, I get up,

I look at the sun, I don't stare at the sun, but I get my sunshine. I it all starts with a really good night's sleep. I think that's really important to understand so much so that if I wake up and I don't feel rested enough, I'll often do a non-sleep deep rest, you know, need to go back to sleep for a little bit, get up, really prioritize one, you know, the big block of work for the thing that I'm researching. I think a little bit of anxiety and a little bit of concern about deadline helps.

Turning the phone off helps. Realizing that those peak hours whenever they are for you, you do not allow those hours to be invaded unless there's a, you know, a nuclear bomb goes off. And nuclear bomb is just a, you know, a phraseology for, you know, it could be family crisis would be, you know, would be good justification. There's an emergency obviously, but it's all about focus. It's all about focus in the moment. It's not even so much about how many hours you log. It's really about

focusing about how much total focus can you give to something. And then I like to take walks and think about things and sometimes talk about them in my voice recorder. So I'm just always churning on it all the time. And then of course learning to turn it off and engage with people socially and, you know, not be podcasting 24 hours a day in your head is key, but I think I love learning and researching and finding those papers and the information and I love teaching it. And these days,

I use a whiteboard before I start. I don't have any notes, no teleprompter. Then the whiteboard that I use beforehand is to really sculpt out the different elements and the flow, get the flow right and move things around. The whiteboard is such a valuable tool. Then take a couple pictures of that when I'm happy with it, put it down on the desk. And these are just bullet points and then just churn through and just churn through and nothing feels better than, you know, researching and

sharing information. And as you did, you know, grew up writing papers and it's hard. And I like the friction of a, like, can't, you know, I want to get up when I was in college. I was trying to make up deficiencies from my lack of attendance in high school so much so that I would say a time

where I wouldn't let myself get up to use the bathroom even. Never had an accident, but I was, you know, I mean, it was like I listened to music, classical music, rancid, a few other things, some Bob Dylan maybe thrown in there and just study and it felt, and then you know, hit the two-hour mark and you're in pain and then you get up and you're like, he's about to be like, that felt so good. There's something about the human brain that likes these kind of friction points and working through

them and you just have to work through them. So yeah, I'm productive and my life has arranged around it. And you know, that's been a bit of a barrier to personal life at times, but my life's been arranged around it. I've set up everything so that I can learn more, teach more, including, you know, some of my home life and but I do, you know, still watch Chimpanzee. I still got time to watch Chimpanzee. Look, the great Joe Strummer, right? Clash or my favorite, Mascalaros, he said,

you know, that's famous Strummer quote, no input, no output. So you need, you need experience, you need outside things in order to foster the process. But yeah, just nose to the grindstone, man. I don't know. And that's what I'm happy to do with my life. I don't think anyone should do that just because, but this is how I'm showing up and you know, you don't like me then scroll.

Why do they say swipe left? So I don't know. I'm not on the apps, dating apps. So that's the other thing I keep waiting for when, um, listens to like streaming podcasts is a check box on like hand your bumble or whatever it is. But I don't even know are those that are field is I don't know what that what are the apps now that I've never used an app and I those file troubles somehow,

little information is provided on apps. Well, they're the ones that are like a stock lake like, like Raya, you know, it's like that they like they sort of like companies will actually fill them with, you know, people that look a certain way and will soon will be filled with AI. Oh, yeah, that's what you said. Oh, that's a heartbreak within that. Well, I, you know, I'm guilty of liking real human interaction. Have you tried AI interaction?

Yeah, I know what I have a feeling you're going to convince me to one day. Yeah, I've also struggled finishing projects that are new. There are some, something new. Like for example, some one of the things that really struggled finishing is something that's in Russian that requires translation and overdub and all that kind of stuff. The other project I've been working out for like over at least a year, often on, but trying to finish is something we've talked about

in the past is I'm still on it project on Hitler and World War two. I've written so much about it. And as you don't know why I can't finish it, I have trouble like really, I think I'm terrified being in front of the camera like this, like this or solo. Well, actually, no, no, solo. Basically, do solo and seriously, because we've done this before, right? Our clean dust and study missions. I'm happy I sit in the corner and work in my book or do something if you want to feel

just just for the feeling of somebody else. Definitely. What do you, I mean, how do you, you don't seem to, you seem to have been fearless to just sit in front of the camera by yourself to do the episode. Yeah, it was weird. I mean, the first year of the podcast, it just spilled out of me. It was just I had all that stuff. I was so excited about it. I've been talking to everyone and who would listen and anyone who they run away. I'd keep talking, you know, before there was

ever a camera wasn't on social media. 2019, I posted a little bit. 2020 is, you know, a start going on podcast. But yeah, I had so I just, I just, the zest and delight in this stuff is circadian rhythm. So I'm going to tell you about this stuff. I just felt like here was the opportunity and just let it burst. And then as we've gotten into topics that are a little bit further away from my, my home knowledge, you know, it's like I still get super excited about it. It's music in the brain

episode. I've been researching for a while now. I'm just so hyped about it. It's so so interesting. There's so many facets singing versus improvisational, excuse me, music versus I'm listening to music versus learning music. I mean, it just goes on and on. There's just so much that's so interesting. I just can't get enough. And I think I don't know. You put a camera in front of me. I sort of forget about it. And I'm just trying to just teach. Yes, that's the different. That's interesting.

I mean, I forget the camera. Maybe I need to find that joy as well. But like for me, a lot of the joys in the in the writing and the camera, there's something. Well, the best lectures, as you know, and you're in a phenomenal lecture. So you embody this as well. But when I teach at Stanford, I was directing this course in neuroanatomy and neuroscience and for medical students. And I know is that the best lectures would come in and they're teaching the material from a place of

deep understanding. But they're also experiencing it as a first-time learner as at the same time. So it's just sort of embodying the delight of it, but also the authority over the notherty, but the sort of mastery of the material. And it's really the delight in it that the students are linking onto. And of course, they need and deserve the best accurate material. So they have to know what they're talking about. But yeah, it just tap into that energy of learning and

loving it and people are long for the ride. Or I get accused of being long-winded. But things get taken out of context. That leads to greater misunderstanding. And also I look at, listen, I come from a lineage of three dead advisors, three, all three. So I don't know when the reaper's coming for me. I'm doing my best to stay alive a long time. But whether or not it's a bullet or a boss or cancer or whatever or just old age, I mean, I'm trying to get it all out there.

It's best I can. And if it means you have to hit pause and come back a day or two later, like, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. I'm not going to go longer than I need to and I'm trying to shorten them up. But again, that's just kind of how I show up. It's like Tim Armstrong would say about writing songs. I asked him, do you write, how often do you write every day? Every day. Was Rick ever stopped creating? No. Is Joever stop preparing for comedy? Are you ever

stopping to think about world issues and technology and who you can talk to? I mean, it seems to me you've always got a plan. The inside, the thing I love about your podcast the most, to be honest, these days, is the surprise of like, I don't know who that is going to be there. It's almost like, like, I get a little nervously excited about when a new episode comes like, no idea. No idea. And, you know, I mean, I have some guesses based on what you told me during the break. I mean, you've

got some of them. People were just like, whoa, Lexus went there. Awesome. Can't wait. Click. You know, they're, you know, I think that's really cool. Like you're constantly surprising people. So you're doing it so well. Like it's such a high level. And I think it's also important for people to understand that what you're doing, Lex, there's no precedent for it. Sure, there've been interviews before. There've been podcasts before. There are discussions before. But it's not like

how many of your peers can you look to to find out how best to do the content like yours. Zero. There's one peer you. And so, you know, that should give you great peace and great excitement because you're, you're a pioneer. You're literally the tip of the spear. I don't want to take an unnecessary tangent. But I think this might thread together two of the things that we've been talking about, which are I think of pretty key importance. One is romantic relationships and the

other is creative process and work. And this is again, it's something I learned from Rick, but that he and I have gone back and forth on and that I think is worth elaborating on, which is earlier we're saying, you know, the best relationship is going to be one where you, where it brings you peace. I think peace also can be translated to, among other things, lack of distraction. So when you're with your partner, can you really focus on them and the

relationship? Can you not be distracted by things that you're upset about from their past or from your past with them or their, and of course the same is true for them, right? They ideally will feel that way towards you too. They can really focus. Also, when you're not with them, can you focus on your work? Can you not be worried about whether or not they're okay because you trust that they're

an adult and they can handle things or they will reach out if they need things? They're going to communicate their needs like an adult, you know, not creating messes just to get attention and things like that or, or disappearing, you know, for that matter. So peace and focus are intimately related

and distraction is the enemy of peace and focus. So there's something there, I believe, because with people that have the strong generative drive and want to, you know, be productive in their home life in the sense of a rich family life or partner life, whatever that is and in their work life, you know, the ability to really drop into the work and like, okay, you might have that sense. Like, I hope they're okay or, you know, need to check my phone or something, but just know,

like we're good. So peace and focus, I think, and present being present are so key and it's key at every level of romantic relationship from, you know, certainly presence and focus, you know, everything from sex to listening to, to, you know, raising a family to tending to the house and in work, it's absolutely critical. So I think that those things are kind of mirror images

of the same thing and they're both important reflections of the other. And when you start to just, you know, when work is not going well, then the relationship, the focus on relationship can suffer and vice versa. So it's crazy how important that is how how incredibly wonderful it could be to have a person in your life that kind of enables that creative focus. Yeah. And you supply the peace

and focus for their endeavors, whatever those might be. I mean, that that symmetry there, because clearly people have different needs and the need to just really trust, you know, like when Lex is working, he's in his generative mode and and and I know he's good. And so then they, they feel sure they've contributed to that, but then also what you're doing is supporting them

in whatever way it happens to be. And I think that sometimes you'll see that people pair up along creative creative or musical musical or computer scientists, but I think again, going back to this Conti episode on on relationships is that the superficial labels are less important

it seems than just the desire to create that kind of home life and relationship together. And as a consequence, the the work mode in for some people, they're both people aren't working and sometimes they are, but I think that's I think that's the good stuff, you know, and I think that's the big learning and all of it is that the further along I go with each birthday, I guarantee, you're gonna be like, what I want is simpler and simpler and harder and harder to create, but oh,

so worth it. The inner and the outer piece, it's been over two years, I think, since Costello passed away. Still tears me up. I tried about them today. It's it's it's it's proportional to love, but yeah, I'll cry by right now if I think it wasn't putting him down. It wasn't the act of him dying any of that actually that was a beautiful experience. I didn't expect it to be, but it was in my place when I was living in Topanga during the pandemic where we launched the podcast and I did

it at home and I hated the vet. So I did at home and it was he gave out this huge right at the end. And I could just tell he had been in just not a lot pain fortunately, but he'd just been working so hard just to move it all. And with the craziest thing happened, like so it was unbelievable. I've never had an experience like this. I expected my heart to break and I've felt a broken heart before. I felt it, frankly, when my parents split, I felt it when Harry

shot himself. I felt it when Barbara died and felt it when you know when Ben went. So as well. And so many friends like way too many friends. I mean, end of 2017, my friend Aaron King, John Johnny Fair, John Eichelberry, stomach cancer, suicide, fentanyl. It's like, whoa, all in a break in a week. And I just remember thinking like, what the, but when cost like in just heartbreak

and you just carry that and it's like, uh, but and that's just a short list, you know. And I don't say that for sob stories, just for a guy that wasn't in the military didn't grow up in the inner city. Like it's an unusual number of like deaths like close people. Um, when Costello went, the craziest thing happened. My heart warmed up. It like heated up and I wasn't on MDMA and I wasn't, I was just, just the moment he went, he just went, whoosh. And I was like, what the hell is this?

And it was just, it was like a supernatural experience to me. I just never had that. I'd put my grandfather in the ground. I was a Paul bearer at the funeral. I've like done that more times. I had like to, to, to have ever done it. And you just heated up with Costello. And I thought, what the fuck is this? And it was almost like, and you can make up these, we make up these stories about what it is. But it was almost like he was like, all right, I have to be careful because I will

cry here. Um, and I don't want to. Um, it was almost like he was like, all that effort because I put in putting so much effort into him. I was like, all right, you get that back. It was like the giant friggin' thank you. And it was, it was incredible, you know, and I'm not embarrassed to shed a tear too about it if I have to. Like, I was like, holy shit. Like, that's how close I was at end. What do you think, what do you think you can find that kind of love of death? Man, I don't know.

I mean, when, um, and excuse me for, for well and up, but it was just, I mean, it's a friggin' dog, right? I get it. But for me, it was, um, the first real home I ever had. Um, but when Costello went, it was like we'd had this home in Topanga, we'd set it up and we're like, and he was just so happy there. And I think it just, um, I don't know, it was, it was like this weird like victory slash massive loss like, like we didn't. Eleven years, we can did everything, everything to make him

as comfortable as possible. And he was super loyal, beautiful animal, but also just funny and fun. And, and I was like, I did it. Like, I like, you know, I gave as much of myself to this being as a human, I felt I could without making it, you know, like, you know, detract, detracting from the rest of my life. And he loved, and so I don't know, um, when I think about Barbara, especially, um, I well up and I, and it's hard for me, but I mean, I talked to her before she died, and that was

a brutal conversation saying goodbye to someone, especially with kids and, um, that was hard. Um, I think that really, um, flipped a switch in me where I'm like, I always knew I wanted kids, I'd say I want kids, I want a lot of kids, that flipped a switch in me. I was like, I want kids, even on my own kids. You might be able to find that kind of love. Yeah, I think it, because it was the caretaking, it wasn't about what he gave me all that time. And the more I could take care of

them and see them happy, the better I felt. It was crazy. And I, I don't know. So, I miss them every day, every day, I miss them every day. You're, uh, you got to heart that soulful of love. I can't wait for you to have kids, uh, be a, be a father. Yeah, well, I can't wait to do this. I'm ready for it when, uh, you know, uh, when, when God decides I'm ready, I'll, I'll have them. And then I will still beat you to it. I said, told you many times before. I think

you should, um, absolutely have kids. I mean, look at the people in our life, because, because we're kind of the, if you, in case you haven't realized it already, like we're the, the younger of the podcasters. But, you know, like Joe and Peter and Segera and, you know, I'm, you know, and the rest, right? They're, they're like the, like the tribal elders, right? And, um, and we're, you know, we're not the youngest in the crew, but we're, we're, if you look at all those guys,

they all have kids. They all adore their kids. And their kids bring tremendous meaning to their life. Like we, we, we'd be more on s if, you know, if you didn't go off and start a family, I didn't start, yeah, start a family. Um, and yeah, that, I think that's, that's a goal. I mean, I think the kids of the goals, that's one of them. The kids not only make them, uh, their life more joyful and brings love to their life. It's also makes them more productive, makes them better

people all that and say, go, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's kind of obvious. Yeah. I think that's what Costello wanted. I think I have this story in my head that he was just like, okay, like take this, like you can, yeah. And don't fuck this up. And don't, Lord knows, don't fuck this up. Andrew, love you, brothers. This is incredible. I love you too. Thank you. I appreciate you. Let's, as, we will talk often on each other's podcast for many years to come. Yes. Many, many years to come.

Thank you. Thanks for, for having me on here. And, um, there are no words for how much I appreciate your example and your friendship. So, love you, brother. Love you too. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Heberman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Camus. In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an

invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger, something better, pushing right back. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.