#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships - podcast episode cover

#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships

Jun 28, 20241 hr 57 min
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Episode description

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get $350 off - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/andrew-huberman-5-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Andrew's YouTube: https://youtube.com/AndrewHubermanLab Andrew's Instagram: https://instagram.com/hubermanlab Andrew's Website: https://hubermanlab.com Andrew's X: https://x.com/hubermanlab Andrew's book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3RNSIQN Andrew's book: https://hubermanlab.com/protocols-book PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:24) - Quitting and evolving (17:22) - How to focus and think deeply (19:56) - Cannabis drama (30:08) - Jungian shadow (40:35) - Supplements (43:38) - Nicotine (48:01) - Caffeine (49:48) - Math gaffe (1:06:50) - 2024 presidential elections (1:13:47) - Great white sharks (1:22:32) - Ayahuasca & psychedelics (1:37:33) - Relationships (1:45:08) - Productivity (1:53:58) - Friendship

Transcript

The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his fifth time on the podcast. He is the host of the Huberman Lab Podcast and is an amazing scientist, teacher, human being, and someone I'm grateful to be able to call a close friend. Also, he has a book coming out. Next year, you should pre-order now called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. Now, a quick few second mention of the sponsor. Check them out in the description.

It's the best way to support this podcast. We got A-C for NAPS, Element for Electrolytes, A-G1 for Nutrition, Shopify for Ecommerce, NetSweets for Business Management and Software, and BetterHelp for Mental Health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to LexFridman.com slash contact. And now onto the full live reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you

must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by A-Sleep and it's Pod for Ultra. First of all, Pod for is an improvement over the Pod 3, which was already awesome. 2X the cooling power. I always love it when stuff is just improving. When smartphones are improving, I love the amps are improving. I jump to a claw 3.5. It's just great. And a GPT-5 might be coming

out soon. It's just great. It's great to see improvement. But also, there's the Ultra part, which is an extra layer that adds the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame and the base can control the physical position of the actual mattress. So basically, you can not sleep in your bed and you can also read in your bed, which is a thing that I think a lot of people like doing. I have trouble reading too much of my bed because I fall asleep. The bed is just too

nice. Anyway, go to a sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod for Ultra. This episode was also brought to you by Element. The drink that Andrew and I consume a lot of during the episode. I drink a lot of Element almost, or not almost on every single podcast episode. That's just what I drink. I put Element in the water. I take, I have one next to me right now.

A Power Rated Zero bottle with 28 fluid ounces, fill it up with water, put one packet of Element in there, usually watermelon salt, mix it all up, put in the fridge, and about 30 minutes later, there's cold, refreshing deliciousness. But yeah, in the Texas heat, when I'm doing the long runs, or heart training sessions, like I just did 10 rounds the other day in grappling. No drinks. I usually don't like to drink during training. So afterwards, your body is completely dehydrated.

That's such an amazing feeling to replenish it with all the electrolytes you need. So, especially when it's cold and delicious. I love it. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase, try it at drinkelement.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It's kind of hilarious, how when Andrew and I hang out, how the supplementation and the diet and just our way of being is on point.

There's a lot of AG1 consumed, there's a lot of Element consumed, and there's a lot of ground beef or steak consumed on a regular basis. We've been planning to run together more, but we haven't quite done that. It's mostly my fault because running has just been such a solo thing for me. I really don't remember the last time I've ever run with anybody. I get so much into my head that I just feel like I'm even more introverted than I usually am. I lose myself inside my mind.

It's become such a meditative process that to do running with another person, it just feels a little bit weird. I feel like I wouldn't be able to contribute to the conversation if there's a conversation. Also pacing wise, there's a certain pace where a conversation is still possible, but it's a little uncomfortable. I can't really think at that pace that well and talk.

I already started talking, so I don't know. Well, it's a figured out, but he's just such a great person to work out with and a great person to talk to that will have to figure it out. Anyway, AG1 is always part of the picture. I drink it twice a day. It's a foundation of my nutrition. It's the thing when I consume it, I feel like I've got all my bases covered, no matter the crazy mental or the physical stuff that I'm going to do. They'll give you a one

month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell stuff anywhere with a great looking online store. It took me a really short time to set everything up. LexRoman.com slash store is a few shirts on there. I actually got a linear skinned shirt via Shopify recently, and I love it. I need to get more

rock music like classic rock shirts. They brought so much joy to me. They just want to celebrate it. I don't know why, but it seems like a cool way to celebrate it, especially if it's a nice linear skinned or a Led Zeppelin or pink Floyd shirt. A shirt I haven't quite found that's a golden night. Sure, one exists is SRV Steve Ray Bond. I just don't want a generic one. I want to want a super cool one. Hey, man, Jimmy Hendrix have a certain way about them that requires

a super cool shirt, not just a generic one. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Got a Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud

business management system. It is the machine inside the machine, where the company is the meta machine, and society is the meta-meta machine, because it's a collection of groups and companies, and it's also a collection of nations and a constant state of energy against each other with no centralized control. The centralized control comes from the government that does the regulation on the on the machine of capitalism, but within capitalism there's a certain degree of

freedom that allows you to build epic shit to build epic stuff. And that's where NetSuite could be the thing that helps you build the epic stuff by taking care of all the messy things like financials, HR, inventory supply, e-commerce, if that's the thing you do, and much more business related stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. I wonder how many companies

there are in the world. It's kind of cool to think that there's 37,000 companies. Each one with a person who founded or a collection of people founded the head of dream, and that are working hard to bring that dream into a reality, trying to survive, trying to thrive, trying to make money, trying to put food on the table of all the families involved, all the responsibility of that. I don't know. Those are all little puzzles, little battles. Sometimes big battles fought.

It's cool. I love humans. This is one of the ways that humans are awesome. I'm taking advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at NetSuite.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp spelled H-E-L-P. They figure what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It's kind of incredible the power of language. The power

of spoken language to explore the human mind. In order to generate speech, if it's a taken idea that's in your head, if you compress that idea into something that could be represented in comprehensive sequence of words, and you have to speak it, within the full context of everything that's been spoken previously and everything that's been going on around. Then there's another

human being on the other side that hears it. First of all, they have to hear it correctly. If it's noisy or whatever, or maybe their whole mind is focusing on some aspect of the scene that prevents them from being able to really hear what's being said. But once they do, they have to then interpret it and decode, decompress the thing that was represented in language into an idea and visualizes it, integrated, loaded in to the brain. And make sense of that idea, again, in the full context

of everything that's happened before. And in that way, back and forth, humans talk and make sense of the world together and make sense of their own mind together. It's just cool. It's cool that that's even possible and it's cool that that's actually a powerful way to understand yourself and to understand the world. So yeah, I'm a big fan of talking of rigorous deep conversation. And certainly talk therapy is rigorous and deep when done well. So if that's something that you're

interested in trying, you should try better help because it's super easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is Alex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now to your friends. Here's Andrew Huberman. You think there's ever going to be a day when you walk away from podcasting? Definitely.

I mean, I came up with in and then on the periphery of skateboard culture. And for the record, I was not a great skateboarder. I was tough to say that. Skateboarders are relentless if you call something you didn't do or whatever. I mean, I could do a few things and I loved the community. And I still have a lot of friends in that community. Jim Thiebo at Deluxe. You can look him up. He's kind of the man behind the whole scene. I know Tony, Hawk, Danny Whale, these guys, I got to see

them come up and get big and stay big in many cases. Start huge companies like Danny and Colin McKayce or DC. Some people have a long life and something. Some don't. But one thing I observed and learned a lot from in skateboarding at the level of observing the skateboarders and then the ones that started companies. And then what I also observed in science and still observe is you do it for a while. You do it at the highest possible level for you. And then at some point, you pivot

and you start supporting the young talent coming in. In fact, the greatest scientists, people like Richard Axel, Catherine Dulach, there are many other labs in neuroscience called Diceroth. They're not just known for doing great science. They're known for mentoring some of the best scientists that then go on to start their own labs. And I think in podcasting, I am very fortunate I got in in a fairly early wave, not the earliest wave. But thanks to your suggestion of doing a

podcast, fairly early wave. And I'll continue to go as long as it feels right. And I feel like I'm doing good in the world and providing good. But I'm already starting to scout talent. My company that I started with Rob Moore, psychomedia, a couple other guys in there too, Mike Blayback, our photographer, Ian Mackie, Chris Ray, Martin Phobes, we are a company that produces podcasts right now. That's human lab podcasts, but we're launching a new podcast, perform with Dr. Andy Galpin.

Nice. And we want to do more of that kind of thing, finding a really great talent, highly qualified people, credentialed people. And I've got a new kind of obsession with scouring the internet, looking for the young talent in science, in health, and related fields. And so will there be a final episode of the HLP? Yeah, I mean, bulletbuster cancer aside, you know, someday there'll be the very last. And thank you for your interest in science. And I'll clip out. Yeah, I love the idea

of walking away and not be dramatic about it. Right. When it feels right, you can leave and you can come back whenever the fuck you want. Right. John Stewart did this well with the Daily Show. I think that was during the 2016 election, where everybody wanted him to stay on, and he just walked away, dish up hell for different reasons, walked away, disappeared, came back, gave way so much money. Didn't care. And then came back and was doing like stand up in the park in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah. Genius. You have Habib who undefeated, walks away at the very top of the sport. Is he coming back? No, it's not least we don't know. Yeah. Right. You don't know. I don't know if there is everywhere or word. Yeah, I think it, you know, it's always a call, you know, you know, the last few years have been tremendous growth. We launched in January 2021. And even this last year,

2024 has been huge growth, you know, in all sorts of ways. It's been wild. And we have some short form content planned 30 minute shorter episodes that really distilled down the critical elements. We're also thinking about moving to other venues besides podcasting. So there's always the thought and the discussion. But when it comes to like when to hang up your cleats, you know, it's like there just comes a natural time where you can do more to mentor the next generation coming in.

Then focusing on self. And so there will come a time for that. And I think it's critical. I mean, again, I saw this in skateboarding like Danny and Colin and Danny's brother, Damon started DC with Ken block the driver who unfortunately passed away a little while ago, rally car driver. And they eventually sold it, I think to Quicksilver or something like that. But

they're all phenomenal talents in their respective areas. But they brought in the next, you know, the next line of amazing writers for the plan B thing, you know, Paul Rodriguez for skateboarders. They know who this is now in science. There are scientists like Feynman, for instance. I don't know if anyone can name one of his mentor offspring. So there are scientists who are phenomenal. Like beyond world class, right? Multigenerational world class who don't make good mentors. I'm not

saying he wasn't good mentor, but that's not what he's known for. And then there are scientists who are known for being excellent scientists and great mentors. And I think there's no higher celebration to be had at the end of one's career. If you can look back and like, hey, I put some really important knowledge into the world. People made use of that knowledge. And guess what? You spawned all these other scientific offspring or sport offspring or podcast offspring.

I mean, in some ways we look to rogan and to some of the other earlier podcasts is like they, you know, they paved the way. Ron Napatric first science podcast out there. So, you know, it eventually the baton passes. But fortunately right now everybody's active and it feels really good. Yeah, well, you're talking about the healthy way to do it, but there's also a different kind of way. Where you have something like Grisha, Gregory Pearlman, the mathematician who refused to accept

the field's model. So, he's one of the greatest living mathematicians and he just walked away from mathematics and rejected the field's model. What did you do after he left mathematics? Life. Private. 100%. I respect that. He's become essentially a recluse is these photos of him looking very broke. Like he could use the money. He turned away the money. He turned away everything.

You know, there's there's you just have to listen to the inner voice. You have to listen to yourself and make the decisions that don't make any sense for the rest of the world and makes sense to you. Bob Dylan didn't show up to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. That's punk. Yeah. Yeah. He probably grew in notoriety for that. Yeah, maybe just doesn't like going in Sweden, but it seemed like a big fun trip. I think they do it in a nice time of years, but hey, that's his right. He earned

that right. I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize. They aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art. Yeah. It's the the Rick Ruben thing. He got a verb it through download your inner thing. I don't think we've talked about this. That this obsession that I have about how Rick has this way of being very, very still in his body. He's what keeping his mind very active as a practice when he spends some time with him in Italy

last June. We would tread water in his pool in the morning and listen to history, rock and roll and 100 songs. Amazing podcast. By the way. Yeah. Then he would spend a fair amount of time during the day in this kind of meditative state where his mind is very active body, very still. And then Carl Diceroth when he came on my podcast talked about how he forces himself to sit still

and think in complete sentences late at night after his kids go to sleep. There's a state of mind, rapid eye movement sleep where your body is completely paralyzed and the mind is extremely active and people credit rapid eye movement sleep with some of the more elaborate emotion filled

dreams and the source of many ideas. There are other examples Einstein people described him as taking walks around the Princeton campus and pausing and would ask him what was going on and the idea that his mind was continuing to churn forward at a high rate. So this is far from controlled studies but we're talking about some incredible minds and creatives who have a practice of stealing the body while keeping the mind deliberately very

active, very similar to rapid eye movement sleep. And then there are a lot of people who also report great ideas coming to them in the shower while running. So it can be the opposite as well. Where the body is very active and the mind is perhaps more on kind of like a default mode network,

not really focusing on anyone specific thing. You know interesting is a bunch of physicists and mathematicians have talked to they talk about sleep deprivation and going crazy hours to the night obsessively pursuing a thing and then the solution to the problem comes when they finally get rest. Right and we know we just did this sixth episode special series on sleep with Matt Walker. We know that when you deprive yourself of sleep and then you get sleep you get a rebound in

rapid eye movement sleep you get a higher percentage of rapid eye movement sleep. And Matt talks about this in the podcast and he did an episode on sleep and creativity sleep and memory and rapid eye movement sleep comes up multiple times in that series. There's also some very interesting stuff about cannabis withdrawal and rapid eye movement sleep people are coming off cannabis off and will suffer from insomnia but when they finally do start sleeping they like dream like crazy.

Cannabis is a very controversial topic right now. Yeah I saw that what happened is a bunch of drama around episode you did on cannabis. Yeah we did an episode about cannabis talked about the health benefits and the potential risks right it's neither here nor there. Depends on the person depends on the age depends on genetic background a number of other things. We published that episode well over a year ago and it had no issues online so to speak. And then a clip of it was put to

X where you know the real action occurs as you know your favorite. Yeah the the four ounce gloves as opposed to the 16 ounce gloves that is X versus insomnia or YouTube. There was kind of an immediate dog pile from a few people in the cannabis research field. So PhDs and MDs yeah there were people on our side there were people on our side I mean yeah the the statement that got things riled up the most was this notion that for certain individuals there's a

high potential for inducing psychosis with high-teach see-containing cannabis for certain individuals not all that sparked some issues there was really a split you know you see this in different fields it there was one person in particular who came out swinging with language that

in my opinion is not like of the sort that you would use at a university venue especially among colleagues but that's fine you know we're all grown-ups well for me from my perspective it was strangely rude and it had an era of like elitism that to me was it the source of the problem during

COVID that led to the distrust of science and the the popularization of disrespecting science because so many scientists spoke with an arrogance in a douche baggery that I wish we would have a little bit less of yeah it's tough because most academics don't understand that people outside

the university system are they don't they're not familiar with like the inner working as a science and and the culture and so it's to be very careful how you present when you're a university professor and when yeah so you know he came out swinging and some you know a four-letter word type language

and you saw obviously upset about science simply said what I would say anywhere which was hey look you come on the podcast let's chat and one you give your tell me where I'm wrong and let's discuss and and fortunately he agreed and initially he said well no how can I be sure you're not going to

misrepresent me and so I said we got on a DM then an email then eventually phone call and just say listen like you're welcome to record the whole conversation we've never done a gacha on my podcast and let's just get to the heart of the matter I think this little controversy is perfect

kindling for for a really great discussion and and he had some other conditions that we worked out and and I and I felt like cool like he's really interested you get a very different person on the phone than you do on Twitter I will say he's been very collegial and that conversation is on

the schedule I said it will fly you out we'll put you up he said no he wants to fly himself he really wants to make sure there's like kind of a space between I think some of the perception of science and health podcasts and the academic community is that it's all designed to sell something

now we run ads so it can be freed everyone else yeah but I think look in the end he agreed and I'm excited for the conversation it was interesting because in the wake of that will exchange there's been a bunch of press from traditional press about cannabis is now surpassed alcohol

in many in many cultures as within the United States as when I say cultures I mean demographics the United States as the as the drug of choice there have been people highlighting the issues of potential psychosis and high THC containing and so it's kind of interesting to see how traditional

media is sort of on board certain elements that you know I put forward and I think there's some controversy as to whether or not the different strains the indicas and sativas are biologically different etc so we'll get down into the weeds on intended during that one and I'm excited it's

the first time that we've responded to a direct criticism online about scientific content in a way that really promoted like oh here the idea of inviting a particular guest and so it's great let's get a guest to his expert in cannabis I believe I could be wrong about this he's a behavioral

neuroscientist it's slightly different training but look he seems highly credentialed to be fun and we you know we welcome that kind of exchange I'm not being diplomatic I'm just saying like it's cool like he's coming on you know and he was friendly on the phone right like he literally

came out online was like basically like kind of like FU like F this and FU but you get someone on the phone and say hey how's it going and they're like oh yeah well you know I there was an immediate apology of like hey listen I came out normally I'm like not like that but online you know

yeah okay listen so it's a little bit like it's a little bit like Jiu Jitsu right people say all sorts of things I guess but if they if you're like all right well let's go then it's probably a different story you know it's not like Jiu Jitsu because in Jiu Jitsu people don't talk shit because

they know what the consequences are let me let me just say on my can off mic you have been very respectful towards this person and I'm look up to you and respect you and admire the fact that you have been that said to me that guy was being a dick and when you graciously politely

invite him on the podcast he was still talking down to you the whole time so I really admire and look forward to listening to you talk to him but I hope others don't do that like you are a positive humble voice exploring all the interesting aspects of science like you want to learn if there you've

got anything wrong you want to learn about it the way he was being a dick I was just hurt a little bit not because of him but because like there's some people I really really admire brilliant scientists that are not their best selves on twitter on x definitely I don't understand

what happens to their brain well they regress they regress and they also are protected you know you know when you remove the I mean no scientific argument should ever come to physical blows right but when you remove the real world thing of being right in front of somebody and people will

throw all sorts of stones at a distance you know an overall wall and they've got their their wife or their husband or their boyfriend or their dog or their cat to go cuddle with them afterwards um but you get in a room and it's like you know confrontational people in real life are pretty rare

but hopefully if they do it they're like willing to back it up with knowledge in this case right we're not talking about physical altercation yeah he kept coming and he kept putting on conditions how do I know you want this and I was like well you can record the conversation how do I know you

want that listen we'll pay for you to come out how do you know and eventually he just kind of relented and and to his credit you know he's agreed to come on I mean he still has to show up but once he does you know we'll treat him right like we would any other guest yeah you treat

people really well and I just hope that people are a little bit nicer on the internet yeah well you know X is an interesting one because you it thickens your skin you know to just to go on there I mean you have to be ready to deal with sure but I can still criticize people for for

being douchebags yeah because like that's still not good inspiring behavior like especially for scientists that should be sort of symbols of scientific thinking which requires intellectual humility humility is a big part of that and Twitter is a good place to illustrate that yeah

eight years ago I used to I was a student in TA then instructor and then directed a cold spring harbor course on visual neuroscience these are summer courses that explore different topics and at night we would host what we hoped were battles in front of the students where you'd get two

people on it you know would it be neural prosthetics or molecular tools that would first you know restore vision to the blind kind of arguments and you kind of like it's kind of a silly argument because it's going to be a combination of both right but you get these great arguments but the

arguments were always couched in data and occasionally you'd get somebody would go like or would curse or think but it was the rare very very well placed you know insult it wasn't you know coming out swinging I think ultimately you know Twitter's a record of people's behavior that the internet

is a record of people's behavior and here I'm not talking about news reports about people's behavior I'm talking about how people show up online up is really important you've always carried yourself with a ton of composure and respect and you know you just you would hope that people would grow from

that example well I'll tell you that the the podcasters that I'm scouting it's their energy but it's also how they treat other people how they respond to comments and you know we're blessed to have pretty significant reach when we put out a podcast like someone else's podcast it goes far and wide

so like a skateboard team like a laboratory where you're selecting people to be in your lab you're you want to pick people that you would enjoy working with and they're collegial etiquette and etiquette is lacking nowadays but you're in the suit and tie bringing it back

bringing it back you said that your conversation with James Hollis a younging psychoanalyst had a big impact on you what do you mean James Hollis is a 84 year old union psychoanalyst is written 17 books including under saturn shadow which is on the healing and trauma of men that eating

Eden project excuse me which is about relationships and creating a life I discovered James Hollis in an online lecture that was recorded I think in San Diego it's on YouTube the audio is terrible called creating a life and this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span I can't remember and it

was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time I was like I just found the most incredible lecture I've ever heard and I he talks about the shadow he talks about your developmental upbringing and how you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents tendencies and values

in certain areas he talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages of life to live a full life so it's always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast and he wasn't able to travel so our team went out to DC sat down with him we rarely do that nowadays

people come to our studio and he came in he had some surgeries recently and he kind of came in with some assistance from a you know a cane and then sat down and just just blew my mind it from start to finish he didn't miss a syllable and every sentence that he spoke was like a quotable sentence

of with real potency and actionable items I think one of the things that was most striking to me was how he said when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response and we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or well seated or well lying down

doesn't have to be meditation but it could be that we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we really want and that if we do that practice repeatedly ten minutes a day here 15 minutes a day there that we start to really touch into our unique

gifts and the things that make us each us and the directions we need to take but that so often we just stay in stimulus response we just do do do do do do which is great we have to be productive but we miss those important messages and interestingly he also put forward this idea of what

is it like get up shut up suit up yeah something like that like get out of bed suit up and shut up and get to work he also has that in him kind of a goggin type mindset so be able to turn off all this self reflection and self analysis and just get shit done get shit done but then also take

dedicate time and stop and just let stuff guys are to the surface from the unconscious mind and he quote Shakespeare and he quotes young and he quotes everybody through history with with incredible accuracy and and in exactly the way needed to drive home a point but that that conversation to

me was one that I really felt like okay you know if I don't wake up tomorrow for whatever reason that one's in the can and I feel really great about it it's it to me it's the most important guest recording we've ever done in particular because he has wisdom and while I hope he lives to

be 204 chances are he's got another what 20 30 years with us hopefully more but I really really wanted to capture that information and get it out there so I'm very very proud of that one and he's the kind of guy that anyone listens to him young old male female whatever and you're

going to get something of value what do you think about this idea of the shadow that the good and the bad that we repress that tides from plain sight when we analyze ourselves that's there I think there's like a ocean that we don't have direct access to yes yeah we're young said it we

have all things inside of us and we do and some people are more in touch with those than others and some people it's repressed I mean does that mean that we could all be you know horrible people or marvelous people benevolent people perhaps I think that thankfully more often than not people

lean away from the like violent and harmful parts of their shadow but I think spending time thinking about you know one's shadow shadows is super important how how also are we going to grow otherwise you know we have these unconscious blind spots of denial or repression or whatever

you know the psychiatrist tell us but it clearly exists within all of us and we have neural circuits for rage we all do we have neural circuits for altruism and known to born without these things and some people they're atrophied and some people they're hypertrophied but I've

with looking inward and recognizing what's there is key or positive things like creativity maybe that's what Rick Rubin is accessing when you go silent silent body active mind that's interesting what is it for you what place do you go to that generates ideas that helps

you generate ideas I have a lot of new practices around this I mean I'm all always exploring for protocols I have to that's like in my nature when when I went and spent time with Rick I I tried to adopt his practice of staying very still and just letting stuff you know come to the surface or

the dice serathi in way of formulaing complete sentences and while being still in the body what I I found works better is what my good friend Tim Armstrong does to write music he writes music every day he's a music producer he's obviously a singer guitar player for rancid and he's helped dozens and

dozens and dozens of female pop artists and punk rock artists write great songs and many of the famous songs that you've heard from other artists Tim helped them write Tim wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night and what he does is he'll start drawing or painting so what he's done and

Joni Mitchell talks about this too you find some creative outlet that's like 15 degrees off center from your main creative outlet and you do that thing so for me that's drawing I like doing anatomical drawings neuroscience based drawing drawn neurons that kind of thing and if I do that for a little

while my mind starts churning on the the nervous system and biology and then I come up with areas I'd like to explore for the podcast ways I'd like to address certain topics right now I'm very interested in autonomic control a beautiful paper came out that shows that anyone can learn to

control their pupil sizes and without changing luminance through a biofeedback mechanism um and that gives them audit control over their so-called automatic autonomic nervous system and I've been looking at what the circuitry is and it's it's beautiful so I'll draw the circuitry

that we know underlies autonomic function and as I'm doing that I'm thinking oh like what about autonomic control and those people that supposedly can control their pupil size then you go in and there's a paper published in nature press one of the nature journals and there's a recent paper

on this like how cool and then we talk about this and then how could this be put into a kind of a post or how could this you know so doing things that are about 15 degrees off center from your main thing is a great way to access I believe the circuits for in Tim's case painting goes to song

writing I think for Joni Mitchell that was also the case right I think it was drawing and painting to singing and songwriting for Rick I don't know what it is maybe it's listening to podcasts I don't know that that's his business do you have anything that you like to focus on that allows you then

an easier transition into your main creative work no I'd really like to focus on emptiness and silence so I picked the dragon I have to slay so whatever the problem of the work on and I just sit there and stare at I love how fucking linear you are man it's just and if there's no if you're

tired I'll just sit I believe in the in the power of just waiting and usually I'll stop being tired with their energy rises from somewhere or an idea pops from somewhere but there needs to be a silence and emptiness it's an empty room just me in the dragon and we wait that's it like if

it's a usually with programming you're thinking about a particular design I kind of I design this thing to solve this problem any cognitive enhancers I've got quite the gallery in front of me oh that's right yeah this is not a sales thing is just I tend to do this bounce back and forth

your refrigerator just happen to have a lot of different choices so water all my refrigerator I know right there's no food in there there's water there's element which they now have canned yeah and yes they're a podcast sponsor for both of us but that's not why cracked one of these open I like

them provide their they're cold and that's by the way my least favorite favorite flavors I was saying that's that's the reason it's still left in the fridge the cherry one is really good the black cherry there's an orange one yeah I pushed the sled this morning and pulled the sled for my workout

at the gym and and it was hot today here in Austin so some salt is good and then Matina Yerbomate zero sugar full confession I helped develop this I'm a partial owner but I love your Bermate half-arge in teen been drinking mate since I was a little kid there's actually a photo

somewhere on the internet when I'm like three sitting on my grandfather's lap sipping Mate out the gourd and then this my fun interesting this is just a little bit of coffee with a scoop of Brian Johnson gave me cocoa just like pure unsweetened cocoa so I put that in chocolate and I like it

it just for the taste well actually nukes my appetite and since I'm we're not going out to dinner tonight until later I figure that's good yeah Brian's an interesting one right he's really pushing this this thing the optimization of yeah although he just hurt his ankle he posted a photo

of the hurt his ankle so now he's injecting BPC body protection compound 157 which many many people are taking by the way I didn't episode on peptides I should just say you know BPC 157 one of the known effects in animal models is angiogenesis like development of new vascular

which can be great in some context but also if you have a tumor you don't really want to vascularize that tumor anymore so I worry about people taking BPC 157 continually but and there's very little human data I think there's like one study and it's a lousy one so a lot

of animal data some of the peptides are interesting however there's one that I've experimented with a little bit called pinellin which I find even if I've just taken it twice a week before sleep then it times it seems to do something to the circadian time keeping mechanism because then on

other days when I don't take it I get unbelievably tired at that time that normally I would do the injection these are things that I'll experiment with for a couple weeks and then typically stop maybe try something else but I stay out of things that really stimulate any of like a major hormone

pathways when it comes to peptides there's actually a really good question of how do you experiment like how long do you try to think to figure out if it worked for you well I'm very sensitive to these things so I and I have been doing a lot of things for a long time so if I add something in

it's always one thing at a time and I notice right away if it does not make me feel good like there's a lot of excitement about some of the so-called growth hormones to critigogs hypermuralin testimonial and sermerialin I've experimented a little bit with those in the past and they've

nuke to my rap and eye movement sleep but given me a lot of deep sleep which doesn't feel good to me but other people like them I also just generally try and avoid taking peptides that tap into these hormone pathways because you can run into all sorts of issues but some people take them safely

but usually after about four or five days I know if I like something or I don't and then I move on but I am not super adventurous with these things I know people that will take cocktails of peptides with multiple things they'll try anything that's not me and I do blood work but also I'm you know

I'm mainly reading papers and podcasting and I'm teaching a course in X-spring Stanford I'm going to do a big undergraduate course so I'm trying to develop that course and things like that so I don't need to lift more weight or run further than I already do which is not that much weight or or far as it is. All right you're not going to the Olympics you're not trying to truly maximize

the mass-pukedere performance. No and I'm not and I'm not trying to get down below whatever you know 7% body fat or something I don't have those kinds of goals so hydration, electrolytes, caffeine in the form of mante and then this coffee thing and then and then here's one that I think I brought out for discussion this is a piece of Nicarat they're not a sponsor.

Nicotine is an interesting compound it will raise blood pressure and it is probably not safe for everybody but you know the nicotine is gaining in popularity like crazy mainly these pouches that people put in the lip not we're not talking about I'm smoking vaping dipping or

snuffing. You know my interest in nicotine started this was in 2010 I was visiting Columbia Medical School and I was in the office of the great neurobiologist Richard Axel on the Nobel Prize co-recipient with Linda Bach for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction.

Brilliant guy he's probably in his late 70s now. Yeah and he kept popping Nicarat in his mouth and I was like what's this about and he said oh well this was just anecdote right but he said it but he said this he said oh well you know it protects against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's I

said it does he goes yeah yeah I don't know if he was kidding or not he's known for making jokes and then he said that when he used to smoke it really helped his focus and creativity but then he quit smoking because he went lung cancer and he found that he couldn't focus as well so he

would choose Nicarat so occasionally like right now well each I do a half a piece but I'm not Russian so I'm a little you know you deduce pop the whole thing in your mouth so I'll do a couple milligrams every now and again and it definitely sharpens the mind on an empty stomach in particular

but you fast all day you're still doing one meal a day one meal a day yeah yeah I did a nicotine pouch with Roganet dinner and I got high yeah that's a lot that's like usually six or eight milligrams I know people that get a canister of Zen take one a day pretty soon they're taking a canister a day

so you have to be very careful I will only allow myself two pieces of Nicarat total per week and you will notice that you know in the day after you use it you know sometimes your throat will feel a little bit like like a little spasm you like you might want to cough once or twice

and so you know if you're singer or your podcast or something you have to do long podcasts you want to just be mindful of but yeah you're supposed to kind of like keep it in your cheek and now here we go but it did make me intensely focused in a way that was a little bit scary because

yeah the nucleus basalus is in the you know basal four brain nucleus has colonurgic neurons that radiate out axons little wires that release acetylcholine into the neocortex n elsewhere and when you focus on one particular topic matter or one particular area of your visual field

or listening to something and focusing visually we know that there's an elaboration of the amount of acetylcholine released there and it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor sites there so it's a kind of an intentional modulation by acetylcholine so you're getting it with nicotine

you're getting an exogenous or artificial heightening of that circuitry and the time I had talked across another podcast he told me that apparently it helps them as he said publicly keep his love life vibrant really it caused the vasoconstrictions like he literally said it

makes it take very hard he said that publicly also okay well as little as I want to think about Tucker Carlson's trust on sex life no disrespect the major effect of nicotine on the vascular my understanding is that it causes vasoconstriction not vasodilation drugs like siallus,

the dalleville, biagra etc. vasodilators they allow more blood flow nicotine does the opposite less blood flow to the periphery but provided dosages are kept low and I don't recommend people use it frequently or at all and I don't recommend young people use it you know you know 25 and younger

brains very plastic at that time and and certainly smoking dipping vaping it's nothing not aren't good because you're gonna run into we were running into trouble for other reasons but in any case um oh and even there vaping is a controversial topic

sit probably safer than smoking but has its own issues and I said something like that and boy did I catch a lot of heat for that can't say anything as a health science educator not piss somebody off you know it just depends on where the center of masses and how far outside that you are

for me the caffeine is the main thing and actually it's a really big part of my life and one of the things you recommend that people wait a bit in the morning oh yeah to consume caffeine if they experience a crash in the afternoon that this is one of the misconceptions I

um I regret maybe even discussing it for people that crash in the afternoon often times if they delay their caffeine by 60 and 90 minutes in the morning they will offset some of that but if you eat a lunch this too big or you didn't sleep all the night before you're

not gonna avoid that afternoon crash but I'll wake up sometimes and go straight to hydration caffeine especially if I'm gonna work out here's a weird one if I exercise before 8 30 AM especially if I start exercising when I'm a little bit tired I get energy that last all day if I wait until

my peak of energy which is mid-morning 10 AM 11 AM and I start exercising then I'm basically exhausted all afternoon and I don't understand why I mean it depends on the intensity of the workout but so I like to be done showered and heading into work by 9 AM but I don't always meet that

more so you're saying it doesn't affect your energy if you start with exercising I think you can get energy and wake yourself up with exercise if you start early and then that fuels you all day long I think that if you wait until you're feeling at your best to train sometimes that's detrimental because then in the afternoon when you're doing like the work we get paid for like research podcasting etc then oftentimes you know your brain isn't firing as well.

Yes interesting I haven't really rigorously tried that wake up and just start running or loses the jaco thing and then there's this phenomenon called entrainment where if you force yourself to exercise or eat or socialize or view bright light at a certain time of day for

three to seven days in a row pretty soon there's an anticipatory circuit that gets generated this is why anyone in theory can become a morning person to some degree or another and this is also a beautiful example of why you wake up before your alarm clock goes off you know people wake up

and all of a sudden it goes off it wasn't because it clicked it because you have this incredible timekeeping mechanism that exists in sleep and there's some papers that have been published in last couple of years nature neuroscience and elsewhere showing that people can answer math problems

in their sleep simple math problems but math problems nonetheless this does not mean that if you ask your partner a question and sleep that they're going to answer accurately like they might screw up the whole cumulative probability of 20 percent across multiple months all right listen what

happened what happened here's a deal a few years back I did a four and a half hour after editing four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility um the entire recording took 11 hours and at one point during the and by the way I'm very proud of that episode there's many couples

have written to me and said they now have children as a consequence of that episode and my first question is what were you doing during the episode but in all seriousness um we should say that four and a half hours yeah and for people then they should listen to the episode you're it's extremely

technical episode yeah you're not stopping facts and and referencing huge number of papers it's must be exhaust I don't understand how you can possibly talk about sperm health sperm agences to talks about the ovulatory cycle talks about things people can do that are that are considered

absolutely supported by science to talk about some of the things kind of out on the edge a little bit that are a little bit more experimental talks about IVF it talks about XC it talks about um all of that it talks about frequency of pregnancy as a function of age etc um but there's

this one portion there in the podcast where I'm talking about the uh probability of a successful pregnancy as a function of age and so there was a clip that was cut in which I was describing cumulative probability and by the way we've published cumulative probability history of

in many of my laboratories papers including one that was a nature article in 2018 so we run these all the time and yes I know the difference between independent and cumulative probability okay that's just like I do um the way the clip was cut and what I stated unfortunately combined

to like a pretty great gaff where I say you're just adding percent I said you're just adding percentages 20 to 20 to 120 percent and then I made us kind of unfortunately my humor isn't always so good and I made a joke I said um 120 percent but that's a different thing altogether what I

should have said was um that's impossible you know and here here's how it actually works but then that that continues where I then describe the cumulative probability histogram for um successful pregnancy but somewhere in the early portion I I mistated something right I made a math error

um which implied I didn't understand the difference between independent and cumulative probability which I do and it got picked up and and run and people had a really good laugh with that one at my expense and so what I did in response to it was rather than just say everything I just said now

I said I just came out online and said hey folks in an episode dated this on fertility I made a math error here is the formula for a cumulative probability successful pregnancy of that age here's the graph here's the you know and I offered it as a teaching moment in two ways one for people to

understand cumulative probability it was sort of interesting to a number of people that had come out critiquing the gaff also um like biology and folks came out pointing out that they didn't understand cumulative probability so there was a lot of posturing you know the dog pile oftentimes people are

quick to dog pile they didn't understand but a lot of people did understand some smart people out there obviously I call my dad and he was just laughing he goes oh this is good this is like the old school way of of hammering academics um but the point being there's a teaching moment um

giving an opportunity to say hey I made a mistake I also made a mistake in another podcast where I did a micron to millimeter conversion and we're sending me your conversion but and we always correct these in the show note captions we correct them in the audio now um unfortunately on YouTube

it's harder to correct you can't go and edit and segments we put in the captions but that was the one teaching moment if you make a mistake it's substantive and related to data you you you apologizing correct the mistake uses teaching moment the other one was to say hey you know

in all the thousands of hours of content we've put out I'm sure I've made some small errors I think I once said serotonin when I'm in dopamine and you know you're you're going you're you're riffing and it's a reminder to be careful um to edit double check but the internet usually uh

edits for us and then we go make corrections but it didn't feel good at first but ultimately you know I can laugh at myself about it um long ago at Berkeley when I was teeing my first class it was a biosecology class it's been 1998 or 1999 um I was drawing the pituitary

gland it which is you know it has an anterior and a posterior lobe actually is a medial lobe too I'd buy five six hundred students in that lecture hall and I drew his chalkboard and I drew the two lobes of the pituitary and I said my back was to the eye and I said you know and so they just sort of

hang there and everyone just erupted and laughed because it looked like a scrotum with two testicles and I remember thinking like oh my god like I don't think I can turn around like in face this you know and like I like I got to turn around sooner or later so I turned around and we just

all had to be laughed together it was embarrassing I'll tell you one thing though they never forgot about the two lobes of the pituitary yeah and you haven't forgotten about that either right there's a high high salience for these kinds of things and it also was kind of fun to see how excited people

get to see people trip it's like an elite sprinter trips and does something stupid like you know runs the opposite direction out the blocks or something like that and or you know I recall at one world cup match years ago a guy scored against his own team I think they killed the guy do you

remember that some South American or Central American team yeah and they killed the guy but yeah let's let's look it up I just said world cup yeah he was gunned down Hodgers Eskabar yeah scored against his own team in 1994 world cup in the United States just 27 years old

playing for the Columbia national team yeah last name Eskabar it's a good name I think it would protect you listen you know so there's some gaffes that get people killed right so you know how forgiving are we for online mistakes you know I said it's the nature of the mistakes

people were quite gracious about the the gaff and some weren't and you know it's interesting that um we as you know public health science educators um you know we'll do long podcasts sometimes and and you need to be really careful what's great is AI allows you to check these things now more

readily so that's cool and there are ways that that's now going to be more self correcting I mean you know I think there's there's a lot of errors out there on the internet and people are finding them and it's cool like things are getting cleaned up yeah but mistakes nevertheless will happen

are you do you feel the pressure of not making mistakes sure I mean you know I try and get things right to the best you know to the best of my ability um I check with experts it's kind of interesting when people really don't like something that was said in a podcast a lot of times I chuckle because

I'm you know it's definitely some amazing scientists but they're I talked to them else people elsewhere um and it's always interesting to me how you know I'll get divergent information and then I'll find the overlap in the Venn diagram and I have this like question do I just

stay with the overlap in the Venn diagram like I didn't episode on oral health I didn't know this until I researched that episode but oral health is critically related to heart health and brain health that there's a bacteria that causes cavity streptococcus you know that can make

its way into other parts of the body through the mouth that um can cause serious issues there's the idea that some forms of dementia some forms of heart disease are starting the mouth basically I talked to no fewer than four dentist dental experts and there was a lot of convergence I also

learned that teeth can de-mineralize that's the formation of cavities they can also remineralize as long as the cavities into deep it can actually fill itself back in especially if you provide the right substrates for it that saliva is this incredible fluid that has all this capacity to

remineralize teeth provided the milieu is right things like alcohol based mouth washes killing off some of the critical things you need is fascinating and I put out that episode thing oh well I'm not a dentist I'm not an oral health episode I talked to a pediatric dentist there's a terrific one

doctor downscore stacy staceci on instagram does great content talk to some others um and like and then I just waited for the attack I was like here we go and it didn't come and dentist were thanking me I was like whoa you know um that's a rare thing more often than not

if I do an episode about say psilocybin or mdma you get some people liking it or ADHD and the drugs for ADHD we did a whole episode on the riddle and viavance adder all stuff you get people saying thank you you know I prescribed this to my kid and it really helps and this and I but they're

private about the fact that they do it because they catch so much attack from other people so I like to find the center of mass report that try and make it as clear as possible and then I know that there's some stuff where I'm going to catch shit what frustrating for me

is when like I see claims that I'm like against fluoridization of water which I'm not right like we talked about the benefits of fluoride it builds hyper strong bonds within the teeth I went and looked at some of the the literally the crystal struck not excuse me not the crystal

structure but the the essentially the like micron and sub micron structure of teeth is incredible and where floor I can get in there and form these super strong bonds and you can also form them with things like hydroxyapatite and why is there fluoride in water well it's the best okay you get

you say some things that are interesting but then somehow it gets turned into like you're against fluoridization which I'm not or I've been accused of being against sunscreen I wear mineral based sunscreen on my face I don't want to get skin cancer or I use a physical barrier there is

a cohort of people out there that think that all sunscreens are bad I'm not one of them I'm not what's called the sunscreen truther but then you get attacked for like if you so we're talking about there are certain sunscreens that are problematic so what and Rhonda Patrick's now starting to

get vocal about this and so there's certain topics it's interesting for which you have to listen carefully to what somebody is saying but there's a lumper or lumping as opposed to splitting of of what health educators say and so it just seems like like with politics there's this like

urgency to just put people into a camp of expert versus like renegade or something and it's not like that it's just not like that so the short answer is I really strive really strive to get things right but I know that I'm going to piss certain people off and you've taught me and Joe's taught me

and other podcasters have taught me that like if you worry too much about it then you aren't going to get the newest information out there like peptides there's very little human data unless you're talking about Viley C or the Melana you know the stuff in the alpha Melana site stimulating hormone

stuff which are prescribed for female libido to enhance female libido or um Stormarellin which is for certain growth hormone deficiencies with with rare exception there's very little human data but people are still super interested and a lot of people are taking and doing these things so you want to get the information out do you try to not just look at the science but research what the communities are talking what the various communities are talking about like maybe research what the

conspiracy theorists are talking about just so you know all the armies there are going to be attacking your castle yes so like for instance there's a community of people online that believe that like if you consume seed oils or something that like you're setting up your skin for sunburn and if you

don't you know like there's all these like theories but I like to so I like to know what the theories are I like to know what the extremes are but I also like to know what the standard conversation is but there's generally more agreement than disagreement I think where um you know I've been kind

of bullish actually is you know or like supplements like people go oh supplements well there's food supplements like a protein powder just different than a vitamin and then they are compounds there are compounds that have real benefit and but people get very nervous about the fact that they're not

regulated but some of them are are vetted with for potency and for um safety with with more rigor than others you know and it's interesting to see how people who take care of themselves and put a lot of work into that are often attacked that's been interesting also one of the most

controversial topics nowadays is ozempic mongaro I'm very middle of the road on this I don't understand why the quote unquote health wellness community is so against these things I also don't understand why they have to be looked at as the only route for some people they've really helped

them lose weight and yes there can be some muscle loss and other lean lean body loss but that can be offset with resistance training they've helped a lot of people and other people are like no this stuff is terrible I think the most interesting thing about ozempic mongaro is that they are GLP1

during the GLP1 pathway googon like peptide one and they was discovered in heel monsters which is lizard basically and someone what the now the now the entomologist will dive on me it's a big big lizard looking thing that doesn't eat very often and they figured out that there's this peptide

that allows it to curb its own appetite at the level of the brain and the gut and it has a lot of homology to sequence homology to what we now call GLP1 so I love anytime there's animal biology links to cool human biology links to a drug that's powerful that can help people with obesity and type

two diabetes and there's evidence they can even curb some addictions those are newer data but I don't see is it either or in fact I've been a little bit disappointed at the way that the whatever you want to call it health wellness biohacking community has like slammed on ozempic

mongaro it's like they're like just get out and run and do listen there are people are caring substantial amounts of weight that running could injure them they get on these drugs and they can improve and then hopefully they're also doing resistance training and eating better and then

you know you're bringing all the elements together well why do you think the criticism is happening is that that ozempic became super popular so people are misusing it or that kind of thing no I think what it is is that people think if it's a pharmaceutical it's bad and then or if

it's a supplement it's bad depending on which camp there in and and it wouldn't to be wonderful to kind of like fill in the gap between this divide that you know what I would like to see in politics and in health is neither right nor left but what we can just call a league of reasonable

people that looks at things on an issue by issue basis and fills in the center because I think most people are in our I don't want to say center in a political way but I think most people are reasonable they want to be reasonable but that's not what sells clicks that's not what that's not

what drives interest but I'm a very like like I look at issue by issue person by person I don't like in group out group stuff I never have I've got friends from all walks of life I said there's another podcast and always sounds like a like a political statement but like the the the push towards

like you know polarization is it's so frustrating if there's one thing that's discouraging to me as as I get older each year I'm like wow are we ever going to get out of this like polarization speaking which how are you going to vote for the presidential election I'm still trying to

figure out how to interview the people involved and do it well what do you think the role of podcasts that's going to be in this year's election I would love long form conversations to happen with the with the candidates I think it's going to be huge I would love Trump to go on Rogan

I would I'm embarrassed to say this but I would love to honestly would love to see Joe Biden go on Joe Rogan also I would imagine that both would go on but separately separately I think it's I think it debate Joe does debates but I think Joe is best as one-on-one conversation really intimate

I just wish that Joe Biden would actually do long form conversations I thought he had done it it wasn't me I think it was on Jay Shetty he did Jay Shetty he did he did a few but what I mean long form I mean really long form like two three hours and more relaxed it was much more orchestrated

because what happens when it's the interview is a little bit too short it becomes into this generic political type of NBC CNN type of interview you get a set of questions and you don't get to really feel the human expose the human to the light in it the full we talked about the shadow the good

the bad and the ugly so I think there's something magical about two three four hours but it doesn't have to be that long but it has to have that feeling to it where there's not people standing around and everybody's nervous and you're going to be

strictly sticking to the question answer type of feel but just shoot and shit which Rogan is the best by far in the world at that I don't think people really appreciate how skilled he is at what he does and the number I mean the three or four podcasts per week plus

the UFC announcing plus comedy tours and stadiums plus you know doing comedy shows in the middle of the week plus you know husband and father and a friend and you just do the guys got like super human levels of output I agree that long form conversation is a whole other business and I think

that people want and deserve to know the people that are running for office in a different way and to really get to know them well listen you know I guess you I mean is it clear that he's going to do jail time or maybe he gets away no I don't think I'm because I was going to stay I mean

that does that mean you're going to be podcasting from in prison yeah we're going to back down going to figure out how to commit a crime so I can get in prison please don't please don't well that's yeah I'm sure they have visitors right that just doesn't feel enough

lent a way to get the interview but yeah I understand you wouldn't be able to wear that suit you'd be wearing a different suit that's true yeah it's going to be interesting and you do I'm not just saying this because you're my friend but you would do a marvelous job I think you should

sit down with all of them separately to keep it civil and and see what what happens here's one thing that I found really interesting in this whole political landscape when I'm in Los Angeles I often get invited to these like they're not dinners but gatherings where you know a local

you know bunch of podcasters will come together but a lot of people from the entertainment industry big agencies big tech like big big tech many the people have been on this podcast and they'll host a discussion or debate and what you find if you look around the room and you talk to people

is that about half the people in the room are very left leaning and very outspoken about that and they'll tell you exactly who they want to see in the in the when the presidential race and the other half will tell you that they're for the other side a lot of people that people assume are

on one side of the aisle or the other are in the exact opposite side now some people are very open about who that who therefore but it's been very interesting to see how when you get people one-on-one they're like telling you they want ex-candidate to win or why candidate to win and sometimes

like really I can't believe it like you like yep and so it's what people think about people's political leaders is often exactly wrong and and that's been eye opening for me and I've seen that in university campuses too and and so it's can be really really interesting

to see what happens in in November in addition to that as you said most people are close to the center despite what Twitter makes it seem like most people whether that's not a lot to center right the kind of close to the center yeah I mean here's the to me the most interesting question who is

going to be the next big candidate in years to come like who's that going to be right now I don't I don't I don't see or know of that person who's it going to be yeah the young promising candidates we're not seeing them we're not seeing like who another way to ask that question who would want to be

well that's the issue right you know it who wants to live in this 12-hour news cycle where you're just trying to you know don't come the other team so that nobody notices like the your the shit that you fucked up you know like that that's not like that's not only not fun or interesting

it also is just like it's got to be psychosis inducing at some point and I think that you know God willing we're gonna you know some young guy or woman is like on this and refuses to to back down and was just like determined to be president and will make it happen but like I

don't even know who the Bible candidate is are maybe you looks you know we should ask Sagar Sagar would know yeah yeah maybe Sagar himself Sagar's show is awesome yeah it is crystal to a great thing he's incredible especially since they have somewhat divergent opinions on that that's

what makes it so cool he's great and looks great in a suit looks real set he's taking really good care of himself he I think he's getting married soon congratulations Sagar forgive me for not remembering your your wife but future wife's name he won my heart by giving me a biography of Hitler

as a president that's what he gave you yeah I gave you a hatchet with a poem and that shows the fund them out the difference with the poem inscribed in it which was pretty damn good I realize everything we bring up on the screen is like really depressing like the soccer player getting killed

can we bring up something happy sure we're gonna nature's metal Instagram that's pretty intense we actually did a collaborative post on a on a shark thing really yeah what kind of shark thing so to generate the fear VR stimulus from my lab in 20 was it yet 2016 we went down to Guadalupe

Island off the coast of Mexico me and a guy named Michael Muller who's a very famous um portrait photographer but also takes photos of sharks and we used 360 video to build VR of great white sharks right back to the lab we published that studying current biology in 2017 went

back down there um and that was the year that I exited the cage that you lower the cage or the crane and that year I exited the cage I had a whole mess with a air failure the day before I was breathing from a hookle line wall in the cage I had no scuba on divers were out the thing got

both constricted up and I had an air failure and I had to actually share air and it was a whole mess story for another time but the next day because I didn't want to get PTSD and it was pretty scary the next day I cage exited um with some other divers and it turns out with these great white

sharks in Guadalupe the water's very clear and you can swim toward them and then they'll they'll veer off you if you swim toward them otherwise they see you as prey well in the evening you've brought all the cages up in your hopefully all alive and we were hanging out fishing for tuna

we had one of the the crew on board had a line in the water was fishing for tuna for dinner and a shark took the tuna off the line and it's a it's a very dramatic take and you can see the the just absolute size of these great white sharks the the waters there are filled with them

that's the one but look so this video just the neural link link was shot by Matt McDougall who is the head neurosurgeon neural link there it is takes it now believe it or not looks like it missed like it didn't get the fish it actually just cut that thing like a bandsaw so I'm up on the deck

with Matt yeah and so when you look at it from the side you you really get a sense of this of the the girth of this freaking thing so as it comes out if you put the eyes of that thing and they move through the water with such speed just a couple you see when you're in the cage and the

cages lower down below the surface they're going around you're not allowed to jump the water there some people do it um but and then when you cage eggs sit they're like what are you doing out here and then you know they you swim toward them they veer off but what's interesting is that if you look

at how they move through the water all it takes for one of these great white sharks when it sees a tuna or something it wants to eat is like two flicks of the tail and becomes like a missile it's just unbelievable economy of effort and ocean Ramsey who is in my opinion the greatest of all

cage eggs at shark divers this woman who dealt with enormous great white sharks she really understands their behavior when they're aggressive when they're not going to be aggressive she and her husband won i believe his name is do they understand how the tiger sharks differ from the great white

sharks we were down there basically like not understanding any of this we never should have been there and actually the airfellar the day before plus cage eggs thing the next day i told myself after coming up from the cage eggs that that's it i'm no longer taking risks with my life i want to

live got back across the border um a couple days later i was like that's it i don't take risks with my life any longer but yeah mcdougal mcdougal shot that video and then it went in quote unquote viral through uh nature's metal we passed them that video actually uh i saw a video

where an instructor was explaining how to behave with a shark in the water and that you don't want to be swimming away because then you're acting like a prey that's right and then you want to be acting like a predator by looking at it and swimming towards it right towards them and they'll

bank off now if you don't see them they're ambush predators yeah you know you're swimming in the surface and apparently if they get close you should just like guide them away by yeah like grabbing them and moving away some people will actually roll them um but if they're coming

in full speed the you're not going to roll the shark but it here we are back to dark stuff again i like the shark attack map and the shark attack map shows that um you know northern california there were a couple actually guys head got taken off um he was swimming north of San Francisco

there's been a couple in northern uh california that was really tragic but most of them are in florida in australia florida say that the surf rider foundation shark attack map there it is yeah had they have a great map there you go so they look like they have all the little scars on them so

if you if you zoom in on um i mean look at this if you go to the north america um that could skulls there's yeah where they're where they're deadly attacks um but in yeah northern california sadly this is really tragic if you zoom in on this one um i read about this uh this guy

if you can click the link 50th year old male he was in chest high water this is just tragic i feel so sad for him and his family you know he's just um three members of the party chose to go in he was you know nine jai was in his chest high water 25 to 50 yards from shore great breached water

seized his head and that was it you know so it does happen it's very infrequent um if you don't go in the ocean is very very very low probability um but but if it it doesn't happen six times in a row no nice 120 percent chance yeah what do you think wins uh a saltwater crocodile or a shark okay i do

not like saltwater crocodiles they scare me to no end muller michael muller who dove all over the world he sent me a picture of him diving uh with salties saltwater crocs in cuba it was a smaller one but goodness gracious have you seen the size of some of those saltwater crops yeah um i'm thinking

that i'm thinking the the sharks are so agile they're amazing they've head camd one or body camd one um moving through the kelp bed um and you look and it's just they're so agile moving through the water and and it's looking up at this surface like the cameras don't hit the surface and

you just realized if you're out there um you're not in your swimming and you get hit by by a shark you're not just gonna talk shit and say that a salty has way more bite force but according to the internet recently data indicates that the shark has a stronger bite so i was i was assuming

that a crocodile would have a stronger bite force and therefore agility it doesn't matter but apparently a shark yeah and turning one of those big salties this is probably not that you know turning around like a battleship i mean those sharks are i'm leaving they can hit from all sorts

oh and they they do this thing we saw this you you're out of the cage or in the cage and you and you'll look at one and you'll see it's i kind of like looking at you they can't really fove it but they'll look at you and you're tracking it and then you'll look down and you'll realize

that one's coming at you they're just they're ambush prayers they're working together they're fascinating i like i like how you know that they can't foveate right you're you're already considering the vision system there it's a very primitive eyes on the system very primitive

eyes on the side of the head their vision is decent enough they're mostly obviously sensing things with their um electro sensing in the water but also um oh faction um yeah i spend far too much time thinking about and learning about the the visual systems of different

animals if you get me going on this like we'll be here all night see this is what i have this meglot on to i saw this in a store and i got it because this is from a shark goodness yet i can't say i ever saw one with teeth this big but it's beautiful it's beautiful yeah it's probably

the only probably your blood pressure just goes and you you don't feel i feel a thing yeah um it's not there before we went down for the kjx it um a guy in our crew pat d'Ausses very experienced diver um asked one of the South African divers that um so what you know like

what's the contingency plan if like somebody catches a bite and they were like he was like every man for himself and they're like basically saying like if somebody catches a bite like that's it you know um anyway i thought we were gonna bring up something happy

well that is happy well we nature is beautiful yeah nature is beautiful uh we lived um but you know that there are there are happy things that you brought up nature as metal this see this is the difference between Russian yeah Americans and Americans is like maybe this is actually a good time

to bring up your ayahuasca journey i've never done ayahuasca um but i'm curious about it i'm also curious about ibogaine eboga um but you told me that you did ayahuasca and that for you it wasn't the dark scary ride that it is for everybody else yeah it was an incredible experience for me

i did it twice actually and have you done high dose psilocybin never no i just did small dose psilocybin a couple times so i was you know nervous about it i was very yeah i understand there so i've done high dose psilocybin it's terrifying but i've always gotten something very

useful out of it so i mean i was nervous about like whatever demons might hide in the shadow in the yung in the shadow like i was i was nervous but i think it turns out i don't know what the lesson is to draw from that but my experience be boys Russian it must it must be the Russian thing

i mean there's also something to the jungle there it strips away all the bullshit of life and you're just there i forgot the outside civilization exists i forgot time because like when you don't have your phone you don't have meetings or calls or whatever you lose the sense of

time the sun comes up the sun comes down that's the the fundamental biological timer you know every mammalian species has a short wavelength so you think like blue uv type but like absorbing cone and a longer wavelength absorbing cone and that and it does this interesting subtraction

to designate when it's morning and evening because when the sun is low in the sky you've got short wavelength and long wavelength light like when you look at a sunrise it's got blues and yellows orange and yellows you look in the evening reds orange and and blues and in the middle of the day it's

like full spectrum light now it's always full spectrum light but because of some atmospheric elements and because of the low solar angle you like that that difference between the the different wavelengths of light is the fundamental signal that the neurons in your eye

pay attention to and and signal to your circadian timekeeping mechanism like we are that the core of our brain and the superchisementic nucleus we are we are like wired to be entrained to the rising and setting of the sun like that's the biological time which makes perfect sense because you know

obviously as the planet as the planet spin and revolve i also wonder like how that is affected by you know in the rainforest the sun is not visible often so you're under the cover of the trees so maybe that affects well there's social rhythms there feeding rhythms sometimes in in terms of

some species will signal the timing of activity of other species and um but yet getting out from the canopy is is critical of course even under the canopy during the daytime there's far more photons than at night you know there's always what i'm telling people to get sunlight in their eyes

in the morning and in the evening people say there's no light no sunlight this time here i'm like it go outside on a really overcast day it's far brighter than it is at night right so there's still lots of sunlight even if you can't see the sun as an object but i i love um time perception

shifts and you mentioned that in the jungle it's linked to the rising and setting of the sun you also mentioned on ayahuasca you zoomed out from from the earth these these are like to me the most interesting aspects of having a human brain as opposed to another brain of course you've only ever

had a human brain but which is that you can consciously set your time domain window like you can we can be focused here we can be focused on all of austin or we can be focused on the entire planet you can make those choices consciously but in the time domain it's it's hard like different

activities bring us into fine slicing or more or more broad bending of time depending on what we're doing programming or exercising or researching or podcasting but just how unbelievably fluid the human brain is in terms of its the aperture of the time space window of our cognition and of our

experience and i feel like this is perhaps one of the more valuable tools that we have access to that we don't really leverage as much as we should which is when things are really hard you need to zoom out and see it as one element within your whole lifespan and that there's more to come

um you know i mean people commit suicide because they can't see beyond the time domain they're in or they think it's going to go on forever um when we're happy we we rarely think this is going to last forever but uh which is interesting contrast in and so on right but i think that

psychedelics while i have very little experience with them i have some and it sounds like they're just a very interesting window into the the different apertures well how to surf that wave is probably a skill one of the things i was prepared for anything is important is not to resist

i think i understand what it means to resist the thing a powerful wave it's not going to be good so you have to be able to surf it so i was ready for that to relax through it and maybe because i'm quite good at that from knowing how to relax and all kinds of disciplines

playing piano and uh guitar when i was super young and then through jiu jitsu knowing the value of relaxation and through all kinds of sports you should be able to relax the body fully just accept whatever happens to you that process is probably why it was a very positive experience for me

do you have any interest in eboga i'm very interested in i began eboga there's a colleague of mine and researcher at stanford nolan williams who's been doing some trans cranial magnetic stimulation and brain imaging on people who have taken the i began i began um as i understand it gives a 22

hour psychedelic journey where no hallucinations with eyes open but you close your eyes and you get a a very high resolution image of actual events that happened in your life but then you have agency within those movies i think you have to be of healthy heart to be able to do it i think you have

to be on a heart rate monitor it's not trivial it's not like these other psychedelics um but there's a wonderful group um called veteran solutions um that has used eboga combined with um some other psychedelics um in the veterans community to to great success for things like PTSD and

it's a group i've really tried to support in in any way that i can mainly by being vocal about the great work they're doing but um you hear incredible stories of people who are just like like near cratered in their life or zombieed by PTSD and other things post-war um get back a

lightness or achieve a lightness and a clarity um that they didn't feel they had so i'm very curious about these compounds um the state of Kentucky we should check this but um i believe it's taken money from the opioid crisis settlement for i began research i mean so this is like no longer yes

if you look here let's see uh did they do it oh no oh no they backed away can't talk you back away from the plant to fund opioid treatment research they were going to use the money to treat opioid now officials are backing off 50 billion what is on its way over the coming years 50 billion

dollars 50 billion dollars is on this way to state and local government over the coming years the pool of funding comes from multiple legal statements with pharmaceutical companies that profit it from manufacturing or selling opioid painkillers Kentucky has some of the highest number of deaths

from the opioid so they were going to do psychedelic research with iBegin supporting research on illegal illegal folks psychedelic drug called iBegin well i guess they backed away from it well so we're later we'll get some happy news up on the fun internet and this stuff so

good i don't talk about this the shark in the crocodile fighting yeah yeah that's true that's true and you survived the jungle well that's the the thing i was i was i was writing to you on what's that multiple times because i was going to put on the internet are you okay and if

you're like alive and then i was going to just like put it to twitter just like he's alive but then of course you're far too classy for that so you just came back alive well jungle or not one of the lessons is also you know when you hear the call for adventure just fucking do it i was

gonna ask you it's kind of silly question but like give me a small fraction of the things on your bucket list bucket list yeah uh goodamars yeah what's what's the status of that i don't know i'm being patient about the whole thing red planet ran that cartoon of you guys

uh that's funny right that was pretty funny that's true that was pretty fun that one where goggins is already up there yeah that's a great that's a funny one probably also true i would love i would love to die in Mars oh but i just love humanity reaching onto the stars and doing this

bold adventure and taking big risks and exploring a love exploration what about seeing different animal species i'm a huge fan of this guy Joel Sartori um where he he has this photo arc project where he takes portraits of all these different animals if people aren't already falling

him on instagram he's doing some really important work um this guy's instagram is amazing I purchased well look at it look at these portraits the amount of um i must say personality because we don't want to project anything onto them but yeah the the like the eyes and the

occasion put him moving on it's a little owl i delight in things like this i've got some content coming on animals and animal neuroscience and eyes and dogs or all kinds of all animals and i'm very interested in um kids content that that incorporates animals we have some things

brewing there like i i could look at this kind of stuff all day long look at that like bats people thinking about bats is kind of like well flickering a little annoying disease carrying things but look how beautiful that little sucker is how's your podcast with the cookie monster coming oh yeah we've been in discussions with cookie the um it's uh can't say too much about that but um cookie monster embodies dopamine right cookie monster monster cookie right wants cookie right now you know

like it was that it was that one tweet cookie monster eye bounce because cookies come from all directions you know it's like it's just embodying the desire for for something and which is an incredible aspect of ourselves the other one is you remember a little while ago um Elmo put out a tweet

hey how's everyone doing out there and it went viral and you know the surgeon general of the United States have been talking about the loneliness crisis he came on the podcast and a lot of people were talking about the problems with loneliness mental health issues with loneliness Elmo

puts out a tweet hey how's everyone doing out there and everyone gravitates toward you know so that the different Sesame Street characters really embody the different that kind of aspects of self through very like narrow neural circuit perspective um yes nuffel off against a shy and

Oscar the grouch grouchy right and the count one a two the archetypes of yeah the architect is very young and yeah and I think that um you know the creators of Sesame Street clearly either understand that or it's an unconscious genius to that so yeah that there are some things brewing on on

conversations with Sesame Street characters it's not I know you'd like to talk to Vladimir Putin I'd like to talk to cookie monster it illustrates the differences in our like sophistication or something well that illustrates a lot yeah but yeah I also I love animation so I'm not

anime that's not my thing but animation so I'm very interested in the use of animation to get science content across so there are a bunch of things brewing but um but anyway I delight in start Tories work and and and it's there's a conservation aspect to it as well but I think that

mostly want to thank you for finally putting up something that like where something's not being killed or like let's some sad sad outcome uh these are all really positive they're really cool they're really cool and every once in a while look at look at that uh mountain line um but I also

like to look at these and and some of them remind me of certain people right so let let's just scroll through like for instance I think when we don't try and process it too much so like like okay look at this cat this amazing like I feel like that somebody I feel like this is like a like someone

I met once as a curiosity curiosity and a playfulness um carnivore carnivore frontalized eyes found in very important conception right so then you go down you know it's like this beautiful fish neon pink right sure reminds you of some of the like the influencers you see on Instagram right except

this one's natural just kidding um uh let's see no filter um filter yeah um let's see like I feel like bears I'm a big fan of bears yeah bears are beautiful this one kind of reminds me of you a little bit there's like a stoic nature to it a curiosity so you can kind of feel like the essence

of animals you don't even have to do psychedelics to get there uh look at that he's like the behind the scenes of how it's actually yeah and then there's um wow yeah yeah the uh in the jungle the diversity of life was also stark yeah from a scientific perspective just the the fact that most

of those species are not identified was fascinating right it was like a little every little every little insect is a kind of discovery right I mean one of the reasons I love New York City so much despite its problems at times is that um everywhere you look there's life it's like a tropical reef if

you've ever done scuba diving or snorkeling you look on a tropical reef and it's like there's some little crab working on something and like everywhere you look there's life you know the Bay Area if you go scuba diving or snorkeling it's like a kelp bed you know the Bayer is like a kelp bed

everyone's a while some big fish goes by it's like a big IPO but like most of the time not a whole lot happens actually the Bay Area it's interesting is I've been going back there more and more recently um there are really cool little subculture starting to pop up again nice um there's incredible

skateboarding the gx 1000 guys were these guys that that bomb down hills they're in nuts like they're just going like that to just speed not tricks you got to see gx 1000 these guys going downhill since San Francisco they are wild and occasionally unfortunately occasionally someone get hit by

car but you gx 1000 look into intersections they have spotters you can see someone there um oh I see there's uh like the into traffic yeah into traffic so in San Francisco yeah this is crazy like this is unbelievable and um and they're they're just wild but in any case

well it's on your bucket list you haven't done well I'm working on a book so I'm actually going to head to a cabin for a couple weeks and write which I've never done um people talk about doing this but I'm gonna do that that's I'm excited for that just the mental space of really dropping into

writing like jack digelsen the shining kind of let's hope not okay let's hope not you know before I mean only start doing public facing anything for posting on instagram in 2019 but I used to head up to wallala on the northern coast of california um sometimes by myself um to a little cabin there

and spend a weekend by myself and just read and write papers and things like that I used to all the time I I missed that so some of that um I'm trying to spend a bit more time with my relatives in argentina relatives in the on the east coast see my parents more they're in good health

thankfully I want to get married and have a family that's an important priority and put a lot of not a work in there yeah that's a big one yeah yeah yeah put a lot of work um into the the the runway on that um what are advice for people about that or give advice to yourself about how to

find love in this world how to find how to build a family get there and then I'll listen to it someday and see if I hit the marks um yep but well obviously pick the right partner but also like do the work on yourself know know yourself that the oracle know that I self and I think um listen

I have a friend he's a new friend but he's a friend uh who I met for a meal he's a very very well-known actor overseas and his stuff has made it over here and um we become friends and we went to lunch and we were talking about work and being public facing and all this kind of thing and

and then uh I said you have kids writing so she has four kids I was like oh yeah you know I see your post with the kids you seem really happy and he said he just looked at me lean didn't he said it's the best gift you'll ever give yourself and he also said and pick your partner the mother of

your kids very carefully so you know that's good advice coming from excellent advice coming from somebody who's you know very successful in work and family so that's the only thing I can pass along we hear this from friends far as as well but um kids are amazing and families amazing and

um you know that's the different people all these people want to like be immortal and then live to be 200 or something you know there's also the the old fashioned way of you know having children that live on and evolve a new legacy but they have you know half your DNA so that's exciting yeah

I think you make an amazing dad thank you it seems like a fun thing and you know I've also got an advice from friends who are super high performing it and have a lot of kids and they'll say just don't over think it right start having kids let's go right well the chaos of kids is kind of the

like it can either bury you or it can or it can give you energy but I grew up in a big pack of boys always doing like wild and crazy things and so that kind of energy is great and and if it's not a big pack of wild boys it's you know you have daughters and they can be you know different form of chaos sometimes same form of chaos um how many kids do you think you want?

you know it's either two or five yeah very different dynamics you're one of two right you're the other yeah um I'm very close with my sister I couldn't imagine having another sibling because it there's so much richness there we we talk almost every day sorry yeah three four times a week

you know sometimes just briefly but we're we're tight you know we're really look out for one another she's an amazing person like truly an amazing person and it's like raised her daughter in an amazing way she's like you know my niece is like gonna have to college in a year or two and

like my sister's an amazing job and her dad's done a great job too they both really put a lot into um the family aspect and I just spend time with a really amazing person in the Peru and the Amazon jungle and he is one of 20 kids wow so he's got most it's mostly guys that's just a lot

of brothers and I think two sisters wow I just had Jonathan height on the podcast the guy who's talking the anxious generation causing an American mind he's great but he was saying that you know in order to keep kids healthy they need to not be on social media or have smartphones until

they're 16 I've actually been thinking a lot about getting a bunch of friends onto neighboring properties you know everyone talks about this not creating a commune or anything like that but I think he I think Jonathan's right we we were more or less our brainwiring does

best when we raised in small village type environments where kids can forage the whole free range kids idea and I grew up skateboarding and building forts and dirt clawed wars and all that stuff um it would be so strange to have a childhood without that yeah and I think more and more

as we wake up to the negative aspects of the digital interaction we'll put more and more value to in person interaction so I mean it's cool to see for instance kids in New York City I'm just kind of moving around the city with so much sense of agency it's really really cool the

suburbs like where I grew up like as soon as we could get out take the seven F bus of San Francisco and hang out with you know wild ones like you know while there were dangers I mean we couldn't wait to get out of the suburbs the moment that you know forts and dirt clawed wars and stuff didn't

didn't cut it we just like wanted into the city so I bucket list I will probably move to a major city not Los Angeles or San Francisco um in the next few years um New York City potentially those are all such different flavors of experiences yeah so I'd love to live in New York City for a

while I've always wanted to do that and I and I will do that I've always wanted to also have a place in a very rural so area so Colorado Montana or high on my list right now and to be able to pivot back and forth between the two would be great just for such different experiences I and

also I like a very physical life so the idea of getting up on the sun with the sun in Montana or Colorado type environment um and and I've been doing some putting some effort towards finding a spot um for that and New York City to me I know it's got its issues and people say it wasn't what it

was okay I get it but listen I've never lived there so for me would be entirely new and um you know shul seems full of life there's an energy to that city and he represents that I mean there's yeah he and and the full diversity of weird that is represented in New York City is great yeah walk down

the street there's like a person with like a cat on their head and no one gives a shit yeah that's great right San Francisco used to be like that the joke was like you have to be naked and on fire in San Francisco before someone takes it but now it's changed but again it recently I've noticed

that San Francisco it's not just about the skateboarders it's there's some community houses of people in tech that are super interesting there's some community housing of people not in tech that I've learned about him and known people have lived there and and it's it's cool like there's

stuff happening um in these cities that's new and different I mean that's what youth is for they're supposed to evolve evolve things out uh so amidst all that you still have to get shit done I've been really obsessed with tracking time recently like making sure I have daily activities of habits

that I'm maintaining and I'm very religious about making sure I get shit done using an app or something like that or just Google sheets so basically I spreadsheet and I'm tracking daily and our right scripts that that whenever I achieve a goal it glows green yeah do you track your workouts

and all that kind of stuff too no just the fact that I got the workout done yeah so I just it's a checkmark thing so I'm really really big on making sure I do a thing it doesn't matter how long it is I've a rule for myself that I do a set of tasks for at least five minutes every day

okay and it turns out the many of them I do way longer but just even just doing it I have to do it every day and there's currently 11 of them it's just the thing like one of them is playing guitar for example so do you do that kind of stuff do you do like daily habits yeah I do my um I wake up

if I don't feel I slept enough I do this non sleep depressed yoga need your thing that I've talked about a bunch we actually released a few of those tracks as audio tracks on Spotify um 10 minute 20 minute ones puts me back into a state that feels like sleep and I feel very rested actually

Matt Walker and I are gonna run a study he just submitted the IRB to run a study on NSDR and what is actually doing to the brain there's some evidence of increases and dopamine etc but those are older studies still cool studies but um so I'll do that get up hydrate and if I've got my

act together I punch some caffeine down like some Matina some coffee maybe another Matina and resistance train three days a week run three days a week and then take one day off um and like to be done by 839 and then I want to get into some real work I actually have a sticky note on my

computer like just like reminding me how good it feels to accomplish some real work and then I go into it right now it's the book writing researching a podcast and just fight tooth and nail to stay off social media text message what's up YouTube all that um get something done how long can

you go can you go like three hours just deep focus if I hit a groove uh yeah 90 minutes to three hours if I'm really in a groove um that's that's for me uh I start the day actually this way I'm afraid I'd really prize that those morning hours I start with the work yeah and the it's it's uh

I'm trying to hit the four hour mark of deep focus straight I love it then all can't work yeah I'm really really yeah it's it's often torture actually it's really really difficult oh yeah the agitation but I've sat across the table from you a couple years ago when I was out here in

Austin doing some work and I was working on stuff you were and I noticed you're just like stare at your notebook sometimes just like pen at the same position and then you'll get back into it like they're those oh my god building that hydraulic pressure and then go yeah I try and get

something done of value then it the communications start and talking to my podcast producer my team is everything I mean it like the magic potion in the podcast is Rob Moore right um who's in the it's been in the room with me every single solo costellies to be in there with us because that's it

people have asked journalists have asked can they sit in friends of ass nope just Rob and uh for guests interviews he's there as well and I talk to Rob all the time all the time we talk multiple times per day and um you know in life I've made some errors in certain relationship domains in my

life in terms of partner choice and things like that and um certainly don't blame all of that on them but you know played my role but but in terms of picking business partners and friends like you know to work with I mean Rob's just it's been bulls eyes and it's just Rob has been amazing

might play back our photographer and the guys I mentioned earlier like we just communicate as much as we need to and we pour over every decision like near neuroticism before we make we put anything out there and so it's like you've created decisions of like topics to cover all that yeah like it like

a photo for the book jacket the other day Mike shoots photos then and then we look at them we pour over them together um logo for the perform podcast with Annie Gallup and then we're launching like is that the right contour Mike's the real he's got the aesthetic thing because he was at DC so long

as a portrait photographer um and his cute close friends with Ken Block did Jim Conna like all the car jumping in the city stuff like I mean Mike is a mask he's a he's a true master of that stuff and um and we just pour over every little decision but even which sponsors you know there

dozens of ads now by the way that that old geosarcizer thing of me saying oh you guy went from a two to a seven I never said that that's AI like I would never call number off somebody a two to a seven are you kidding me it's crazy so as AI if you bought the thing I'm sorry but like our sponsors

we list the sponsors that we have in Y on our website and like the decision do we work with this person or not do we still like the product and we've we've got ways with sponsors because of like changes in the product or change you know most time at the animal pool all good but you know

like just every detail and that just takes a ton of time and energy but I try and work mostly on content and my team is constantly trying to keep me out of the other discussions um but I because I obsess but um yeah you you have to you have to have a team of some sort someone

that you can run things bot for sure but one of the challenges the larger the team is and I'd like to be involved in a lot of different kinds of stuff including engineering stuff robotics work research all of those interactions at least for me take away

from the deep work the deep focus right unfortunately I get drained by social interaction even with the people I love and really respect and all that kind of stuff you're an introvert yeah like fundamental introvert so to me it's a trade off getting shit done versus collaborating

and I have to choose wisely because without collaboration without a great team which I'm fortunate enough to be a part of like you wouldn't get anything really done but as an individual contributor to get stuff done like to do the hard work of researching or programming all that kind of stuff

you need the hours of deep work I used to spend a lot more time alone that's that's all my bucket list spend a bit more time dropped into work alone it I think social media like causes our brain to go the other direction I try and answer some comments and then and then

get back to work I'm really after I go to the jungle I appreciate not using the device I've played with the idea of like spending certain maybe like one week a month not using social media at all I used it is so after that morning block I'll eat some lunch and I'll usually do

something while I'm doing lunch or something and then a bit more work and that real work deep work and then around 230 I do a non-sleep depress take a short nap wake up maybe a little more caffeine and then lean into it again and then you know if you I find if you really put in the deep work

two or three bouts per day by about five or six p.m. it's over I was down at Jaco's place not that long go and in the evening did a sauna session with him and some family members of his and some of their friends and it's really cool like they all work all day and train all day and then in

the evening they get together and they they sauna and cold plunge I'm really into this whole thing of gathering with other people at a specific time of day I have a gym at my house and I you know Tim will come over and train or you know that we've kind of slowed that down in recent months but

I think gathering in groups once a day being alone for part of the day it's like very fundamental stuff we're not saying anything that hasn't been said millions of times before but how often do people actually do that and and call the party you know like be the person to like bring people together

if it's not happening that's something I've really had to learn even though I'm an introvert like right I'm like gather people together you came through town the other day and a lot of people at the house yeah actually it was funny because I was getting a massage when you

walked in I don't sit around getting massages very often but I was getting one that day and then everyone came in and the dog came in and I ever was piled in it was very sweet again no devices but choose wisely the people you gather with right right and I was close thank you for clarifying

I wasn't which is very weird yeah yeah the the the friends you surround yourself with that that's another thing it's like I understood that from my awasca and from just the experience and then jungle was like just select the people just be careful how you allocate your time I just saw

on somewhere kind of a Gregor has this good line I wrote a down about loyalty he said don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with oh that guy's I mean he's being on loyalty all the shit talk all of that set that aside to me like loyalty is really big because then if you invest

in certain people in your life and they stick by you and you stick by them and what what else is life about yeah well hardship will show you who your real friends are that's for sure and you know we're fortunate to have a lot of them it'll also show you who you know who really like

has put in the time to try and understand you and and understand people like people are complicated I love that so you read the quote once more don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with yeah so in that way a hardship is a gift it shows you definitely and it makes you stronger it definitely makes you stronger yeah let's go get some food yeah you're one meal a day guy yeah I actually ate something earlier but it was like a protein shake and a couple pieces of built on I hope we're eating a

steak so I hope so too I'm full of nicotine and caffeine yeah what do you think how you feel I feel good yeah I was I was thinking you'd probably like I only did a half a piece and I won't have more for a while but a little too good yeah thank you for talking once again man yeah thanks

so much Lexum it's been a great ride this podcast thing and you're the reason I started the podcast you inspired me to do it you told me to do it did it and you also been an amazing friend you showed up in some some very challenging times and you showed up for me publicly you've shown up for me

in my home in my life and you know it's an honor to have you as a friend thank you I love you brother love you too thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

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