#496 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Science Of Peak Performance

Hello friends, welcome back to this show. My guest today is Dr Andrew Huberman, he's a neuroscientist, associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a podcaster. The mind and the body are intimately linked, trying to improve your mental outcomes without thinking of your physical inputs is a losing battle. But the question of which inputs to use and when is a huge challenge.

Thankfully, Dr Huberman is one of the best communicators of high performance advice on the planet and

has a lot of answers. Expect to learn the neuroscience of getting over your ex, how David Goggins trained himself to lean into fear, whether dopamine detoxing really works, the most important things to avoid doing during your morning routine, just how worried we should be about men's testosterone levels dropping, what everyone can learn about endurance from Lex Friedman, why Andrew doesn't show his tattoos,

and much more. This is a conversation that I've been looking forward to having for nearly a year now that me and Andrew have been talking and I really think he's filled a position that was

desperately needed in the world of science communication. We wanted somebody that was more based in evidence and rigor and biology and genuine physiology and not just pro science giving us just so stories that perhaps sound plausible but don't actually get into the mechanisms or fully understand why sauna exposure is good or cold exposure or how to sleep or the supplements that you

need on a night time or whether you should be timing carbs before and after a workout. All of that together just cutting through all of the rubbish and actually getting to the point of what is most effective, how can you achieve peak performance and this is why it works. I really appreciate his work. I'm very very glad to have had him on and if you're new here don't forget to hit the

subscribe button. Jocka Willink is coming on the podcast in a week and a half's time you do not want to miss that and there is three episodes a week and it supports the show and makes me very happy indeed so navigate to your little podcast app and press subscribe. Thank you. It's important to me that the supplements I take are of the highest quality and that's why for over

three years now I have been drinking AG1. Taking care of your health should not be complicated and AG1 simplifies this by covering all of your nutritional bases and setting yourself up the success in just 60 seconds per day. Their ingredients are heavily researched for efficacy and quality and I love that every single scoop also includes prebiotics, probiotics and digestive enzymes for gut support. I've partnered with AG1 for so long because they make the highest quality product that I genuinely

look forward to drinking every day. So if you want to replace your multivitamin and more it starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a year's free supply of vitamin D3 and K2 plus 5 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription at drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom that's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business ask nine experts and you will get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall, inflations up or down. I'm still waiting on

Elon Obey's OST to successfully invent a crystal ball. Until then over 38,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There is one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you are spending less time

looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I needed this product, it is exactly what I'd use. So give it a go. Right now you can download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at net suite.com slash modern that's net suite.com slash modern. If you are looking for new reading suggestions,

look no further than the modern wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die the most interesting life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them and you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Andrew Huberman welcome to the show. Great to be here. It's been a long time coming.

Very long time coming. What do you mean when you say you cannot control the mind with the mind? Yeah that statement really emerges from the fact that if we are in a pretty relaxed state or if we are happy we generally feel like we can do what we want to do. We can maneuver through our environment. We can make choices that are reasonable but oftentimes we're not in relaxed and happy states. That's

just part of the human experience obviously. And there is a fundamental feature to the nervous system which is this thing they call the autonomic nervous system which is just fancy nerd speak for the components of your nervous system that raise your levels of alertness or bring them way down. Sometimes we hear fight or flight, rest and digest but this system governs all that but a lot more.

And basically what happens is when we are at the extremes of the autonomic what I call sea saw of very very alert to the point of being really stressed or panicked or concerned or if we are very close to sleep and we're drowsy and we're exhausted. At those points along the autonomic nervous system our thoughts become a bit like a runaway train. If you're very upset it's hard to talk yourself out of it. If you're stressed it's hard to think yourself out of it. In fact you can start

doing all sorts of third personing and rationalization. You can call someone you can text somebody. It's very hard to get yourself out of those states with thinking alone but the beauty of the autonomic nervous system is that it traverses the brain and the body and it connects to essentially all the organs of the body. And it's a two way street such that certain behaviors, even certain patterns of breathing etc allow us to shift where we are on the autonomic continuum

between very very alert and stressed and very calm. And thereby give our mind a shift also in terms of the kinds of thoughts that we can entertain, the sorts of actions that we can engage in. To make this concrete if you're very very stressed, you're very very upset. Two things happen. One it's very hard to take your focus off whatever it is that's upsetting you. And if you don't know what's upsetting you, you know pure anxiety but you don't know why it's very hard to take your

mind off of the feelings of anxiety. In those states of mind there's another component which is that for whatever reason and no one really understands why this is it feels as if the state that you're in will go on forever. Now when we're in happy relaxed states rarely do we think gosh this is going to go on forever. And yet when we are in these unfortunate states of mind we get the idea somehow. We sort of

hijacks our perception of time and we feel like this is never going to stop. If we turn to the body and certain behaviors, we talk about what those are, we are able to move ourselves along the autonomic continuum. And at that point when we've done that successfully and it's actually quite straightforward to do, we are able to think about things differently. We start to get a sense that

the way we feel might not be the way we're going to feel forever. And it's in those shifts that we start to realize ah my mind actually is not my best friend at these extremes but there's a lot more to it. You're only getting the tip of the iceberg in those states. So that's why I say if you can't control the mind with the mind, look to the body to control the mind. How would that be adaptive? How would it be adaptive for us to focus all of our attention on to the anxiety? Is that

something that you could see a useful? Absolutely. So let's take stress as an example and this could be stress panic anxiety. You know each one of those has a definition in medical terms, psychological terms but to be fair, no one really knows how to draw the line in the brain between fear and stress and anxiety. But we can say with certainty that all of those states involve high levels of alertness, high levels of awareness, sometimes for things in our environment and sometimes just for

what's going on internally. When we are stressed, anxious, afraid, waking up in the middle of the night, doesn't matter what triggered it, there are a couple basic things that happen to all of us. First of all, our heart rate quickens. That's kind of an obvious one. Fuel from our muscles and our liver is shuttled to particular organs of the body and away from others. In particular, fuel is shuttled towards the big muscles of the body, you generate large movements. This is why

we quake a bit when we're stressed. The hands will shake. It's preparing us, we are prepared for movement. How does that prepare us for movement? The shaking actually is the consequence of trying to not move when we are stressed. Basically, this is why taking a walk or a run, you actually feel like you can kind of dispel the stress. You're not actually dispelling the stress. What's happened is it's like the RPM are getting cranked up. It's like idling and right, you could sit there in

a parked car and do that. Basically, you take the thing out of park and it just wants to go. A lot of the times when we're stressed, it's in conditions in which we're trying to remain still. Public speaking and a tough argument, the doctor's office about to get an injection. It depends on what stresses people, obviously. But that readiness for action is a second component. It's a heart

rate readiness for action by way of shuddling glucose and other fuels to the muscles. Then away from the reproductive organs, from digestive organs, etc. It's just not the right time for that. Another very, very powerful feature of this response is that our pupils of our eyes, the dark parts of our eyes, get big. Now, you might think that that expands your visual field, but actually the

way the optics of the eye work, that narrows the aperture of your visual field. When you are stressed, you literally are seeing things through a small aperture, so to straw view of the world, as they say. Under those conditions, you cannot see things in your periphery, as well as you could prior to being stressed. But you become exquisitely good at measuring small detail changes in whatever it is that you happen to be looking at. Now, there's an internal process, too, which is that

the aperture on your thinking also becomes very, very narrow. So that, for instance, I had this happen the other day. I heard something very stressful. I couldn't think about anything else. That might just seem logical. Of course, you can't think about anything else. It's very stressful. You're concerned about this. But my mind wasn't thinking about this particular incident. It was thinking, if this, then this, then if that, then that, and so you start dropping into the future.

You start dropping into the past. Like, why did we do that? You start doing all that kind of cycling through things. Of course, there are so many things that can help relax us. Meditation, exercise, a nice, healthy meal, social connection. But the fifth column of the stress response is that your aperture, vision, your aperture of thinking gets very narrow. And it becomes harder and harder to do the very things that would keep you out of stress. And so this is kind of the double-edged

sword that is stress. And so all the more reason why, in those moments, if the stress is not desired, because there are moments when stress is desired, you're navigating an emergency, etc. But if you don't want to be in that narrow aperture of thinking and vision, etc., then you need to find some way to bring your level of autonomic arousal, as it's called, down slightly, so that you can start

thinking about other possibilities. Or, you know, there are instances, I think everyone's been in this kind of situation where the thing that's stressing out is not going to get resolved today, and you just sleep. And of course, you know you need to sleep, and then you can't sleep, and then of course, that creates a compounding stress. And now you're stressed about not being able to sleep. And then over the course of the next few days, you dissolve into a puddle of tears. But,

fortunately, there are ways out of that kind of self-destruction. You've done a lot of work on fear that was one of the things that you mentioned before. Is there something that everybody is scared of? Because I've heard the story, the wives tale, babies are born with as if fears of heights and loud noises or something. Is there any truth in that? Is there something everyone's scared of?

There is. I think the one that everybody who has a healthy nervous system will react quite robustly to is if you start increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that they're breathing and reduce the amount of oxygen that they're taking in, that's terrifying. Am I right in thinking there's an experiment you can do where it's a single breath, and that is pretty reliable at bringing on an anxiety attack. Yeah, if you have people, please don't do this because you need the right proper medical staff

around. But they're great experiments of having people breathe carbon dioxide directly. And it, you basically panic, it's terrifying. One big gulp of carbon dioxide will make you very afraid. It turns out that there are a little group of neurons. Of course, neurons are just nerve cells that low group of neurons in the brain stem that respond to levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. It turns out the reason we breathe is of course to bring in oxygen and then off low carbon dioxide.

But we don't have neurons that stimulate breathing for oxygen. We have neurons that sense when carbon dioxide levels get too high. So if you hold your breath, eventually carbon dioxide levels go up. And then at the moment that they reach a certain threshold, these neurons fire and trigger the gas brief flex. So in that moment, you bring in oxygen and then of course you offload some carbon dioxide. That's why it's so important to work on CO2 tolerance for breath work.

Yeah, so free divers, a sport I actually don't recommend because there's only one way out of that sport, as they say. I have some friends who are free drivers and obviously you can do it safely with the right guide and training, etc. But it is a very dangerous sport because for most people, when carbon dioxide levels increase in the bloodstream and brain triggers this gas brief flex, what free divers train is carbon dioxide tolerance. So they do that a couple of different ways.

And again, please don't do this because you actually, people have died doing this. So one way is you can do what's called cyclic hyperventilation. Right, you do that 25 times or so. And you think, oh, you're bringing a lot of oxygen. You are, but you're also offloading a lot of carbon dioxide, especially if you use forceful exhales. Normally, humans breathe through active inhales and passive exhales. They just sort of dump their air passively. But if you do cyclic

hyperventilation, you're dumping a lot of carbon dioxide. And then if you were to hold your breath, what you would find is you could hold your breath for a lot longer. Why? Because your carbon dioxide levels are reduced so you don't have the same impulse to breathe. Now, on land, that's a more or

less safe thing to do provided that you can get a good gulp of air once the gas reflux hits. If you do that before going underwater, cyclic hyperventilation, they call air packing, and then you go under water, you're going to be able to, excuse me, cyclic hyperventilation to air pack and then go under water.

But your carbon dioxide is then lower, you're going to be able to stay under longer. But this is very dangerous because normally when that carbon dioxide threshold hits, you would pop up to the surface, you sort of panic and want to go the top free divers, learn to tolerate high levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream and stay very, very calm. The way they die is very interesting

because it speaks to the physiology. The way they die is they'll just be swimming, feeling completely calm because they're very used to, they've trained up this CO2 tolerance, carbon dioxide tolerance. And when they die, they don't suddenly feel like, oh my goodness, I'm running out of air, it's just lights go black. That's it, they're just black out. And so they're alive and then they're

gone. And so this is why they use spotters, they have a line, et cetera. Anytime you hear about somebody dying, doing free diving, it's rarely because they weren't comfortable at a given depth or because they don't think they got depth. The gas reflux is kicked in, it's because they gas reflux has been so desensitized that it's after the point at which they die. Precisely. And this, you know, it's sort of like when you hear that skilled parachuters die, why? Well, because they're

so comfortable with so many jumps, they actually forget to pull. There's sometimes, there are many instances in which they're, they're videoing the first time jumpers, right? And they're getting the video for them and they themselves forget to pull because they're so comfortable jumping out of planes. And so as people get more and more advanced in something, there's a new risk that surfaces because unless it's very reflexive and they built all the protocols in, oftentimes they

can overlook the very thing that allowed them to become expert in the first place. Why do my palms get sweaty when I watch videos of people climbing up cranes and stuff like that? You know the ones that I mean? The guys got to go pros to do called James Kingston from the UK that's a psychopath. He goes up to the highest towers of Dubai illegally in the middle of the night and then I watch it

on a screen. So I need this big and I get this visceral response. Yeah, well two things for so I can relate, you know, I saw the free solo movie with Alex Honnold and you know he lives and it's still scary to watch, right? You actually know the outcome at the beginning. They sort of make it clear that he manages to do this and you're, it's still terrifying. And I think it's for the same reason that the OCEU videos are terrifying, which is that we are so visual as animals,

we are so visual. I mean rodents, even a lot of carnivore predators are extremely olfactory, smell driven. Humans are incredibly visual. I mean more than 40% of the human brain has something to do with vision. Visual navigation, eye movements, visual perception, color perception, face perception. We have dedicated areas of the brain that are just for perceiving human faces and the

micro expressions of human faces. So highly evolved for us. When we see depth of field that's not parallel to the ground, it is terrifying with good reason because, you know, what's the universal force that we all experience from the time we're born is gravity. The first thing you learn is that things fall down, not up. Right? You know, it's like the fundamental rule that we come into the world with. It's like day one, even though the baby is kind of flopping around like a potato

but can't even hold its head up. Eyes are off and, you know, the ocular muscles of the eyes are off and not very good. So babies will kind of, their eyes are rolling back in their head. That generally corrects itself over the next few weeks or so. But the feeling of gravity of them, you know, if they feel like they're being dropped even the tiniest bit, right? They will go wide

eyed. So there's a built-in vestibulose ocular reflex. So when you see depth of field in the direction of the gravitational pull, you actually get a little bit of activity in your cerebellum, which literally means mini brain, a little area of the brain in the back that actually looks like a little mini brain if you were looking at the brain. And that area of the brain is responsible

for all the reflexes associated with the falling reflex. It does a lot of other things too. So when you see that depth of field in the direction of gravity, you have a little microactivity in your brain that you might fall. And if you've ever been to a tall bridge or a dam and you go to the edge and, you know, people love to play with this. There's also that tower in Toronto. They have the big, say as tall? Well, the big, no, the big tower in Toronto. I forget what it is. Maybe it's in Calgary.

Goodness. Canadians are going to hate me. Okay. I love Canadians, but for some reason I can't remember this. They have one of those glass floors there where you can walk in. It's terrifying. And you know you're not going to fall through it. They tell you you're not going to fall through it. But it's terrifying because your body and brain are preparing for this immense fall. So when you see this in video, it's the same thing. I always say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video

is worth 10 million pictures. I mean, this is the reason why we're so drawn to things like Instagram scrolling. It's like text, text, text video, you know, or the enormous popularity of TikTok. It's video. Now the enormous popularity of Twitter still escapes me because that's a different, different sort of cultural gravitational pull. But video and in particular action that gets us in a kind of a primitive mode, that is an extremely alluring visual image. What about emotional fears?

Like fear of failure or social disapproval or something? Do they work in a similar way or is there a different part of the brain that's using that? Yeah, great question. So a few years ago, a postdoc in my lab was now a staff scientist, Melissa Yomah. Excuse me, Dr. Melissa Yomah's ball bunch is a long name. Excellent researcher studies fear did a very broad scale survey of the general public, thousands and thousands of entries. Created this kind of cloud of bubbles,

the bigger the bubble, the greater of number of people that had that fear. We saw some interesting things. So heights, certainly public speaking, certainly doctors office and syringes, certainly public speaking fear is very common. Social isolation fear is very common, but we also saw some things like dogs. You know, there are a number of people who are afraid of dogs, which is inconceivable to me

because I love dogs so much. Exactly the same. Yeah, but people, you know, people form these associations, whether or not through experience or through indirect experience, observing others. I think public speaking is one of the greatest fear of dying. I don't it's not funny, but figure a speech. I never think about dying and being afraid of dying. I think about all the scary things that could happen while I'm living, but there are many people who are just intrinsically

afraid of dying. And so that's that's a big one for people that don't swim fear of drowning, for people that swim less so. For people that have some sort of psychiatric disorder, genuine psychiatric disorder, like obsessive compulsive disorder, which is not just obsessive compulsive personality, but obsessive compulsive disorder, fear of being discovered in the shame that they have around their obsessions and compulsions. These are true OCD is very common. Do they all live

in the same place? All of these different fears of all existence. So yeah, so I was rattling off and I didn't answer your question to the more important point. So forgive me. The short answer is they have a final common pathway, which is increased autonomic arousal, and that is funneled through a couple what we call limbic structures among others. So there's certainly involvement of the now famous amygdala, which means almond is his almond shape structure on the two sides of the

brain. There's also an area of the brain called the street terminalis, which is also involved in fear. And then the hypothalamus, this small collection of neurons just above the roof of your mouth, which is really to me one of the more fascinating areas of the brain, harbors neurons that create a body wide and brain wide response to something that the higher order areas of the brain, like the forebrain, see and perceive as dangerous as threatening. So the short answer is yes, it all funnels

through hypothalamus, amygdala, street terminalis, and autonomic nervous system. That's a final common pathway. But in terms of the variety of different things that can stimulate fear and the ways that they can do that, that is highly contextual. So the forebrain, this real estate in the brain, right, behind the forehead, is incredible because it's sort of free real estate for you to customize for your life, according to what happens to you early on. So for instance, you might not be

at all afraid of heights, and you say, well, why is that so? Well, maybe when you were a kid, you were one of those maniacs that like, you know, doing within the states, we call them cherry drops, the kids that could swing on their feet and then jump off the bar, and then other kids are timidly crawling to the top of the thing, don't even want to go up the ladder to the slide. There's a ton of variation, and that variation does not exist in the kind of deeper circuitry, the final common path

circuitry. It exists in the learning that we experienced early in life. One bad fall can do it. I mean, I was bitten very badly by a German shepherd when I was a kid, and I almost got my eye, but you know, for whatever reason, I've always liked dogs anyway, but there are other things that I've experienced that have left long-term negative imprints. So it's highly contextual, and a lot of

it has to do with what happens immediately after the bad experience. This is why nowadays there's a lot of legal use of the drug ketamine after traumas, you know, this is all very dark stuff, unfortunately. But if you, you know, you just imagine the family member that was just in a car crash and saw the driver, their loved one, impaled onto the steering column. I mean, what could be more

horrible than that? Nowadays, if they come into the emergency room, they will often give them an injection of ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic, to get them to dissociate from this extreme emotional state. So there are ways now to treat this, and ketamine is used clinically at later periods too. Didn't you, you, you did an experiment where you went diving with sharks,

and I think that there was a complication, and you went back the next day to redo it. I'm going to guess that this is for the exact same reason, to sort of conquer and integrate the experience. Yeah. To make a long story short, we went two years in a row out to Gualupe Allen where there are a lot of great white sharks. Some of the more expert shark divers were cage exiting. They

were leaving the cage. The first year I did not. The second year, I decided I would, but the day before I did, I went down into the cage, just get comfortable again down there, and I had air failure, and the safety tanks were out also. And obviously, I experienced extreme carbon dioxide, overload, and panic. I didn't full-blown panic. I kept enough awareness that I was able to, obviously, I'm here. I survived doing a share air protocol, etc., but it was a very bad situation.

I don't like to say I nearly died because that's actually sort of letting the bug in. My brain, I like to joke that the reaper came in and offered me a fist bump and I offered him a different gesture instead. So I survived, but the next day I woke up very, very distraught because I had this bug in this loop in my brain. This notion came so close to the end. And so I did go back down and I did cage exit. And I don't say that to suggest that it was the smartest decision. Obviously, you're

safer on the boat or on land. I don't say it's a sound, you know, again, tough for anything. I did it deliberately because I did not want to return home with this loop of fear. And so I went back into the traumatic circumstance and obviously made it out. And if you look at all the successful treatments for trauma, they all involve getting close to the trauma-inducing mindset, exposure therapy, gradual and assisted by a clinician. But rarely if ever are people with serious trauma encouraged

to get as far away from the feeling of at least not in the clinical setting. This has a lot of implications for things like trigger warnings. Colleagues of mine in psychiatry have asked them directly, what do you think of trigger warnings? And they said, you know, I mean, there's some logic to it on the surface. But if you really think about true trauma, we can define trauma. Dr. Paul Conti was on my podcast, is amazing trauma psychodrecy. He said, trauma is an experience,

it's not just a bad experience. Trauma is an experience that changes your nervous system, such that it behaves differently in the future, that in a way that's maladaptive for you. So if you look at all the trauma treatments, they're all about learning to talk about the trauma, even experiencing some of the same feelings. So things like trigger warnings and all these things that buffer us against feeling our true feelings, do nothing but prolong the trauma and prolong

and exacerbate fear. You had David Goggins in the lab to study him for fear. What did you learn from looking at that guy? David's great. I always chuckle with David because, you know, the one thing about David is what you see on social media is actually what you get when you interact with David. We worked long hours one day and I was, everyone was ready to tap out. This was a bunch of people in Silicon Valley for a day, you know, doing some workshop type thing and he just,

just changing into his running shorts. Midway, he was going to run to the airport and he ran to the airport as far as I know. I get his flight. I believe so, you know, but there was this moment of should we continue? Should we take a break and he was like, no, let's keep going, keep going. Everything you see and read and hear about David is exactly how he shows up. It's really wonderful. He came to the lab and he did, you know, we have a virtual version of the shark thing,

which of course is not the same as the real experience. But for people who are afraid of sharks, it's quite scary for them and allows us to study fear. David was, he's very afraid of sharks, which was sort of amusing to me, given that as a seal, he had to spend a lot of time in water. But he was first one in, wanted to do the VR, talked about how he didn't like it, but that's why he did it. You know, constant testing himself. In fact, I think, even though David's quite successful,

I think and has many, many options of how to spend his time. I believe this is correct. I think right now he's doing fire jumping. He's fighting fires in the wilderness by zip lining in or fast lining in or jumping out of planes. So he's constantly pushing that friction lever to create

or build or further build this thing about leaning into friction. And this is a term that isn't really scientific, but that I decided to coin because this idea of limbic friction, that when we're very tired and we need to be in action or when we're very stressed and we need to perform in a more calm and controlled way, there's friction on both sides, getting out of bed when we're exhausted, hard, very hard often. Leaning into action in a calm and deliberate way when we're freaking out,

like going to give a public lecture if one has fear of public speaking. Also hard. So this limbic friction and David just seems to seek what I call limbic friction in every domain of life. Is that like exposure therapy for limbic friction then? Essentially, yeah. I mean, what you're training and improving when you're getting better at dealing with stress is this ability to tolerate high amounts of adrenaline in your body and to think clearly in function. Well, I mean, adrenaline

is epinephrine and just a little bit of physiology. It's released from the adrenals obviously above the kidneys. That gets your body organs amped up and energized. It can't cross the so-called blood brain barrier. You have a high restriction fence that we call the blood brain barrier around the brain. Keep bad molecules out. Adrenaline, therefore, is released also within the brain from a

little cluster of neurons called locus serulius. The name doesn't matter. So when you are stressed, your brain and your body both wake up and that adrenaline hijacked certain systems, narrows your visual focus, et cetera, et cetera. If you look at almost all stress inoculation protocols, cold water, ice bath, cold shower, cyclic hyperventilation, those all do the same thing. They generate a

lot of adrenaline release in the brain and a lot of adrenaline release in the body. But it's different if the adrenaline in the brain and body is evoked by you that you did it because under conditions under which you did the ice bath deliberately and now you're wide awake and really, really alert, there's this feeling that you have options. It wasn't done to you, but you can train up an ability to, for instance, think clearly and calmly, maybe even do some simple math problems in

your head or maybe try and relax while there's all this adrenaline in your system. And that carries over so that when you, you know, we've all done it, you're driving along the person in front of you, stop short and you're almost in the accident, right? There's that moment where you could panic or that moment where you could, you know, road rage or that moment where you could freak out. But if you are familiar with the feeling of adrenaline in your brain and body, you navigate that in a

calmer way. How? Well, because adrenaline is generic. There's no adrenaline for the car crash, adrenaline for the heights, adrenaline for the, the, the, the relationship situation. It's all the same. So we can get better. We can raise our stress threshold as I like to refer to it. And that can be done through cold water or cyclic hyperventilation, ideally not at the same time. But cold water,

you know, is a universal stimulus for creating adrenaline release. And there's a big range of cold, not infinite, but a big range of cold in which you can generate adrenaline without harming your tissue. Whereas with heat, you get into a very hot environment or very low oxygen environment. You'll also get a lot of adrenaline, but you can also suffocate and burn yourself. So this is why

cold is used in Navy SEAL screening and training. And this is why I think so many people really like the ice bath and cold showers has a bunch of other positive effects, but it is a great trigger for adrenaline. Speaking about relationships, one of the most common traumas probably that people are going to go through is heartbreak, right? You're going to be in a relationship that you imagine is going to continue forever. Maybe when you're 18 or sometimes when you're 48. And then it's going

to stop. Have you thought about the neuroscience of what's happening during heartbreak? So I've done episodes of our podcast on love attachment and relationships, which is a fascinating literature, mostly from psychology, but also biological literature. And that's mostly about people's orientation toward attachment. So they're just very quickly. There's the so-called secure attached style. This typically emerges in childhood when there's a very predictable care, caregiver,

carry relationship between child. And most often mother, but it can be father to or other caregiver. Just so happens that the classic experiments were done on mothers because this was in the 1970s and there weren't as many reversed roles, you know, homes, etc. There were some,

but not as many as there are now. So that's one style of attachment. The parent leaves. The child gets a little distraught, but then can distract itself doing other things or just simply do other things because they have a high degree of intrinsic knowledge, not the thought, but intrinsic calm. The autonomic nervous system doesn't feel any to ramp up because the mom returns. Then there's the so-called insecure attachment styles and there are a bunch of different ones, but those are the

ones where it's really stressful when the parent leaves. It's not clear they're going to come back. And when they come back, it's not clear that they're going to reestablish the bond, the child will feel supported, etc. Here's what's fascinating. Those same neural circuits are repurposed for romantic attachment in adult life. The same circuits, which shouldn't surprise us. I mean, why would the brain throw away valuable circuitry? But this whole Freudian notion that, you know,

childhood attachment styles map onto adult attachment styles, that's real. That's physiological. Now, one important point, it's not one for one in the sense that let's say you had a secure attachment to your father. Let's say it's a young girl and as a baby and young child, she had a secure attachment to her father and an insecure attachment to her mother. In adulthood, and let's say

she's heterosexual, so in adulthood, she prefers men as romantic partners. This girl grows up, and you might say, well, she had a good relationship to her dad, so she's going to have a good secure attachment style in her adult heterosexual relationships. Often it's not the case. They will transplant or superimpose the insecure attachment style to the mother onto male relationships, but have great relationships to female friends, for instance. So we have to be a little careful to

not map one for one. That's important. So all of that is in us, and then you were talking about breakups, and we did an episode on grief. And the way that grief works in the brain and nervous system is that there are three factors that are mapped in our consciousness and our subconscious. And these are space, time, and this notion of closeness, which is attachment. Space in time is

very simple. It's where is the person that I love and when will I see them next? I mean, if you have a relative that lives overseas and you know they're alive, you're not going to grieve them. You might really miss them, but you're not going to grieve them the same way you would. If suddenly you get the note, unfortunately, that they passed away. And then attachment is how close you are to them, like how critically you rely on them for internal control and support. And that doesn't

mean they have to be in immediate caregiver. It could just be like a really good friend you'd call them mates over in the UK, right? Like a really good friend that just your knowledge of him just makes you feel good. You feel better in the world. You know, as a guy who mostly grew up with kind of a big pack of male friends, I mean, I feel strongest and happiest and most secure in life when I see something about one of my friends doing well in life. It just makes me feel good.

If one of them dies and unfortunately, I'm getting to the age where a number of them have died, then you feel like all of a sudden, like goodness, like there's a loss internally, right? Okay, that's all sort of obvious. But what's interesting is that the grief process itself is about restructuring this map, this map, think of it like a tripod. It's got three pieces space, time, and closeness. When someone dies, it's very confusing for the brain because where are they in space? Well,

the body is put someplace. Maybe it's cremated. Maybe it's not. We have notions of a spirit, and that depends on one's orientation, a soul or a spirit, okay? Or if you don't, then you don't, then where do they go, right? And then time, when will you see them again? There's the never. You'll never see them again. And the closeness component remains. And so there's an untethering of

this map. And so there's been brain imaging studies, beautiful work by Mary Francis O'Connor, University of Arizona, showing that if you look in the brain and people that are in grief from loss of a really strong attachment, the state of brain and body that gets flipped on is a motivational state. It's exactly the same circuitry in the brain that one sees active, if someone very hungry, is put just outside the wall of some delicious food, or if an animal that really wants to mate,

I guess it mate with animals, you got copulate. They really want to copulate with another animal, is put just beyond the wall of that animal, but they can smell them. I mean, these are highly motivated desiring states. So grief is a motivated state to bridge the distance in time and space,

and yet it's impossible. And so the process of grief is a gradual waning of that motivation, and a gradual shift of the memory of the person into some concept, whether or not it's a soul, whether or not it's just the past, whether or not it's their energy, and again, it depends on what the four brain of that particular person believes. Shifts that concept of that person into a place where the brain is comfortable. There's no more autonomic arousal. There's no motivation.

And we've all experienced this. If you've had a loss, and I've had a loss, for instance, where my graduate advisor died, and I adored her, and every once in a while her daughter will call me from her cell phone, and she kept the same number on that phone and the name and everything. So every once in a while, a ring, Barbara Chapman, and I'll reach for the phone, and then there's this moment where I'm like, oh goodness. So anyway, I'm going on and on just to color this with

example. But when there's a breakup, it's exceedingly hard, especially if the person is young. You know, if you look at suicides after breakups, those are far more common and younger people than they are and older people. Why? Because the relationship represents the whole future. They have no concept that they're, they know there are other people, but it sort of feels like the whole world is shutting down. So in breakups, what's happened is the person is no longer available in time and

space. This is why when someone breaks up, you literally have to let them go, right? You know, constant pursuing of them is the out of context. It's not healthy. They have a name for that. It's called a stalker. Don't do it. But it's almost as if you have to, the brain has to think that the person is gone in time and space. This has become much harder with social media, right? Because people can check up on people. They can hear from people in the old days. When I was growing up, you just

like took the phone off the hook or you you diverted your attention. Now we are constantly renewing that the person is still there. And so love and the loss of love and the death grief are virtually identical. It's that motivational state. And this is why it's so hard to not reach out to somebody that you really miss and want back. I saw a study last week that had research

as asking participants to write emotional and physical pain of a breakup. They found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, reporting high levels of both physical and emotional pain. But while breakups hit women the hardest, they tended to recover more fully. Men on the other hand, rarely fully recovered. I thought that was very interesting. I wasn't too sure what that meant. Yeah, it's interesting. It also rings true with my experience and my observations. I think,

I mean, this could relate to a number of things. And here I'm painting with a broad brush, right? But how comfortable one is feeling their feelings is male or female is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief. This is the same thing as trauma. The more willing someone is to feel the full depth and intensity of the feelings that they associate with that trauma, the more quickly they're going to move through the trauma. Again, I'm lifting from Paul Conti's words,

so these aren't mine. But you know, people use a number of strategies. They use distraction. They use states like they sublimate to things like anger and avoidance of various kinds in order to not feel the traumatic feelings or not feel the breakup. People will, you know, try and self-south, alcohol or try and self-south with multiple new partners or whatever happens to be doesn't work. It just extends it because this map of space, time, and closeness needs to be fractured.

And the only way to do that is for the brain to have to confront the reality, which is that whether by death or by breakup, they are no longer available. It's like the food on the other side of that wall is gone. It's just not there anymore. Or that the food that was accessible, now there's a wall in between and you will not get through it. And you know, you can see this actually in animal

studies that are kind of hard, they're actually very hard to watch. You'll see the animal persevering, literally damages the own body trying to get through a barrier to something that's highly motivated to see. People do that post-breakup. They usually do that by talking to everybody about the breakup, which is its own form of perseverating on the motivation. What did I do? What did I do wrong? And some of that analysis is healthy. Some of it's not. Now why would one group be more of,

let's just say effective at dealing with breakups? It's probably the ability to really feel the full intensity of how sad it is and be able to confront that. And here I'm, you know, I'm a male of only ever lived in a male body. So I can tell you is that I think from a very early age, there's an ability that at least, I'm sure it transcends to women too or extends to women too, but learning to pack down feelings, right? And so when are we really talking about when we're talking about pack

down feelings? I'm not a psychologist, but what we learn is top down control, four brain to autonomic control. It's the same thing like, I don't want to jump off the high dive or I don't want to do this public speaking, but I'm going to, I'm going to kind of like, I'm just going to force myself. I'm going to David Goggins it, right? Grief is an autonomic state. We say it has valence, has negative valence, but it's high levels of autonomic arousal with a negative

connotation because you can be high levels of autonomic arousal with happiness, right? You can be very alert and aroused and happy. You very alert and aroused and sad. It's very alert and aroused and sad. And yet we learn how to tamp that down. What is tamping down? It's reducing our heart rate. It's going to work each day, being a functional human being. There's a lot of that, rather than allowing ourselves to sob uncontrollably into a pillow. Some people are better at this.

I mean, the late Steve Jobs was a big proponent of scream therapies. He used to go up into the hills behind Stanford. He actually owns a still owns a property back there. He was really into catharsis, cathartic release of internal state that he felt would allow him to return to the happier, nicer person. He was also kind of well known for screaming at people in the office.

So he obviously had a lot pent up inside. So I think the better that we can lean into the emotional states that we fear the most, but in a controlled way where we're not harming ourselves or other people, the better. The more that we try and avoid that and we try and sublimate or just, you know, and I've done this. So I'm speaking from experience, you know, I would use the anger or the sadness from an experience to just work 10 times longer, 10 times harder,

to just get that much more focused. You're taking that autonomic arousal, that narrow aperture and that energy and you're putting it onto something that moves your life forward. So in some cases, that's good because you still need to function. But it can give you the, out here, I'll just say, it gave me the illusion that I was working through something because you get all the accoutrements and rewards of hard work. But what you don't do is remap that space-time

closeness map. And then you find, I guarantee, you find yourself five or 10 years later, wondering why you're so exhausted or why certain things in life aren't going well. And it's because, when they say you haven't dealt with the loss, you never actually allowed yourself to feel the feelings. But once you do, it's like a valve it releases. You hear musicians say that the most recent album was shit because I didn't have any heartbreak to work through. And it is strange how people,

it's a difficult thing to pass because a little bit of it is kind of like alchemy. A little bit of it is kind of like turning something that's terrible into something that's useful and beautiful. It's fuel. But you're right, it is a hiding away from what it is that you actually need to do, from the work that you need to do. And in a world which is a meritocracy where people want success and status and accolade and fame. And you go, well, enemies and revenge and bitterness, resentment,

pretty good motivators. Maybe I could use some of that. Maybe I should go out of my way to try and put myself into positions where this motivates me. And working out where that falls on the ledger is a difficult one. It is. And I think it depends on life stage and it depends on how one is going to work it out. I mean, the narrative around the shark dive. I mean, even as I say it now, that was 2017 was the second dive when I think about all that. That was crazy. I was out there studying

fear. And I almost was the professor who died studying fear. It would have been terrible into the story. What was I doing? Don't do this. Don't do this. But you know, there are times in our life where we feel compelled to take on certain challenges for whatever reason. There's a phrase it doesn't exist in the scientific literature, but it captures two components of physiology that are

absolutely factual. Earlier we talked about limbic friction. As it relates to creative process and sublimation of anger and sadness and creating things from bad events, books, music, etc. The words that come to mind are limbic resonance. The human beings resonate with these extreme states. There aren't many great albums written about a good day walking on a Sunday in the park. It's kind of boring. I mean, there's the beautiful painting Sunday in the park with George,

but now, be honest, it's beautiful, but it's also kind of boring. You can look at the details of it for a while. People like intensity. The scream is that people look at that for a long time and speaks to the psychosis of the artist, etc. People don't generally bond through passive, relaxed states unless they've also been through a lot together. We can talk about this separately if you want, but all of us are here because of the autonomic sea-sawing that is the reproductive act.

It goes from highly aroused. How you refer to it in your lab? Yeah, it's very interesting that the arousal process is one of increased in autonomic arousal in order to get true arousal, but then not so much that it inhibits arousal, then mating behavior. The orgasm response in males and females is highly what we call sympathetic, not

emotionally. It can be, I suppose, emotionally sympathetic, but from a pure physiology standpoint, it's an activation, hyperactivation of the stress system, even though it has positive valence. There's a very quick rebound to the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic

arousal system, this deep relaxation, which we don't really know why. I wasn't consulted the design phase, but we think that that post-coidal bliss and the relaxing the desire to not run around a bunch more for most people was to exchange

odor and molecules to increase pair bonding. Even if people aren't trying to pair bond, because people don't always just mate to reproduce, but that some of the molecules that are released in each of the two individuals, oxytocin being the main one, give people a sense of post-coidal bliss, and it's a very calm one that creates opportunity for bonding and discussion in the zogol like pillow talk. There are other forms of pillow talk too.

Not clarity. But for women, it might be something different. Of course, a different name. I only speak in the language of physiology, but for both men and women, this happens. It creates this little orb of closeness that is both physiological and but neurochemical too. So what we can say for sure is that whether or not it was in vivo or in a dish, we are all here because two parents, a male and a female, unless you're a condor,

where two females can produce a baby. This has now been shown. But as far as we know, where a male and a female reproduce, because they each went through this arc of arousal, not too high, arousal, extreme stress relaxation. That happened separately or together,

because in vitro, it could be fertilization to be separate. So the test of whether or not we get to reproduce is actually the ability to assuming that people are doing this together and not through in vitro fertilization is a test of whether or not people can coordinate their autonomic nervous systems. Now there are ways around that into overriding, but by and large,

that's the way humans evolved and the way all other animals evolved. Now, limbic resonance isn't a good way, I think, to describe that process, but that carries over to other things too. An album about an extreme loss, a song or a poem about extreme loss, brings the reader, the listener, into a limbic state that's very similar or approximates what they create or

experienced, the person created that art or that poetry. And in the same way, if something is about a lot of anger, if you like loud, fast music or something like that, it's an extreme state. It has a gravitational pull to it. Again, I'm using this language, limbic resonance, rarely if ever, do human beings bond through nothing. They bond through shared experience. And you think of what makes people feel close, whether a couple things, and this has everything to do with time

perception. Typically, when there's a high degree of limbic resonance, it means that the molecule dopamine was increased substantially over baseline at some point. Dopamine is almost always discussed in terms of pleasure, but it's the molecule of motivation drive and to some extent reward. It tends to narrow our visual focus. And believe it or not, dopamine is the molecule from which

adrenaline is manufactured. Biochemically, you get adrenaline from dopamine. So these two act as close cousins to put us into the states of motivation and have energy to pursue things. When dopamine is very present in our system, or if you're in the company of someone else, and there's a lot of dopamine, two things happen. First of all, you're very motivated, narrowing a focus. That's one. The other is that the way that you perceive time is quite a bit

different. For instance, if you ever had an amazingly exciting day, just tons of things. Maybe you meet someone new, you're having the best time. I mean, just think falling in love in the most incredible date that you can imagine how it begins and how it ends. It just feels incredible. It all feels like it went by very, very fast. And yet when you look back on that day, it seems like so much happened. Now, think about an opposite situation. You go to the doctor's office and you're

sitting in the doctor's lobby and you're waiting and you're waiting. And there's no phone reception. So you can't scroll Instagram. You're waiting and you're waiting. It's incredibly boring. It's a very low dopamine state. It feels like it goes on forever. And yet when you look back,

nothing really happened. So dopamine changes our perception of time. And in terms of developing human bonds, this has been well-established that if two people, for instance, go three different places in a given day, they tend to feel like they know each other far better than if they stayed in one place even for a longer period of time. Did you know that pick-up artists were weaponizing

this about 15 years ago? Oh, no. It doesn't surprise me, but I'm sorry to hear it. It was common held wisdom in the pick-up artist community that you were supposed to have a three location date to manipulate precisely this to make the girl feel like you had progressed further down the maturation process of spending time together. Surely there have to be female pickup artists too. Yeah, I feel like their job's probably easier. I can't comment. I don't know. I've never been one.

Going back to dopamine. Just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine? Okay, great question. We often hear that, you know, the social media did dopamine hit after dopamine hit. When we first get on social media after the first time or after a long period of time, the amount of dopamine that's released we think is quite substantial. It's novel. Remember, dopamine is about novelty, surprise, and the sense that we are on some exciting track. That's what dopamine is really

about. It puts us into states of readiness, anticipation, looking, seeking, etc. Almost always for things outside the confines of our skin. Just to contrast it, maybe for more of a future discussion, serotonin does the opposite. When there's a lot of serotonin in our brain and body, typically it makes us feel satisfied, say it, more quiescent, comfortable with what we have in our own immediate sphere and within us. The comfort of a good meal, the food you have, dopamine is about go, go, go.

If you look at somebody who's high on cocaine or methamphetamine, it's all about pursuit, because that's a very dopamine-ergic drug. You look at somebody who's taken a drug, and I'm not suggesting people do this, but they're really ramps up serotonin. Let's say a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, prozaxle, etc. The side effects of those drugs, if the dosages are too high, lack of appetite, lack of libido, kind of met about life, then so they'll adjust the dose down. That's

because those are serotonergic drugs. In general, when we are in pursuit of things, dopamine is quite high. Now you have to remind me your question, because we set up the dopamine serotonin perlophones. Perlophones. Yes, forgive me. The thing about cell phones is when you first get on there, and you have, let's say, no Wi-Fi on the flight or something, and you land, it can actually be quite

stimulating. You get a lot of dopamine. There's this. There's that. But very quickly, when you're scrolling on social media, you're no longer getting the novelty, but you're continuing to do it, you almost don't know why you're doing it. At that point, it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive-compulsive behavior, where we can define an obsessive-compulsive behavior, where the obsession leads to a compulsion. The obsession is a thought, the compulsion is a behavior,

but the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession. This is very different than being obsessed with food or obsessed with cleanliness. There's no payoff. Exactly. There's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion. With OCD behaviors, like scrolling social media, the dopamine quickly wanes, and then you find that you're just sort of, and we've all been there, you're scrolling. Why am I doing this? This isn't that interesting. This isn't that interesting.

Now, the algorithms for social media are very clever. I don't want to demonize it. I provide a lot of, a lot of my life has spent on social media now, but the algorithms that they've incorporated function on the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior or an animal for that matter is intermittent random reward, a random intermittent reward, that you don't know when you're going to hit the jackpot. You're scrolling, you're scrolling, and then you see something.

Typically, it's very high in nerd-speak, we'd say signal to noise. If you're reading some interesting things, this came out in the news, this came out, and then it's all a sudden a riot, or a person that is based jumping off of building, or for people that are scrolling looking at bodies, or something like that, live bodies. Hopefully people aren't looking at dead bodies. But look,

if something's very tragic, then that has this gravitational pull. Then what happens is you start getting the system working for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's going to come. It's just like gambling. I look at social media as initially being very dopamine-ergic, driving rewards, surprise, and excitement, but very quickly transitioning to something more like OCD, and the kinds of behaviors where it looks, if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of

an experiment, like we would an animal experiment, we think that animal is sick. If you saw an animal digging in the corner, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking for a bone, the dog, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, you'd think, that's really sad. That's us. That's us. I'm pointing at myself intentionally. That's us. So we have to learn to self-regulate the amount of time. But that doesn't have to be a process of, you know,

scruffing ourselves and saying, don't do it, don't do it. Think about it in terms of the positive. The more time away from something, the more positively reinforcing it will be when you return. And that just to sort of superimpose this onto the relationship conversation. You know, many of us are fortunate to have partners that we love spending a lot of time with. It's also good to miss that person every once in a while. Now, that might be an hour for some

people apart of no communication. It might be a week. Everyone varies on this spectrum. But the idea of missing someone is that positive anticipation, that kind of pain, right? It's a motivational state. And then when you see them, it's all the richer. So you can imagine that dopamine circuits can be used to more successfully navigate a number of different

things. And, you know, a lot of couples completely quash the excitement and the pleasure of being together, not just physical pleasure, but just pleasure of being together because they just spend too much damn time together. Or they're texting all the time, right? Or they're, you know, and this whole thing around texting has become a really interesting test of dopamine expectation. There's a thing called dopamine reward prediction error. If you think the reward is coming and it

doesn't, you drop below baseline levels of dopamine. That's why you should never tell someone that this restaurant's going to be the best restaurant you've ever been to in your life. Exactly. I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend on the way here. I wanted to read this book. I'm like, this is an amazing book. You should read it. And I caught myself and I thought, damn it. I'm actually detracting from how good she's going to experience the book at- Tell her it was terrible.

Oh, yeah. It's really good though. This is the problem. It's all it's hard to do. So I think the key is to leverage dopamine reward prediction error in the best way. It's the surprise that, you know, if you take kids, you're driving home from school and suddenly you pull into the ice cream shop, they're going to be so ecstatic. But if you tell them you get to go the ice cream shop and it's

closed, huge drop below baseline. Does that mean if you tell them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's open, that's less than not telling them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's surprised? Correct. They literally tear out into maximum, surprise is the maximum dopamine release. Then successful completion of the missions as it were is the next and then unsuccessful. Is there an argument to be made that you would be able to drag out the amount of time that dopamine

is released for because of the anticipation? Yeah. So well, and people do this in relationship quite a lot, right? Anticipation is the kind of ultimate fuel of the courting dance, right? I mean, this is also, but one has to be very careful because whether or not it's from the male side of the female side or whatever variation thereof, there's that you only get so many reward prediction errors before people start to predict or associate low dopamine with somebody or some experience.

In other words, if you, you know, I'll use an example, not for my own life, but if you say, you know, we're going to Costa Rica on vacation and then you say, listen, I have to work. They might understand, but that's a let down. It's a dopamine reward prediction error in the direction of lower dopamine. They might recover from it. They might not, but most people recover

from it. If you do that two or three times, what ends up happening, you can model this beautifully and they've seen this experimentally in animals and humans, then you say, okay, we're really going to Costa Rica this time. And you think, well, the surprises are going to be that you actually go. The amount of dopamine that's released for positive for a successful completion of the initial goal is far lower than it ever would have been. So you can only cry. Well, I suppose that's not

the right way to put it. You can only create positive anticipation so many times and then create a let down before completion that the pro, delivery of the promise has very little impact. And so you have to be very careful with one's words, better to say nothing than to let somebody down for sure in the context of human relationship. And you know, this plays out in some less perhaps amusing ways, where you know, you look at people who are successful in life and you always hear success build

success. And it's absolutely true. Like when students come to my lab and they do a PhD thesis, it's very important for me to get them onto a research track quickly that they're going to experience some success. Because if they spend four years and then it fails, that's the devastating. And then they have to start over again. Same thing with kids. I mean, getting some success early on, even if it's low bar success really does build up one's positive anticipation and ability to perform

well in the future because dopamine gives energy, memory, supercursor to adrenaline. And the sense that the world is predictable. Now, this can go a wrong way too. And I see this a lot with the idea that everyone gets a blue ribbon. This is terrible too because if everyone is rewarded, every child is rewarded regardless of how well they performed. If they're all rewarded to the same level, you actually flatten the dopamine curve. And so in that sense, yes, everyone might feel

celebrated, but you actually are lowering motivation for the given activity. This has a whole landscape of research in back of it related intrinsic versus extrinsic reward. The strongest motivation is always going to be intrinsic motivation. If you reward kids or adults for something too many times, even if they like that activity, the propensity to do that activity will be reduced. But if you reward without effort or without success, that is devastating for a nervous system.

In fact, I've gone on record and I'll say it again and again and again, which is that dopamine that arrives without prior effort destroys people. This is drugs. This is, you know, this is things like cocaine and emphetamine. It's high levels of dopamine with no effort. They had to buy it, they had to find it, they did whatever it. But there's no physical effort or mental effort involved in getting the dopamine peak. This is why hard work followed by reward. Great. Working

hard on a relationship and then it gets better. There's a breakthrough. Whatever it is, that is powerfully positive. Dopamine that just arrives because you say, oh, you're here so you get reward terrible. This is why rewarding every little positive thing that a child does with, you know, their favorite thing eventually diminishes the value of that thing and diminishes their ability to get motivated on their own. So a very, very powerful system. One has to be very, very careful how

one leverages it. What are your thoughts on dopamine detoxing? Is that legit? Does it work? Well, up until about six months ago, I would have said no, but my colleague Anilemke was a fan on the show. Fantastic. I have such admiration and respect. She's great. Yeah, I just brief anecdote. I directed neuroanatomy courses for the medical students at Stanford.

I should have known who Anna was and then one day she came in to give a lecture on dopamine and addiction and my first thought was, oh my goodness, you know, I have to get her on the podcast and I have to get, I want her talking to the world because it's such a powerful knowledge. So if people haven't heard that episode or I go listen to Chris talking to Dr. Anilemke, I'm going to listen to it. I listened to all her podcasts that I was aware of, but again,

we were talking about it's sometimes hard to find podcasts. So I'm going to listen to that. Cannot listen to her enough times. You know, the dopamine, you asked earlier about the arc of dopamine and how long it lasts, that the one of the key takeaways from that book, the dopamine nation that I've incorporated in my own life is that there are certain activities like cold water that create long-lasting arcs of dopamine. Those can be very useful for putting us into long-lasting

motivational states. So these are not big peaks and troughs. These are the pain of the cold water followed by this long, long arc of dopamine. Wonderful. It's kind of an antidepressant, positive motivator, natural stimulus. I always say if you don't have access to a nice bath, cold showers, yes, will work. If you have a shower that doesn't get cold enough, keep in mind that the original study showing this dopamine increase had people get into 60 degree

water, which is not that cold, 60 degree Fahrenheit, for 45 minutes to an hour. So your water bill might go up, but you could just draw a kind of cool bath and get in that up to the neck. So because I realize there are sometimes some cost barriers to people, they're not everyone has an ice bath. Dopamine detoxing. Yeah. So dopamine detoxing is something that, apparently today, my short-term working memory is off. I swear I can't. I can't think of any, I'm caffeinated. I can't think of any

pharmacologic reason for it, but no excuses. So dopamine detox I would have thought was not something real. It seemed kind of silly to me, actually. And I'll tell you why it seems silly and why it still seems silly, but why I may have some utility. But then Anna, Dr. Anolamki, told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media. Certainly from any addictive drugs, that's the treatment for addiction and restore

those dopamine levels to baseline. Now, the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the Bay Area, where it seemed a lot of tech types were talking about it, was in terms of, I heard something like, oh, people aren't even looking at other people's faces. They're really kind of living in this like munchish lifestyle, like no food that they really enjoy, no anything. That to me seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme. I mean, I can understand not ingesting a lot of

highly palatable foods, you know, eating some more blandter foods. I can understand not, certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine. Caffeine increases dopamine receptors, which makes the dopamine that's available more powerful at evoking the dopamine response. I can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors, but the idea that you weren't going to look at people in the eye because there's going to be too much dopamine.

I mean, I guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much they're look positively or houses you, but the fact of the matter is that that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox, but staying out of high intensity, highly rewarding activities. I think

could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance. And everything we know from Anna's work is that dopamine, you know, if you drive those dopamine energy, it states too long, addictive drugs, etc. People can do this with sex, food, drugs, gambling, social media, all sorts of things, pornography. You know, what ends up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and down and pretty much is traversing

into the territory of pain. And then people again are back to this thing where, you know, they're scrolling internet porn eight, nine, ten times or hours a day. And then they're wondering like, why this isn't effective for them anymore, whereas it was before. And there's an additional issue with pornography, which is not often discussed, which is that remember guys in particular.

The brain is a learning prediction machine. And if I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else, right? Especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography, the brain is learning sexual arousal to other people having sex.

So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur? Yeah, or just create challenges in sexual interactions with, you know, with peer with a real partner, right? Very Harrington has the three laws of polo dynamics. And the second law of polo dynamics is the law of fat entropy. And it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time.

And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever-decreasing stimulus that comes back. Yeah. And, you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology, right? I'm not a you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in it in any way. At least not I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the idea here is that,

you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good. What I'm saying is it in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release. And Anna will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop

to baseline, you drop below baseline. So again, it's not these things aren't good or bad. They just have to be controlled in a way because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them, typically it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often. And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and then maybe an ability for yourself,

your system to reset. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be superimposed onto real sex, right? That one also has to be cautious there, right? But the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states, dopamine fasting as it were, but maybe just low dopamine states. These are natural rhythms that existed in the nervous system. We had to remember what the dopamine

energy system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted the design phase, but we know as it as a generic form of motivation and pursuit, you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty. It needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true. You need energy in order to get the thing to eat. So our nervous system has energy also. That's dopamine and epinephrine. Yes, we use glucose and glycogen, etc. when we're

pursuing things. But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track. So you go down that track and then, ah, there it is. You know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this. So you get to kill the prey and eat it. And then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every every species

but certainly humans have to innate desires built into them. Whether or not they decide to actualize this or not is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that. Even if people don't have children in general, people care about children because they of what they represent. Very few people dislike children. I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children, but you always worry about those kinds of people.

You were talking earlier on about the fact that dopamine can be released when you set yourself a little goal and then achieve it in one of the ways that you encourage your grad students is to give them a little bit of reward earlier on so that it keeps them motivated. Is this the same mentality that works during an endurance event when you want to say, I'm just going to get myself to the next lamppost. So we've got to get myself to that hill over there. Is that the same dynamic?

Yeah. We can call it milestone. You just set some milestone. And the key thing here is that, and this is the beauty of the dopamine system. Just like the stress system is generic, the fear system is generic. It's designed for a bunch of different scenarios. The motivation system is also generic. It can be to achieve the next lamppost as a milestone or it can be five miles

as the next milestone. You get to control that. And so it's completely arbitrary. I mean, one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me by an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple. And yet I do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself is that it's all internal. Right? If you finish a marathon in first place, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, you self generate that. It's all internal. It's all about your

internal representation. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life. But the fact of the matter is that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there, if you allow yourself a moment to register that win, you get energy to do to then set the next milestone and achieve it. That energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine into adrenaline. And this is why you hear these incredible heroic

stories. Like, I mean, I think the movie, sorry, I hate to say, but the movie was less good than the book, but like loan survivor, the Marcus LaTrell story. And the actually, I think today, where yesterday might be the anniversary of Operation Redwing. So all those guys sadly died except Marcus. And you know, in the movie, he's like fast forward to where he, I don't want to give it away, but where he basically is the loan survivor. But in the book, it's crazy. I mean, they got dragged

himself on elbows and knees for miles and miles and miles. Right? You know, that kind of ability, where you hear about people walking on stubs to, you know, these incredible feats of human endurance and willingness to persist. I mean, those people were able to do that not because of glycogen or they drank their goo or whatever the triathletes are always using. It's because of nervous system energy, the ability to continue to manufacture adrenaline and keep going. And the

and the extent to which that can continue is no one will ever know. I do believe that humans have a tremendous capacity to endure and persist, but that few human beings actually know how to tap into that system except under conditions of extreme survival. And you also hear from really good physicians, ones that aren't into woo biology or woo psychology at all that to some extent, yes, there are people that unfortunately die in their battle against cancer, no matter what. But

that the desire to continue living is a powerful force in of itself. They are maybe spiritual components. That's not the business I'm in, you know, and how I don't know the experiment I would do to test it. But almost certainly setting of milestones and the ability to generate dopamine and adrenaline is what allows people to persist and live longer. There's no question about that. One of the best books I've read this year is The Expectation Effect by David Robson.

So he is a science writer from the UK and he looked at a whole bunch of studies. The placebo effect which everybody is familiar with, right? There is a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication and lo and behold that outcome manifests. He found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about. So my two favorite studies from this, so so interesting. He realized that gluten intolerance, self-report, gluten

intolerance is increased from 3% to 30% in 10 years. This is why there's so many gluten free options on the menu. Prisad, they've got the 30% of the population assert, yeah, so people need it. And he was wondering, well, what is it? Human biology hasn't changed that much. Is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that? Or is it maybe some sort of expectation? Because the type of news stories that are hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us

and inflammation and all this sort of stuff, maybe it's that and people are expecting it. So they brought people into a lab and they sit them down. These people do and do not have self-reported gluten intolerances and they give everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that it's got gluten in it. It's got no gluten in it. After a while, people who don't have a gluten intolerance biologically, who haven't eaten gluten, have diarrhea, they have hives, they're breaking out

in inflammation, they're having to run at the bathroom. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting. He did another story that he spoke about. VL2 max tests that they were looking at. Apparently, there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off CO2 and upregulate oxygen in a better way. They brought people in, even numbers, of people that didn't, did not have this genetic trait. Split them into two random groups. So there was a mix of both do and do not have

the trait in each. First group was told, you've got the right genetic trait. You should be really, really good at this. Second group was told, sorry, you don't have it. You shouldn't be too good. There's no surprise, perhaps, of the group that was told that they did. They ended up performing better. But when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people, they found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation but were told that they did

had a lower overall lactate threshold. They had a lower overall heart rate. They were blowing off CO2 more effectively and upregulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation, but were told that they didn't. So he coined this term that said your expectations are even more powerful than your genes. I love that. I'm going to read the book. That's a remarkable example. I think that a lot of these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things. But

this is almost in a different direction. This is a psychophysiological response. I find this kind of thing to be honest, among the more fascinating and interesting aspects of neuroscience, if not the most interesting lately, those examples are tremendous. So I can't counter those at all with anything more spectacular. The work of Dr. Alia Krum at Stanford, she runs the Stanford

Mind Body Lab. She's done simple experiments, but they're really elegant, instructing people, one group, all about the terrible effects of stress, destroys your immune system, etc., etc. Other people telling them also true things, but all the positive effects of stress. It sharpens your ability of function. You can remember things better, etc., etc. You see exactly what you were told, basically. Now, you can't lie to people. You can't

tell them things that aren't true. It's just about the subset of information that you get, dictates the response you get. And perhaps the most traumatic was they gave two different groups of people. And then they actually each got the opposite condition to a milkshake. One group is told this milkshake is very high calorie. It contains a lot of fat and sugar, etc., another group is told the milkshake they're getting is very low calorie. It's very nutrient sparse, etc., then they measure

hunger. So how long it takes for them to get hungry again after ingesting it? They also look at insulin. And they also look at Drelin, this hormone that is secreted as you essentially makes you hungry. It's associated with hunger. There are other things too. But you see exactly what you would expect, which is the people that get the nutrient dense milkshake are satisfied for longer. Their Drelin is suppressed and their insulin is higher. You see the opposite in the group that had the

so-called low calorie shake turns out to be the exact same milkshake. This is remarkable, right? Because this is not simply the placebo effect. I think it's the placebo effect plus the expectation effect plus a real physiological effect. Because that's what you describe as well. And the way that Ali, Dr. Ali, from as she goes by, the way she describes it is that any

event causes a real physiological response. But that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding of what the response ought to be to create the actual response. So it's sort of real plus perceived equals your reality, right? Exactly. And so I love this kind of thing as you can tell. I'm eating up the example that you gave. I think it's spectacular because what it means is that no, we can't lie to ourselves. We can't tell ourselves

that drinking water is going to sustain us just as food would for five days. We're not going to be hungry. But to some extent, if one understands that, well, you can survive a long time on just water, and you don't need to eat, then you might experience less hunger. That's the way the nervous system works. Well, you can definitely survive longer on just water if you believe that you can survive longer on just water. There is no reason not to believe this. So I was really, really a verse to

the whole ronda burn, the secret, who sending out messages to the universe. And David's positions himself very anti that as well in the book. But you can't deny the fact that the positive thinking has a real physiological impact on what you do. He was talking about, they did a study with older people that were past retirement, and they asked them to use what

sort of words do you associate with getting older? They split these people into two different groups, and the sort of words that people used, perfectly mapped on to how long they were going to live. So the people that used the sort of words alone, frail, fragile, injury, death, they were the ones that lived the shortest. The people that said happiness, freedom, liberty, connection, maturity, those sorts of words were the ones that lived the longest. So your expectations

can literally impact your longevity. There's, I'm yet to read the book in detail, but I've talked to a guy named Ethan Cross, he wrote a book called Shattered on the Show. Oh, fantastic. Okay, I think that internal chatter world is a very interesting one that neuroscience will eventually have something to say about. I think the most powerful mindset, at least to me, is one that again, I learned from

Ali Krum. This is a mindset that in her peer-reviewed studies of different populations, it's clear exists universally in people in the SEAL teams, but less so, or it's perhaps even absent from the general population, sadly. The idea that stress grows you, that challenge grows you, but isn't the only way that you can grow, I think, is a very powerful mindset. So what do you mean by that? So what they did is, she surveyed a bunch of different people, different professions,

and ask, what's your view of stress? Do you think it grows you, it diminishes your ability, et cetera. So this isn't giving people information, this is asking them for information. And the only group that said stress grows you, the more challenge the better you get, et cetera. The more stress you experience, the more likely you are to succeed, was this group from the SEAL teams. I don't know if they were new recruits, or if they had been in a long time, but that was the group.

I would add to that, that yes, if you adopt the mindset that stress grows you, you're going to be much better off, but also that stress is not the only way to grow in life, right? There's this idea, you know, we have this, and again, there's sort of a gravitational pull of this, I like stress grows you know forward center of mass, or you know, always be in friction, limbic friction, limbic friction.

How about a more expansive or nuanced version of that might be stress grows you. So if you're under stress, you're back on your heels from something you think, okay, how can I get flat footed, or even forward center of mass, you tell yourself stress grows me, stress grows me, stress grows me, but that doesn't mean stress is the only thing that will grow you, right? Learning to cycle between

periods of hard work and deep, what I call non-destructive, deliberate reset, right? That's what really works over time, I can attest to that, you know, at people who just really go out and tie one on in order to recover, you can only get away with that for a few years before your body and mind start

to give out, right? So fine non-destructive ways to reset, and also adopt the mindset that stress grows you and adopt the mindset that, you know, there are other ways to grow that don't involve stress, and I think you're set up to have a pretty fantastic life. That's my, you know, simple view of the way these things work. Speaking of endurance and suffering, what have you learned from Lex Friedman

since he'd been friends with him? I think that works a lot. You can text him or call him a pretty much any hour except the early morning hours that he happens to be in because he's likely to be a sleep. You know, Lex is a really interesting one because, you know, like a lot of scientists and engineers, he has that ability to really drop into the trench, which is certainly not unique to

scientists and engineers, but is really helpful. I think Lex comes at things from at once a very engineering physics perspective, which obviously computer science robots and all AI and all that. He loves that stuff, but you know, there's a phrase that he's used over and over again in our conversations, and he's talked about this publicly, and I've started to pay a bit more attention to, because he says it so many times, which is, you know, approach life with love in your heart,

you know, which is weird, right? You think about an engineer who's thinking like this goes there, and this is what gets going to predict the best outcome and then you think like approach things with love in your heart. And I think he's right because, and I think that is very powerful because

there are so many pitfalls, and by pitfalls what I mean are energy sinks. You know, across the day, from the time you wake up until you go to sleep at night, there's so many places for you to put your energy, can go into online battles, it can go into, you know, texting five different people, it can be investing in one person, it can be, there's so many things, and so much of success in any domain is about, yes, maintaining focus, we hear about that a lot, focus, focus, focus.

But what is focus? Focus is really about not allowing energy to dissipate into these kind of meaningless trails. So I think about Lex and I, as I do for all people, I think, you know, what animal does he best represent, or what animal best represents him? I think of all people like this. I have this kind of weird process where after I spend some time with somebody, it just pops to mine. Like, I can't tell you what animal comes to mind yet. You might see that after the ice bath light

around you say how long I see. It might be, you might be a polar bear, super comfortable in the water, the cold water. But I think that, you know, at some point I realized that Lex is gets very fixated on things, very, very fixated, but he also knows how to disengage, and he really avoids energy sinks through this, and losses through this kind of love thing that he's really into. Because anger is very energetically demanding. It's great fuel, but it's not efficient fuel overall.

Right? It's like having a gas tank full of fuel, but there are a lot of leaks in it. Whereas, I do think that doing things out of genuine desire, there's a calm, sort of energized balance that comes with that, and you feel like you can go forever. So this is starting to sound a little bit woo. It sounds like, oh, you know, the heart is more powerful than the adrenals, and like, they're both powerful. The adrenals can keep you alive and enduring for a long, long time. But if

you do things out of anger and friction for too long, your immune system will crash. We know this. But it is essentially infinite. How much energy you can derive out of genuine desire to engage with something or somebody. Well, animal is even. You know, Lex, well, his hair

makes me think he's some spiky thing. He's sort of like, he sort of has the persistence of the porcupine, but he has, he's definitely has, I think he, as much as I don't want to admit it, because I wish it were me, not him, but I think the animal that best captures Lex, because he's also a bit of a loner is the Wolverine. I've spent a lot of time thinking about actual Wolverines, not the huge actin version of Wolverines, but the actual Wolverines. They're very solo animals, unless they

pair up to mate. They're incredibly strong. He is freakishly strong. I've done jugetzu with him. I'm not going to jugetzu. He is. He's a black bell jugetzu, but he is freakishly strong. So if I had to pick an animal, I'd say probably the Wolverine. What's interesting about him. I went to Thanksgiving with him last year, which was my first time of enjoying that holiday here, which is a fantastic holiday, actually, we think we don't have something in the UK where people sit back and do

that gratitude, reflection, period, except for Christmas. People do that end of your review, but I really think, and especially the time of your return, it's perfect. We were talking, and he was talking about the fact that he was working hard, but he feels this gap between where he is and where he could be, which sounds like Lex. Sense is a common pattern, yeah. He was saying that a lot of the friends that he speaks to will say, you're doing well, you're working hard,

and he looked me in the eyes and he's like, I don't want them to say that. I want them to tell me to suck it up. I want them to tell me that I need to stop being such a pussy and keep going. I say it takes an unbelievably singular person to work as hard as he does. I don't think that the internet, whatever people know about how hard he works, is only a small sliver of just how obsessive and committed he is, and for him to say that he wants to be around more people that push him in

that way. It made me realize that perhaps I could be offering more to my friends as well, that offering them just support in the form of acceptance and presence. I'm hearing you and dude, you're doing great or whatever reassurance in that way. Maybe isn't always the best way to go about things. It's just something that stuck in my mind. It's a little model that I've kept with me where I'm thinking, look, does my friend need me to tell him that he's doing good? Does he need

me to tell him to suck it up and get his nose down because I know that he can do it? Sounds very much like Lex, and I'm learning about your internal workings a bit too. There are three kinds of reward. Two of them are often discussed. One is rarely discussed, but it's pretty powerful. And I think it's useful to think about toggling between these different rewards, whether or not for ourselves or whether or not in trying to stimulate and motivate other people.

One, of course, is reward. You did great. Congratulations. That was awesome. Love that podcast. Great that you got an A plus on your report card or B plus because last year you got to see whatever it is. Reward. Then there's punishment, right? This is obvious. You screwed up, like, you take something away or you take the anticipation of reward away, whatever it is. You screwed up, you're punished, you're grounded, et cetera. You're not watching TV for a month or whatever

it is. No screens from them. Then there's the third kind of reward, which is the reward that you hang out in front of somebody at a distance, like a carrot on a stick out in front of them, which is not reward for what they've accomplished, but reward that they can anticipate if they accomplish something. I think this could be very effective in the context that we're talking about it, which is how would I do this with Lax? I'd say, you know, I really loved this particular interview.

If only the next time you have that person on, you also asked them this, right? That's not a punishment. You're not saying it sucked because it didn't include this. You're not saying it wasn't great. You're saying, if next time you were to do that, I think it would be even better. So, you're hanging a potential reward out in front. I think that can be a very powerful motivator. So, you can, you know, we could build up a number of different examples around this,

but this is not often talked about in sort of reward punishment schedules and motivation. We always think reward and punishment, but we think immediate reward, immediate punishment. Now, in terms of building habits and goal setting and goal seeking, we know that visualizing failure is for better or for worse, is a far better motivator than visualizing success if you want to get people motivated to start, right? To start. Now, getting people to continue involves

regular rewards for reaching milestones. However, and I should have said this earlier, I want to make sure that we do emphasize that the best schedule really is random intermittent reinforcement. So, if you're setting milestones on this run or in your intellectual pursuits or business pursuits or relationship pursuits, if you set a milestone and you get there, you do want to have a little bit of an internal celebration. Remember, it's all internal. So, internal celebration, not extrinsic

celebration and reward. But every once in a while, it's good to just not reward yourself. Now, at what ratio should you do that? Well, the computer modeling data say that the optimal ratio of successful trials and unsuccessful trials for learning and motivation is going to be about 85% of the time to reward yourself and about 15% of the time to not reward yourself. So,

random intermittent lack of reward is another way to think about it. And I talked about this with Jocco a little bit and he thought, oh, yeah, probably what we should do is have workouts where it's a big fish bowl full of ping pong balls and about 15% of them are marked with reward. But the other ones is you do something and you get to go take a ping pong ball out and if you take that out, then you get some reward if it's marked and if it's not, then you don't.

And rather than every time you accomplish something, you go reward yourself. So, here we're talking, we're getting kind of into the weeds of reward schedules. But I think if you really want to support a friend, punishment you should use very judiciously, although if they really screw up a good friend, as they say, we'll put the friendship ahead of the friend or the friend ahead of the friendship. Excuse me. The friend, like you're going to tell them what they really need to hear, even if it

compromises the friendship, if you really believe they need to hear that. Other times reward, like that was awesome. Congratulations. And then occasionally, if it's warranted, that was great ish, but it would be so much better if the next time you did this. Or that was great, but honestly, I think it was a mixture of good and not so good. So I think those are three powerful ways to reward and they can be mixed up and toggle back and forth according to whatever schedule allows

that person to continue. What does your morning routine look like at the moment? Morning routine is wake up if I run about what time? I'm waking up these days around 6 am, 6.30 am. I'm trying to go to sleep by about 10.30 pm. Sometimes it's 11. Sometimes it's 10. I wake up and I have to be careful here because whenever I've described my routine in a little bit of detail, people always say, I can't believe you don't go to the bathroom. It's like, well,

so I want to be clear. Yeah, I take care of my basic functions. But when I wake up, I make a beeline for sunlight. So I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes for the, you know, I'll probably go into the grave saying this. So forgive me if people have heard me say this before. But the single best thing you can do for your sleep, your energy, your mood, your wakefulness, your metabolism is to get natural light in your eyes early in the day. Don't wear sunglasses to do it. It takes

about 10 minutes or so. If you live in a cloudy area, if you're in the UK and the winter, yes, or the summer, or the summer, maybe you resort to some artificial light as a replacement. But as much as one can get bright, natural, and if not natural, artificial light in your eyes early in the day, without sunglasses, contacts and eye glasses are fine. Don't try and do it through

a window or windshield. It's going to take far too long. This sets in motion a huge number of different neurobiological and hormonal cascades that are good for you, reduces stress late at nights, offsets, cortisol, a million different things really that are good for you. So I get that. And yes, sometimes I walk, didn't I look? Ideally, that would be a walk, but sometimes we'll just go into the yard and have some coffee and you know, soak into whatever sunlight through

through the clouds. If it's a cloudy overcast day, it might be 20, 30 minutes. If it's a it's a very bright day, it might just be a few minutes. But really the quality studies on humans that have looked at this say try and get as much natural light as you can in the morning hours whenever it is that that is for you, especially the first three hours after waking. If you can work outside great, if you can get in your window, because as opposed to just in a dark conference room,

that's better. But if you can get outside, that would be fantastic. So I get sunlight, I hydrate, I drink water, and then your bimote is my favorite form of coffee, excuse me, caffeine. Are you waiting? How long are you waiting for 90 to 120 minutes? Are you doing any salt showing that time? Are you taking any electrolytes in? I am a fan of water with element before I had element packets. I would just take a little bit of sea salt or pink salt. She favorite element flavor. I like them all.

There's one I don't like. I'm not a fan of the chocolate one, but I like it. Yeah, some people love it. My podcast producer, his wife loves that. So I give it to her, the chocolate mint one. But I like the raspberry, the citrus one. I love that stuff. Mango chili is, if you open the mango chili and breathes in shortly afterwards, it's like being pepper sprayed. It's absolutely insane. It's like being blasted in the face. But yeah, I mean, that's just the best way, that cold

glass of water and that first thing in the morning. And I mean, it was you who reassured me of the what I thought was bro science about your adenosine system not being active for the first 90 minutes. And if you're going to pump caffeine onto that, you're not really actually acting on that. Your adrenal system is the one that you need to be looking at, optimal uhydration, all that sort of stuff. It's just such a good way to start the day. So okay, we've got 90 minutes deep.

What have you been doing in that? You've had your light in the eyes. What have you been doing between that and the year, but matter 90 minutes? I do everything I can to not do email, not do social media and to take care of a few critical tasks. These days, I'm, I have this obsession with

trying to do one cognitively hard thing a day, one and one physically hard thing a day. Now, does it not extreme physical, not David Goggins level workouts or anything, but in that 90 minutes, I'll typically try and read a research article start to finish or I'll work on a document that I might be doing a grant or research paper or planning a podcast or researching a podcast. I try and

get my brain into kind of a linear mode. I try and narrow that aperture. So if I don't, the distraction that's created by social media and interactions with others can kind of wick out into the rest of the day. So I'm not necessarily trying to finish something in that time, but I try and do something

challenging. I experience great pleasure from battling through something mentally challenging, but that's something that I built up since my university years when I was about, you know, 19 or so got serious about school and really started to experience the deep pleasure of like, I figured that out or like that was really tough. I don't always succeed, but that's what I'm doing in that

hour to 90 minutes. But I confess sometimes we'll take a walk during that time and maybe talk through some things that are challenging, you know, or sometimes I get lazy and I miss a day of that cognitive challenge. Then I do caffeine about 90 to 120 minutes after waking and even though I prefer to work out earlier, I generally will then do some sort of physical workout. I have a very

consistent routine. I've done it over 30 years where I weight train for 45 or minutes to an hour every other day and occasionally I take an extra day off and occasionally do to travel or other commitments, I'll occasionally double up two days and then take two days off. So it's really boring, you know, talk about workout schedules, but it's really simple. It's like, you know, I'll do a kind of pushing day, rest, pulling day, upper body push, up, rest, upper body pull, rest, and then

legs take two days off, something like that. Are you doing on the off days? Are you doing some sort of zone three? Always jogging or skipping rope. Those are my favorite forms of cardio. Sometimes swimming, but typically I'll go running for 30 to 45 minutes or if I'm feeling a little bit lazier because I

always find the high intensity stuff to be easier than the long drawn out stuff. I'll sometimes throw on a weight vest, a 30 or 50 pound weight vest and I'll go out for a shorter run or I'm a big fan of knees over toes, Ben Patrick. I know you had him on. We were down in Costa Rica with him and his wife who had the best time and learned so much, occasionally do a backwards, you know, hill walk or throw on the weight vest for that. We sometimes will get bands and we'll tag. So

there's a great way to combine this. We will sometimes get two people in one of these thick bands, do hill walks in the morning while getting our sunlight. But that I don't really consider a workout. I consider that just kind of rehabilitative movement. So on the off days, I'm doing cardio and sometimes that's the morning, sometimes that's in the evening. I do not like to weight train on the second half of the day because I like to be really caffeinated when I weight train. I like to

listen to loud fast music. Most of the time not always. I keep my phone out or off of for most workouts. Podcasts maybe if I'm running. But I really try hard when I'm working out to just focus on the workout and those workouts, the weight training workouts are always 10 minutes or so warm up and then no more than 40 to 50 minutes of really hard work. If I do train hard any longer, I don't recover enough to be able to come in a few days later. And when I train that way, I generally make pretty

consistent progress. And you're taking yourself up until what's that probably maybe 10, 30, 11 AM, something like that? Yeah, and then I'll eat my first real meal. Now occasionally, I'll wake up really hungry if I didn't eat that well the night before. But typically the after I train, I, yeah, I like oatmeal after I train oatmeal fruit, some fish oil, protein drink, and then maybe 90 to 120 minutes after that. I'll have a real lunch. My lunch is pretty much the biggest meal of the day.

If I have my way, it'll be steak, salad, maybe a little more starch, although I sort of got it earlier. Yeah. Resil nuts, that meal sometimes can extend longer. I love to eat. I love to eat. I love to eat. Yeah, so I'll eat and then I confess I usually will work a little bit more for about 30 minutes or an hour, typically email. And then I'll take a 10 to 30 minute yoga knee-dra nap or a nap and then come back refreshed. I really struggled with the naps when I come back after

that and my emotions are all over the place. I'm disoriented. Maybe it's because I struggled to fall asleep super quickly. And therefore, I'm extending that period out for a little bit longer than I need. I probably need to try the yoga knee-dra thing. But for me, it's it I'm absolutely all over if I do that. I wake up and I don't know what day it is. And my emotions always feel a little bit out of

whack as well. I wake up grumpy from nap sometimes. I'm told there are a few times when I'm walking up, just really angry. I have no idea what that's about. I don't know any of the neurochemistry associated with that. Sometimes I wake up from naps that's really pleasant. I'll occasionally do if the nap is early enough in the day afterwards. I'll have a nice double espresso and get back into work. That's the hardest part of the day actually. If I was well structured in the early part of the day,

it's that two or three p.m. The key is then to try and get something really useful done, cognitively again. So some people might look at this and say, wait, you're working for an hour in the morning and 30 minutes here and an hour in the afternoon when you actually working. But it's really about the depth of the trench when you're working. And so if I'm going to drop into something again for a few hours in the afternoon, I'm really going to drop into it. And that's

typically phone off and out of the room. And my goal is to get to the evening time so that I can do the things that I want in the evening. I can enjoy. I'm always setting a goal of the next time block. So this is something I've been doing for a long time, but even more so lately. I don't think my

goal in the next hour is to do blank. I think this is dopamine reward predictions in action. I think, okay, if I get this workout done, then I'll be able to eat more or less the same time, which I enjoy, and then something else will happen. So I'm very focused on what I'm doing, but I'm doing it for the purposes of like opening up the next door to the next thing. So if I can get that afternoon work block done, I'm thinking, I can just really get this podcast recorded, which I enjoy.

Is that your usual time to record middle of the afternoon? I used to be in the morning, but I'm getting, I'm putting more and more preparation into them all the time. My poor podcast producer, he's like, you know, I was joke that the one thing these podcasts probably will succeed in doing, meaning my podcast is they're going to cure insomnia because some of them are so damn long, but I experience so much pleasure from spending a week or two researching something and then

putting some structure on it. As you know, I mean, podcasting is its own, it's own sort of natural drug. It just feels good if you enjoy doing this sort of thing. So typically we'll be starting late in the day now and going till pretty late. For me, the problem that I have some fasted right now were what? One minute to 4 p.m. You haven't eaten anything today? No, not this gracious. So that's the only way. If I eat, my thoughts become slower. I'm not as verbally articulate. I'm nowhere near

as agile. Now I could push this super, super light. I'm sure and it would be probably a pretty bad idea. Maybe I could avoid, maybe I could go protein and fat or just mostly protein early on and that would have avoided, but I just find that my thoughts and my verbal articulation just goes through the toilet. It's adrenaline. I mean, I think that, sorry to interrupt you, but if you ingest a bunch of glucose or, you know, I think you're getting that, I mean, you've got to have a

nice, I'm guessing that we were to tap your vein right now. If we could do micro dialysis on your brain that you have a nice low, but steady level of adrenaline. And listen, this adrenaline thing, this dopamine thing is no joke. This is the stuff of human evolution, right? These are the same neurochemicals. This is the energy drink of human evolution. This is not the rock star red bull, et cetera. That stuff just hijacks this very system. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just

feeding the very same system. So if you find an eating schedule or fasting schedule that allows you to tap into that as a resource, I don't care what anyone says about whether or not fasting will make you live longer or not. Who knows, right? If you're in the control group, you know what's going to happen. So, but everyone presumably, everyone dies eventually. So pick your, pick your mode of eating, be my guest. But if you figured out a way to tap into this, in a way that works for you,

by all means leverage that. Because until somebody comes along and says the intermittent fasting is unhealthy, well, then to me, it seems, at least for me, eating between 11 p.m. Excuse me, 11 a.m. Ish and 8 p.m. Ish is great. And what I can also tell you is that having a consistent meal schedule, meaning I'm feeding window, we absolutely know, I don't know why this isn't discussed more, we absolutely know that that helps anchor your sleep schedule. And having a anchored sleep schedule

helps anchor your light viewing schedule. And light viewing, so it all starts to piece together. I think that what's lost in the discussion about nutrition, it's set for the fact that most online discussions about nutrition are carried out by people. Religious. But they also seem to be carried out by people that have, I don't know, like real feelings of powerlessness in themselves.

Like it comes through, because they're quibbling over whether or not you should eat a crack or not, or whether or not, you know, inhaling oxygen, you know, westward is going to break your faster or not. I'm obviously joking. I won. So David Sinclair came on my show twice and he's a fantastic human. I know your friends with him. And he talked about the fact that his reds-varitrol goes into a small amount of fatty yoghurt, I think, because it's like, bricters, right? So you need to mix it in,

and it's homemade yoghurt and something else and something else. And it's like that it's a shot of yoghurt, right? It's enough for him to put his little capsules of reds-varitrol in. And the comments were allite with people saying that's not a real fast. So hilarious. Because you've got... It's so sad. You know, it's so sad that we can't have a nuanced conversation about nutrition online. Well, let's be fair. Calories in Calories out applies, right? I don't think the laws of

thermodynamics have disappeared. And yet you have people who would argue that it doesn't. And okay, like we'll let them have their arguments. I think that the key thing is when you find an eating schedule that works for the other things that you need to do in life, it's really beautiful. Because then you really start to exert some control over these energy systems. What we're talking about is focus and defocus. We're talking about focus and deliberate decompression, but not

it's yoga, knee-dra, or a nap, or simply a walk. And food, as you point out, is a wonderful source of caloric energy. We need it at some point. But it also can create this parasympathetic response where we feel very tired, especially if you don't eat for long periods of time and then you eat substantial amount of starches, you will feel calmer and more relaxed. And maybe sleepy or maybe brain foggy. So I've been, of course, assaulted by this for this online. I do tend to eat

some more starches in the evenings and fewer proteins. And sure, you can show me 20 double-blind placebo control. We're randomized control trials saying that if you're going to eat starches, you should eat them in the early part of the day. Well, I do that too after I train. But ultimately, what I'm interested in doing is maintaining the bodily health and aesthetic that I'm looking for. My blood lip is that I'm looking for it. But I want to accomplish things in

life. So I think if one gets too distracted by what's possible with nutrition, it can be, it can really take somebody off target. No one ever succeeded in creating anything useful in terms of work or relationships by overly focusing on changing their dietary intake. But so once it works, so what once something works for you, I say just stick with it. Just lean into it. Just lean into it. And that can change over time. So that can really change over time.

Do you know Alex Hall-Mozzi? You're familiar with him? Sounds familiar. Really hot shit on the internet at the moment. This sort of Jim Bro who has founded this company and is now moving on to bigger and better things. He's eaten, I'm pretty sure he's eaten the same lunch for 10 years or something. He always has the same lunch and he's got the exact same thought process

around this that you do. If you were to go back to the morning routine thing, if you were to design, or if you were to instruct someone to do the worst possible things in the morning to set their day up for failure, what would they be? Wake up and stay in bed. Well, wait, there are good reasons to stay in bed in the morning. But once those are completed, then staying in bed is- Curtain's drawn. Yeah, Curtain's drawn just using your passively scrolling on social media.

There are neurological data showing that when you are upright, you actually are stimulating this area of the brain called locus serulius. Whereas when you recline, you actually are less alert. Literally the position of your body dictates some of your levels of alertness. That's why you suggest people to not sit like this at their work desk, right? Yes. And if you're looking down while working, you're actually less alert than you could be if

your eyes are averted slightly over to the nasal level. Most people that are on their phone. Including me, and the postural stuff is really bad, too. I mean, I'm trying to really combat that internal rotation, you know, that the C-shaped human kind of thing. It's really not good. I'm really trying. In fact, one, this is so common now. The C-shaped human thing that it almost feels strange to be upright. You know, like people, they get exactly the open,

the, the, sort of external rotation is good for us. We know this. But- In bed. I would say in bed so people are on their phone. They're in bed. They're not getting enough light or they just are artificial light, or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window terrible. They are then going and sitting and getting into like hip, you know, hip flexor contraction. They're drinking coffee too early in the day. They aren't getting into any kind of

movement. But it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities. Sort of making a cup of coffee while texting. Not getting sunlight. You know, then they're scattering that in with like a little bit of work, but then something hits the stressful and then diverting their attention. They're sort of building in this attention deficit like disorder through behavior. They're not single tasking. They're not monotasking. And they're not being deliberate or intentional with the

things that they're doing. They're just allowing the morning to kind of come and take them wherever the wind blows. That's right. And I have to say, even though I describe my routine accurate, my morning routine accurately, if I were to really optimize it, and I've done this from time to time, I would get up, I would hydrate, and I would immediately exercise. I would use that early, you know, peaking of the cortisol response that comes with waking to get the body into action.

Sort of jaco willing style. I'd 430. I always see his posts, but I see them at 7 AM. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the jaco was up performing again today. Yeah. He seems to always beat me by a few minutes unless I wake up in the middle of the night for a moment, but to really get into action, because that's going to generate its own dopamine and adrenaline

response. Any time I've worked out really early, like if I have a flight, and then, you know, and then moved into the other components of my day, I find that I feel better all day long. I also will say if I work out really early, maybe between 7 and 8 AM, well then my first meal might land at 9 AM. So, you know, you need to be flexible with some of these things, but the general principles apply. I noticed that you haven't put cold exposure on your morning routine. I'm going

to guess you must have a cold tub of some kind. Yeah, I have a cold tub in a sauna. I've been less good about that lately. The best time to do that for me is on my cardio days. I do it after a lot. Because you don't want to do it post-hypertrophy, because you're going to blunt some of the responses that are actually you're trying to get by the workout itself. That's right. And I have one,

I should say I have one rest day per week where I don't do any cardio or weight training. I really like doing, having a complete rest day, but on that complete rest day, if I can, I'll do 20 minutes of sauna and then cold for three minutes, 20 minutes of sauna and then cold. I'll make the rest day reparative. And generally we make that social where we're talking about things. And we're very social in our working out. Like we talk, my partner and I talk while we work out, you know, when it's

set, when it's time to do a set, I become a little bit of like the drill sergeant. Like let's do your set, do your set, but then occasionally I'm the guy doing a set and I'm like, all right, so this afternoon we're going, you know, but I try and I try and really focus and I enjoy training by myself too, but generally we train together. And then and then typically if we're doing ice bath

or sauna, we try and coordinate those things. So I've seen a bunch of research about sauna, seen a bunch of research about cold exposure, contrast therapy, which is huge here in Austin, going from sauna to cold. And it seems like 20 and three, three rounds is very typical. Is there something that we're gaining or something that we're losing by doing that cycle rather than doing a block of heat and a block of cold separately? Not that I'm aware of, but you know that

we finally have some good science to put to this. And unfortunately it wasn't from my lab. This is the beautiful work of Susanna Soberg who's over in Scandinavia, published a paper in cell reports medicine showing that the threshold you're trying to hit each week is at least, you can do more, but at least 11 minutes of uncomfortable but safe cold exposure per week total. So that could be three minutes, Monday, three minutes, one, six, so on, two 11 minutes and 57 minutes per

week minimum. That's what they found. What did they find? Increases brown fat thermogenesis, thereby metabolism, thereby comfort being, you know, in cold, etc. Clearly there's a resilience effect. Clearly there's a dopamine increasing effect and clearly you can do more. You can do all that in one day or you could spread it out throughout the week or you could do more, it kind of depends on what you're shooting for. How cold people always say how cold, how hot, well for heat

is generally between 187 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Somewhere in that range and for cold, it's cold enough that you really want to get the hell out, but that you can stay in safely because I don't want anyone to kill themselves with doing this stuff. Did I see you say that evening time heat exposure increases growth hormone release by 16 times or something insane, but subsequent sessions of the same only increase it by a very small margin.

Yeah, so I'm talking about my asset. No, you're absolutely right. So we can delineate some protocols. If you want to get better, more resilient, cold exposure is going to be great anytime. Post cold exposure, your body is going to heat up. Think of your body heating up as waking up. So if you are concerned about not being able to sleep, then I would suggest you do your cold exposure earlier in the day, right? Heat does the opposite. So I'm laying out some parameters here.

Heat does the opposite. You're going to heat up while you're in the deliberate heat exposure, but afterwards there's a post heating dip in temperature. We talked, this was all covered in an episode. I do it with Dr. Craig Heller on Thurma Genesis. It gets a little bit down in the weeds, but take my word for it. If you want to get the science, you can go there to find the science behind this. So sauna at night is great as well. Now let's think about how to combine these things.

So let's say you're on a, it's a Tuesday. You've done your weight training on Monday, and you want to do your heat and cold. You don't have time to optimize everything perfectly. You could say, okay, I'm going to do my heat and cold at 10am or 8am. You get in the sauna for 20 minutes or so, and then you get into the cold for three minutes. Then you might get into the sauna again for 10 minutes, and you get in the cold for another minute or so. You end on cold.

Why? Because it'll wake you up, and presumably you're not, you want to be woken up for the day. That also means don't then, if you're doing it in a facility, don't then go and have a warm shower. Right. Once you finish. Coolest shower is fine because you want to clean off often. I mean, the ice bath is clean-ish, but it's, you know, in, that depends where you're going. In laboratories. You're absolutely right. In laboratories, if we want to preserve something in particular

of virus, we put in the freezer. If you want to kill a virus, you heat it up. This is not- I was dead either, soreners you want, but they called to- Well, the, yeah, the sauna sort of is its own autoclave if it gets hot enough, right? And the cold, cold stuff needs to be cleaned out now and again. You get mold growing in a freezer, which is kind of freaky to think about, but you really can't- It's never going to grow in a sauna.

Never going to grow if it gets hot enough. Now, there is what I call the sobered principle, which is if you are using deliberate cold exposure to increased metabolism, end on cold. So, finish on the cold, not just because it wakes you up more, but because then you have to keep your body up naturally, which is a thermogenic metabolic response.

So, end with cold, and if you really want to push it, you can do things like don't use a towel, use of operation, spread out your limbs and don't huddle so that you have to shiver more, et cetera. I mean, there are a lot of little games you can play. But let's say you want to reduce post-exercise inflammation. You're not concerned with hypertrophy gains, muscle-sized gains or strength gains. Well, then get in the cold after your workout. Do that for one to- Some people can

do 10 minutes, reduce inflammation. Let's say you really want to hit growth hormone, which is what you asked. The biggest effects of sauna on growth hormone, and they are big effects, are when the sauna is only done once per week, but it's done in four cycles, or sets, we could say, of 30 minutes each. So that means 30 minutes in the sauna, at the temperatures I described before, then a five-minute

rate, just air cooling off, or 10-minute rate, then back into the sauna for 30 minutes. This is brutal. Then again in the afternoon, 30 minutes in the sauna, then 10 minutes, just air cooling off, and then back into the sauna for 30 minutes. So that's two hours at 187 to 212 degrees in one day. In one day. In one day. The maximum of what, less than 20 minutes of rest in between those little sessions, then the big rest in between. So you have to be very careful. He can kill you,

you got a hydrate, you need to make sure you get an assault. This is work. But you see in these human studies, up to 16 fold increases in growth hormone. So you could imagine this could exert some very strong reparative effect if you're training for a big event or endurance event, or maybe you're just really wiped out from the week. This is a stressor, but it's a stressor that delivers

a potent growth hormone response. Now, if you do sauna more often than that, you're not going to want to do two hours a day in the sauna because presumably you're doing other things. You have a life. You have a life. In addition to that, the growth hormone effect starts to diminish if you become too heat-adapted. That raises a more interesting question, perhaps, which is why is it that this two-hour protocol really works if you do it once a week to increase growth hormone?

It's because it's a stressor. Certain stressors increase growth hormone. Does it have to be heat? No. You could probably also do for really long rounds of ice bath. I'm guessing you'd probably see a similar effect. No one's ever really looked. Probably see a similar effect because it's all about

the stress stimulus. Now, those that work on exercise science and weight training would probably say, yeah, you could also do a, this has been shown, you know, a 90-minute, 10 sets of 10, multiple exercises for 10 sets of 10, high volume, German volume training, workout, and get the same growth hormone effects. There's so many studies like this. I personally like to do the sauna two or three days a week. If I'm traveling off and don't get the opportunity, if I'm in Austin,

it's great because they're all these sauna places. But if I'm traveling abroad, I don't have the time, then I might do. I might take a day. I'm thinking, wow, I did three podcasts. I'm exhausted. When I'm in New York, I like to go to a place. I have no relation to them, but I think it's called Spa 88. It's a Russian Banya. I'll just go for the whole day. If I've been working really, really hard, they serve food there, they sort of borscht and all this other kind of pickled vegetables.

They must think that you're Russian. They must walk through the doors and they go, hello, brother. Sometimes, the best way to appear Russian, Lex, I hope you're listening, is to just not say anything, just to nod. That's the most Russian thing that you can say is nothing. Exactly. That place is great and they have different sauna, steam sauna. They have cold dunes. Sometimes I'll just spend three, four hours there. There's one in San Francisco called Archimedes Banya.

So sometimes that's an occasional thing. Now, most people are trying to incorporate this into their daily life. And just like as we said, for ice bath, if you don't have access to ice or ice bath or cold tub, do cold shower or longer, cool baths, with heat, I realize not everyone has access to a sauna. Hot baths do work. Now, one thing about hot baths in hot sauna is they will

nuke your sperm. It's not nuke. Nuke is a slang. They will reduce viable sperm counts. So for males that are trying to reproduce, trying to create children, you want to be careful about hot baths and hot sauna too often. Some people will bring a cold pack in and put in their groin. You can't do that in a bath. But sperm are maintained outside the body. The testicles are maintained outside the body. You write this. The room has varying elasticity

and order maintained temperature of the sperm. That's why that is the various effects that have been described are on purpose. So why human evolution design this way? I don't know. Someone will say. But in any case, unless you're trying to, and again, the ice pack approach is interesting. Some people do that. Actually, there's a kind of interesting relationship between cold and testosterone and spermatic genesis. There's a little cottage industry out there. I think on Amazon, people will

buy these gel pack underwear of, I think they're called snowballs. This is cooling the scrotum in order to try and increase the spermatic genesis. Now, I'm not aware of any data on this, but people report anacad data and have shown their blood work and stuff that it actually works to increase testosterone levels. I am not aware of any period of studies. I am not. I would not be sitting

as comfortably as I am right now. But I find this sort of amusing on the one hand. And then on the other hand, I think what we're arriving at is some general principles of physiology, which are that light, exercise, temperature, both heat and cold are all very powerful stimuli for creating

hormonal and neuromodulator dopamine epinephrine effects. And when you start to dig beneath the surface of all these protocols, Wim Hof breathing, ice pads, sauna, snowballs, what you are finding is that these are all different stimuli to tap into these different neuromodulator systems. Sunlight on our skin and on entourage organizes all these hormone cycles. There's a beautiful study

out of Israel just this last year. Pure reviewed studies showing that if men and women are told to go outside and get a lot of sunlight exposure on their skin for 20 minutes a day three times a week to testosterone and estrogen levels go up substantially, feelings of desire and sexual passion go up. There's a real effect of the summer months for people. And it's hormonal and that's because

the skin is an endocrine organ. These effects shouldn't surprise us. And some people hear these and they go, oh, so basically you're just telling us to get sunlight and exercise and eat well and you know, and avoid bright lights at night so that you can see it. Yeah, that's basically what we're saying. We're saying that because there's now substantial physiology to support that. There's nothing new in terms of the mechanisms. The mechanisms haven't evolved and we believe

hundreds of thousands of years. It's not more. The ways to tap into these systems are many. High intensity interval training. You're going to get increased adrenaline. Yoganidra meditation a nap. You're going to get increases in serotonin. So it's not trivial though. I want to be really clear. These sorts of things are not trivial. They are exceedingly powerful because they tap into systems that we all harbor. So the beautiful thing is they work the first time

and they work every time. And there are a few things you can say that about. They work the first time and they work every time. And the reasons they work are now becoming clear to us through these more high quality studies. There's a lot of conversations at the moment are unconcerns for the average amount of testosterone that man have got. East regions in the water and stuff like that. Should we be worried? I was thinking about a plastic bag. So I just recently came back from

Copenhagen. I was there to give a talk for the Lundbeck Foundation and there was another talk that the Lundbeck Foundation put on. They do a great popular science series called Coffee and Cocktails. I'm not a drinker but people, it's so European. It's so different than over here. Is everybody smoking outside? No one was smoking but people would bring were allowed to bring in real glasses with ice in them and yet the auditorium was silent.

This was a big concert hall in Copenhagen. It's a very beautiful venue. And you couldn't hear an ice cube chink the entire night. No clink clink clink. No chinking of the ice cubes. People were in there with their cocktails and enjoying and enjoying science. And earlier that week there was a talk by Dr. Shana Swan. She wrote a book called Countdown. She went on Joe Rogan's

podcast, I believe earlier last year. As she talked about the decline of sperm counts from the 1930s until now and ties it in a very serious researcher with National Institutes of Health grants, etc. ties this to the increasing presence of thalates. The most difficult word to pronounce in the

English language besides ophthalmology. Thalates that are present mainly in pesticides. If you look at sperm counts and testosterone levels in males in different areas of the United States, they are significantly lower in areas where there's a lot of pesticides use in rural areas where there's a lot of farming and pesticides. Very serious issue. And in the offspring of mothers that ingest thalates, there's this the analgenital distance is what they study in the lab. A lot.

The analgenital distance, literally the distance between the base of the scrotum and the anus in males is much greater than it is in females. The females don't have scrotum obviously. So they measure from the base of the genitals to the base of the vagina to the to the anus. In males they go from the base of the scrotum. Depends on the study sometimes it's the top of the scrotum. I always have to be careful when people are measuring anything related to genital.

Because somebody is going to cheat in the measurement. So in any event, I don't know how they control for that. But she shows these remarkable pictures in mice and in humans of people that are exposed or mice that are exposed to thalates. And basically males are showing the more female like pattern of of analgenital distance when they're exposed to the thalates in utero. Okay, this is not post birth. This is in utero. The mother's being exposed. It crosses the blood

placental barrier. What's happening? Well, this is reducing sperm counts. Now what can people do about this? Well, first of all, there's this question of whether or not thalates are having a similar effect after a child is brought into the world. One doesn't know. But we do know, and this goes back to my early graduate work was on the effects of endrogens like testosterone and DHT

on different traits of brain and body. We know that for instance, it just very briefly that during pregnancy, the brain is organized male by way of, believe it or not, testosterone converted to estrogen through a process called a Romanization. But the growth of the penis, the fact that there will even be a penis, et cetera, is set by a testosterone called DHT, dihydrotestosterone. Testosterone converted to DHT through five alpha reductase. And that's an organizing effect

on the system as they call it. But then there's an activating effect where during puberty, the testes just start producing testosterone. Some is converted to DHT. And the DHT is what creates the growth of the penis. Okay? In people that inject thalates during puberty and in the post-puberty years, it's conceivable that those thalates could inhibit the activating effects of endrogens, not just what we call the organizing effects of endrogens early in life. Okay, why is this

interesting and important? Well, sperm counts are definitely going down. Are they going down so much so that people are incapable of reproducing? Probably not because as they told us in school, it just takes one and indeed it just takes one sperm. But it is a probability. It's a numbers game. The reason, you know, people that take antibiotics steroids, unless they do things to offset the effect on their own testosterone and sperm production, sperm counts are down. So the probability of

successful insemination is of the egg is reduced also. It's a numbers game. So just takes one, but having many improves the probability that the one will be able to fertilize. So the short answer is yes, I think it is very concerning. Now, which things should we be concerned about? My understanding of the literature in here, I'm not an, I'm now venturing to territory for which I am certainly not an expert, is that things like plastics that have BPAs may be a concern.

Drinking water may be a concern, but the most serious or enriched source of BPAs aren't things like printed receipts. I was out for dinner the other night. It was probably about a month and a half ago and the server came over and I reached for the receipt. And as I was going for it like this, one of the girls who I'd never met before, she's a creator online, hit my hand away. Like are you really going to touch that? And this is the first time I've ever heard

about this. This is legit. Yeah, printed receipts are a rich source of BPAs. And topically, that could come through the same. Yeah, it could go transparently. I mean, now you'd probably have to handle a lot of receipts. I mean, I don't think you're going to hear a checkout cashier, perhaps this should be something definitely checkout cashier. And listen, it's going to vary. Some people are operating with a testosterone level and sperm count that's already back on

its heels. So to speak, some people have abundant testosterone and sperm. So it's really going to depend on the individual. I don't think people should get paranoid or delusional about any of this. Just don't start sleeping in a bed of receipts. Don't start sleeping in a bed of receipts. That's an interesting one. There are all sorts of jokes that could be made about that one that I won't make. But there are also some other things like, you know, do a little bit of online

research about fallets. And don't go to fringe sites. Go to Dr. Shaneur Swann's website. I believe she's outbound. Sign I or one of the other larger medical schools in New York. Go to her website. She's a legitimate researcher and see what's there. See what the sources of fallets are. Pesticides. Does that mean you should only eat organic fruits and vegetables? Maybe. I don't know which pesticides people are using on which fruits and vegetables. So there's some research that

needs to be done. But the moment we start talking this way and people start saying, oh, wow, this is really like hippie science. This isn't hippie science. This is serious NIH-funded researcher saying fallets before birth can dramatically alter the trajectory of the male stability and make sperm and testosterone. Fallets in puberty may be able to do that. But we know that that androgens in particular DHG and testosterone converted to estrogen have a powerful role in

masculinizing the brain and body during those years. Why wouldn't people be, you know, do a half an hour of research online? Or for instance, the abundant data that melatonin suppresses pregnant excuse me suppresses puberty. And yet people take melatonin like it was, you know, insane super-savological levels. Am I saying melatonin is going to suppress your puberty? If you took it as a kid, you're messed up. No. And yet it's very easy to replace it with some of the healthier

alternatives that are out there. So I think that one can have a thoughtfulness about this stuff and it's action oriented without having to really freak out about it. How do you think that creators like Derek from more plates modates or Greg do set us someone who's changed the way that the internet understands hormonal profiles and supplementation? Because since watching a lot of Derek's stuff since he's become big on YouTube,

I have been much more considering the balance that's inside of my body. But I don't think that that was super common before guys like him were around. Yeah. Look, Derek's not a scientist by training, but he's done an immense service to the world because no one was talking about this stuff. It was talked about in bodybuilding circles where they talked very openly. It was starting to emerge in testosterone replacement therapy clinics and then mostly guys were doing this stuff

in lying about it. They're doing it, but then they don't want to talk about it. Actually, Kudos to Joe Rogan who years ago came out and said, yeah, he decided to start doing TRT and to load us up at testosterone. He's already successfully reproduced and this. So he, you know, he brought it up and it's clear that this is becoming more common. Here are some of the general principles that I think, forgive me, Derek, if I get this wrong in terms of what you believe,

because I never want to speak for anybody else. But my read of the science and the actual protocols speak to the idea that many people do not need testosterone replacement. Young guys should really avoid doing animal steroids. They can really mess up their system, not just physically, not just for the ability to have kids later, but lead to all sorts of sexual issues and sexual performance

issues. There needs to be some medical incentive, hypogonatism, for instance. But at the point where someone either has bank sperm or decides they don't want any more kids or is willing to do something like THCG to maintain testicular and function in spermatogenesis, it's very clear that going with the lowest, you know, doctor described, right? I'm not talking about illicit use, the lowest possible dosage of testosterone therapy is going to be better than, for instance,

taking 200 milligrams in a one-mill injection every two weeks, right? Because you get these huge increases and then these troughs. So people are- Is this something that you've learned from Derek? Yes. And in talking with other people. I'm no longer doing this, but I did a run of it from 45 to 46 years old and nothing before that. And I did it because I'm working on a book really that has a whole section on hormone therapies I wanted to see what it was like. I'll tell you,

basically testosterone gives you more energy to work more. If it's done appropriately, right? Maybe that's the secret for legs. Maybe help me- Excellent. Maybe help me- It's just brimming. Maze brimming. And I'll say when I went into it, my levels were mid-range, they were fine. High-to-mid-range, they were kind of like seven-zates, but I was doing some supplementation to support that. I've since gone back to that. It was funny. When you say something on the internet,

people think that means it's forever, right? It is possible to start and come off, right? So what I've done. And so here's what's relevant here. People are now spacing out, you know, 30 milligrams on Monday, 30 milligrams on Wednesday, 30 milligrams on Fridays, like kind of a low reasonable dose. Again, talk to your doctor. These aren't recommended dosages. That's more typical.

Another thing that's really important is that people have traditionally blocked estrogen by increases while doing this, by taking an aromatase inhibitor, nolvidax, or remadex, these kinds of things. That almost often is a bad idea, almost often, because having enough estrogen around allows you to maintain cognitive function and libido. A lot of guys think it's just, you know, and it is true, if estrogen is very high and testosterone is very low, it can be a libido-can-suffer. But if

testosterone is very high, and estrogen is very low, libido can really suffer. So a lot of people who are crushing their estrogen realize that by coming off some of those drugs, they feel far better. Far better. Far better. So most people I know that are doing this are taking low doses of testosterone semi-frequently throughout the week, 20 to 30 milligrams every other day, or so.

There's a lot of variation around this. And then not doing anything to reduce aromatase, or if they are taking very low doses, not one milligram of aromatics, but maybe something like 0.1 milligrams of aromatics every third day or so. Again, not a recommendation, talk to your doctor. The smarter clinics are starting to think about this. And actually, I don't have any financial relationship to Derek or to Marik Health, which is his clinic. But from what I understand,

they do a very good job. I did help them design a herbal, mostly herbal supplement for testosterone support for people who are not on TRT, as things like Tonga Ali, Fadoja. But unbeknownst to most people, I have not made one penny on that. That was just based on a conversation of the research with him and Dr. Kyle Gillette and a few other people. So estrogen can help maintain libido, also. It can increase libido. Now, here's something I learned that's really interesting from Peter Atia

recently. Women, as we know, make both testosterone and estrogen, and of course a bunch of other hormones, too. If they get their blood work back and you were to adjust the units that those hormones are measured in, nanograms per desolate, or in some cases, picograms per desolate, or in other cases, if you normalize them all to the same nanograms per desolate, you would find that a healthy

woman has more testosterone than she does estrogen. That's right. I asked him this three times. I'm like, you're telling me that women have more testosterone circulating in them than estrogen. He said, absolutely. Now, maybe there's a caveat to that during some phase of the menstrual cycle, but that does not mean that their testosterone levels are higher than that of men. But this

is remarkable, right? This means that these androgens testosterone are doing interesting things in men and in women, and estrogen, as we just described, are doing really interesting things certainly in women and in men. So this idea of more testosterone less estrogen good is always the case. That's simply false. You have to think about whether or not it's a man, whether or not it's a woman, whether or not the goal is more or less, typically people aren't going for less libido, but I suppose it's

possible. Some people out that with them. Some people might be highly distracted by an excessive libido, or I thought that's a different story. But, and then of course, DHT. So I think one of the things that Derek has really contributed to the world, and I think is important for people. Know that a lot of the drugs that are used to treat hair loss, finasteride, propio-shut things, like that block DHT receptors, the hydrotestosterone, DHT is responsible for beard growth in the face,

and for balding, male pattern baldness. People, because they want their hair, will take these drugs. If they take it in pill form, they're blocking DHT everywhere, and they can experience severe defects in libido and sexual performance. Now, before that. Chice between your hair and your erection. For a lot of people, it is. Right? I mean, for now, there are now topical things, and Derek talks about all this kind of thing. They're topical.

You're really deep into that. He goes really deep into all this. And what's interesting is, you know, we also can take a step back and say, like, what's the landscape of health information that created this opportunity for a kid in his 20s? By the way, no one knows his last name. Very clever. No one knows his last name. I played Daring. It's kind of an avatar of a human, right? Although he's real. What created this landscape for this guy to be able to get this

information out there, even though he's not a physician, he's not a scientist. And I think what it is is that he saw that there was all this information nested in these very niche communities that, no, most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder, right? And yet what he did was he sort of normalized the discussion about hormones. He normalized the discussion about other things like dopamine and cortisol, etc. And what's interesting is that science now is kind of

following suit. You know, 10 years ago, a discussion about hormone therapies would never come up in the hallways of discussions with my colleagues. Since doing an episode of the podcast on optimizing testosterone and estrogen, no fewer than 10 of, I'm not going to name names, but these are serious scientists. And it's a mixture of men and women have approached me by like, hey, like what can one do in order to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels? Is estrogen therapy for menopause a

useful thing? When should one start? Now, I'm not an endocrinologist. So all I can do is point them in the way of information. But this is an important area. And here's why hormones control neuromodulators like dopamine estrogen and so on. And those neuromodulators powerfully influence our states of mind. So if your hormones are out of whack, your neuromodulator is going to be out of whack. Typically, the treatment for depression would be to go in and just give us our toning reuptake

inhibitor or well, butren-type dopamine thing. Now that has its use. But I love this trend now, not towards hormone therapy necessarily, but just toward a thinking, a mindset of how deep in the layers of my biology can I go to create these sort of waves of health that rise up to the level of ability to focus and et cetera. For so many years, it's all been attacked at the surface,

kind of the waves on the surface of the ocean. And yet, there's this like, we're now talking about the deep tectonic plates movements that are affecting all that in any case. Around about 30 years ago, you took a real hard turn in life. It seemed like you drastically altered the trajectory that you were moving on for quite a while. And I'm very interested in how

anybody manages to make severe life changes like that. I think that many people can, they believe that they have control over maybe their daily habits and little things here and there. But they don't have huge global control over their life direction, certainly not in the way that they want. Reflecting on that now, does it almost surprise you sort of the ability that you have to be able to change that direction? It seems so unbelievably rare.

Right. So I don't know. I like to think everybody harbors it inside themselves. I can say without going into the whole backstory because I've done it before. I mean, at 19, I basically just looked to myself and decided that I was a loser. I mean, I was able-bodied, which was helpful. I had a mind that could remember things, which was helpful. I was interested in a few things, but none of those things were setting me up for career on going progress. And I had a lot of maladaptive behaviors.

Right. At the time, I was getting involved in fighting. I just didn't, I wasn't completing my schoolwork. I was just really in a bad place. And it was really fear and desperation, mostly fear that inspired the switch. Along the way, I haven't talked about this publicly to any great extent, but along the way I hit numerous roadblocks again and again. Sometimes they were situational,

like people close to me dying and the grief that came with that. Sometimes it was my own kind of feeling like I was getting pulled back toward a state of mind that wasn't healthy for me. And so on. But I think what I've been good at, at least good at, not great at, but at least good at, is finding really good mentors that would allow me to get to the next node of the next milestone. And I should say that some of those mentors were real people that I didn't say, can you be my mentor?

Not that that would be a bad thing, but really tried to model my behavior after people that I respected. And sometimes those mentors were people that I didn't know at all. I mean, I'll just say this right now. I mean, I'm an embarrassment by saying that, but I was a junior professor, meaning before I got tenure, running a lab, I had a bulldog puppy, a laboratory, and a home for the first time in my life and feeling very, very overwhelmed and distraught. And I made many of the things that I

heard Tim Ferris say sort of central to my way of doing things. I didn't go four hours of work a week, but I did start to get extreme about organizing my schedule. He was a big influence on you, Tim. Huge. Huge. And I know Tim a little bit. We have some common friends. And I feel very fortunate that now we're in touch because it gone on his podcast and gotten to know one another. But just huge. I mean, there were no organizational forces in my life for me at that time that could

help me navigate through this landscape of, you know, I'd never been a professor before. I had taught it now. Those are many years ago now, but I knew how to do science. I felt confident in my ability to take an empty room in a budget and create, buy the right equipment and do the experiments higher. The people, I had no problem with that. But how to regulate my time and my energy and how to communicate with people. I mean, he had these like little things that I don't like the word hacks.

I hate it because hacks are, implies you're using something for a purpose that it wasn't intended for. That's a hack. But he had things like instead of asking people, you know, like what's up when they come in your office, asking them, you know, what specifically, you know, what can I do for you? Like what do you need? Right, really cutting to the chase because time became a valuable resource. Little things like that, tiny things on the, on the surface that translate into huge conversion in

terms of time and energy. And even just setting aside some savings and things, I'm not dumb about money, but I wasn't, I've never really taken the time to think about how I was going to invest money or doing it. So Tim did a tremendous service for me without realizing it. And I've thanked him now a million times on the thank him a million times on the thank you, Tim, I'm thanking you again.

Things like that. So selecting mentors, then eventually when it came time to start podcasting, I mean, Lex, whether or not he knows or not, you know, just thinking, Oh, here's another guy who's a scientist, he's MIT. The fact he always wore that suit. But I'm going to copy him and just always wear the same thing because I don't have to take guesswork, I can take the guesswork out of it. There were little things that were super deliberate that just saved me time and energy.

And I think that that's helped me along the way. And then the other thing is I have really tried to adopt this idea that when it's inevitable and it will inevitably arrive that stress grows us, that it really sharpens decision making, it really sharpens decision making. And you know, if you have a very stressful event and then you recover from it, the worst thing to do is just go and keep going. You need to take some time and reflect about what led into that. So I think I'm

very good at leveraging fear into positive change. If I really think about most of the major shifts in my life, it was, I'm scared as hell to remain in this situation. And I'm very good at broadcasting fear into my future. You know, if I've ever been in a bad relationship, it was clearly, if I stayed in it, it could have been so bad that I felt like I had to leave. So I would broadcast and project, you know, how horrible it would be for my future children. And I might even build that up a little

bit, my system. Now one could say, well, maybe you could have navigated successfully, I'm better at projecting fear into my future. And that has led me to make, I think, better and better decisions over time. That's it. How much of the old Andrew still rises to the surface today? I know that the music that he'd send to listen to when your training is still pretty punky. And when I work, yeah, I mean, I have two very polarized versions of music. I do love, you know, I love Bob Dylan,

I love Joe Strummer acoustic. I like, you know, I like melodic music too. But yeah, I'm listening to Rances, Diffle fingers. I mean, I was the first ever gig I went to. Diffle fingers. I've never actually seen them play live. I'm a huge Diffle fingers fan. Huge Diffle fingers fan. Huge against me fan, huge Rances fan. I mean, you know, for people that my generation, they probably remember it,

people were younger, probably think, oh, that's all 90s stuff. But to me, I mean, I have huge collections of like 80s and 90s music, 70s music, second wave punk, third wave punk, I collect a ton of that stuff. I love it. I mean, how much of me still exists? I believe that we are all born fundamentally with some gift. And it's our job to reveal that gift to ourselves. And you know, here, I'm, I want to thoroughly acknowledge someone else who's been a great mentor without ever meeting him.

It was like Robert Green, I think, is a wonderful fantastic guy. Fantastic. I've never met you, Robert, but I'd love to meet. I mean, it's one of these things where I used to put you in touch. You've been on the show twice. Amazing. I used to suggest the book mastery to graduate students and to undergraduates, like, you know, learn this process of finding a mentor. And in science,

we have natural mentors, graduate advisors and postdoc advisors. And I made sure, I will say this, I should have said this earlier, when a mentor has sort of arrived in my life, either virtually or in reality, I make the most of that relationship. I really nurture those relationships. I mean, I still go to visit the children of my dead graduates advisor, kids, you know, because I care, I mean, these are like, these people are like family to me. How much of it still exists? Well,

the energy has always been the same. The energy is, I have an absolute obsession from day one. This maybe was what I was kind of born with, to, I like to learn things and share them with the world. I was six years old, giving lectures on Monday after reading about medieval weapons or, you know, goldfish biology in class. I mean, my parents were, thought it was crazy. And they took me a psychiatrist and I'm like, no, he just really likes learning, he really likes telling people

about that, about what he learns. So, and I had a little bit of an underlying Tourette's when I was younger, I had a grunting tick. I had a, when I'm tired, it sometimes emerges a little bit. And for me, learning and kind of seeking kind of calms that somehow, as does training, as a skateboarding, I did boxing, of course, had damages and goods, so I stopped boxing. But that's always been in me. That's how I'm, that's how my nervous system kind of tilts left in that way. The energy, I would

say I'm able to turn the dial. I'm able to tap into kind of some old hurts and anger as fuel. But I really try and orient towards things in a very lex-freedman-ish way from a place of like love. Show them, show them, do things from a place of love because it's a more continual resource. I really believe it's this dopamine up in a friend cycle, positive feedback cycle. I really do. And so, that's all there. You know, I have pretty much eaten the same way I have since college.

I've really, I haven't really changed the way I eat that much. I mean, I probably ate more junk every once in a while. I've screwed in pizza and stuff. Now I have less of an appetite for it. But I still am the same. I still train every other day. I love music. I love movies. I love nature. I love the flora and fauna of life. I mean, I have this kind of obsession with fish tanks, freshwater fish tanks. I love, and listen, my ex-girlfriend is a, she's a florist. I developed a love of

flowers, you know, in those years. I love, you know, I probably the one guy who was like wandering around in college, I would go to these like work festivals and some of them look like aliens. And I just, I just love learning and I love digesting novel information. And, and now, you know, I have to say I'm in a place where the people that I'm closest to, I mean, thankfully, really kind of support that. And I can indulge it through podcasting.

It's so lovely now that the environment of curiosity, I think, the podcasts and, and YouTube and creators have, and gendered. So cool. You know, the fact that you get to find out about something that you really, that you would have done, right? You would have done it for free without anybody else knowing about it. Right. And then somehow telling other people the thing that you found out in this version of the simulation is called a job or a pursuit or something. It's, it's wild.

Another thing that has carried over from your youth, your tattoos, which I've heard you talk about, but never seen. What's your relationship with your tattoos and why has no one ever seen them? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it was Tim Ferriss that outed me on this one. He was like, I found a picture on the internet with you in full sleeves. Yeah. You know, I believe that, you know, tattoos are, I mean, this is come as no surprise or a literal expression of what we feel on the inside.

And I, and I'm not recommending this. Kids don't do this. I started getting tattooed really young. How again? Well, 14 I got my first tattoo. No way. We did them ourselves with India. Please don't, no, please no one do this. India, Inc. and a needle. And we used to do these. It's really bad. It's called Nicknack tattoos or we kind of would do this at home. Don't do it. It's really bad to get bad infections. They're ugly. They, they, they blur. They bleed. They're

not good. Yeah. I started getting tattooed. I, when I was a kid and growing up skateboarding in the punk rock scene, there were these guys in the town where I lived. They called themselves the Yachtzi guys. I don't know why. I don't know what that was about. But they all had full sleeves. And they were super nice guys and they were all into skateboarding and, you know, and vehicles. And I just looked up to these guys. I thought, oh, like someday I want full sleeves. I,

yeah, I've got full sleeves. I'm basically like neck to neck to wrists. So chest pieces as well. Yeah, back, back cover. Yeah. Nothing on my legs. Nothing on my stomach ribs. Yeah. Yeah. Top some my, tops of my shoulders. And I got a big picture of Costello. My dog back there. I've got a picture of his paw back there. I've got a picture of another dog used to have. There's still some space for a few things. There's some things very personal to me.

Is that the reason that you prefer not to show them? Yeah, you know, I think that there are a couple reasons. I'll just be clear as to why. First of all, when I show up to podcast, it's the same way I show up to lecture in the classroom auditorium. And I swear on my life, this is my mindset and this is my mantra when I do it. I'm there to teach. It's not about me. It's about the student. It's about the people learning. I don't want it ever to be about me. I don't want

the focus to be on me. I mean, obviously, I'm the voice and the person talking. But I really want people to internalize the information. And I do think that the tattoos because they have nothing to do with the information are a distraction. They're just a distraction. I don't know. It would sort of like be wearing like a bright yellow shirt or something. It's not my style. I prefer to kind

of make myself disappear as much as I can and let the information come forward. That's, you know, even when I gave scientific lectures, which I still do, of course, for my professor job, I generally liked the room to be pretty dark and I wanted the light to be on the data on the slides. I was happy to be the voice, but I want people thinking about the data. So, podcasting is a little difference. You come through as a voice nut or on YouTube, a voice in an image, but I really

prefer that it not be about me. Now, there's a human element too. And I think things have changed a lot. When I was growing up, tattoos were not accepted. There are many work environments where, if you have, for instance, where people prefer that they're surgeon or their doctor not have tattoos. Some people might prefer their surgeon or doctor have tattoos. When I was growing up, if you had a, I never had one, but if someone had a nose ring, they had to cover it up with a band-aid or take it

out if they worked at the coffee shop. Remember that? You probably don't. You're probably going to know. Or eyebrow rings. Trends have changed, right? Things have changed. And I'm kind of old school, because I'm kind of old now, 46. And the etiquette for me has always been, you know, and this is Lex does this too, is I personally find that if I can just show up as formal and consistent as possible, that people at least know that I'm taking them seriously. So, I don't really do it for me.

I pretty much do it for the audience. And also, none of the tattoos are that interesting. It's my dog. I really like raptors. I've got a bunch of birds. I've got, I mean, I have all sorts of different things. Like raptors like the dinosaur? No, raptors like red-tail hawks and blue, you know, I like birds. I had either dinosaurs or trucks. You really need to love Ford raptors. No, no, no, no, Ford Raptor. I drive a Toyota 4Runner and I love it. I've got one truck

and I love that thing. Although, with gas right now, I mean, it's kind of got a wonder about having a gas driven vehicle like a 4Runner. In any case, yeah, the tattoo thing, I would say for younger people coming up, just be aware that you can't control other people's perceptions either. And so, you know, I always made it a point that I didn't want things on my knuckles, I didn't want them on my hands, I didn't want them on my neck, I didn't want them on my face. Do I judge people

and they have them? No. But do I want them for me? No. I also think that this is very neuroscience, as neuroscience is that we have dedicated brain areas called fuchsiform gyros, face area that's dedicated to the processing of faces. Even if I just put two dots and a line in between them on a piece of paper, you see that as a face. When one puts a tattoo on their throat or on their face, it actually changes the way that the face is perceived, right? I mean, it almost looks like

another mouth there, right? It's a very different look. It can be a little bit jarring. I'm not saying one shouldn't have it, but it can be a little bit jarring. It changes the look of the person forever. It's not just that it's above the neckline. It's that it kind of competes with the processing of their face and it's normal way. For me, whenever I see somebody with a throat tattoo or a face tattoo, it's hard to orient around that. I think there's some biology that relates to that.

When it comes down to it, people need to be individuals and live their life the way they want to live their life. I've also never been that much of an iconoclast. I grew up in the punk rock thing. I hate in-group out-group stuff. I always had friends from a lot of different, you know, friends or jocks and hippies and punk rockers and straight and gay. I don't care as long as people are living their best life and they're not harming anybody, like, I'm like, great. Go for it.

I'm very laid back in that way. Of course, if people are harming other people, then I believe that liberty and independence, freedom is one of the highest things for me. But I don't consider myself a very judgmental person, but you can't always control the perceptions

of others. I just think people should be thoughtful about what they want to accomplish in life in terms of a life mission and just ask whether or not some of the permanent cosmetic changes they might make, might align with, compete with, or be neutral for those life missions. My life mission is very simple. I want to teach people the beauty and the utility of biology.

I'm going to do that today. I'm going to do that until I take my last breath in one form or another because that's what excites me and that's like what keeps the dopamine cranking. Dude, let's bring this one home. Look, I really, really appreciate you. The work that you've done, the fact that I feel like I have a lot more agency over my life because I understand that

my internal process is of something that I can influence. You know, the first time that I heard you say that you cannot control the mind with the mind, a lot of different things clicked for me. So I'm very glad that Lex Bully-Gee will convince you to start doing your show. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing a lot more of what you've got to do in the future.

Thanks so much and thanks for bringing me on today. Obviously, we've been in touch and I align with you and I feel resonance along the life as a podcaster, right? But also, we've had chance to interact a few times and looking forward to more because I think what you're doing, bringing knowledge to the world is so important and I so appreciate your questions and learning from you. I'm also going to get these resources about the expectation

of fact and the rest. I've been taking notes here because I'm obsessed with learning. Why should people go? People want to make sure that they listen to more, watch more, follow more of your stuff. Why should they go? Thanks for asking. Yeah, it's very straightforward. The Huberman Lab is the podcast and it's all the standard places, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, etc. Huberman Lab on Twitter, Huberman Lab on Instagram and the Twitter and Instagram mainly are short

content. I used to do a lot more hand drawings and kind of- I think you're doing Instagram pretty much as well as any science communicator that I've seen. I don't think there's anyone else that's optimised it better than that. Thanks, right now. Thanks. Yeah, I try and answer comments and respond to things and any of those three places and we have a website which is hubermanlab.com where all the podcast episodes are, links to all things in all formats. We have a newsletter and

people can produce that if they want. It's all, I should say, zero costs to access. So that's been a major goal that we've stuck to which is to just we don't put anything behind a paywall. The information that's there is the information that anyone can access. Data, I appreciate you. Let's go and get hot and cold. Let's do it. Thank you.