#700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Andrew Huberman, he's a neuroscientist, associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a podcaster. It has never been so easy and also so difficult to remain healthy and perform at your best. The right tools and insights that we all need to avoid pitfalls and maximize our outcomes are thankfully at our fingertips and today we get to go through some of Dr

Huberman's favourites. Expect to learn how breathing can literally change the shape of your face, what Andrew thinks of the Huberman Husbands kink, just how bad vaping actually is for you, how to increase your willpower using science, what everyone misunderstands about stress, his opinion on Tom Seguris' transformation, how to be more productive, and much more.

This episode is so good, I absolutely love Dr Huberman's work. The guy is the biggest health and fitness podcaster on the planet and with good reason, he's made every bro biohacker look very silly over the last couple of years by using science and evidence to work out exactly what we actually need to do to improve our outcomes, our longevity, our health, literally everything. I really appreciate all of the work that he puts in and there is so much to take away from today.

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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 that's chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dr. Andrew Huberman.

What were you just teaching me about mouth reading and how it changes the shape of the face? So I arrived carrying a copy of the book Jaws a hidden epidemic. This is not Jaws the Shark. This book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sondra Khan and Paul Erlich and it has an introduction by Jared Diamond who won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs and Steel and a forward by the great Robert Sapolsky also a colleague of mine at Stanford. So four heavy hitters on this book just to

credential it first. This book centers around a couple of core concepts but the first being that people and in particular children who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing have changes in the structure of the face that would to be quite direct makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe. It also discusses the chewing of foods as essential

to mouth and face development. Sondra Khan is an expert in cranial facial function and structure and the fact that if your parents and you did things right you should be able to place your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed. Now I can't do that. I'm not going to do that. So when you were teeth closed, some of the roofing your mouth I can but I still feel the back of my teeth a bit.

So yeah. Okay. So that's the second point that we want to chew hard. Chewing foods is essential to tooth and mouth and face development. These days many children slurp their food. Many adults slurp their foods. Many adults are eating like babies and of course babies before they develop their mature teeth and even before they get all over their teeth in need to obviously breast milk and you know putting like foods. Okay. But so that's the second point. So nasal breathing, good mouth

breathing, bad for cranial facial development. Chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth. Great for cranial facial development oral development tooth development and tooth health which by the way are correlated with a number of other things like cardiovascular health and metabolic

health. Very interesting links there. And then the third point is that the the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia, things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers are the byproduct of poor breathing and let's just say over consumption of soft foods in place of hard foods behavior. And so there's this guy who's from your side of the pond, Mew. I like to talk about a

Mew method of restoring normal cranial facial development. The book is chalk a block full of impressive photos of before and afters, impressive because in some cases you'll see kids that were mouth breathers or we're eating a lot of soft foods and then they recovered their behavior. So to speak and became those breathers. Of course we have to mouth breathe when we're exercising really hard or when we're eating or speaking we're going to mouth breath. But at rest we should nasal

breathe is the argument and that greatly improves cranial aesthetics. And the good news is this stuff is modifiable across the lifespan. And so the book isn't arguing for anyone to purchase anything. You don't need a jazzer, cizer. I'm saying that explicitly because they took clips of me talking about this and and and productized it and I had nothing to do with that. So hopefully you'll keep this in the episode and they even admitted they were breaking the law and he said we don't care

we're going to continue to do it. So sales salesman. Yeah, but now those those you know to the credit of products for exercising the jaw sure there are muscles of the jaw that can. What you're talking about is that it's a food. Yeah, it's a food is if you don't have a sufficiently tough diet, I guess you could replace it. But it's explained to me the mechanics of how the difference in whether you breathe through your nose or breathe through your mouth changes the shape of your face

and head. Yeah, well, and it goes beyond that. If you breathe through your mouth as opposed to your nose, the first of all you bring in less oxygen than you would have. So you're limiting your effectively putting yourself into a state of apnea, right, which is bad during sleeping. Guess what,

it's bad during waking states also. You get less oxygen to your brain, bad. The sinuses, you know, we hear our my sinuses are clogged or my son the sinuses which I brought a skull with with me because one of the most impressive things about a skull human skull being no exception is that the

sinuses are literally these little tubes are channels through which fluid and air can move. And the sinuses, even though they are essentially that create by the fissures between different bones so like there's two or three different bones that are interdigitated and create these tunnels, they're actually fairly plastic in the sense that they can be modified in terms of their shape and so people will say, well, I have a deviated septum. Guess what? You should try and emphasize

breathing through both nostrils as in order to undeviate your septum. Now, someone has a broken nose or something that's really structurally abnormal. They may need corrective surgery, but purely through deliberate nasal breathing. So it could be mouth taping at night, but also just deliberately nasal breathing during most of your cardiovascular training unless you need to really, you know, hit the gas in which case mouth breath is going to help dilate the sinuses and lead to

better airflow, which makes nasal breathing easier. The other thing is that nasal breathing, we know, well, first of all, there's a nasal microbiome. There's also an oral microbiome, but the nasal microbiome is particularly well suited to scrub or capture and destroy viruses bacteria and even some fungal infections. So in other words, when you're breathing in through your mouth, you're more susceptible to infections. This is important heading into winter as well. So there are a number of,

I mean, we could talk about this for hours, but the point is nasal breath when you can. Kids, especially, but adults as well, chewing foods that require, you know, eating foods that require some chewing and really working at it and chewing away. They have some impressive images in this book of kids that were twins that were raised separately, one by a group that eats a lot of,

let's just say tougher foods that require chewing versus one that's slurping their food. And I mean, one kid is literally incredibly attractive, perfect dentature with no orthodontia or dent or, you know, regular dentistry and the other kid is teeth is like snaggle. They have the horse, what's like the horsey smile, even though they've got the same genetic predisposition. Right. Right. It's not a perfect experiment because there are other factors as well. And, you know,

none of this is the cut for better or worse. None of this is really amenable to kind of in laboratory type stuff. So as these are naturally occurring experiments, as we say, there are also some very impressive images in the book. Or if we just say depressing of kids that were pretty attractive as kids. And then there's an example of a kid who got a pet hamster. He was allergic to the hamster.

He switched as a consequence. He becomes a mouth breather. And then the characteristic change in the face when one over does mouth breathing is that the chin for to move the recesses, yeah, toward the, toward the neck and the rest of the face was out, but also the eyes become droopy.

And then, but as you say, why would the eyes be affected? It's not just musculature. What's happening is there's less use of literally the, the sinuses in the upper, towards the upper mandible and up towards the eyes because as they ever had a sinus infection, it's painful up here in your forehead and around the eyes. So again, it's pretty straightforward. No products required chew, chew your food well, chew on both sides of your mouth, especially if you're a young person.

But even if you're not being nasal breather, really chew at your food. Try and, it's probably also as benefits in terms of limiting an essential or low, low nutrient density calories. It was slurping your food all the time. I mean, I love drinking calories, man. I love a good Greek yogurt, you know, but, but drinking an excess of calories is probably not good. And eat like an adult, I would say, I know one of the things is I don't know, like to me,

growing up snack food was something that kids indulged in. You know, once you hit 18 or so, you know, eat like an adult. I'm still waiting to learn that lesson. You mentioned Sapolsky that I had him on the show recently. What do you think most people misunderstand about stress? Obviously, he's contributed an awful lot to this and you've thought about this too. What do you think people don't understand fully about stress? Yeah, the findings that I think

are overlooked tremendously are the following experiment. There's an experiment in animals where a rat is given the opportunity to run on a treadmill and rats and rodents of all kind love, kind of love running on treadmills. You know, there's these interesting, we'll see who catches this fly first. I'm ready, man. Yeah, I think, you know, there's even a study from Hoppy Hofstra's lab at Harvard that showed that if you put a wheels, running wheels in fields, that rodents will run

there in the middle of the night and run on them. That's how insanely obsessed with running. They just end up just like they want to go. There's something rewarding about it for them. But in any event, it lowers their blood pressure. It leads to improvements in a number of metrics that you expect. And you see the same thing in humans, right? We run on a treadmill or run outdoors or swim in cardiovascular exercise. Okay. Well, Sapolsky and I love to talk about an experiment where they

took two different cages with animals. One is running voluntarily. But then that running wheel is tethered to a running wheel and another cage that encloses an animal forces it to run every time the other one runs. So forced exercise versus voluntary exercise. And the takeaway is very straightforward. Volunteary exercise leads to all sorts of improvements in health metrics, resting heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, resting blood glucose, etc. Awakened blood

glucose. The animal that's forced exercise, you see the opposite, right? So it's not exercise per se. It's something about being forced to exercise. It causes decrements in a number of health metrics. And you see the same thing in humans. So what's wild is my colleague, Dr. Ali Crum, Department of Psychology at Stanford has done these beautiful experiments on mindset and

belief. These are not placebo effects. And what she's shown in a just absolutely spectacular way is that if people watch a short video about all the ways in which stress can really diminish your health, well then indeed stress diminishes their health. Whereas if a separate group watches a factual also five minute, also factual tutorial on all the ways that stress can enhance performance by harnessing your ability to focus memory formation, etc. Which is true. That's indeed what you see.

Can I give you my favorite one that I learned about over the last year? Yes. So the Boston Marathon bombing, 2012, about 10 years ago, 2016 maybe, anyway, Boston Marathon bombing, a study was done comparing people who had been at the actual marathon while the bomb had gone off. And people who had watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it. And the people who watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it showed a greater stress response than the people who'd literally

lived through it. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. The mindset and belief effects are are absolutely extraordinary and very real, right? I mean, I think, you know, recently I've been reading and researching a lot about and did a podcast on tenacity and willpower. And there was this idea early on from Balmyster and colleagues that willpower is a limited resource. Some of ego depletion. We'll do a depletion. Yes. It was controversial. They showed that replenishing glucose

in between hard tasks could restore willpower. They showed that I was at juries or judges that were low in blood glucose were more likely to give hosha sentences, stuff like this. Yeah, it sort of wicked out to a number of naturalistic situations. And it made good sense. And then my colleague, Carol Duac also in the psychology department at Stanford, most famously known for her work on mind growth mindset did an experiment in which they essentially asked whether or not tenacity and

willpower are limited in terms of being some sort of resource. And also whether or not it was somehow linked to glucose availability fuel in the brain and body and found that if people thought or were told that mine that excuse me willpower was a limited resource. That's indeed what they observed experimentally, but that if they were taught or were told that willpower is unlimited

and divorced from glucose levels, well then that's exactly what you saw. So the thing that learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower is a limited resource is an information hazard that is self-fulfilling. Potentially. Balmyster showed himself to be pretty determined and countered the the the dewec counter by showing that if indeed if there's a hard task followed by a hard task, then your beliefs about willpower can impact your performance on the second task.

So the aka dewec is right. But that if you have hard task hard task and then another hard task so back to back to back tasks or more, which is a lot of what life is like, well then it seems that the willpower is a limited resource and glucose supporting well power theory holds up a bit better. What have you come to believe about the difference between willpower and motivation and discipline? How do kind of all of these fit together in your mind? Yeah, so willpower and tenacity are related

to motivation, but they're not quite the same. I think we should think of motivation as a as the verb state that moves us from let's just say apathy to tenacity. Okay, so it's sort of it's the verb function that moves us along that continuum apathy at one end tenacity and willpower a strong exertion of willpower at the other end. One of the most interesting structures in the entire

nervous system is one that gets very little coverage unfortunately. In fact, most neuroscientists aren't aware of what its function is and it's called the AMCC which is the anterior mid-singulate cortex. You have one on each side of the brain. The name isn't really important, but we want to, you know, to the credit of the of the structure we should name it the AMCC. The AMCC receives inputs from a

lot of interesting brain areas related to reward related to autonomic functions. So how alert or sleepy we are to prediction to prediction error. It's a hub for many, many inputs and outputs, a hormone systems, etc. Beautiful experiments done by my colleague Joe Perivisi at Stanford have shown that if you stimulate this brain area, a tiny little brain area in a human, they immediately feel as if some challenge is impending and they're going to meet that challenge. It's a forward center of mass

against challenge response. This has been seen in independent subjects. They do controls where they then tell them they're stimulating, but they're not actually stimulating and they're like, I don't feel anything, you can turn on and off tenacity and willpower. So there's literally a hub for this. Now here's where it gets really interesting. I'm going to list off a bunch of peer-reviewed published results in rapid sequence and I'm happy to point out the substantiation for this or the

references. Okay. Individuals that are dieting or resisting some sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that. The size and activity in their AMCC goes up over time and the structure gets bigger. Dieters who fail, flat or downward trajectory of the size and activation of the AMCC. This can be taken too far. Individuals with anorexia nervosa, the most deadly of all psychiatric disorders where a self deprivation of food activates excessive reward. There's this kind

of loop of reward. Their AMCCs are significantly greater size than others. So there's, you know, this can be taken too far. Super-aggers, which is a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are people who maintain healthy cognitive function similar to people in their 20s and 30s into their 70s, 80s and 90s. Their AMCC maintains or increases in size into their later years.

Typical agents, the size of, we always hear that you lose brain mass across your lifespan. Well, most of it is from the AMCC and beautifully, and this is two of my favorite results that really bring this around to a protocol or a takeaway. If people are given an easy task, the AMCC isn't activated. If they're given a hard task, in particular a hard task, physical or cognitive, that they really don't want to do. The AMCC levels of activity go through the roof. And here's

what's really cool. They give aging, what's, you know, people age 60 to 79, the task of adding three hours extra per week of cardiovascular exercise. Now, that's a lot, right? Three one hour, they call them aerobic classes, but getting their heart rate up to about 65-70% of maximum. So, it's getting me into like zone three, a area. Yeah, people can look up zone three, but you nailed it,

zone three. The size of their AMCC increased across that six-month protocol and offset the normal age-related decline in this, in this bread and area in terms of its size. The theory that's starting to emerge is that the AMCC isn't just about tenacity and willpower to push through hard things, that it may actually be related to one's will to live, one's will to continue living. And I think this is, these are some of the most important results. By the way,

I didn't participate in any of the research that I just described. I spent a lot of time with that literature, but I think it's so important, I mean, we hear about the amygdala, the hippocampus, the pre-vroomed recording, all of very important brain structures, but if nothing else hopefully this conversation, but the AMCC on the map. The one that literally could create your will to live

is the one that's been overlooked a little bit. And what's interesting about this structure is that it's involved in generating tenacity and willpower for all things, not just for one situation. And what's really wonderful, I think, about the research literature on this is, it's so clear what we need to do. We need to do, let's say like me, you're a person who enjoys weightlifting

and you love running. I love those two activities. Well, guess what? Those activities, even if they're hard, like a hard run that I'm really enjoying, or some hard sets in the gym, not going to increase the size or activity of the AMCC. People love to over-romanticize the utility of those final two reps.

Sure. Okay, pushing to failure. Great. You know, running hard till your lungs burn great, but if you enjoy that, you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willpower, at least according to the research data. What's going to do it is doing something what I call micro sucks or macro sucks. You know, and so micro sucks could be all the little things that you don't want to do during the day.

Macro sucks could be the larger things, but of course you don't want to do things that are going to damage you psychologically or physically, of course, of course, but everyone, I believe, would benefit from picking a few micro sucks to do some of your micro sucks or micro sucks that you could sprinkle throughout the day. Okay, so on a household maintenance level, you know, I maintain a very clean

home. I'm constantly throwing things away as well, but there are a few things like once I exceed a certain number of dishes in the sink, it becomes this, okay, I'll load the dishwasher later type thing. Like a micro suck for me would be like, it's especially if something's been in there for a while,

it's kind of gross and then you gotta like work through it. Of course, I try and put each dish away as I, you know, dirty them up, but so little things, the things like that, I really don't want to deal with that right now. That's the kind of thing, those harder tasks where you have to breach some barriers, some resistances to put it into, you know, Stephen Pressfield language or our friend David Goggins, right, you know, this idea that one has to callus the mind. I mean, David said that, right?

He's probably got an hypertrophy to AMCC that's bigger than most people's probably. And the beauty of having an AMCC that's highly available for activation is that, you know, through the micro and the macro sucks of the day, you have this thing, it's like an engine that you can devote to other things. So then you can devote the AMCC to other endeavors. I have this thing I called email anxiety and it's

when my unread inbox reaches three figures or more. And that's when it just, it kind of follows me around like a poltergeist throughout the day. And that, that absolutely for me, that's probably a macro suck, you know, to get through that, it's probably three to four hours, a lot of it scheduling, when's this guest coming on? I need to speak to this partner, we go blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I feel that. What else? What else is subjective, right? I mean, what's what sucks is someone else might

love emails. Yeah, someone might and I think that, you know, you've talked a lot on your show with various guests about, you know, when we're in too much comfort, we're not meeting our goals. I love deadlines for that reason. I love deadlines. I love pressure. I think Parkinson's Lawyers is close to a thermodynamic of productivity as we can get. Do you know what I mean? Like, when you have a deadline, you will meet it. Right. If you do not have a deadline, you will

manana, manana until forever. That's right. And some people I think preload the deadline by procrastinating. And then that's what, you know, gets their activation energy to a level where they can, they can engage. So I've started thinking about this a lot lately. You know, I love running, but it's interesting. I like to finish it my driveway and I live on a hill. And I say this morning, I was out for a run in the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac is my sort of,

designated stop point. So it actually sucked to do the last, you know, 20 meters this morning. So there, I probably got a little bit of AMCC activation because everything was the number of negotiations I went through when I turned up my street at the end of this run, whether or not I was going to run this extra 20 meters was ridiculous. I mean, the human brain and struggling to not do this extra

20 meters was so silly. So it's got to, it's got to hurt a little bit again. You don't want to damage yourself, but I think in the context of, for instance, cognitive learning, getting to the point where you finish something and then forcing yourself to do one little extra bit there at the end. So, you know, I, I'm not looking for any credit for it, but I want to be very clear that the scientific literature doesn't call these things micr-sucks. I call them micr-sucks. And I sort of

put that out there just to make it clear as to what we're referring to. Do you know Nick Bear? I don't. In Austin, he's an athlete and so forth. Right. Supplement company on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like a hybrid athlete. A larger guy, but he runs really fast. Does bodybuilding shows? Does powerlifting also run? To be clear, I know that large guys run fast, but typically they don't run fast for 20 miles. Correct. And he does. That's accurate.

He, his little catchphrase is go one more. And it's interesting what you're saying here is, it's not just about the completion of the thing that you're doing because a lot of the time, the thing that you choose to do, even the thing that's difficult, is done under your own volition. You're wrong. Don't get me wrong. If you do a difficult crossfit workout, Fran, whatever 21, 59 of

thrusters and pull-ups, it is, or it's hell, right? There's literally a name for what your throat feels like once you finish called francoth, the people get from having taken their heart rate as high as the bads and the other. Yeah. Yeah. That taste of metal in the back of your throat. But what what people are doing that, although they're doing something that's difficult, it's like volitionally difficult and it's within their domain of enjoyment. And what you're saying

here is that we're looking to just push ourselves a little bit past that. It's like an unnecessary amount of challenge. And I think that go one more makes quite a nice reminder for us with the micro sucker, the macro sucklets. Push ourselves just a little bit beyond where we would have got our sense of satisfaction because presumably you get the dopamine, I've completed the task,

fuck yeah. And then it's like, and then I do just that tiny little bit more to bring one person that I think's been really interesting from this side, you're good friends with Tom Segura. Yeah. And we're related. We're cousins. You're kidding me. No, no, no, we're cousins. I can see it now. His commitment to fitness has been pretty fascinating for me to see. And he's kind of treating his body like an athlete to facilitate his chosen pursuit of comedy. I think even Burt is trying

to sort his sort of health and fitness out one step at a time too. Burt's the control experiment. If the experiment is about willpower, tenacity and discipline, Tom is the active condition and Burt is the control. But I'm seeing more and more people now, especially performers that aren't using the aren't within the realm of physical fitness, really starting to understand if I want to perform outside of this. I need to think like an athlete. I need to be looking at my hydration.

I mean, Tom had his train and traveled with him on the road for months. Yeah. Yeah. Tom's really serious about his craft as is Burt. They just have different approaches. And when it comes to fitness, by the way, I know as Burt is training, he's working out. I've been trying to get Burt to quit drinking alcohol for a while, not because I'm the arbiter of who should do what. Never tell people what to do. By the way, provide information. People can do what they want. I'm a

live and let live. I want to be very clear about that. But it's out of care and affection for Burt that, excessive alcohol consumption over long periods of time. Bad. I mean, we can keep that one pretty brief. But Burt is working out. But Tom, I know because we talk and I spent some time with him that he trains. He trains hard and he sees it as integral with his writing, with his ability to show up

for his family and business, et cetera. I mean, I think we're finally approaching a time in human history where we accept at the level of the scientific community all the way through to wellness and just generally that the brain and body are intimately linked at the level of what you, you know, if you want to improve your body, do something for your mind. If you want to improve your mind,

do something for your body. And it's so clear now what we all need to do. I mean, we can get into the details, but at a macro level, it's clear that we should all be getting that 150 to 200 minutes of zone two per week or walking a lot if you live in a big city or probably getting that. But then also getting your heart rate up to to, you know, max heart rate once a week, doing some sprint type stuff on in whatever format is safe for your body. Some people swimming, some people throwing,

some people running for me. It's running, but you know, not everyone will enjoy running or can do it. And then everyone should be doing at least six sets of resistance training per muscle group, per week, minimum, hard sets. Two failure. Okay. Maybe, maybe not close to failure. Yeah, probably. And it's especially the groups that have been, let's just say a verse to weight training,

right? Typically women, older folks, although now more women weight train because they understand that in the absence of a lot of injected or prescription anabolic hormones, they're not going to get enormous. That's the funniest thing for me. That's funny. We died, I think, right? That concept that, you know, if you want lifts weights that they're going to be getting. Become bulky. Do you realize to all of the women who are out there that are concerned about lifting weights because they're

going to get too bulky? Do you know how hard I've worked to try and desperately become bulky for 15 years? Like I've worked really, really difficult, hoping that one day I'll become bulky. And there is, I think it's dissipating a lot now. But there was for a long time, this fear that I would do a couple of bicep calls and you're going to look like the incredible Hulk. It's like me and my friends have

really, really prayed for that to happen forever. You do not need to be concerned. It's not going to creep up on you. On one day, you're going to wake up and be the sort of vascular beast. Right. A couple of things about that. I mean, from a longevity standpoint, we know that maintaining healthy nerve to muscle function, neuromuscular junctions is one of the things that resistance exercise does. And it's highly correlated with cognitive function into older age.

And for those people, I guess going back to our earlier conversation, we'll probably do this a few times in the course of this episode. But the thing you want to do the least, that's actually the thing that where you stand to build up your AMCC the most. So for me, that would be language learning or learning a musical instrument. Two things that I love music. But I just, it's just so hard for me.

So it sits there on the shelf as a possible way to activate the AMCC. But in terms of actual resistance training, resistance training has an interesting property that I haven't heard discussed before that pertains to men and women who do it, which is unlike cardiovascular training. During resistance training, because of the blood flow to the muscle, so-called pump, you get a

little window into what the potential progress would look like. That pump dissipates, posts work out, and then if you allow sufficient rest and nutrition, etc., you'll get a hypertrophy response. But it's so unlike other forms of exercise. Like if I go to a yoga class and I stretch around, doing some movement, I get to that limit where I'm quaking and I fall over. It's very different than getting a picture of just how flexible I will be the next time, and then losing that until I

adapt. With running your lungs, sometimes your throat burns as you pointed out. And that's showing you your limit. And of course, then there's an adaptation response that then allows you to perform at that level without the burning in the next time, right, if you allow sufficient recovery. But with weight training, it's kind of interesting. The whole pump thing was never something that I really drew me to weight training very much. But it's interesting because you get a glimpse into what

the progress might look like. And so for, I would say for anyone who's worried about getting too big, unless your pump is bigger than you want to be, you're not going to get that, right? And so you actually get a window into how much potential size increase you're going to create. But it's so different than other forms of exercise in that way. It's like what other thing in life, like if you took a language class, and you're like, oh, I'm going to learn Japanese and you go and during the class,

you actually become fluent for a moment. Then it's taken away and then you become fluent. So it's a very special form of exercise that that offers some unique gifts to us as incentives for going back. But look as I say this, I realize some people hate resistance training. They love running. Some people hate running. They love resistance training. Some people I realize hate exercise. But if you hate exercise, you should do it anyway, and you're getting the AMC. So going back to what you think

might be happening to someone like Tom, who is like a cognitive athlete, right? But largely the physical realm. Comedians, apart from, I guess, until Joe, which is part of the beginning of like the comedian bro, bro, bro left a revolution. Before him, it wasn't exactly like I wasn't looking to comedians as being the vanguard of health and fitness. No, I was like that. I mean, look at

BaluCi, right? I mean, he was that he was the epitome of lack of health. So what talked to me about what would be happening to the brain of somebody like Tom, who pivots from being maybe 40 pounds overweight. I don't know how big he got it is at his biggest, but lost a good bit of weight. And it wasn't just losing weight. It was then gaining muscles. So Dr. Gabrielle Lion world of like muscle centered medicine. He's going to benefit from that. The insulin sensitivity will be like some

physiological changes, but talk to me for the people who are cognitive athletes. What's going to happen in someone like Tom's mind when he changes his body? Yeah. So improve blood flow to the brain. I mean, the brain is most metabolically demanding organ in the entire body. It consumes a ton of glucose. If you eat carbohydrates, yes, it can run on ketones, but blood flow through arteries, veins, and capillaries to the neurons of the brain is it's inseparable from cognitive function. So when

you improve blood flow to the brain, you improve cognitive function, period. When you restrict blood flow to the brain, even at a micro level, you impair cognitive function. In addition to that, we know that several forms of age-related cognitive decline and dementia are considered nowadays. Some people will even call it type three diabetes, although that's a controversial term, diabetes of the brain. This is why a number of people who have Alzheimer's go on ketogenic

diets and get some degree of relief. It's not that by the way, it's not a cure for Alzheimer's, but some people do better when they switch the major fuel source for the brain. But in the case of Tom as an example, but someone who gets into exercising regularly both resistance training and cardiovascular training, you're getting improved blood flow, you're getting far less inflammation of the brain. Inflammation is cognitive depleting, reducing inflammation, cognitive enhancing. That's

absolutely true across the board, right? In animal studies in humans. In addition to that, there are a lot of bloodborne factors, two of which I'll just highlight now, just for sake of time only, too. First of all, when we do that positively impact brain health and memory in particular. When we do load-bearing cardiovascular exercise, so running as opposed to swimming, anything where the skeletal system is under some load, there's a hormone that's literally

secreted from bone. I know we normally think of bones as endocrine organs called osteocalcin. Asteocalcin is released from the bones under these load-bearing conditions. It can cross the blood-brain barrier. We know that it plays an active role in promoting not just new cell production, but because that's a more minor component of neuroplasticity, but enhancement of nerve health and function in the hippocampus, which is an area that's instrumental for the formation

of new memories. There's something about movement of the body that signals to the brain. We're moving, you actually need to maintain or perhaps even enhance your ability to remember things. This probably is an evolutionary conservative circuit that exists. We know it exists in mice as well. That's one example. The other is that my colleague at Stanford-Toni Weiss-Cory is best known for these young blood experiments where they'll take the blood or plasma from a young rodent and

put it into an aged or demented rodent and see improvements in cognitive function. Outside the United States, there are some clinics. By the way, I'm not recommending people do this. That have shown improvements in cognitive function or even offsetting of Alzheimer's and age-related cognitive decline. This is led to the idea of vampires and baby blood in this.

Green and chrome. Yeah, which is all crazy and conspiracy. I go on record saying that, but there's a recent paper that also from Tony's lab showing that if in animals that exercise regularly, if you take their blood or plasma and you supply that blood or plasma to aged or cognitively deficient animals, they're cognition or their cognitive abilities improve. There's something about blood of the exercised body that enriches the brain and could be many different growth factors.

It could be BDNF, brain derived, nitrophic factor. It could be things like IGF1, insulin-like growth factors. It's probably going to be a cocktail of different things as well as osteocalcin. What we want to think about is that when we exercise, and that's a broad statement exercise or word, rather, cardiovascular and resistance training, it creates a cocktail that then crosses into the blood brain barrier that then creates a milieu of general growth, health, or at least

maintenance of cognitive tissues that's there. Tom's incredibly sharp. Of course, comedy requires not just memory, but also writing of new jokes. He's got to do Netflix specials for a long time. I actually went and saw him and asked him a small venue. I flew out there to see him because I wanted to see him in a small venue. Because in small venues, his work comics often work out their new material. To me, it was just astonishing. I like to see the number of different

thought threads. One thing that makes Tom's comedy so wonderful and other people like Richard Pryor to this exceptionally well-too is that he can switch personas very fast. He's doing his voice, then he switches to his son's voice, then switches back, and the speed and precision with which he does that. Very agile. Makes it seem we forget that they're very agile, and then we've, he creates a panel of characters, and then wipes that board away. He's the only guy up there,

wipes that board away, and then creates a panel of new characters. That requires a lot of cognitive dexterity. Exercise is absolutely one of the best ways to improve brain function over time. In addition to that, there's been so much interest in, should we do crossword puzzles? Should we, you know, why is it that some people maintain cognitive function? I think what's very

clear to me based on all that literature is that it's not one specific thing. Crossword puzzles are social engagement or exercises, all of those things, but let's not forget the super-aggers. The people who are constantly trying things that are difficult, that are pressuring themselves a bit to do things that are difficult, those people are offsetting. As far as we know, all of the major shrinkage of these brain structures that normally would shrink as people age. We have a lot of control,

but it does require effort. I'll tell you, there's never going to be a pillar injection. Whether not it's ozemic or something like it, but for the brain, there's no way. There's no way that you're ever going to recapitulate learning and effort. Yes, it requires time, but it's so clear. I don't know how many more papers in preclinical models and in humans, one needs to see before they finally just bite the bullet and go lift whites. Lift weights and run or end-to-cardiovascular training.

It can't be one or the other. The stereotype of the big guy who's dumb, I don't think it's entirely, I mean, you need to meet some big folks that are smart. But there is something in the broad correlations of people who tend to only do cardiovascular training. Maybe it's a selection bias. The people who are already avid readers are more intellectual leanings, maybe get more involved in tennis swimming,

running type sports, rowing because of the schools they went to or whatever. But people who just lift weights, it does seem as if over time, I don't know, maybe Derek Witalisley, their neck is getting too big. They have sleep apnea. They don't seem as sharp and they're often mouth-breathes. Look at the really big guys in the gym. They're often not strong in the gym. Not just between sets, not just after hard sets. I think they're also, they're fixating themselves in sleep. We

know this. Then you look at runners and the people have the kind of like the really svelteants and they and sure they might maintain cognitive function. But their bodies are very vulnerable to injury. And they always seem to be complaining about what hurts. You know, my friends who do a lot of extended training, unless it's David Goggins who doesn't seem to have the circuit for complaining.

At least certainly not online. Yeah, they're always seem to be complaining about injuries. So I think a combination of resistance training, cardiovascular training is, let's just face it, like you can't do one and not the other. If you want to be healthy all around, healthy of heart, healthy of body, healthy of mind, cognition, improved or at least maintained as we age,

you got to do both. Coming back to the discussion about alcohol, which is one that you tried to interject with Berton, I think your episode that you released last year, back end of last summer. I think that really opened a lot of people's eyes to some of the risks of alcohol. I've been kind of flying the flag of it as a tool for productivity. Quite a wide alcohol. Yeah, that I think when you were entirely or do you drink at all? I brought it back into my life now, but I did six

months sober three times and then a thousand days without alcohol, too. But yeah, I'm seeing right now a huge pushback against unseen, unintentional drinking. I think that your episode last year opened a lot of people's eyes to it. Thanks. Again, I don't tell people what to do. I give them the fact so they can make the best decisions for them. It's very clear that unless you're an alcoholic and provided you're an adult that two drinks per week maximum is about the upper threshold beyond

which you're going to start getting some health. That's called a warm up to a warm up in England. Yeah, so I've never been a big drinker. I don't drink. I'm lucky that it's not something that's a strong draw for me. I have friends that are recovered alcoholics and their lives are so much better as a function of being sober. But for non-alcoholics, I think everyone should just know the health risks, especially women where the risks for breast cancer and other types of cancers

are elevated so very much. It was interesting to me about the response to that episode is that I think many people took it, the impression I got was that many people took it as permission to finally stop drinking or drink less because they didn't enjoy drinking. As you, so beautifully put out on social media, drinking is one of the few activities that if you don't partake, people assume or accuse you of having a problem. It's just wild. I mean, why would that be?

I think it also makes, once actually I was out to dinner with a colleague years ago, and I declined drinking that evening. I was just talking to the visiting speaker. She said, how that's so boring. First of all, I don't have a problem saying what's on my mind without alcohol. I don't have an excessive gabburgic inhibition. I'll say what I want to say as best I can. But I think drinkers don't like people who don't drink because it takes the fun out of it for them.

Because there's this idea that's prolific on college campuses. If everyone's drunk, that somehow the entire vibe of the party is going to take on a new flavor. I went to a college, UC Santa Barbara, where at the time people drank a ton, a ton, it discovered alcoholics. I used to go to parties sometimes and look around on things like everyone here is just blasted. Like, if anything happened, did you drink? Yeah, I drank in college, but not that often.

I had to have it, and I don't recommend this. I had to have it going out about once a month, and I would tie one on, absolutely. And frequent, but binge. Yeah, I never, you know, my tolerance to alcohol was always such that I would get drunk quickly, and then sober up really fast. So I was drinking late into the night, but then I'd sober up really fast. Now, of course, we know the sleep you get after even one drink is vastly diminished.

Every single person that's got an oral or a whoop strap or something is feeling you right now. And I think that alcohol, to me, never felt good. I never liked it. And it was a recipe for, you know, there was a lot of fights. There was a lot of, you know, there were a lot of bad stuff happens when people were drinking too much. I've drunk driving to say nothing of poor decision making. I mean, to me, it just feels like there's so, there are so many better ways

to have a good time that alcohol isn't necessary. But I do understand that it's a big part of many cultures. And I do understand that for many people, it's so part and parcel with relaxing and with festivities and with feeling comfortable and with drawing a boundary between the normal day and the rest of the day. That's interesting. There's a ritualistic aspect to it. Yeah, there's a sort of it divides the day in an interesting way. So I'm not judgmental of it.

But for me, I mean, I'll go to a party where people are drinking and just hang out. I'm perfectly good. Dude, I've stood on the door of a thousand club nights in my career, right? As a club promoter, and I can promise you, for the people that are thinking, I like the sound of this justification, this excuse that I don't need to drink anymore. Dr. Cuban has said that, you know, maybe it's not for you. Maybe it's not as enjoyable. Nothing good happens in nightclubs after

one in the morning. I am patient zero. I have the, I am the doctor of late night parties. Okay? Like, that's one of my expertise. Nothing good happens in a nightclub. It's this sort of messy, sloppy fights and kissing people you shouldn't and stumbling all over the place and stuff. If you go out and you don't drink and you go home at one in the morning, I think you probably get to capture about 80% of the enjoyment of the event that you would have done had you have

drank, pre-drinks, gone out, done the whole thing. And I got a bit of push. I got quite a bit of push back from a sobriety community a few years ago. I did this thousand days sober as a club promoter, which was, I guess, I could kind of a big deal in some regards for like pushing the sobriety community forward. But I was never doing it because I had a problem. I was doing it because it gave me more consistency and more time and more money to spend on things that I cared about.

So it was a productivity tool like the Pomodoro technique, right, or going to bed on time or something. And they had a little bit of a problem, they had a big problem with the fact that I said there is something to the enjoyment of drinking on a night out. I think anybody that says alcohol has no role in improving the quality of a night out ever just hasn't been on enough good nights out. Right. There are ways that it can improve kind of loosens people up. It can reduce their

inhibitions. If you want to go and dance, you know, you're dancing at a rave or at a festival, which I think there's one going on quite close to here. If you're there, it's really great. But if alcohol wasn't so widely distributed, I think people would ask a lot more questions. It's like you can't see the word for the trees, right? You don't question it. It's such a, it's baked into the fabric of just human life. Every single time that I take a macro dose,

but low of psilocybin, one where I can still function. What is what is 0.75, 0.75 to 1 gram. So that's about, it's a little less than half of the macro therapeutic dose for for intractable depression, which is something like 2.2 grams or so. So you can still hold a conversation, depending on what strain you've got. But every single time that I do it, without fail, a thought comes into my mind, which is why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does anybody do it? Because I'll go

to bed, my HRV, my recovery's fine the next day. Maybe I'm a little bit tired. I've had a lot of like activation. I've been super energetic. Very little hangover. On the evening, I don't do stupid things. It makes me want to say nice things to all of my friends. My thoughts are sharper than they were before. Sometimes they're silly, but they're sharper. And then you compare it with alcohol

and it's this kind of sloppy, muddy, very unadjial. It's just I totally get what you mean. When you've taken a little bit of time away from it and you look at it in the harsh light of day, the effect that alcohol gives you just aren't that enjoyable and it's been folded into people's lives through tradition and through just anchoring bias and continuation. Yeah, and marketing, you know, the idea that like someone can quote unquote hold their liquor is such like it's been made synonymous with,

you know, masculine ideals. It's like, I mean, it's kind of crazy because we know it also, it crushes testosterone levels. What's interesting is that, you know, I forget who said this, but, there's a very different picture of a young drunk versus an old drunk. Someone who's been just drinking for too many years, it's not a pretty picture. They become infantile. They become really infantile. And you know, again, I'm not the anti-alcohol crusader. I did that episode not expecting

much of a response actually. That shows just how out of touch sometimes I can be. I think it just to reiterate it, man, I think it gave people the excuse. What you did, you gave people the justification, you legitimized them. It's like the best bucks tell you something that you already know. It was like everyone always, lots of people always had an idea. I probably shouldn't be drinking. Maybe I don't enjoy that much. Maybe these aren't my friends that just my drinking partners. Maybe I

don't like the way that I feel the next day. Maybe my life could be better if I stop drinking. That's the justification. Well, I'm happy to hear that for those folks, you know, the information is out there. I've, I was accused several times on Twitter, slash X, of taking all the fun out of parties, at least in the Bay Area, but I'll tell you, I grew up in the Bay Area. The good parties

ended a long time ago. But there still exist, you know, I mean, I think they're, you know, and when I say other ways to have fun, I don't mean like, oh, everyone should sit around and do math or read neuroscience, although for me, that's fun. You know, I think, I think in the broader sense, I think there's a shift nowadays that people really think about, you know, how to engage

socially in ways that are interesting. I mean, perhaps it's again, a sampling bias because of the topics that I cover and who talks to me, but like in the Bay Area, there are these Russian bonnets in New York. They're spy 88. By the way, they don't pay me a say this, but I like to go this Russian bonnia down in Wall Street. You go there and, you know, got hot saunas and coal plunge and people are,

you know, young people are there enjoying themselves. And they actually serve alcohol. So they'll have sometimes they'll do like little gimlets of vodka or something there. And so, you know, people, sometimes that's part of the tradition. The most Russian thing that I can think of, shot of vodka whilst hot. Right. So that, and you know, and they've got theories as to how that can help. And listen, I think some of those traditions can be really be wonderful. But, you know,

people are starting to combine socializing with health promoting protocols. And, you know, going out and eating good food together, like eating really wonderful food with the social component. You know, I'll go into the grave talking about getting morning sunlight, something that maybe we should talk a little bit more about. And as people like roll their eyes, I'll just

say there's this incredible study now just out in nature. Mental health published about 80 that has 85,000, 85,000 subjects showing that the ratio of getting a lot of sunlight during the day to getting minimal artificial light exposure at night, it really sets the tone of your overall system and is, and is associated with brain and body that is and is associated with better mental

health outcomes across the board. And the inverse, right, if you're getting too much artificial light at night, we're not enough sunlight or both is associated with everything bad, elevate depression, anxiety, etc. Now, I do believe people should get out and have a good time. Don't avoid the bright lights of a city or a club. Have a great time like dancing socializing. Those are great reasons to stay up too late and get minimal sleep or sleep in the next day. Great reasons.

So everyone's in a while. Sure, 20% of your life you're going to do that. And you're probably some percentage of time is also going to be raising kids. So you're out because you have to keep them alive, which is important or species. So thank you. But I think people, you know, forget that yes, you can go outside and get morning sunlight and which I highly recommend. People do that as most people know. But I mean, so many benefits on mood and mental health and improve sleep

that it just and it's completely zero cost, you know. But I often get accused of okay, well, but what if you have kids like how do you do this? Well, you take the kids with you because guess what they need it to you, you take them outside, you eat breakfast outside or at least facing a window indoors. It's not going to be as good as having the window open or being outdoors. But even if the sun's on the other side of your apartment building, I mean, these things have

an outsized positive effect on health. And I'll major both upper limbs anyway that many, many, many of the mental health issues that we see nowadays in young people and in adults is the consequence of disrupted circadian rhythms because of a lot of time in a two dimensional screen space, which I'm not condemning. I spend time on and put out most of my content on social media and YouTube and Apple Spotify, right? And in addition to that, the lights are too bright at

night and they're not going to enough sunlight during the day. And an important thing to understand about our circadian slash health, you know, circadian system and health is that throughout in the morning and throughout the day, your eyes are less sensitive to light and you need more of it in order to get what you need. Okay, broadly speaking. And at night, your eyes are far more sensitive to artificial lighting and you need far less of it in order to disrupt your circadian system in

bad ways, disrupt your mental health. Now, does that mean you have to walk around with sunglasses at night and, you know, dim all the lights in your house? Well, no, but you could afford to dim them a little bit. You could afford to switch to the red light function on your phone. There's actually a triple click red light function on every phone that maybe I'll pass the throughput of what to do to your phone. It's which allows you to accessibility functions on iPhone. My goes to

my goes to grayscale when I do that. Yeah, you can yeah, so you can have it switched to gray scale or to purely red, you know, you're limiting the blues, a trick that my friend Rick Ruben taught me. I was like, Oh, this is great. You know, you don't, you know, you don't necessarily have to purchase blue blocker glasses or anything like that. So there are a bunch of little things that we can do that make a vast improvement in the way that our biology and psychology function. And it's

amazing when you start to think about how most people exist now. It's too dim, not enough light for them during the day, especially not enough sunlight. And that's too bright for them at night. And they're also living mostly in a two dimensional world of screens. What's the problem with the two dimensional thing? Well, you know, the we have an epidemic of myopia of nearsightedness and it's been shown in a bunch of different clinical trials. Now the first couple of them that were attacked

like most studies, something comes out then it gets attacked. Then there's a retaliation study, et cetera, that kids that spend two hours or more out of doors per day have a far lower incidence of myopia, nearsightedness. And even if they're on iPads and books and computers, there's something about far viewing, about viewing things further than three or four feet away from us on a frequent,

for a significant portion of our day. Doesn't mean you have to be staring off into the horizon. But as opposed to near viewing where you're looking at something within about four feet of oneself, this distance that we're sitting across from one another is about probably about four and a half five feet. It's not quite far viewing, but you think about watch people's behavior. Look at how they go through the day. They're spending most of their time looking at things about a foot to a

foot and a half away. And as a consequence, the eyeball gets longer. This is a well-established fact in animal models and humans. And then the visual image isn't focused onto the retina, the light sensing portion at the back of the eye. The image falls in front of the retina, so-called nearsightedness, right? It's falling too near to the lens, okay? There are other, some people claim

that nearsightedness has to do with the actual perceptual changes, but in any event. So fortunately that the eyeball actually can change in length, so viewing things further away can actually, especially early in life, allow the eyeball to adjust its shape. Amazing, just like the sinuses. There's plasticity of a lot of different organs. And so the point is that we need to get out and view things at a distance. If you're walking down the street looking at your phone, you're

degrading the functioning of your visual system. I told you, I think I texted you before I did it. I got laser eye surgery. I'm wondering if you- Yeah, so you got the lasec. Yes, great. And that's, so the lasec just to educate people is to actually change the shape of the eyeball somewhat in order to make it more perfect optically in a way that for many people allows them to not have to wear corrective lenses of any kind. Yeah, I can see everything. I can see your ancestral trauma

and and full works now at a hundred yards. Amazing. Your vision is super sharp now. Correct. Oh, it's 2015. What was this- was this surgery painful? It's very interesting. So I actually videoed it. I haven't put it up because it's kind of- it's probably pretty uncomfortable for people to watch. That's never strapped you before. That's true. That's true. So they numbed both of your eyes using numbing drops. Okay. And then they come over the top with a kind of a large

box on an arm. You're wrong. They rest the valve of the front of this box on the eyeball itself and then suck the eyeball onto the actual valve so that it can't move. They then use one laser to create a flap in the cornea, which is at the precise distance based on all of the tests that they did in the days prior to that. They then take it off. You're still lying back. You have to keep looking at a green light that's above you. The surgeon will lift the flap, the

front flap of the cornea up using kind of a soft pair of tweezers. The laser will then come in behind now the opened part of the cornea, do the corrective surgery. The flap will then get replaced and it needs to be very, very, very precise so that any slight nudge, I actually had to go and get the- I had to get my flap relifted a couple of days later on my left eye because a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of oil from the top of my eyelid had been caught underneath the flap

and it was causing a flaring of bright lights. So I had to go back and actually get the flap relifted. Get this. The flap that they make can still be relifted up to three years later. Amazing. It's fascinating. And yeah, how did it done on both eyes? A couple of one day of recovery, it feels very gritty for the people that are concerned about whether or not it's going to hurt them. My recovery period was one day and I was able to- I recorded a podcast 48 hours in bright

lights, 48 hours after. Was it an expensive procedure? Four grand, GBP, so five grand, USD. Not a trivial sum. Not a trivial sum, but also given that it's literally how you navigate the world. Sure. And I was squinting. A lot. I was squinting at screens to have read the text. I was using really large text. The only reason I found out about this is because I went in for a checkup and they got me to do my eye test and the lady turned and said, yeah, you, um, you legally

can't drive without glasses. How was that? What are you talking about? My vision's great. My vision's always been like this, but she got me to do the thing and I thought, yeah, it shouldn't be- I should be able to read those huge letters that are only 20 feet away from me, shouldn't I? And, sure enough, after this corrective surgery, 2015 vision, everything's razor sharp. The only considerations that I would say are night time viewing of bright lights, specifically

street lights, cars coming towards you. You get a little bit of flaring around them. And that's because it's now passing through not just one piece of material, but there is a second cut. That supposedly dissipates a little bit over time. But I am flying the flag for a laser eye treatment, man. It's been a complete game changer. My pickleball game's improved, which is obviously what was most important. Everything's- it's really, really good. And I'm very, very impressed.

And thank you to my surgeon for doing it. Yeah. So that there's little flap. Do they tell you how big the flap is? I can just show you the video. I can show you the video once we finish up. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I think it's an interesting procedure. And we did an episode of our chair of ophthalmology, Jeff Goldberg. And he was a proponent of it for people that- I texted you to make sure that like the the ophthalmologist guy with all of the dudes that

know it. Like am I all right to do this? Jeff's amazing. Actually, we trained it in the same lab. He was a graduate student. I was a postdoc. Then he ended up in Miami and then we'd conversion San Diego. Then when he moved to Stanford, I moved to Stanford. So I said we sort of- he'll argue I was tracking him. I'll argue he was tracking me. But he's my chairman. So I'll just say I was tracking him. But a very, very smart guy. And I think- yeah, getting- keeping your eyes healthy is

key. This actually comes back to light. So there's some really beautiful data. I've Glenn Jeffery's laboratory at University College London. I'm known Glenn for more than 20 years. He's a spectacular vision scientist showing that exposure to artificial red light. There's a lot of the like the jube and these other red lights that are out there. Cozy and these other red light

systems, which by the way, I don't have any financial relationship to. The idea that red light could somehow enhance different functions of art tissues or preserve different functions of art tissues. People think it's really biohacky. Like, oh, this is- people under red lights. But there was a Nobel Prize given for the use of long-wave length light for the treatment of lupus, almost 100 years ago. So the idea of phototherapy is not a new concept. But people love to kind of

push it into the realm of biohacking and slash pro-science. But it's not. The red light therapy has been shown to have some positive outcomes for the treatment of acne, for scar healing and wound healing. Red light is long-wave length light, which can penetrate further through tissues than short-wave length lights. That's sort of the argument there is that when you look at red light or red light is placed on- there's a shown on the skin. Some of it is actually getting into the deeper layers

of the dermis. How deep is questionable. Some people argue they can even get into the blood supply if you know it's like on the wrist or so in any event. Glenn's lab has shown two really important findings. And the first one they've shown twice in separate studies, and this is all in humans. The first result is that if people look at red light for two or three minutes, once or twice a week, in particular early in the day, it can offset some age-related vision loss. How?

Well, the photoreceptors at the back of the eye are some of the most metabolically consum- metabolically active in, let's just say, energy-consuming cells of the entire nervous system, which is saying a lot because the nervous system is the most metabolically consuming or metabolically, excuse me, active organ. And so as a consequence, these really active cells create a lot of so-called reactive oxygen species. And that negatively impacts the functions of mitochondria.

So viewing red light seems to restore some of the mitochondrial function by limiting reactive oxygen species. In the photoreceptors at offsetting, and they've shown this, some, not all, but some age-related vision loss. Presumably, you're not talking about looking at one of these red light panels because these things are like a fucking like flat. It's huge. I am. I actually am referring

to that. But you want to do a distance that's comfortable, so several feet, right? Those panels, for the people that don't know these things, they even provide you with the- Like the- Like the texture. Yeah, the stuff for the- So the sunbed. That's right. It goes with them. Yeah, so you don't want to do this for more than a couple of minutes and you do want to blink and you do, and probably through eyelids closed, if your eyelids are thin enough and it's bright enough,

it can probably get in nonetheless. But let me very, very clear. Well, I'll tell you the other result, and then I'll tell you why you don't necessarily need a red light. The other result, which is more recent, and is still under review, so I want to be very clear, but the data look interesting to say the least is that there's this old theory, like old theory that the French have really expounded that, you know, eating food outdoors is metabolized differently than eating food

indoors, which sounds crazy, right? I mean, at some level. And yet, this study shows that if people do this red light viewing while eating, or in the minutes just after eating for just a few minutes, that the post-meal blood glucose level is significantly dampened, which is a good thing, right? You don't want big elevations in blood glucose or excessive elevations in blood glucose. Now, that all sounds a little bit at the edge of what we consider, you know, valid or reasonable.

And yet, if you think about sunlight, sunlight is full spectrum light. So this isn't saying you need to run out and buy a red light. This is, if you get outside and get your morning sunlight, yes, it's going to set your circadian rhythm for elevated mood, focus and alertness during the day, improve sleep at night. But in addition, that you're getting red light to your eyes early in the day.

You absolutely are getting red light to your eyes. Now, in very densely overcast days, say in the UK, or elsewhere, if it's not, you're going to really filter out the clouds are going to filter the joy, the will to live. And as a consequence, some people choose to supplement their light with these red light devices. But this idea that the French and others have argued, and I'm sure, as I say, the French said it, then the French will nod and everyone else will say, no, it's like it

was us first or us also. It's probably multiple people throughout history, groups throughout history. But it does seem that there's something different about the way that food is metabolized if under different lighting conditions, which sounds crazy. And I can already hear Lane Norton stomping in with his, basically, Lane's brain sort of has like PubMed ideas. I think it's great, by the way, Lane, we love you. And I love his adherence to PubMed ideas. But these are

published studies. I'll send along. You can tell me what you think, Lane. But the point being that there still needs to be more work on this, right? But it's always nice when some nicely controlled studies done by well-established laboratories that people in a field trust, like Glenn's lab, start seeing things once or twice over in multiple studies that really work well with what we know from kind of naturalistic conditions. For instance, they're hunters, people that are adventures that

are whose job depends on them being able to see into the distance. Cameron Haynes. Yeah. Cam Haynes, these people maintain vision well into their older age. Nerves like me who spend too much time in front of a book or a screen who spend most of their time and have for many years looking at things down, I mean, for years I looked at things down a microscope. That was where most of my life was down looking down the microscope, but also reading things at close distance. Well, you know, it makes

sense that the eyeball would lengthen you and up with your sadness. I do wear corrective lenses at night, especially if I'm driving at night. I've really worked hard to try to not succumb to the need for corrective lenses because I'm trying to keep my vision health good. I don't want to become reliant on it, but you know, at night I have to wear corrective lenses. Talking about the red light stuff, have you heard of hubam and husbands? Do you know what this is? Yeah, unfortunately.

Well, I should say that the most unfortunate thing about the Huberman husband's post is that it was about is that it was taken by certain media outlets to amplify the idea that the audience of my podcast is just male. When in fact, it's 50% male female, at least in the listenership. YouTube skews male, but we knew that anyway. But the listenership is 50% male, 50% female.

Fumon, the Huberman husband's thing was really about how a woman was saying that she think she's the Huberman husband because she does all these different things that are taken from that. For the people that don't know, the metamine around Huberman husbands, which you can search on TikTok right now, is that the hot new thing that all of the wife's want out there is a husband who's into red light therapy and he does cold plunges and he does sauna treatments and stuff.

So I wonder... So you guys, I'm trying to help you out. Look, dude, I wondered how you feel of a bunch of guys potentially cosplaying as Andrew Huberman in the bedroom. Like the price of long sleeve black shirts has gone through the roof. You now have people fully lopping as you... Maybe they're telling their wife that they didn't get enough sunlight in their eyes as dirty talk in the bedroom. I'm not sure. I wondered how it feels to have this army of Andrew Huberman's

from wish now existing on the internet. So we covered the AMCC, it means interior mid-singulate cortex, but I confess, even though I know that, I don't know what cosplay is and I don't know what larping is. Cosplay is dressing up. It happens that a lot of conventions, someone will go as Anakin Skywalker or Pikachu or whatever and lopping as life... Sexual tittleation. Sometimes, but not always. So this is like the action hero variation on furries.

Kind of. Yeah, but it's not as... furries is more lexas domain. Precisely. Yeah, we know that well. And then lopping is... We know that, but we don't know it well, fortunately. Live action role-playing, lopping. So that again is this kind of... I'm saying there is potentially a market out there if a guy is struggling in the dating world to take the aesthetic, get fully hubam and pilled and then there is a huge potential demand amongst the wives out there.

Okay, so this is news to me. One thing that's come up recently in discussions with some traditional media outlets, but also just generally, right, is to what extent is all this focus on health? Does that change something about masculine, feminine dynamics? Like the traditional stereotype of men was that they're tough enough to not need to engage in any self-care, right? They don't need sleep. They can drink a lot of liquor. They'll eat when there's food. They'll eat

whatever. They don't like going to the doctor, right? It's like runs very counter-current to the kinds of things I talk about in my podcast. Like, hey, get up in the morning, get some sunlight, right? Lift weights run. And I should point out that none of what I've talked about with exercise ever, of course, there's an aesthetic component, right? Limiting body fat to some extent, right? Not having excessive body fat. Resistance training, as we know, is an incredible way to adjust

this one's aesthetics. If they feel like their proportions aren't where they want or, you know, by the way, guys train your neck. Clearly, Chris does. I mean, nothing looks more ridiculous than like, why do they keep body neck? They got a little neck. And a little neck. Hand's a neck. I mean, it's just, it's crazy because this is proportionally. You see it, and you're like, this is, it's the, it's the male equivalent of the BBL. If you have like a,

I'm teaching you. I'm so happy that I get to teach you. This is all like class for me. I've got a class plan. You make sure that you've got your notes. So this is the Brazilian butt lift. It's kind of like the bum equivalent of a boob job. And they have an implant for the glutes. I think that they actually take fat from elsewhere in the body and then put it into the, it's the risk, the surgery risk of this is really quite high. They just do like hip thrusters or

something. No, isn't there that there's, that takes too long. There's the Brett Contreras glute guy. Yeah. Yeah. He's very popular because he puts glutes on people, but they actually put them on themselves because they're the ones doing that. I think the doctor technically puts it on them. But yeah. And it kind of looks because there's no associated leg development with the glute development, it's kind of like if you put two basketballs on upturned baseball bats. So you have

like a leg and then you have like ridiculous. It's, I've seen some, I went to Miami for the first time a few months ago and I saw one that kind of terrified me. It looked like a bag of cats from behind in a set of leggings. You know, like you could kind of see sort of paws coming out like this. Pooly, poorly finished. I would say plant moves. I just, it wasn't, it wasn't good. Anyway, my point being neck for guys need to have it proportional to the shoulders. Yeah, it, I mean,

yeah, so I'm sort of taking digs at people that don't train their neck. It's also life insurance, right? I had an accident a few years ago where I fell off a second story roof and I walked away from it because I've long done neck training because I injured my neck when I was younger and even if you don't do fight sports, I don't do fight sports, but wouldn't be aligned with my my role in needing my brain. And I got nothing against people that do fight sports, but that's a

choice that I've actively made not to do them anymore. But neck training is really important for just what's the 80 20 of neck training? What's the biggest move is for improving your neck? Well, first of all, I'll tell you in a moment, but I think that, you know, remember that your neck is your upper spine. So people are big on training their abs, you know, for spine stability and

lower back, hopefully as well for spine stability, the mid thoracic regions as well. But, you know, it's your upper spine and you want it strong and you you'll get much stronger and other things as well. Everything's better. People's posture is far better when they train their neck. It actually changes the tone of people's voice. And I had a guest on my podcast, Dr. Eddie Chang, who's chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, I've known him since we were kids, is a phenomenally smart and

creative guy. And I've asked him about this offline, you know, why is it that neck training does that? Well, you know, the voice change that occurs in boys when they when they develop and go through puberty is a thickening of the vocal cords that's angiogen dependent. I have this weird mutation. I've talked about this a little bit, but maybe not that on a program as broad as this that I actually have the same voice I always had from when I was a little kid. My voice never actually changed. I

have a so I have an angiogen receptor alteration. Okay. So fortunately for me, like doesn't cause any other issues, but this was my voice when I was five years old. How terrifying. Yeah, they call me froggy. Yeah, it was kind of a joke. I go like the kid on the little rascals that was froggy. In any case, but for most people, they hit puberty and then their voice changes because of a thickening of the vocal cords. But obviously, I had some early androgen exposure. That was clear because I also

had hair on my Adam's apple when I was like four years old. So there was some early androgen exposure. Not going to fuck with that for you. No, I was a I was a kind kid until I was a teenager. And then I eventually angry team. I went through it. But you know, I was I was kind nonetheless. But in any event, when you train your neck actually, it does improve posture and it actually changes the timbre of your voice somewhat. But for the people who speak a lot for a living podcaster singers,

actors, et cetera, lawyers and lawyers seem to talk a lot. You don't want to do a lot of really heavy neck training because it actually changes the way that your jaw moves and the way that you speak. And you know, you know, especially like my solo podcast, it sometimes take me 11 hours to record. And so you want to maintain healthy air flow through through this region, right? But the best way to develop a strong neck safely is to unfortunately stay away from bridges, which

you know, wrestling coaches love to give. Again, the discs can can be injured. You can you can cause dysfunction in the discs and then the pain comes on in a moment and then you're your hose. Best thing to do is take a plate and start really lightly on a bench, stabilize yourself by putting one arm down. Okay. So you want to close the chain. So speak if you can get a foot down as well and then put that plate, you know, probably start with a five or a 10 pound plate wrapped in a

towel. So you don't end up with an imprint of the five or 10 on the side of your head or face. And then you're you're just going to go from neutral position, which is your head, you know, essentially straight up and down, but you're lying on your side to just, you know, uh, about maybe 30 or 45 degrees. You don't like really cinch into it. And you want to keep this is important. Keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth, your jaw shut so that your jaw and moving around because some

people do neck work and then they'll get clicking of the jaw, they get pain in the ear. There's I've spent a lot of time with skulls and I can tell you human skulls and other skulls by virtue of my work in neuroscience and dissecting stuff and I've kind of obsession with craniofacial stuff as well. And you know, there's a lot of musculature and ligaments of the the skull that have to be contended with. So tongue on the roof of your mouth and you're just going to, you know, nasal breathe

and you're not going to failure. You're not training really heavy higher reps in the, you know, 10 to 25 repetition range. Three sets. Yeah, three sets. And then the other side. And then, you know, rather than doing a lot of forward neck work, which people are already doing because they're doing a lot of phone reading and shaping themselves like a sea, you want to lie on your stomach and put a plate on the back of your head and get into that, you know, the neck extension straight back.

Okay. But not pinching or wrenching your head back. Movements like where you're creating some torsion up into the sides like this is a little more dangerous. I don't recommend. The person has great tutorials on this and many other things as well as Jeff Cavaliere, athlete, and acts has a great neck tutorial. May you get a link to that's where I learned it. Over time, I worked up from a 10 pound plate. So I can do five or six reps on each side with a 45 pound plate. But kidding me. No,

but a 40 that's 20 kilos. Sure. Anglicans. Yeah. So I'll do that. And I don't say that to be tough or anything. But the idea for me is to just have a really strong neck so that also for pressing movements and pulling movements, you'll get much stronger there. Well, listen, the bar has now been set. No, fledgling cuba and husbands out there. They know that the neck training is a

important part. Black shirt neck training bit of a beard. Well, the black. Well, to be clear, and women should probably train their neck as well, but lighter, you know, for static reasons. And if they want to have a bigger neck, they can do that. But I think most women don't want their neck. This is one muscle error group that does tend to grow pretty quickly. Is that right?

Yeah, it does. And then the other thing and this looks ridiculous, but that fighters know it's very useful is that there's the kiss the sky thing where they'll actually look up and you know, and you'll feel it in the deeper muscles of the neck. So that kind of thing is again, you know, some people use a towel for this stuff that they don't have access to weights. But neck work is really key. Just like ab work is key. Just like lower back work is key. Just like tip work is key.

Knees over toes guy. You know, love his content. Ben's amazing. So the smaller muscle groups are not going to be the mainstay of any workout, but they become so important when you're thinking about longevity, because they are the muscle groups that tend to cause if not train shin splints, kink in the neck, the kink in the neck is obviously as not a technical term, but pain in the neck, the turning in the shower after doing heavy pressing and then like you're out your neck,

you can't turn your head. The lower back pain, sciatica often lower spine stabilization issues. Everything Jeff Cavaliere has some of the best zero cost content on this that I followed his content for years. And you know, if you put in, for instance, sciatica low back pain, he has diagnostic tools there that really help you establish whether or not it's truly lower back pain, or it's a medial glute issue and gives you the proper things to do. And neck is just one

piece of the equation, getting back to Hubertman husbands. Yeah, I chuckled the first time I saw it. I think it was a little frustrating to me because I thought, wait, there are a lot of women that do these protocols to our protocols are we have had some male hormone health episodes, some female hormone health episodes. But in general, we're just talking about stuff that's applicable to everybody.

But listen, I don't control the internet. I don't make the rules out there. And you know, and then traditional media amplified the Hubertman husbands piece through a couple of rightly so. And the next thing you know, that's right, the black shirt, I should just say, is because I try and as we've talked about before, I don't want to add my tattoos to distract. And I got a lot of them. I want to focus on content and teaching and people hearing the content.

And, and the black shirt is something I did long before I had a podcast. And that's because the great Joe Strummer singer for the clash, my scolaroes wore a black button down shirt while he would do full shows and he'd be soaking wet. It was like the punkest thing I ever saw. Yeah, that he was like doing full shows, like belting it out in like in long sleeve black shirt. And he was just literally the shirt was like stuck to his body. And I was just saying, like not only

is he an amazing humanitarian writer poet, singer for the clash creative, missed him. He's gone. But he's still here through music, right? As they say. And he, you know, he's just so punk. He's just up there in his 40s or late 40s. And, and soaking wet. And I'm thinking like that guy, like he's got he's got it figured out. I'm going to do. So anyway, and I like the black shirt. What can I say? How can Sunday think we should be about vaping? Spoke about alcohol. It seems like there's this big

vape is on Netflix at the moment. It's a documentary about the rise of jewel. And I'm only one episode in, but it seems like vaping is now catching an awful lot of attention. What how can Sunday think we should be about vaping? Yeah. Sorry. I'm just taking a note here. I take notes during our podcast. Highly intense. It's only makes sense. Just the things I can go back to. We should be very concerned.

So when it comes to smoking or vaping, there's the thing that's being consumed, the thing that people are trying to put in their bloodstream, nicotine cannabis, et cetera. And let's just set those aside. I've done episodes on nicotine and cannabis. And they have their application. They also have their problems. Vaping is terrible because of the other chemicals that delivers to the lungs. It's also very clear. And we haven't released this episode yet, but I talked to a female hormone

doc from Austin, Natalie Crawford, so OBGYN. Vaping is associated with disruptions in egg health and what they call egg quality can create certain mutations in eggs. And serious endocrine issues in women. Personally, I find it disgusting. I just find it like I don't do it. But when I see people vaping, to me, and listen, I used to, when growing up, I quit smoking a long time ago, but I used to smoke a bit of nicotine growing up. Remember I was a wild one, but that's not why I

did it. I just, nicotine works for me as a drug and I don't do it anymore. But vaping is so addictive. It's a mutagen. It mutates the genes of cells. It mutates the genes of rapidly dividing cells most. So breast cancers, ovarian cancers, egg quality, sperm are constantly turning over. So, you know, people always say, no, I vape all the time and I got so-and-so pregnant or whatever. You know, when I say I have a perfectly healthy kid, that kid might have been much healthier.

And also the kid's not grown up yet. Like introducing me to the kid later. I wish for that kid. I pray for them, but that their healthy is can be. But it is so clear that you're introducing a laundry list of toxins to the lungs and they're getting into the bloodstream and there are a number of them that cross the blood brain barrier. And once they cross the blood brain barrier, those neurons by virtue of the fact that neurons don't turn over across the lifespan, you've born with the ones

that you're going to die with. You might add a few across your lifespan, but you're mostly born with the ones that you're going to die with. Well, they're going to harbor those chemicals and those particulates. And, you know, yes, we have a grandparents that smoked and lived to be 90, but you know, those are generally the outliers. So I can't find one good reason why people should vape. If people want nicotine in their system that badly and hear I'm not recommending that,

they would be much better off relying on a troture of patch. Or even toothpicks or injectable. I know people I'm not going to out any nicotine. Oh, I'm not going out anyone here, but I know people in our podcast community that rely on nicotine injections for hot, that's hot. That is so hot. Yeah, I don't it causes elevation and blood pressure. It causes these constriction, but it also will robustly increase focus and attention. And it will tell you

not lining nicotine. Yeah, you're starting to see some companies that offer things like NAD infusions also offer subcutaneous or nicotine injections going back to the or patch or gum. Yeah, smoking for a very long time. Everyone knows huge campaign, which I think was pretty effective. Actually, it's kind of discouraging people from smoking or at least making them aware about the do you remember how they got kids to stop smoking? They told them for years it was bad for

their health. That didn't work. They told them that it was putting money in the pockets of these like of like these old cackelling white guys that were like rubbing their hands in a kind of wardrobe and making a ton of money. And then it became the rebellious thing to quit smoking. That would be effective. I think about this all the time that there was a big push to both disincentivize and make more different smoke make more difficult smoking. Go to go outside. There's

the smoking area. I remember I worked in clubs one year before the smoking ban came in in the UK. And then people had to go outside, you know, just friction, friction, friction all the way down. And then vaping came in. And vaping is way more enjoyable of an experience than smoking ever was. You can have a higher dose of nicotine that tastes, you know, enjoyable, bubble gum flavor and raspberry unicorn dust and whatever, whatever. I don't know. And it's not going to stink the house out.

You know, you don't have any of the externalities of that. So I wonder whether we have ended up in a net benefit or net cost for public health from switching from smoking to vaping. Yeah, there's an analog here with, you know, cradum and opioids. If you really want to, we just got to put ourselves under attack by even bringing up the topic. But I didn't intentionally. You know, there are things like smoking and opioid addiction, which are,

it's unequivocal. It's just terrible, right? It crushes lives, destroys lives. Yes, there are those rare individuals who smoke their whole life lived into their 90s. And okay, but they're outliers. So the question is, did is vaping allowing fewer people to smoke and

therefore improving their health? Maybe if they're hell bent on getting that nicotine or cannabis into their system and they're opting not to smoke and they're going to vape instead, then maybe we have to be objective and say, okay, if there are absolutely intent on getting it in through some inhalation device, vaping is probably better, but we don't know that for sure. We actually don't know that. And then since I brought it up and I really put the target on myself with this one,

you know, I did a post about cratum, which is over the counter. People will say, it's not an opioid. It taps the opioid system. It taps other systems as well. And a number of people have indeed managed to get themselves off of opioids using cratum as a bit of a bridge, kind of like the methadone heroin thing. But the cratum advocacy groups are really growing strong right now because there is the possibility that cratum will be made illegal and then not too distant future.

And there is the reality that some people who were never opioid addicts have taken cratum and then get addicted to cratum. And then people start arguing, is it real addiction, is it habit forming, etc. So I think the next year or so is going to be an interesting time for dialogue about cratum. I have a couple of guests coming on my podcast. Maybe you'll do it as well. And I'd love that if

you would. There's one thing, by the way, folks, that's so great about the podcast space. Unlike other professions, we love it when one topic or one guest shows up on multiple podcasts because it actually doesn't hurt any of us. You've sent me in the last few months, you sent me Paul Conti, you've sent me Rick Rubin. It's and everyone's got a different flex, right? The conversation you're going to have with Rick or Paul is going to be way different to the one that I'm going to have,

which is going to be way different to the one that Joe's going to have. Yeah, it's a very different thing than academic science than journalism of other kinds. It's a no scoop. They, you know, like an academia or journalism, they say, oh, you know, who got the scoop, you know, that or you got scooped, someone else put it out first and you know, in in podcasting, it's quite the opposite. So I think the cratum versus the cratum topics can be really interesting

and important to cover. But I think, look, my vote is to not vape. I think I'm just shocked at how many people vape. And first of all, it's actually not unlike cigarette smoking. It's expensive. That's not the main reason people avoid it. But it's a significant expense when you add it up across the year. It's clearly addictive. There's another question about it. It's clearly detrimental to lung function. And then people like how it makes their brain feel. And they think that if they're

already pretty active, physically active, then they can offset some of them. They probably can. But I think in the next five years or so, we're just going to see a slew of studies showing that vaping is just bad for us, especially for the developing brain because it's bringing in at a very rapid rate, high potency nicotine and high potency cannabis. And you know from Monolemky's work, and we know, my colleague gets Stanford, that the slope of that increase in dopamine and epinephrine

adrenaline and acetylcholine is so important. The sharper that slope, the faster the rise, the more addictive potential these compounds have. And so it's so far and away different than the kind of dopamine or epinephrine or acetylcholine increase that one sees with exercise or with cold plunges or with with sex or with dancing and things. So and one of course could be addicted to any of the other things I just mentioned too, but the potential for it is far less than something like

vaping. Here's my stance on it that I understand maybe of the two evils vaping is less of an evil than traditional smoking would be. But I think the enjoyability, the accessibility, the fact that it isn't as stigmatized, all of that, I think that it wouldn't surprise me if more people are now going to vape than ever previously smoked. And even if the difference between the two is that vaping is better, that the total area under the curve of public health degradation, I think that we've netted

a loss overall for vaping. And you know, I see, dude, I go to a comedy show and I find myself going and getting an escobar before and I'm like, what, like why is it just habits? It's like a, like a disposable way. So you do vape. I do it if I go to a comedy show and I'm not drinking and I'm tired. So there's like a certain little decision tree that I go through. I'll do it maybe once a month, something like that. What do you vape? Whatever, whatever disposable, unpronounceable

horse shit is available. What is it? My friend. Nicotine or cannabis? Nicotine. Nicotine. We're in California. So people talk about cannabis. Interesting. Yeah, I think rapid onset of these neuromodulators in the brain concerns me. It's just, it's just so different. Also with with behaviors, you can titrate, right? You know, people say, well, video games cause a huge increase in dopamine. Okay, fine, but you can limit the total amount of time that you engage.

You, I think with, with substances, even though you can control dose or number of, what do they call it on? It's not going to be like a toque on the vape pen. What is it? It's going to be like a, like a draw. I don't know. I'm going to go to the language vaping, larping, cosplay. I've got that. You know, we're teaching you everything today. Everything I need to know. This is good because I'm going to be able to navigate the internet. Fantastic. That's better. It's talking about the internet.

How worried are you about how technology is impacting people's ability to focus? Adult ADHD is clearly upon us. It's just clear and so very, I'm very concerned. You think that that's induced or facilitated or worsened by technology? Like tell me, tell me what's going on in the brain. If how's technology able to make such a dramatic change? Yeah, I think if we, let's turn it on its head, I'm not changing your question because I don't like when people do that

to me. And so what you want? No, it's a last question on my podcast and people will flip. They're like, I'm going to give you a different question. Answer that one. I was like, okay, like that. I'm going to answer your question a different way. The circuits in the brain that are required for setting and maintaining focus are inhibited by the process of deliberately shifting one's

focus over and over and over throughout the day. In other words, if ever there was a physical activity that could undermine your cardiovascular exercise, you know, like, I mean, it turns out not to be the case, but there was this idea a few years ago that if you sit a lot during the day, it doesn't matter how much you exercise, it's not going to make a difference. That's not true,

right? Exercise still helps. But we also know that moving and standing and standing and standing up and sitting down quite a lot throughout the day, getting as much, you know, little walks and things like that is extremely beneficial and can amplify the already known positive effects of exercise. Okay. Well, when it comes to focus, I mean, much of what our schooling is about growing up is not just the content that we're taught, but our ability to sit still and pay attention,

to keep the body still and to focus, to some extent, keep the body still. Some people just speculate more of the Italians and the, you know, in certain Arab countries and things like that. And other people are far more still. And we get back to this about body stillness a little bit

later because there's some emerging ideas on that that are worth touching out. But the point is that if one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next, it undermines the stability of all the circuitry in the brain that's responsible for prolonged focus. Now, I partake in social media, so do you, but the scroll function is a practice of shifting focus while maintaining gaze in one location, right? Normally we would shift focus by looking here,

by looking there. I mean, just for, try this for 30 minutes tomorrow. If folks listening to this, take 30 minutes of your day and decide that you're only going to exist in the three-dimensional world, meaning you're not going to look at screens for 30 minutes. Obviously screens your phone has a depth to it, but you know what I'm talking about. You'll notice that your attention is shifting

all the time. You're looking at brick wall, then there's this, and there's you, but it's all harness by some sort of conceptual goal or physical goal, trying to get here, finish a conversation, complete an answer to a question that's all within a tunnel of motivation. When you're on your phone and scrolling, and I think scrolling itself is the major issue, when you're scrolling, you're essentially putting yourself into new context after, new context after, new context,

and the brain has to adjust to all of that. The way that the brain works in addition to controlling heartbeat and on-and-obnac function, et cetera, is think about sort of like a hair. I don't want to diss it, but I went, I took my sister, I see the Harry Potter play recently in New York, and while I wasn't a big fan of the script at all. Was this the half-blood something? What was it called? Yeah, it was the, what is it, the like the cursed child?

Yeah, me Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray got thrown out, nearly got thrown out of that during COVID. I've got to tell you the story once you're done. It's one of the phenomenal thing that I saw. So you went to go and see it too. My sister likes theater, and we go to New York each year for her birthday, and I took her to this show. I wasn't a big fan of the script, to be honest. I only read one of the Harry Potter books liked it, but then abandoned it. But she really likes

the Harry Potter stories. I wasn't a fan of the script. It's just my unformed opinion, but the effects were spectacular. One of the things that occurred to me, they had this library there where the books are alive. As I was watching this, I realized that's very much how the brain works. That for instance, when you walk into a room, it's a new context, and it would be the same

as if you were walking through a library. Let's say you go to a soccer, your Pim football game, and you sit down, and also that your brain calls up all these books about your Pim soccer, and your favorite team is right there. Then you open that, and then all of a sudden you're looking at that, something about your favorite team, what's your favorite team? New castle. New castle,

okay. Then unbeknownst to you. Unbeknownst to you. This is the important part. The books all around you, not the one you're looking at, are now changing to the competitors and the history of that team, but also who's the directly antagonistic rival team? Sunderland. Sunderland. Sunderland. Sunderland. Yeah, there it is, baby. That's the way the brain works. It's calling up context so that it makes it very easy to flip to a discussion about a particular rival arena, a particular year,

in a particular match, in a particular point and player. That's focus. Focus is not about maintaining a single tunnel of cognition. Focus is about calling to mind all these additional contextually relevant batches of information that you might need. The reason I, the analogy

of the Harry Potter library is that it's a dynamic library. The moment we're done here and we walk out, yes, some of the books, so to speak, of this conversation will linger with us, but whatever we're focused on next, whatever goal-directed behavior we have, making it to dinner or through traffic, or wherever we're going, will call up a new library. Now, somebody might say, well, duh, of course, it works that way, but it's not duh because it's very dynamic. Now, social media is the

opposite of that. It's one library. Next account, another library. Next account, another library. Another library. Another library. Another library. The brain is calling up all these different libraries in rapid succession. When I look like I'll be honest, the selected choice of things to

click on tells me a lot about what I've been clicking on. I mean, obviously, the algorithm is telling yourself, I confess, and I'm really embarrassed to say, but not so embarrassed that I won't reveal, that what I find now on that gallery of things to select are street fights, so beat down, and really adorable, strange animals or cute animals. I love the flora and fauna. The duality of Andre Cuban, and not the capybara. If ever, there was an uninteresting animal, it's

the capybara. However, yes, the raccoon accounts are delightful to me. The nature's metal account is very cool. There's an extensive community of capybara enthusiasts on Instagram. Which you're a member of? No, I've actually avoided capybara accounts. You're a big octopus guy, though. I like cephalopods. I like cuddlefish. My lab used to work on cuddlefish and octopuses. Octopi, androcule. It's octopuses. I've been taught for so long that it's octopuses.

And actually, this is the most important thing. This is going to kill me because there was a meme about this because we did a live... Okay, so I know too much about this because my lab used to work on cephalopods, which are one, which are the category of mollusks, include cuddlefish and octopuses. And so its octopuses is the correct plural. This is the most groundbreaking piece of information

that we've got so far. Moreover, the great Oliver Sacks, who's now unfortunately dead, is a neurologist and popular writer about the brain function the man who mistook his wife, her's hat, etc. A real hero of mine. Talked about this. It's also platypuses. And he wrote about... You can look this up. He wrote about traveling to Australia. And then going to the far north where they have a breeding program to reestablish the platypuses

and the location of the breeding program is literally the platypusur. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oliver Sacks wrote about this. So I've long been interested in the platypus as an interesting animal. They're very interesting. The octopuses. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. You know, I'll get that. I'll get that. It's in revolution. So does that mean that the plural is the... Or that the location where they breed octopuses is the octopusur. I hope so. I want to go

that. Yeah. Well, according to Oliver Sacks, this is the correct nomenclature. And he's the neurologist expert in cephalopods. So we can return to this at some point. I want to show you... I'm sure people will put in the comments where we're right, where we're wrong. I'm absolutely sorry. But either way, they will have gone out and researched and learned. And that's what that's what we're here for.

That's what we're here for. I want to show you... I want to show you this video. We can put it up on the screen. Just press play on the middle of that. And let me know what you think. Right. So the... For those listening who aren't watching this is an image of a kid flipping back and forth between an iPad and a phone with incredible dexterity. This is a family out to dinner. And the kids are watching screens. There's another kid without any phone as hands crying, attempting to swipe the

phone that is not in his hand as if as if scratching at an itch, but not successfully. And a kid actually tapping a screen in their sleep. Yes, indeed. We are in the... Thank you. What do you think is going on there? Yeah. And thanks for getting me out of the animal fights conversation. What's happening is very clear, which is that the brain... The human brain is

an incredible organ because it's a map of our experience. It has certain parts that are hardwired that govern our heart rate and control of our heart rate or control of our breathing, immune... certain immune functions and on and on. But then a vast percentage of our... of the human brain is open real estate that is designated as one function or another depending on what happens to you during development. So we know this for sure. My scientific great

grandparents were on the Nobel Prize for this day with Hugh Wohn Torne's and Weasel. That what you see during development really between the ages of birth and about age 14 mainly, but certainly extending longer creates a set of modules or maps within the brain that allow you to predict what's going to happen in the future. So if kids are growing up doing a lot of swiping behavior, this is... Remember we're in the first time in human history where people have written with

their thumbs also, right? Texting. There are entirely different maps of how language is encoded. And motor, I should say, how motor functions and language interact. You know, in the past, meaning for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, gesticulating, accord and speech and grunting

and shouting and pointing. So one of the primary modes of communication, it's not surprising, therefore, that the representation of the hands and the digits, which is a nerd speak for fingers, is right next to the areas of the brain they're responsible for generating language and speech and language. So we now have the ability to speak with our thumbs, so to speak, no pun intended, by texting. We now have the ability to see many different contextual landscapes as we talked

about before by swiping typically up, sometimes down, typically up, right? So the up swipe is become, you know, as perhaps as hard as mapped into the brain as the wave. Hi, you say, what do you say to babies? You know, hi, people try and get their attention, get them to go wide. I'd smile. They do peekaboo. These kind of people, I'm doing this for a very long time. Now, the swipe function is one of the ways in which human beings engage in the world. It's almost, it's not as fundamental as

opening one's mouth to eat, but it's pretty close. So the brain has just adapted to this. There's real estate set aside for whatever your experience was. And so what you're seeing there is just kids very adept at doing this because it's always a trade off. Human visual, in part, when the Nobel Prize for showing that plasticity of the brain, mapping of the brain for one particular sensory experience or function, say swiping or the ability to switch back and forth between

multiple screens is always, always at the expense of some other potential function. You can't do everything. So when children are inculcating that particular habit, there is the tomasol quote, like there are no solutions on the trade-offs. Yeah, I think I've got written on my whiteboard on my fridge at the moment, the five most common deathbed regrets. And it's things like, I wish that I'd not worked as much. I wish I'd let myself be happy. I wish I'd stayed in touch

with my friends. It will be unbelievably surprising to me if in 40 years time I wish I'd spent less time on my phone isn't on there. I would bet pretty much everything that I have, that that would probably appear on average on people's five top deathbed regrets. I wish I'd spent less time on my phone. And we can see this happening in front of us. And the best way that you can tell that this is going to continue to happen is that you can reflect on what you did over the last week.

And one of the most common things that you wish that you'd done less of over the last week was, shouldn't I got captured? I did a couple of YouTube holes or TikTok scrolls or Instagram, whatever. And you know that this is happening in the micro. Spread that across a lifetime. You know, I think that very much we're going to look back at this. And hopefully there is

some kind of solution. Maybe it's neural ink. Maybe we have a way that we can kind of ethically engage with technology and get the communication and the stimulation and the exploration of different ideas and communities. But yeah, right now kind of feels a little bit like, maybe a little bit like when cigarettes first came out like your doctor smokes camels, you know, like we didn't nobody knew what the bad effects of this were. They didn't know

long term what it was going to cause. And did that video I really wanted to show to you because you taught me I was I think correctly or incorrectly categorizing people's phone uses and addiction. And I think that you said it's much more like a compulsion. Right. And that is a child that's asleep or nearly asleep, like compulsively scrolling through that phone. Yeah, because a compulsion does not the an obsession is mental. This is a classic definition of compulsion is a behavior.

But the compulsion in classic OCD doesn't relieve the obsession. It actually exacerbates it. The payoff. Right. So you're not it's sort of like an itch that you scratch and just get it itch is more right. And there is something like that with social I don't want to say social media but with phone scrolling. Now that said, I mean, you know, you know, of my waking hours most of it is spent foraging for organizing or dispersing information and much of that is done on the phone or

computer. But I do read books, you know, hard books, meaning physical books. I brought you one today. Thank you. I like audio books too. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I watch your YouTube videos. So I learn when I'm on the internet. But yeah, occasionally it's the, you know, well, I learned from nature is metal. But I haven't learned anything from the raccoon post. Nothing of substance anyway. He's the thing. They said that they're very like they're very like cute and

very. They do that thing when they scoop scoop food up like this. They wash food in my pool now. I moved to a place. I'm renting a place as a pool. I've never had a pool before. I've skateboarding a lot of empty pools, but I've never had one that had water in it. So and they come through in the nights, raccoon Olympics in the middle of the night. And they're coming through. They make a ton of noise and then they're washing their food. And it's pretty cute. The first time you see it. But

once they wake you up the third or fourth time, then you're done. I'm rocking. You're trying to, yeah. So, you know, I haven't learned much from that from the raccoon videos. Certainly the fight videos haven't really taught me anything about self-defense or anything useful, except how, you know, just kind of cruel people can be. So I'm trying to change the algorithm by clicking on other things. But it's easy to slow to change. I got to tell you this. It's got me on, I've never

been into Star Wars. I've seen some of the movies or whatever. I've never been into it. For some reason, it started delivering me short content about Star Wars law. Like, who would have won between Darth Vader and Dark Moll and all it like, who was more powerful as a Jedi master and all this stuff? Interesting. And I've never been interested in this. And yet, it's created in me, the desire to actually be like, well, yeah, like, would Master Yoda have won, however many

eons ago, if he was at full power when the, the, the Sith was out. I don't even know what I'm talking about. But it's like created in me this thing. The interesting thing that you're talking about there is that there's, when you're foraging, you spend enough time on the internet and you do find something that gives you that, oh, wow, I never knew about that before. And it's that, sort of needle in a haystack that you're looking through. And that trigger of, wow, I found so I

can talk about it on a podcast. This is really interesting to me. That is the carrot, I think, that gets dangled for very many people who want to feel better about their social media use. And think, well, okay, yeah, I wasted 90 minutes, but I did get that thing out of it. I read that sub-stack post or I found this new person that I really care about, you know, the variable schedule reward of intellectual satisfaction is also in there, right? It's not just the shock. It's not

just the cute, yeah, pocket for me is that, you know, PubMed library. The only guy who thinks that PubMed is variable schedule reward. I remember when PubMed first came out as a, like, a very searchable database. And some of the journals later became electronic and now they're all available at trying. And I could not believe I was so excited because I used to go to the library and I have to pay with put money on the card and see your ox copy and stuff. But also in the library, I love

libraries. And I'd spend so much time when I was a student and graduate student and you'd find something. And it's like, I'd look around. Like, did anyone like, did you see that? But since I was a little kid, I was discovering stuff in books and then talking about it to everybody, even if they didn't want to hear. And so I was professing from a young age in class on Mondays and things. So, so for me, it's hardwired into my system by now. And I think that I do think that social media holds

certain gems. I think we're talking about like mining for gems of social interaction too. You know, I've gotten to know some people through social media where it's really enriched my life. I've reconnected with some people. And it's really enriched my life. It's allowed me to connect the dots going backward in ways I hadn't anticipated. And I think going forward, if you're asking about the kids in the video that you showed me or you're talking about adults or anyone, it's the the

success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self discipline. I really do it. Now, it's always been the case, but I don't think it's ever been the case to the extent that it is now. So, this is why I'm such a fan of taking some space from all action. This is actually something I learned from Rick Rubin. You know, I'm fortunate to call him a close friend. We communicate pretty much every day. And I went and spent a week with him abroad this summer. It was the

worst time to travel. And I decided to go over to where he was in Europe and just spend the week with him. We had no plan. And first of all, on the way over there, there was nothing to watch on the plane, but there was this Tom Petty documentary. And I turned it on. I'm not a huge Tom Petty fan, but it was interesting enough. And then Rick Rick is in the documentary. And he's in the documentary lying down doing the interview. Typical, like typical meaning unusual for most people, typical

because it's unusual for Rick to be lying down. And I thought, okay, so get there. I know his family well. And I love them. And it was really wonderful. It was beautiful. It's a beautiful part of Europe. But you know, I noticed, so we had this habit of we would tread water in the pool and listen to podcasts in the morning. And there's a wonderful podcast, by the way, that we should all be aware of. I think it's a history of rock and roll in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. Super

nerdy. It's like getting like a graduate degree in rock and roll. It talks about the music, but also what's happening in like organized crime, how it impacted record sales, very contextual, very cool. I'm very into that lately. And I'm in and in this show on Netflix. Have you seen spy ops? Yes. Very good, right? Because it's not just like shoot them up type stuff. It's really about how spy operations, let me put this way. It can teach you a lot about history, international history

and geopolitical history. So I go over there and we do some treading water listening to podcasts. I learned about this history of rock and roll in 500 songs podcast. We talk about a little bit. And then I noticed that Rick has a practice. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this because I'm about to. Rick has a practice. He has many practices, but one of them is he'll spend a good amount of time just sitting and thinking or lying down and thinking. And it didn't occur to me at the time.

But later after I returned, I thought back to our first guest episode of my podcast. I hosted a guy named Carl Dysroth, who's probably the finest bioengineer on the planet. He's also a fully active clinician psychiatrist. He's got five children. He's one of these phenoms. He seems to be able to do everything. And he's a true genius. He went to school with medical school at Peter T. and Paul Conti. They were all in the same class. Yeah. And I know him very well. He's a colleague

of mine at Stanford. And everyone knows he's a super. He's a super. He's a, like, the Michael Jordan of neuroscience, except he's still active. And that is not a statement about personality, just in terms of successful hit rate. Carl described a practice that he does after he puts his kids to sleep of where he sits deliberately, sits completely still, and forces himself to think in complete sentences. And this set off an delight in my head when I realize Rick does a form of this

and Carl does a form of this. If you read the new Elon Musk book, they talk about Elon doing a form of this. The great Richard Feynman physicist, Nobel Prize winner, talked about going into flotation tanks and doing a form of this. Einstein did a form of this. So what are we talking about? So I'm a neuroscientist, but I'm certainly not as smart as any of those guys.

What we're talking about is body still mind active. Now I've become increasingly curious about psychedelic therapies, one of which is, and by the way, only in a clinical context, etc., legality, etc., not in kids, etc., but the practice is essentially macrodose psilocybin, but with the I'm asked on completely still mind very active. Okay. Contrast that to a different behavior slash protocol that I'm very familiar with, which is I like to do long runs or rocks on

Sunday. Body very active, mind not directed at anything in particular. Sometimes I'll do it without a book or podcast. Sometimes I do it with a combination of both. Many people talk about swimming, or in the shower, or cycling, some sort of rhythmic movement, drumming. The great Joe Strummer was really big on campfires. I was going to mention this earlier, but I'll mention it now that as an alternative to alcohol consumption, get your friends together around a fire. By the way,

the firelight, the light from fire does not disrupt the circadian system. This has actually been shown candlelight, moonlight, firelight, as bright as it is. It's just very low luxe. So that's where great things happen, independent of alcohol, right, around a campfire. That goes way back in our lineage. So there are these two states of mind and body that I find fascinating to the point of being intriguing to the point of having modified what I do now, because they're the inverse of one

another. Body completely still or close to completely still mind very active. Could be with still Simon, but that's not the protocol I'm recommending. I'm talking about some very, very smart, extremely accomplished people who all did the same thing. The other is body very active. Mind isn't still, but is not deliberately channel to any particular linear kind of story or something like that. There's a state in sleep where our body is literally paralyzed, and the brain

is extremely active. It's called rapid eye movement sleep. So I'm raising a flag for this potential protocol slash practice. I don't have any peer-reviewed science to support what I'm about to say, but I have enough examples of extremely accomplished people now in front of me to realize that there's something special about divorcing mind and body function, temporarily, deliberately sitting there and just thinking. And recently, I had a conversation with the great Paul Conti, and the

addition of the words, the great in front of him are appropriate hearings. I believe, based on my observation of his clinical work and intellectual acumen that he's the finest psychiatrist of our age, clearly integrating from so many backgrounds. It's worked with a ton of interesting people coming on the podcast and December amazing. And he's just phenomenal, right? Not just about trauma, but about everything personality type. It's narcissism, gaslighting.

We people throw those terms around like crazy. Pug will tell you what it actually means, okay, what those terms actually mean. But the ability to think and to access the unconscious, Paul refers to the unconscious as the super computer of the brain for the unconscious mind and the

conscious mind are always in a dialogue. But here's the theory. Here's the hypothesis that when we bring our body into states of stillness in REM sleep in these deliberate states that I just described to these other people actively engaging and have for a long time, that the unconscious mind can start to take over a larger percentage of that conversation and we have access to new ideas, new ways of structuring thought, etc. And I don't think one requires psilocybin to do it, but I do

think that is one avenue into it. Reliable. That's reliable. It also carries certain hazards, right? Because it's like being put on a mental rocket ship to some extent. It's not like DMT, but very little control over where one's cognition goes, although there is some in there. Anyway, I just wanted to throw this up on the wall because it's always fun to talk about new

things and kind of what's coming, what I think is coming next. I think if I were to make a prediction, I think in the next two years, you're not just going to hear about meditation, non-sleep deep rest, something I'm a big fan of, yoga, knee, dra, hypnosis, but also whatever we want to call this, you'll probably come up with a better name than I can. Body

still mind active states to access different aspects of our unconscious and cognition. And I must say that we do this with the phone, sorry, I just, because I realize you were about to say something, and when you speak, you say interesting things, and I learned cosplay, the larping, I learned. I put those ones as the most interesting. Oh, no, you say many of those stuff. There's, you know, well, in terms of new terms, new terms, new castle. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, sorry. Sorry. That was one of the most injured concepts, but I'm learning is the point. I wasn't, I wasn't being sarcastic. That when we sit and we're just scrolling, yeah, we're more or less body still mind active, but guess what? None of it's coming from within.

It's all coming from the outside. So whether or not it's still cyber in the I mask or or Carl sitting there as closed deliberately still thinking or fine men in the in the salt equilibration chamber, you know, the float, flotation tank or or Rick line there thinking, whatever it is, he happens to be thinking whatever amazing album he's going to now, you know,

help produce more Einstein. I mean, you know, we can think of the phone and the scrolling as lending itself to less ability to focus in ad ashi but just the real crime, the real insult to humanity. For me, the real cost is what about all the creative imagination of things that come from inside that could be generated by by people in that time? So I'm, I've started doing a practice of 20

minutes a day of just sitting and eyes closed typically. Sometimes it's right as I wake up, but usually it's not and just trying to think about certain topics and hold those topics in a kind of a linear way or sometimes just laying stuff guys are up. Anyway, some people might think of this as like completely wacko, woo, a new ag stuff, but the list of names I I read off there are people that do that and have been doing this for a long time and attribute this practice

as one of the major sources of their best ideas is a non trivial list. When I think about that, there's a few different ways that it's slightly similar. The number of people who've had great ideas whilst walking and attribute an awful lot of their success to walking and thinking. I'm going to go talking body still mind active, but it's like body mostly still it's not exactly like or perhaps there is a unique way to access this too. Maybe it's a different channel to a different

brain state. Maybe it's a different channel to the same brain state. I love doing long rucks and long runs on Sunday. That's my goal on Sunday. Get out as much as possible into the nature and just move in some sort of repetitive way. Like a new author on a rucksack because Peter T got me into that. Sometimes it's with other people sometimes alone. Sometimes I listen to a podcast, sometimes they don't. Sometimes an audiobook, sometimes they don't. But something about motor

repetition. So this is not sets and reps. This is not restacking the play. This is, you know, minimum amount of cognition required to don't freeing up mental space to do other things. Yeah, could be on the row. So again, I think different people will do it differently. I've been hanging around with a lot of musicians lately. I've become good friends with one of my favorite musicians, songwriters, Tim Armstrong, Lee Singer for Rancid, Transplants, he and Travis Barker did Transplants.

And, you know, it's clear that musicians, especially drummers, but other musicians, well, they're always in a rhythm in their head. They're actually Tim and I the other day, we went someplace and we walked out, he said, did you hear that? Like, to hear what? He's like, you didn't hear that. I was like, when he's like, you know, they had the news on and the radio on and he's so tuned into the audio environment. I'm not, right? I'm not that audio oriented,

more visually oriented. But, you know, people who have an internal rhythm, that they're they're, they're, they're noodling on something in their head. I mean, this is, this is the substrate of creative work, right? And again, the phone isn't evil, but the moment you're taking in sensory input from that includes things that have already been creative, excuse me, created, you're, yeah, you could argue that those are the macro nutrients that you're going to combine for your own

creative thing, the gems and the internet. So studies, a scientific studies for me are interesting things on YouTube. But there's also just the raw materials of creative work that come from limiting sensory input and just going inside. Self-generating it. Yes, I've been thinking in one of the things that people want a lot more of, I think is focus, attention, productivity as someone who values the work output that you do productivity as a word is quite

nefarious, quite nebulous, quite sort of ephemeral. How have you come to think about the concept of productivity and its constituent parts? Have you got any tools, any strategies, tactics that you use to kind of drop yourself into a productive state and stay there? Yeah, so I do all the things that I profess at the level of the basics. Morning sunlight, non-sleep deep rest, if I didn't get enough

sleep, physiological size, when I need to bring my level of autonomic arousal AKs, stress down. These are all things I've talked about three days a week of cardiovascular training, three days a week of resistance training, one day a week of deliberate cold, deliberate heat minimum, usually on the day after leg day. I do all that stuff and it creates a structure and yes, it takes some time and a lot of that stuff can be combined, excuse me, with consumption of podcasts and audiobooks at the same

time and social time. But for me, the process of writing and I'm working on a book now, but also just the creative process has been greatly enhanced and productivity overall by setting in this 20-minute period where I force myself to just stop and have deliberate thoughts that are within a single context. I don't let my mind wander, so it's very different than maybe the psilocybin journey where it

feels. It sounds to me a little bit like active meditation or kind of like narrative meditation in a way. You're forcing your mind to come back to the, you're not just allowing yourself to branch off onto a current, onto a new thought, okay, here I am, this is the trunk of the tree and I'm going

to try and follow this trunk as high as I can't. What about, you know, you're sitting down at the desk, you have the research to do, the emails to write, the whatever, what have you got tactically in terms of a priming or a structure for that specific situation? Yeah, I used handwritten sticky notes and I'll put the thing that I'm supposed to do and I'll

keep looking at it because I'm amazed at how often my mind will flick to other things. So it's like, oh, I have to transfer some money to somebody that I owe them or I have to pay that bill or have to, I mean, the number of excuses that leap to mind is outrageous for everybody, unless we're under deadline, fear or extremely rare, but you know, high motivational states because we just simply love it. So I give myself five minutes or so to break into the work or five to ten

minutes. I don't expect full focus in that first five to ten minutes, but here's what I tell myself because I know from 30 plus years of experience, the feeling that I'm going to get after I complete something, having like really had to push against the grain to force my attention back to that thing, the feeling of having accomplished even a, you know, one hour bow to work is so incredibly

rewarding for me. And the feeling of having done basically nothing is such an incredible sense of disappointment and lack of life, like such a, like, vitality drain for me. I'm not as hard on myself as I gather some people out there are, like David Goggins talks about his self-talk and how he can be very hard on himself at times, but mine isn't like that. But I know how great it's going to feel when I get to the, I feel projecting full with the reward that you're

going to feel and trying to bring that into the now. That's very smart. I've got written on my other, I've got to, to fridge whiteboards. The other is what would you tomorrow want you today to do, right? And that to me is the, it's like a panacea for avoiding bad decisions. You know, because you live with the story that you tell yourself about the decision for way longer than the enjoyment or lack of of the decision. There is a cookie on the table. I promise

myself I wouldn't eat it and I make a decision about whether or not I eat the cookie. There is either enjoyment or reward, enjoyment in eating it or reward of satisfaction of discipline for not eating it that happens now. But what's really important is the story that I tell myself tomorrow about being the sort of person that is a cookie eater or is not a cookie eater. And I think that that framing that we place around the present moment largely determines our experience of it. And I find myself

trying to live for future Chris more. And the more that I do that, the better that my life seems to get. There are very few situations in which I make a decision today that I tomorrow would have wanted me to that turn out to be the wrong decision. And that projecting forward how am I going to feel in future? This is difficult now. Rick Hansen, you know, neurons that fight together, why together? Like can you sit with some of the satisfaction after you've done something

that's good? Can you maybe even bring that forward a little bit? Give yourself a little? Oh yeah, that's how it's going to do. Yeah. One other thing that I've just been so fascinated by recently, you have been a big proponent and I think have really helped people in getting sunlight in the eyes early on. Let's get ourselves outside. Walk. I think you taught me about the lateral eye movement

can downregulate the amygdala response. All stuff that I'd found on my own just through doing a morning walk and then again, like with the alcohol thing gets legitimated through the science. You know, it's something that I did found it myself and then I'm like, ah, this wasn't just bro science or some weird quirk of my physiology. This was actually something that can be shown up in the literature too. Reandoris from the flow research collective has the flow morning routine.

Have you seen this from him? I have it by no Reand. Reand is an absolute monster. His morning routine developed with Stephen Kotler to get yourself into flow specifically for deep work and writing is to begin working within 90 seconds of waking because the state of flow and the state of sleep are not far away from each other in terms of brain frequency, delta and theta. Yeah, there's sort of liminal state. Yeah, I haven't seen that yet but I'll

check it out. I am a big believer in the moment you wake up if you were dreaming. Keep your eyes closed and keep your body completely still. Also, similarly, if you wake up from a nightmare and you don't and you want to forget about that nightmare, you need to move your body. There's something about body movement that discards the prior cognitive map. It's like it clears the library. We're talking about the dynamic Harry Potter-ish library. I don't want to give too much

credit to Harry Potter. Certainly not to that play but one thing that I'll just about the productivity piece before I'm reflect on this further because something you said really, really struck accord with me. I can project to the future me but that's not exactly how I do it. I just know because I'm so familiar with it, the feeling that I get having actually accomplished some small percentage to large percentage of what I would set out to do feels so unbelievably rewarding to

me and I know that it also enhances the social interactions I'll have. It's like a feeling of self-satisfaction that transcends to an ability to show up with more clarity of mind. I'm one of the problems for me in terms of productivity is I'm very strongly affiliative. I'm very fortunate to have a lot of close friends. If I get a text message from someone, I feel compelled to write them back, not out of responsibility because if it's someone I'm closer, I love that person.

I love my family but I love my friends. I love my co-workers colleagues at the podcast. I mean, it extends and this has to do with my upbringing and the fact that my non-biological family became my family before I reconnected with my actual family in a really deep way. The one exception being my sister and I were tight the whole time. But for me, a text coming isn't a distraction. That's the good stuff in life. That's one of the

reasons I'm there. I have this practice sometimes of imagining that my crew, as the kids say, I'm pretty crude up these days, which is great because it wasn't always the case. They want me to like forge off to where I need to go and collect the gems and come up with the ideas that are going to be the next post, the next podcast, the next scientific study. They want that. I tell myself they want that for me. They're cheering me on because I know I'm cheering them on. Some

are musicians, some do other things. I'm cheering them on. I want them to know like I'm here and I want you to go get the stuff and do your thing. I imagine that they're doing that for me and I turn my phones off. There's some anxiety in doing that. I'll put in the car sometimes because it's not that I need to neurotically check the phone because I don't feel safe if I don't hear from them. I love these people and I don't want them to feel as if I'm not available. That's really how

it is for me. I know that, and I think someone said it and I forget the quote, so forgive me. If you're going to create anything of value in this life, even if it's with other people, you're going to have to be willing to be on your own for a bit, to forge on your own, to take walks alone, and then return to people, to your tribe, so to speak, and share with them what you've learned, or maybe even just show up with whatever energy shift has occurred while you were off doing your

thing. The phones are a wonderful tool, but I think over the years I lost the ability to be truly on my own and dropped into work. It's something I've recovered a lot in the last few years by telling myself that indeed they want me to do that. Indeed, I show up so much better to all the relationships in my life if I've done some real satisfied with a good taste work. It's sad as you know, it's just that you got over that barrier of resistance. The Stephen

Press field thing of resistance, I wrestled with resistance and won. I think we should all want people to win. I can fast, I'm going to lose some friends with this, but I have variable latency in terms of my text replies. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes an hour, sometimes a minute, sometimes it's the month. I love being on a plane and scrolling through old texts, I'm like,

hey, how's it going to miss this? People were like, that was a month ago. Yeah, it was, and I've been busy, and emergencies are dealt with, but it happens. What's happening in the brain and body when we procrastinate?

Oh, yeah. So procrastination is super interesting. There are actually some data that Adam Grant shared with me recently that people who procrastinate actually have tend to be have access to certain creative states that non procrastinators don't because they haven't stopped justifying the procrastination crowd. That's a dangerous line to go. Yeah, procrastination. I mean, I mean, what the origins of procrastination are complicated and varied to really say a single concise statement as to what

procrastination is. But the way to overcome procrastination is to do something harder than the hard thing that you're putting off. That's very clear. Do something harder. Don't go clean, like suddenly if you want to do their taxes, clean their room, clean the garage, organize the gym, whatever, when they don't want to write a chapter in their book, but you have to pick something that's worse than writing the chapter in your book and do that for five minutes. That's the way

that the dopamine reward system works and some of these stress systems work. What would be an example? Give me a tactical example of this. I need to write a chapter on focus and tools for focus for my book. I'm finding I'm doing everything but doing that, unless you're set at a kind of a fun example. I'll do anything but that. Okay, so then you have to find something worse than that. So for me, worse than that is anything involving a spreadsheet. Just the idea of a spreadsheet

gives me hives. So I would force myself to do five to 10 minutes of like, like, really like establishing a spreadsheet of my expenses and taxes related to, I don't know, some segment of my work life. I mean, I can't think of anything worse in that moment that doesn't involve physical or psychological damage. So doing that and then you'll see it will make writing

that book chapter very accessible. It's a downhill cruise from there. But people find themselves doing all these things that they would normally want to put off as a way to avoid doing the harder thing. So it's about understanding that what is difficult and what you want to put off or do is a dynamic hierarchy. I think you can think of it as dynamic subordination. You know, I don't know if that's borrowed from cosplay or from a commentary or a BDSM. I don't know. I heard it

someplace. But all the places that you mind for information most frequently. No, it's raccoons and street. No, none of those, none of those communities or communities that I know very much about. But I was saying it facetiously. But the point being do something harder than the thing you're trying to avoid. Now, some people really like deliberate cold exposure for that reason. Because in a, here, I'm going to really, if I've taken heat for no pun intended for the deliberate cold exposure

thing, now I'm really going to get behind it for the following reason. People who are really into exercise of various kinds, but not deliberate cold exposure love to push back on people that do posts about deliberate cause. Oh, that's not doing anything. It's not much metabolic lift. Okay. But let's really step back and be honest with ourselves. The adrenaline, the pattern of adrenaline release over time from deliberate cold exposure is something that's very hard to recreate safely

with other endeavors. You know, it sure, a hard workout is going to spike your adrenaline into dopamine also. But is it going to spike it the way that deliberate cold exposure is? No. Also, the amount of a of a mental barrier that one has to get over in a moment, not it isn't a like three warmup sets like walk on the treadmill, zero to 100 pre workout show me the pre cold plunge drink that makes it easier. Okay. It's called willpower. Yeah. Okay. And now some people come to love

deliberate cold exposure. But that's usually for how they feel afterwards. So I think there is so much utility to deliberate cold exposure. Now do people have to do it? No, but deliberate cold shower, deliberate ice bath, deliberate cold plunge is a world apart from all the other self-imposed stressors because of the speed of onset of the stress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even even more so than

a sauna. That's right. You get into a sauna and it takes time for you to heat up. It takes time for you to get on. Right. I mean, it's so it's a very potent tool because of the amplitude and the timing of adrenaline that it creates. What else? What else in the procrastination dissolving toolkit? So we've got do something that is harder than the thing that you're trying to get away from. If you can do cold exposure, that's kind of cool. If you like, I got to sit down and do this.

I find myself a 10 minutes kind of fluffing about trying to do so. I go upstairs. I have a cold shower. Okay. That was way more miserable than this is going to be. Yeah. If it's miserable, if you like it, then no. But if it's way more miserable than that's the thing to do. Pick the miserable thing. I mean, sometimes it'll leave me like hard conversation. You didn't want to have. Some people are, you know, certain hard conversations are harder than others easier than

others. But, you know, in business, I've never had a hard time having hard conversations. People slaying all sorts of demons in an attempt to get away from their procrastination. It's right here. One of the things that I really wanted to talk about was the peril of overoptimization. I think that before we knew about all of these sign space tools, everyone had an excuse not to be optimized, right? And now we're all educated about this stuff. And I think that a lot of people

feel guilt. They can feel guilt because the gap between how effective they are and how effective they could be is felt between them. So given that you spend an awful lot of time thinking about the tools that people can use, how can someone get over this guilt of lack, of not being where they should be with getting all of their things dialed in? Well, guilt is rarely an effective emotion, although sometimes guilt and shame can really help

us make significant change. You know, the word optimization and optimize, I think, needs clear definition. And I'm not suggesting that you you are the one that said this, but a lot of people think it means being perfect all the time. Optimization is something that we need to look at in the context of the moment, the hour, the day, the week, right? You have a viral infection or your

sick or your tired or jet lagged. Optimization is whatever you can do to manage the basic five of, you know, sunlight, sleep, nutrition, exercise, relationships, work productivity that you can. So it's about, it's a verb function. It's not a state to be in like floating around, optimized. It's an optimization. The verb is a process that we're continually in. I mean, people who are raising kids are exceedingly busy raising kids and they're trying to optimize raising the kids and

hopefully taking care of their health as well. So I think people see or hear the long list of science informed protocols that I talk about and they, oh my god, it's how am I supposed to do all of that? That's why I keep coming back to the basics, right? And look, a little bit of sunlight is better than none. A little bit dimming the lights a little bit is better than, you know, keeping them on a full blast at night, you know, making, you know, eating a few fewer heavily processed foods.

They're highly palatable is better than, you know, and not doing that, right? But, and there are certain people who have immense amounts of self discipline. I mean, one thing that's, and they're going to do all the things. I mean, one thing that's absolutely clear is that there's a pattern of people discovering things that make them feel much better and then I need to tell everyone about it. And that's that creates a bit of a divide for people. One thing that I've tried to do is to say,

yes, I do these tools. I do these protocols, but I'm not just sympathetic, but I empathize with the fact that sometimes things happen, travel, kids, illness, you get into an argument with a, with a significant other, you know, or at work or you're just feeling off, you know, and so, you know, it's important to try and do these things on average, is my belief. And to be, you know,

gentle with oneself when the time calls for it. And then there's other times you need to scruff yourself and say like enough of this, like enough, you remember, like it's time to sit down and write this thing. I don't care if you phone is ringing or not. I don't care if you want to or not. And you build up your AMCC while you're doing it, right? You know, that if ever there was a carrot for the hard for doing the hard thing, it's that AMCC activation that makes your AMCC

larger, which makes your willpower more accessible in the future. So it's not that I'm unsympathetic to people who are like, wow, this just feels like a lot. But we also have to remember that we should all, I think as a species, be an individual and individual, excuse me, be striving to do better each day, better than yesterday on the backdrop of what we happen to be dealing with today. I really, really do. I mean, last week I had a great week up until Thursday and then something happened

Thursday. It was a purely professional thing. And it was like, everything got derailed. I literally didn't sleep that night. Very rare for me. Very rare. And I was and it's interesting, the pattern that emerged. I did some reflecting on later after this event passed, which was there's always this moment where we're like, where we don't want to do damage control, where we're thinking, gosh, if I just hadn't done that or with that person just hadn't done that, you're trying to control

the past. So there's that moment. And I've learned you have to let that process take place. Unless you have the amazing abilities of a special, tier one special operations person, it seems to be able to just live in the moment. By the way, those guys, I know a lot of them, very close to them, tremendous respect for them, but a lot of them have trouble when they return from that kind of

landscape where, well, that's done. You got to focus on the next thing because real life involves sometimes ruminating over the thing that happened and just living in that space of, I wish that hadn't happened. Now, you try and compress that to be a limited amount of time. And then you get to okay, damage control and damage control sucks because there's the opportunity

cost of all the other things that you're not doing while you're doing damage control. So, you know, the human animal, including me, needs to accept that there are certain things that we just aren't going to get perfect. And I hate doing damage control like everybody does, but I probably hate it a little bit more. And under those conditions, I just think, okay, you know what? This isn't 72 hours lost. This is an opportunity to learn. And indeed, we came out of this situation

better. Had then we not gone into it. But I'll tell you that realization didn't arrive until Sunday. And I was pretty upset on Friday. And I'm not a bad mood guy. I'm not a moody guy. I don't get headaches. I don't get stomachache. I'm not moody. People don't grade on me. Even people with very different opinions and things. I'm like, living that live and like caught my bulldog Costello. So I guess to answer your question very directly here at the end, I think

optimization is not about removing all negative emotion or physical states. Optimization is about working with what's right in front of you with the understanding that the human brain and its capacity to think about the past, the present, or the future in some combination sometimes. Occasionally, the anchor is still stuck in the sand a few hours or days back or a years back. And we have to accept that as part of our normal neural functioning and psychological functioning.

And try and get, you know, and try and get unmoored and move forward. But that when we're in those moments, you know, we have to know that we're in them. And one of the most useful tools that for this was given to me by a podcast guest episode hasn't come out yet. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's done a lot on the neurobiology of emotions and psychology of emotions. And you know, she said and it's so powerful. Anytime you feel a high activation state of any kind, you should stop.

Because what it's happening is it's revealing to you something very important. And if you don't stop to think about why I'm so upset or why I'm so happy, you're going to miss an important lesson. So this can be positive states to anytime you feel like you're getting above eight out of 10 or seven and a half out of 10 on some scale of internal arousal for good or bad reasons. You want to reflect what is the lesson? Gosh, I really love this person. I love this interaction.

I love this aspect of my job. So that's going to inform the next job I take because I don't love the rest of the job or this really sucks. And there's a lesson. And I learned a very important lesson in that last Thursday. But I didn't realize it until late Saturday. But I remember on Thursday, this thing hit and I was pissed. I don't get pissed very often, but I was pissed. And I remember hearing Lisa's voice in my head and thinking, okay, what is this revealing to me?

Strategic learning opportunity. Three days later, I had in my journal and I still have in my journal. I have many journals, but I have one that's permanent that kind of is the distilled out things that kind of rise to the top as truths for me. And it revealed to me that I care oh so very much about certain things to the point where I they're not about my career. They're really about my

life, my quality of life. And that small cluster of things is something that now I protect inside, I'm stealing Paul Conti's language here, but inside the castle walls of what I consider important. Like I brought some things in that I think before I wasn't reckless with, but I didn't realize it would be like if you have a prized horse or child and you're laying them play outside the castle walls and you know, their marauders out there. But all of a sudden one takes a, you know, an arrow

through the heart and you're like, and it's a huge loss. Well, what do you do with your other horses or children? You bring them inside the castle walls, right? But you it would be a shame to have to have that experience in order to recognize how important they are to you. But there were certain things that I was just not protecting. And now I feel so secure. I also feel like I

gained a huge lesson. So so the short list here is when it when the shit storm hits to put it in scientific nomenclature, know that you're going to be focused on this for a while, except that as quickly as you can, but understand that accepting that itself is its own hard process. Be, be pay attention to those states of higher rouse, there are lessons there, even if this is good stuff, even if this is great stuff, the love of your life, you're now getting engaged, there's lessons,

there's things to be gleaned that you'll want to go back to later. And then three or four days later, go back to those things and examine them from some different perspectives because I think they're huge lessons in these higher rouse, or states, whether or not it's higher rouse, or because of terrible things or higher rouse, or because of good things. And I think having a process for moving through that

is something I didn't have and I'm still learning to cultivate. And you know, gosh, if you wish that you hadn't spent as much time on the phone or other people's words, they haven't spent as much time on the phone, I wish I had known up or had a process for dealing with things that happened to

me or that I created that were unfortunate for myself or others, they created for me a process of moving through that that semi structure that accepts that you're giving up some degree of control, but that there's the opportunity to regain control and establish lessons that you never, ever would be able to access purely retroactively. Yeah, that's kind of like alchemy.

And taking something which is, you know, objectively a pretty crap situation and turning it into something which is really, really useful, there was a quote that stuck with me that you tweeted last year, or maybe you just taught it to me, I can't remember, advice I got early in my career, don't over engage in any controversy unless you are willing to stake your entire reputation on it, rather keep focused on discovering new things and creating or else you become known for the

controversy and nothing else that is no going back. Right. Yeah, this isn't about avoiding being canceled because I think some people might translate it to mean that, which is why I say it's not about that. It's about, you know, we're given this enormous privilege to communicate our thoughts very fast now through social media. And whether or not you have a big following, small following, or no following, it is still a privilege. And it's something that I've learned to really think through

and guard and protect as an asset that we have. And I've thought about this from the beginning of posting on things online and set up certain rules for myself. For instance, I try to ensure that 90% of my posts are really for the pure benefit of the audience and not for my own entertainment. Occasionally, I'll see something and I'll have one of these like, you know, I'll see something, an animal post or something like, oh, that's so cool. Or the other day, I saw something on an

ex account about, you know, bumblebees that sleep inside of flowers. And it was really cool about how they look at polarized light and stuff. But I just was really tickled by this fact. I thought other people might be as well. But it was more for my own entertainment, frankly. But 90% of what I put out there, I'm really trying to think, will people benefit from this? Will they learn from it? Not are they going to be interested in it? But are they going to learn from it? Will it get them

thinking or doing something beneficial to their mental health or physical health? Lord knows I've been attacked for, you know, saying, hey, this is an interesting study about deliberate cold exposure. And then people were like, oh, it's underpowered. And you know, it's a marginal effect. And I love this because I come from the field of science. It's sort of funny. It turned people loose on a paper. We went because you know, you're going to get a range of opinions because no two people read the

same paper the same way. And everyone would like to say that they are the arbiter of truth and how to read papers, which just makes me chuckle. Normally those people have not published very many papers themselves. It's sort of this inverse relationship. But nonetheless, I like to put things out there that stimulate thinking, positive thinking. I don't like controversy for sake of controversy. But you and I have colleagues in the podcast space. And there are many people in, who are public facing,

who see a current event. And they just say what they think. And you know what? More power to them. But it is. And I will say it is a distractor from a larger message that they likely have if they have one at all. But and you see this. And it's not that they go down. What happens? They take their audience that has been built around a certain set of topics. And suddenly they're talking about current events. I guess what I'm basically saying is I don't talk about current events.

Yeah, you've never, as far as I'm away, you've never commented on politics. You've never made any. No, I actually, this is I've, um, politics came to around to me in an interesting way. I'll just share this because it's exactly how it happened. Rogan had Robert Kennedy Jr. on his podcast. Okay. And I liked the post. And I commented. And the comment was the following. I said, I hope all, I hope all presidential candidates go on long form podcasts because I happen to believe

that it's a great way to get to know candidates. Oh, fuck no. So didn't someone edit your Wikipedia pages? Okay. So in this. So this is interesting. So I got calls from colleagues of mine at Stanford. I got literally calls and texts. I got calls from major media outlets asking whether or not I'm a RFK supporter slash anti-vaxxer to which I said, I don't know how you concluded that. Okay.

That's certainly not my stance, right? My politics are my politics, but, but there was a huge leap from, and I said, and I, in my comment, I said, you know, I, I look forward to listening and I hope all the candidates go on long form podcasts. I also see Robert in the gym and it always looks like he's training hard. He trains hard. He's in good condition. Yeah. He wears jeans, which I don't understand when he trains, but anyway, but he trains hard. Odd choice. Odd choice, but free,

free country. So, so be it. So was I commenting on the content of the of his podcast? No. Was I commenting on even listen to it? Yeah. I hadn't listened to it yet. So, but what was interesting was in the subsequent days, I got an onslaught of kind of assumptions or presumptions, really what

they were. And then yes, my, I mean, this isn't about, maybe this is the time I, I published over 70 peer reviewed articles that are indexed on PubMed, you know, many of which had secondary sources in time and other major outlets that covered the findings for the relevance to the general public at the time, this is around 2016, mostly, but in the subsequent years as well. That was scraped from my Wikipedia, scraped from Wikipedia. You mean like scrub removed removed removed? Yeah.

Oh, my research contributions are not there on Wikipedia. Still still. And, and then it was, there were assertions that I was an anti-vaxxer. There were assertions that that I was supporting certain political agendas and so on. And then the page was locked by the editorial staff. I've had communications with the founders of Wikipedia who the page has been adjusted somewhat, but not

none of my research has been put back. I actually am at this point, I think it's sort of interesting because it's such, it's more actually, it's kind of fortunate that it happened in the sense that it's more telling about how the kind of editorializing around Wikipedia exists than this is really not about me. I'm telling this, this anecdote as a way to sort of reveal what was my experience, makes it very clear that, you know, now it includes some, some positive, some negatives about the

podcast. That's fine. We cover supplements. Some people are, and promote supplements in certain context, mostly behavioral tools, but supplements too. And so I'm perfectly fine with that being included because that's true. But it is very interesting to see how, when I, the way that sort of people will pick up the ball and run with things. And it's been super useful for me to understand this because what it's allowed me to do, at first it was like, hey, like what's this about? Then I

tried to figure it out. Then I went straight to the top in terms of trying to understand. And I realized, it's like, what do I really love doing? I love forging for information that can benefit people's mental health and physical health. I love organizing that information. I love dispersing that information to the best of my abilities. And those are the things that make me happy. And those are the things that seem to resonate with a certain number of people. Those are also some of the same

things that seem to irritate a certain number of people. And I love doing it. And so what I'm going to do is just return to doing that. And I learned a lot about the landscape of online information in the process. Very formative experiences. Very formative. And as an academic, you know, all the my papers are on PubMed. Unless a paper is retracted or corrected, there's no removing things from the library. So your Google scholar will just be kind of like, no one's going in that. My H index

is fixed. And it's not, it's to be very clear. I want to be very clear because I don't want to contradict the very thing that I opened up the question, which is this is not, this is not something I want to like die on the sword of. But it really alerted me to the fact that so much of the information that's on the internet has been massaged in a particular direction based on presumptions. So one of the reasons I'm taking this opportunity to talk about this is not to counter major media

news outlets. They're just trying to make a living for it's kind of interesting. They have a lot of the same advertisers that my podcast does. You know, I don't advertise Fendi bags. But, but you know, they use advertisers. We use them. It makes it free to everybody as a consequence. But I think that it's really important for people to realize that this question of like, what can we, who can we trust? What can we trust? We all have to learn to be good scientists and foragers

of information. And, and, and the macro for me is that hopefully people are learning to forge for information better as a consequence of understanding that like, yeah, no one person holds the truth. This is not Mount Olympus. So I think the interesting thing, one of the reasons why you might have seen an outsized response to this is people aren't used to you being in anything, right? Like the, the biggest conspiracy that Andrew Cuban is going to be a part of is like some new study on

sunlight in the eyes or something. It's like, is there was the p-value and stuff? It's like, it's like, it's not accessible to the North. Cold Blunge Mafia. Yeah, precisely. Yeah. There is, by the way, a cold plunge mafia. Who are they? Yeah. Well, I'm not going to talk about it. It's like what it calls the Sikaros. You've got the brotherhood. You've made a blood supply. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have said that. You can keep it in, but it's a pretty, it's a, it's a strong relationship.

Undistinguishable. Undistinguishable. So it's a very powerful, very cold. I understand why people are nervous about the cold plunge. It's me too. So lots and lots of people online get known for their expertise within one area and then start to think to themselves, well, why shouldn't the world know about my opinion on the Ukraine conflict? Like, I've got lots of

things to say and everybody thinks that it's very, very valuable. So maybe I should contribute to what we should do about climate change or what we think should happen in the next election. And I think that, you know, to your credit, you've done a really good job because you will have opinions. You've just chosen not to share them presumably. Right. I vote. Yeah. So, but you've chosen not to do that. And I think that it's almost like the sensitivity dial was turned up so much.

It's like, where's the first ever society? We knew we knew that it was the tattoos and the beard. We always knew that that guy was like like an RFK or do you know what I mean? And any opportunity for somebody to jump on this, right? So this is something that I've been kind of noticing in myself. Somebody asked me this, I'm doing these live shows at the moment. So I know that you do live shows too. Oh great. I want to come to one of your live shows.

We're not doing LA. I'll find you a day live shows are so different than podcasts. And I learned what is your arousal state before you step on stage? Oh, I mean, I have a whole set of protocols. Would you would you would you send me them? Sure. Yeah. I would love I spend the whole day basically in a rhythm. And I talked to only a limited number of people. And I've got a rhythm in my head. And I'm I'm in an SDR hypnosis part of the day. I've sent in receive a few texts of Rick,

my friend Tim Armstrong, my friend Jim Thiebo. I touch base with my team. I do prayer. I'm like, I'm in an altered state. And I need all the help looking forward and looking forward to the protocol. I've got my tour of my first UK and island tour is happening in November. And then I'm going to Dubai. We've got a huge 2000 person show in Dubai. Then we're going to do Canada in the US. Anyway, I got asked recently, I'm doing work in progress shows like a comedian for these. So I'm doing 40

person shows at East Austin comedy club. All of the profits go to charity. I wanted to work out my material, right? Before I went on stage, even though it's not it's not comedy stuff. But I wanted to do it. And it's been really, really useful because I've been able to watch. I shouldn't really open with that story. It's not so you we can move that a bit later. It's a bit heavy. It's a whatever

or whatever. So I thought about this. Yeah. So somebody asked me at one of these shows, what some of the unseen prices are the you pay for building a platform of this size. And what I realized was, both you and I just like doing the shows that we do. Like I love, there is nothing that I would prefer to do at 4.23 pm on a Friday afternoon, then sit down and

have this conversation. There is nothing that I would rather do, right? And if you do that for long enough, you end up accumulating the size of an audience that carries with it responsibility that you didn't ask for. I didn't ask to have my like and comment on my friend Joe's Instagram post scrutinized by mainstream media and trended across Twitter. Right. Not only that, I'd call he's calling the saying not what is happening to you, but literally what happened to you.

Right. It's not awesome. But the same week that we published a clinical trial. So it's not as if like my scientific career. So it was pretty interesting. I actually had very fruitful conversations with those people. I know what I eventually figured out what the answer is to the the question asked before, which is still in this vein, which is here's the thing. There's a certain segment. In fact, a very large segment of listenership, viewership, and media that want to see you

and me and other people do what they would do in a given circumstance. For instance, why didn't you counter so and so when they said blank? Why didn't you stand up for this group when you had the opportunity on that situation? What they're basically saying is they wish they had to have the opportunity and they're angry that you're not. Tip of the spear for them in circumstances that

they don't have access to. I get it. But one one thing that I learned early on by observation is that a sense of justice and a sense of strong opinion about certain things is incredibly important. I mean, that runs in my family, but you have to know when justice needs to line up with action or when justice is time to walk away. When you're not the best suited for something. The other thing that and I have to say Joe Rogan is the best at what I'm about to describe and I admire it so much.

First of all, I'll go on record saying that I think Joe Rogan has been clearly net positive for science, bringing about lots of different conversations about tons of topics. Let's just leave the vaccine thing aside for the moment, but sleep. On a Lemki, Peter Atia and on and on. It's very clear whether or not he's aware that he's not going to be leveraged by anybody.

No one's going to come on to show it. He doesn't allow himself to be used. When someone gets upset that you're not taking a stand that they would take, they're upset that they can't use you to reach their ends. I have many flaws like anybody, but maybe a few extra. I really do. Included in that extensive list of flaws is not the capacity to be used. It just is not. I have strong opinions and there's time for justice and action on all particular lines. I prefer to do

that not using my social media platform or podcast platform. In part, because there's a tremendous number of things that I want to learn about and teach about, guess I want to have on to educate as many people as possible. I'm not being political or diplomatic. I'm being extremely strategic.

I'm not going to be used to achieve somebody else's end. That's basically what it is. I think very hard about the things I want to take on and they're mostly about helping people regulate circadian rhythms, stress, sleep, eating disorders, depression, understanding of self through a mental health series, addiction, sleep, I said sleep multiple times and on and on. The other stuff is really barbed wire. You can get snagged on it and stuck there. Then you're tossed up

against the barbed wire and you're fighting and you're bleeding out. Guess what? A bunch of really great stuff is happening. That you could be focusing on. I often, I always think. That's really what it is. I always think about how much of some of the smartest minds of our generation's time has been

taken up, arguing over, pick your topical issue headline of the moment. What else could have been achieved if these people who outside of the myopia and catastrophe that is most of pop culture headline stuff are phenomenal thinkers and yet they have a, it's like the crypto night that there's something that pulls them away. I want to rip them back in. My thumbs start buzzing. There's the premotor circuits that get me wanting to put something

to my mind. How often do you type and delete? Does that happen much? Three times a day. You're kidding. No, but not because of political reasons, but more sensitivity issues. But about three times a day, there are a lot of posts that just don't go up because I'm like, it's not going to land right. I don't touch on current events. Our friend Lex Friedman covers a lot of current events and gets right in the middle. He's like, he'll travel to current events. He'll land himself in

dangerous territories. I think also something that's really helped me. I had great scientific advisors and mentors coming up. I also, I understand the limits of having one brain and one personality and one history. I have a council of people that I refer to often. It's funny. I brought my notebook today, which I'm always carrying around one of these little notebooks. I'm writing on cards and things. In the front of this notebook is a list of names. I didn't think we'd get into this at

all day, but a list of names are people that I look at this list. Is that the council of Heba and Wright? It is. Who's in the count? I'll give you a non-exhaustive but accurate list. It includes Rick Rubin, close friend, Peter Atia, close friend. It includes Joe Strummer, Oliver Sachs, both the Fumar dead and who I never met. I've consumed their writings and I know people close to them and I have stories about them. It's got a couple people whose names I'm not going to disclose.

There are a few others here that maybe my dead advisors, all three of them, my dog Costello. He couldn't be, he was so stubborn. You could not get him to do something he didn't want to do. It was like he would, you couldn't move him and he always was right about the things he didn't want to do. He had an incredible sense of understanding about his environment. My sister is on here and then my team, who isn't just my team but Rob, Mike, Ian, Chris, Martin, Gary, Greg,

like Sarah, they're here, right? So, these are like any time I'm going to put something into the world, I look at this list and I think like, okay, I don't need unanimity but like what would they say about this? Because I don't need to text them most times, nine times out of ten, I know. And for it just by knowing them. Absolutely. This is something I really wanted to kind of touch on because you've gone. And there are others on that list. So for those that I didn't include, it's like

a, I want to be with Jim Thibault, right? Yeah, I've Joe's on here. It's like, it's like doing an award ceremony. Yeah, Lex is on here. I mean, you know, so, I mean, it's just so clear to me that my brain can't do it right all the time and I need to call on people alive and dead, like known and that I haven't known to help me. And you know, it feels sort of corny to talk about. But if there's one thing I try to do with the podcast, it's to normalize some of the conversations

around things like anxiety, stress, sexual health. We've been doing a lot about hormone sexual health for women and men, communication. You know, normalize some of the discussion around these practices that, that some people might seem kind of hokey. But to me, I mean, this list isn't like three out of 10 in terms of the potency scale of like my productivity and feelings of safety

in life so that I can go do my best work. It's like 11 out of 10. 11 out of 10. And it's the kind of thing where most of these people don't even know that no one knows they're on their list until, on this list until now. But I've always had this list in different forms and it's updated over the years. And I was a kid. I mean, growing up a hero, listen to him every day of my life from 13 on Tim Armstrong, lead singer for Rance, Operation Ivy, Transplant. So I'm like, literally

every day. And through some magical stroke of luck, we've become very close friends. So he was guiding me all along, but he's about, he's 10 years older than I am. He has deep, he's extremely smart, extremely smart. And he has deep understanding of human dynamics and how to be in the world while trying to do creative work. Now he's a musician, not a scientist, but his level of curiosity, intellect, memory. I mean, it's like, it doesn't just, it for years, it inspired me. But now, like,

all text or call Tim, I did that last week like, hey, this is a tough situation. Really help me. I called a few other people too. But he's on this list. And he has been since I was 13. How wild is that? It turns out, you know, I never meet your heroes, right? Well, it turns out this hero ended up, like wildly exceeding my expectations in the positive direction. You do know that there's someone listening to this. There's probably millions of people listening to this, at least not thousands

to whom you're that person, right? They have this parasocial relationship with you, even if you didn't ask for it, even if social, I like that. It's almost like paranormal. Yeah, parasocial. That's the time. Get it in there, along with whatever it was, cosplay. We've got a good

list and Cuba husbands, Cuba daddies. I'm really fascinated by what's what it's been like to be a relatively unknown academic working in the annals, just doing your thing, doing your research, to now as a byproduct of a passion to share science-based tools for people now being sort of thrust out into the public. What's the felt sense of this rapid increase in exposure and scrutiny in

fame being like? I'd love to tell you that it's disorienting, but truly by virtue of feeling very aligned with the work and purpose of the work that I'm doing, I feel like I'm at least in terms of my daily activities and where my mind is at. I'm exactly where I, for the first time, I'm like exactly where I feel like I'm exactly where I belong, not because I'm known, and the podcast has achieved this recognition for which I'm very grateful and humbled by,

but because I love foraging for organizing and dispensing information. So 95% of my cognitive powers are set toward the episode I'm preparing for next week or the week after. I have to literally pull in my impulse to now take off on a tangent about my use of toe spacers to fix this imbalance because of like foot health and like I'll go there. That's the thing, but like it's all gain

teed up. I'll, I prepare for podcasts. I someone asked how long it takes me and I realize in total because I start so many months ahead somewhere between very low and the lowest ever would have been 12, but it's typically more like 150 to two hours of preparation. And I love every friggin' second of it. And so for me, it feels great because it allows me to do what I'm doing. Now in terms of being public facing, I mean, I'm a pretty introverted person. I love close dynamics.

You know, if I think for a second about meaning one on one dynamics and small group dynamics, small parties at my house and things, I'm comfortable in crowds, but I'm not interested in being in them per se. But if I think for a second about how many people are going to listen to something, I'll just, I don't know, I don't think about it because it would not to do it. That's not to do it. You know, it's changed my life dramatically and mostly for the positive,

in positive ways. You know, getting filmed while you're in the gym is funny because, you know, I always, I'm like, if ever I need to use perfect form, like now, I really need it. You know, I'm the guy on the tip raise, man. That's the real, that's the real scandal. It's not that you like to Joe and R.F.K. Post. It's the fact that you can't do preacher curls with perfect tempo. I'm, I'm a four-range emotion guy. I'm a four-range emotion guy.

But I am the guy on the tip machine every day, not every day, but any damn in the gym. Yeah, getting filmed when you're not aware that you're getting filmed, some security breaches and not directly towards me, but towards members of my family and community. Those have been annoying, but that goes with the territory and it'd be mostly lucky. 99% of interactions are immensely positive. When people come over and say, hello, I enjoy it. It's, you know, I don't

always have a lot of time. So there are those kinds of things, but I'm somebody who's genuinely curious about other people. So in those interactions, like I want to learn about them, or you know about me, I want to learn about them. I've always been genuinely curious about other people. This isn't a line. Like I've been friends with the garbage man, the janitor, the, you know, my dentist, like,

you know, well there I've got stuff in my mouth. So I can't, it's a one-way conversation. But, you know, learning about people, I think, allows one to also deliver information in a way that's more accessible to people. This is something that I'm at, I would guess, I would go as far as to say that the level of fame and recognition that I have now is about as like Goldilocks zone as it's

possible to get. It's maybe once every 10 to 15 minutes if I'm walking in a crowded area somewhere and it'll be a 10-minute conversation, a 10-second conversation of High Mate, really love the podcast. And that was like the Amazon Prime delivery driver shouted out of the window. And those are the people that, that allow us to do what we do, right? Like, like, like, I'm so grateful that people are interested in the kinds of information that you put out and then I put out.

I mean, I look at them, I look at anyone I interact with as the students in my classroom, the same way I would, the way I manage my comment section on social media classroom rules. You can say whatever you want to me, but don't be, don't be uncooled other people. And, or I'm going to block you. Why? It's not like I can't take it. Listen, I grew up in skateboarding. I grew up in academia. The hazing process in those communities, very different was intense. It was physical,

psychological, emotional torture at times. And so you develop a very thick skin. I mean, skateboarding, if you do something and you don't make it look right or something is a little off, like, you're going to own that reputation for years. And so that's your new nickname. Yeah, you have to have your, I don't know, I'm not going to say it the way I'd say it like then, but like, I mean, you have to have every, your kit has to be right. Everything has to be right.

And yet you have to try things. And so it's, you know, learning to work through the narrow constraints of social media is nothing compared to trying to come up through academia where people say, oh, nice, nice, great to see you. And then they kill your papers or grants behind your back. It's a game of backstabbing. Now they put reviewers on names on papers. So it conditioned me for it. I will say this. I'm very grateful that all this happened in my 40s, my mid 40s.

It started the podcast when I was 45 on 48 now. It's been three years. Why, why that timing? I just think about the young brain, the 20s, 30s, you know, so much of our identity has formed earlier in life, but we're still trying to figure out who we are. I know exactly who I am. So you've got the guy that since age five has been gathering, organizing, and disseminating information. I like lots of different kinds of people. I like misfits and runts and win it in,

like, and, you know, and jocks and punkers and hippies. And I have gay friends and straight friends like live and live. I love it all. So I oriented towards skateboarding and punk rock because it was like all the styles, all the hair styles. So I mean, people think of like just like bullet belts in Mohawk saying, no, then you got your peace pong seeing it, your vegan pong seeing it, I was like, and I have my thing what I liked, but I love the variety because I love the flora and

fauna of life. I don't love raccoons or capy bars per se, but I love how they fit into the animal kingdom. And I have an obsession with animals and weird animals and cephalopods and the octopuses and the, you know, the platypuses and all of it. And so for me, like being on social media, I get to step back and look at all of it. But I'm not going to let anyone decide who I am or who I'm not. Like, I'm the guy who was wearing black shirts before. My colleague, David Felheim,

we'll tell you this. He's a professor. He's his hand crews. He wants to eat. He was like, he always wore the black shirt. And I was like, yes, it's true. I didn't change at all. I didn't feel like I'd modify myself. I know, you know, I always tried to hold the door for people. I tried. Am I perfect? No. So it's changed things a lot. And yet it hasn't changed me at all. I love it. Dr. Andrew Hüman, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I really appreciate you.

Very much appreciate the support you've given me over the last year. When I've needed to text you, when I've needed a little bit some pieces, it really does mean a lot to me. So what can people expect? The remainder of 2023, what have you got coming up? Okay, well, I can tell you. But first, can I just please just take a moment to say thank you for this opportunity. Thanks for the

kind words. I will say something very important about you, which is that coming up in the various sports ideas, skateboarding and science, I have a really good eye for the person like, I'm going to put my money on that person to be at the top at some point down the line. And it's interesting because I'm not talented at many things. I'm proficient at certain things I work really hard, truly. If I have any inborn abilities, it's my memory has always been sharp,

but loving the thing you're learning helps. Early on when I saw your content, it created some sense in me based on how you were delivering it, the passion, the honesty behind it, and the ways in which you were like moving through and trying to figure it out that I was like, this guy is going to be like at the top. And I was right in that you're a scent trajectory predicts that like I mean, okay, there's still room for upward trajectory, great. But you know,

everyone's in a while someone comes along where you're like, you just love what he does. It's so clear that he's meant to do this. Like you love, and I think it has a lot to do with the genuineness which you invite on and meet your guests. Like you're not going to put someone on because they're going to get clicks, you're going to invite people on because you really want to talk to them and that's very clear. And I think I know that resonates with people. So I've been

truly an avid consumer of your content from go and it's been awesome to see your scent. And I'm sure that this is just the beginning. So I want to say thank you. Thank you. And I look forward to deepening our friendship. And that's a real thing because early on when Lex and I became friends through podcasting, at some point I realized I was like, we need to hang out without these microphones in front of us. I went out to Austin for two weeks. We just hung out. We just hung out. It's also

where he did the jujitsu thing or he choked you out. Yeah. So got me there. I get you back, Lex. But not with jujitsu. Psychological jujitsu. But I hope we get the chance to spend time. And I really just want to say whatever you're doing, keep going because it's awesome and it's clear that you're really working hard on your craft. And I'm really excited about the lives and we can talk about that. Thank you. Rest of 2023. I'm going to try and finish this book that I've been

procrastinating on for a few years now. It's mainly going to be a book of protocols. So it's very straightforward as to what to do. It's kind of the what to do stuff. Not so much story. I think there's a need for that. Or so I know that's going to that's going to break the world and not think I'm putting my heart and soul into it. I got an idea of completion date and then publication day. Sales should probably be February and it should come out end of 24. Yeah. So and I'm putting

everything I've gotten to that book while still podcasting. We're going to do a series. We've done these guest series. We did one with Dr. Andy Galpin on fitness. We did one on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. We're going to do one with Dr. Matthew Walker on sleep and one with Dr. Anulemki on addiction and dopamine soon so that the guest series are that going forward. And then you know, there were times when we thought, okay, we need to do something else. Like do we need an

app to and we've really taken a step back. We're just like, I'm just going to keep searching for organizing and dispensing information mainly in the form of the Monday podcast occasion of these guest series. We do have a premium channel that generates revenue that is directed towards scientific studies. I'm going to talk too much about this. But a significant portion of that has been put to philanthropy to laboratories working on eating disorders on mind body states on

intermittent fasting. Didn't you recently redo your website? We did the website. Yeah, so if you go to heurumlab.com, the engineers have done a great job where it's highly searchable now and take you to specific timestamps. You could even say like dopamine procrastination. I'll take you to that particular timestamp. And I think as the AI tools get better, there'll be more things like that. But really it's going to just be more of the same live shows. Any more live shows this year?

We got live shows coming up in Australia. So the first one in Sydney sold out, the opera house one sold out, but there's another one being announced soon. And then there's a Melbourne and Brisbane. Well, should people go if they want to sign up for the. It's heurumlab.com slash tour to get tickets. Oh, yeah. And those are fun. And they're very different than the podcast. But you know, I'm not a joke to a few months back with traditional media. I wasn't joking that, you know,

I might run for office someday. Like from what I've seen of the experience of politics, like I want to retract that. Zero minus one interest in running for office. But I have every interest in just continuing to indulge this this obsession slash delight that I get from learning and teaching and sharing information. So like, yeah, that's the plan. And keep the main thing, the main thing, man. Yeah, that's the thing. And I never know like I come from a long line of

academic advisors that all died early. Like I hope I live a long time. But I don't know if it's going to be a cancer abullot or a bus that's going to take me out or old age. I have no idea. So I'm just, you know, I'm just leaning into this as hard as I can. Hell yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for today. I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Chris.