These Habits Are Much Better than People Realise - Dr Andrew Huberman (4K)

Most people think about cortisol as a bad thing that you want less of. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Not at all. Cortisol has been labeled a stress hormone and it is involved in stress. We have a bout of stress. You got a spike of cortisol so to speak. Um cortisol like other steroid hormones is bound to things and there's a a free form of cortisol. That's the active one. Um, you don't want your free unbound cortisol to be chronically high. But we need to really think about why it was called a stress hormone in the first place. And the main reason is cortisol's job is to deploy energy sources for your brain and body to be able to react to things, think and move. So cortisol naturally goes up a bit during stress and it comes back again provided you don't ruminate on that stress too much on the stressor that is the big eye opener for me was when I actually went into the modern textbooks on cortisol not the ones that most medical students learn from but what the endocrinologists the specialists really learn from and what the circadian and sleep biologists now understand which is the reason you wake up every single morning even if you have an alarm talk is because of something called the cortisol awakening response. So, if we just step back from a a typical healthy 24 hours, it looks something like this. Uh, a couple hours before sleep, your cortisol is low. Your heart rate's low. You're calm. Hopefully, it's dim in the room. You go to sleep. Your cortisol is then at its absolute lowest levels for the entire 24 hours. And by the way, this is the same time when melatonin, the sleepy hormone, is at its highest levels. After about four or five hours of sleep and typically in that first four or five hours of sleep is when you get your most deep sleep, slowwave sleep, non-REM sleep, many people experience a transition into the sort of last third of their sleep for the night and they tend to wake up around that time and often they use the restroom, go back to sleep. Why did they wake up? Well, it turns out that your cortisol is starting to rise about twothirds of the way through the night. I mean, it's really creeping up throughout the entire night, but it's gone from this nadier to it's starting to climb. And then at some point, let's assume you get back to sleep or you slept through the night. At some point, maybe 6:00 a.m., maybe 8:00 a.m., depends on who you are and what your schedule is, you wake up. Maybe your alarm clock goes off. You wake up. You wake up because the cortisol level reached a certain threshold. Is literally the cortisol awakening response. It is healthy. It is good. And you if I were to measure your cortisol at that moment and compare it to what nor people might call like a stress episode in the afternoon, you would say it's much higher than what stress induced. Okay. So then your cortisol continues to rise and there's this unique opportunity in the first hour, maybe 90 minutes, but in the first hour after waking where viewing bright light can increase your morning cortisol spike, as I'll refer to it, by up to 50%. Bright light can come from sunlight ideally or from a bright artificial light like a 10,000 lux artificial light or even a very bright indoor artificial LED or incandescent light. Okay, why is this important? Well, we could explore all the biology of cortisol and we can summarize it by saying you have this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that sets off cortisol, self-regulates negative feedback loop, etc., etc. That's the normal regulation of cortisol, which basically can be summarized as it never allows you to have your cortisol too high for too long. It feeds back on itself and shuts it down. However, in the first hour after waking, your brain circadian clock has a unique privileged pathway that is separate from the HPA axis where it can amplify cortisol only in that first hour. So you say, why would that be? This is nature's evolutionarily hardwired mechanism for giving you the opportunity to boost your cortisol so that you have energy to lean into the activities of your day. And when I say energy, I'm not saying, you know, it's not like we happen to be in California at the moment, but not energy energy. I'm talking about glucose mobilization. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet, you're going to you're going to mobilize other energy sources. Your brain and body wakes up because of cortisol. You have the opportunity to boost that wakefulness even further by viewing bright light. Yes, you could exercise. Yes, you could drink caffeine. Turns out caffeine, if you're a chronic caffeine user, such as me, such as you, doesn't actually increase cortisol that much. You could jump in a 40° Fahrenheit cold plunge doesn't actually increase your cortisol. All this nonsense going around the internet about, you know, women shouldn't do a cold plunge and if they do, not as cold. Okay, maybe, but it's always attributed to increases in cortisol. Cold plunge reduces your cortisol levels. You can look at the data. The data show that it goes down. Adrenaline goes up. Dopamine goes up. Norepinephrine go up. So cortisol makes you alert. It makes you focused. And here's the key thing. Spiking your cortisol in that first hour after waking is so so important because that negative feedback loop mechanism kicks in about 3 hours after you've been awake. And that's why your cortisol then starts to drop late morning, early afternoon, later afternoon. And in the afternoon, if you have a bout of stress, no problem. you just have a little bit of cortisol bump, adrenaline bump, and it goes back down. If you don't spike your morning cortisol, what ends up happening is your cortisol system, essentially the HPA axis, is primed for stress events to give you big lasting increases in cortisol later, which make it hard to fall asleep, which make it hard to stay asleep, which are part of the reason why people have afternoon anxiety, all sorts of things. So, you you're actually supposed to feel a little stressed first thing in the morning. This is normal. This is healthy and it sets you up for being more calm in the afternoon. Now, none of this is tied to whether or not you wake up at 8:00 a.m., 6:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., or 11:00 a.m. This is not about chronoype. This is simply about the first hour after waking, but after about 90 minutes post waking, that opportunity to spike your cortisol goes away. So, if you can't view bright light in the form of sunlight, get it from artificial light. You would do well to compound that with hydration, which by the way, for reasons that still aren't entirely understood, probably has to do with some electrolyte balance, etc. First thing in the day will also burst your cortisol. If you can't get in exercise right away, even just some skipping rope, jumping jacks, this kind of thing. Getting the body into a high cortisol state early sets you up for being in a low cortisol state in the afternoon and evening. And any cortisol that you might trigger through a stress event will quickly subside unless you what's called flatten your cortisol curve by not spiking in the morning. And and by the way, the the curve that I'm describing high in the morning, lower into the afternoon, low low as you get into the first hours of sleep. This is the healthy cortisol curve for men, women, kids, pregnant women, post-menopausal women. It tends to flatten out a bit and they need to do additional things to to get that spike earlier. So, this is when I hear all this stuff about don't coal plunge, it increases, it doesn't increase cortisol. And also, this notion that we're supposed to avoid stress entirely. Not true. You and I both generally agree on that. But how you time your stress is important. And the last point I'll make is that if you were to do uh say a very intense workout in the late afternoon, evening, it's been demonstrated that will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels for a few hours, not a problem. You can take a hot shower afterwards, do some slow breathing and calm down, provided you didn't, you know, fill up with caffeine prior, you could probably fall asleep just fine. But because you spiked your cortisol late day, what you find is that the next day cortisol is lower, which is one of the not the only reason, but one of the reasons why you're a bit more sluggish the next morning. So, and this is why people's if they exercise too late in the day, their rhythm starts to shift. When we talk about your circadian rhythm shifting in response to light, it's the cortisol peak that's shifting or flattening, which in turn adjusts your melatonin peak and trough. But cortisol is the the trigger. >> Cortisol, think of it like the think about this morning cortisol spike as the first domino in establishing essentially all the rhythms that you're interested in if you want daytime mood, focus, alertness, nighttime sleep. And so these are things I've talked about for years and that we've talked about for years, but only recently has it become clear exactly why cortisol is that first domino in the chain. And we hear so often about dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, all of which are important, all downstream of of cortisol. So chronically high cortisol, Cushings disease, the things that give people moon phase that cause memory deficits, all these sorts of things, that's when the cortisol curve is too flat for too long, meaning too high in the afternoon and evening. But there is I won't say there's no upper limit to how high cortisol can be in the morning. There are people who have pathologically high levels of cortisol in the first hours of the day. Most people, even people with Cushings, have pathologically low cortisol early in the day, pathologically high cortisol late in the day. >> They've inverted that. >> That's right. And getting this curve right is so critical. It predicts longevity. It predicts recovery from everything from chemotherapy to pain relief. Uh you know, it's one of the things that I'm You seem to be doing all the right things. plus these sort of outrageous uh outrageously um ambitious health protocols as well. Although I will commend you if you're going to clean anything including your blood, I do suggest doing in Austria or Switzerland because those are very clean. >> Wonderful place to go and >> Well, they're very clean countries. >> Yeah. >> Uh what about the relationship between cortisol and burnout? Uh you know, you talked about sustained chronically elevated cortisol, but I've also heard you talk about uh burnout as basically being wrongly timed cortisol over time. That's right. Stretched out. What What have you come to learn about handling burnout? Somebody feels that sense. Oh, I feel like I'm sort of close to that. What's going on? And and how can they try to intervene in that? So, there seem to be two general forms of burnout. One is the I'm exhausted in the morning and I just can't get into gear and then it's like caffeine, caffeine, caffeine, exhausted, exhaust. And then late day, okay, finally, you know, the I caught the wavefront and then I'm having trouble sleeping and then the whole thing repeats. >> Wired but tired. >> Wired but tired. The other form of burnout is where people just it's like their cortisol is like a square wave function. Just up in the morning and all day long. I It's sort of how I would describe my graduate school years, probably undergraduate graduate school years, posttock, I think I hit a wall during my posttock years. that was, you know, uh that would be, uh, you know, 30 or 35. And then at some point, you realize you just can't keep this going. And I think most entrepreneurs feel that way. At some point, you're just like, I I can't do this. I mean, even the the David Gogggins and the uh Cam Haynes is they they they do sleep, right? They get sleep eventually. So, I think the main way to think about burnout and exhaustion is to ask oneself, okay, if I had total control, when would I naturally wake up? When would I naturally go to sleep? like what will be my preferred times to do that? And then whatever your wake up time is to really treat that first three to six hours of your day as go time and to do the things bright light, hydration, exercise, caffeine, etc. that really push you into the day. But then really essentially doing all the opposite things that you do in the morning in the last ideally four, but most people won't do that. Last two hours of your day, dim the lights, caffeine, forget it. They should have halted that probably eight hours before sleep. um limit your hydration, right? Unless you're dehydrated, limit your hydration. Um you know, long exhale breathing, anything that can bring your cortisol levels down and bring your melatonin levels up, which is why we we're so bullish about dimming the lights later in the day. And you know, we were talking about the red lens glasses to block out shortwavelength light, which by the way, a lot of people um have said, well, you know, the studies showing that screen light disrupts sleep. Very variable between people. People have different levels of retinal sensitivity. So how how much screen light will disrupt their sleep. But it's not just about sleep. There's a beautiful study published in Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences that showed that people who sleep in a room with an overhead light of 100 lux, which is extremely dim, show abnormally elevated morning glucose levels. Makes perfect sense. Cortisol mobilizes glucose. And this is through closed eyelids. Okay? So you have to get the light down to maybe one to three lux. And you say one to three lux? Like it's basically dark, dark, dark. a a candle light very is very low. A bright full moon where you say, "Oh, it's so bright out." is actually only about 1 to five lux. So, we think of these sources as very bright, but nature set us up to have bright mornings and dim dark nights. And some people will say, "Well, there's no light where I live." You know, like, listen, you don't need to see the sun as a as a delineated object. If you compare how bright it is, let's just say even in the dead of winter in the UK at 9:00 a.m. walking uh in a place with no artificial lighting outside, no street lamps versus midnight the night before in the same location, you'd say you can navigate in the one case without any artificial lighting, without a what we call flashlight, you call a torch. But in any case, the the idea is that there's there are a lot of photons coming through and you want all of that early in the day and you just want to do the inverse in the last part of the day. So, I think to avoid overwhelming people because people have so much to do and think about, get the first hour of your day right, get the last hour of your day right, and you'll greatly improve this morning cortisol peak, late day cortisol reduction, which is what you want, and you'll get your natural clearing out of any melatonin that happens to be in your system because bright light quashes melatonin through a different pathway, but that also originates with the eyes, goes through the superismatic nucleus and couple other relays to your pineal, shuts down melatonin production, And then late in the day, you just make it dimmer, darker, darker, darker, and you bring up your melatonin, you bring down your cortisol. But if you think about what's happened with screens that it's stimulating, I think late last night, I made the mistake of I watched a extended 60 Minutes interview. I actually fell asleep to it. >> Is it the Petro one? >> No, it was the Trump one. >> Okay. >> I was curious. I hadn't heard an interview with him for a long time, and it was it was sort of combative, but there it was an interesting one, and I was um curious to see how that would go. and um I fell asleep in about the last 15 minutes, but that I wouldn't recommend doing that. Normally, it would be screens off in the last hour. I just, you know, I got I got a little loose with my protocols. >> Yeah, we've been I've seen you talking about daylight savings, time changes, and stuff like that. >> This has been nearly a decade now since uh Matthew Walker was first on Rogan. I think it was near almost 10 years ago. And I was still a club promoter at the time. And up until then, I just assumed that sleep was >> it was just like this thing that got in the way of me working. It was just this [ __ ] that was and honestly >> when your 20s that's kind of true. >> You're made of rubber and magic dude. You know what I mean? Caffeine and big dreams and cellar tape and cable ties. You just [ __ ] like strung together with this stuff. Anyway, he came on and >> basically did the scare them straight equivalent. Do you ever have that in school? Scare them straight. So they bring a prison officer in and he tells you about how horrible life is in prison. All of the horror stories. >> What how old are you when you >> like 12, 13? And uh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's saying, you know, they put boiling water into um a cup and mix loads of sugar in it and it's syrup and they throw it on people and then they have batteries and they put them in socks and I remember he hit this sock filled with batteries down on the table and it made me jump and I was like [ __ ] like I really don't want to go to it. Honestly, it worked for me my particular psychological makeup that thing abs I don't think I was the sort of person that was probably going to go to jail anyway. Um but yeah uh I learn sleep is okay really really important. You've been talking about daylight savings. The more that I learn about it, the effects of sleep deprivation are just terrifying. It's just everything gets broken. Yeah. I mean, sleep is the ultimate reset. We could talk about some of the newer data that point to exactly why. I will say just, you know, for uh people's peace of mind, if you don't spike your cortisol for a couple days in a row, you get one poor night's sleep for a couple days in a row, you're going to be fine. the the human body and brain evolved under conditions that were extreme, right? New parents will tell you how difficult sleep can be. I mean, you can pull it off. The the thing that we call chronic stress is frankly when that cortisol curve gets disrupted in any number of ways, but typically it's late day cortisol spikes that don't come back down afterwards for three, four, five days in a row. Your hippocampus, this memory center in the brain, is chalka block full of cortisol receptors. And cortisol unlike adrenaline can pass through the bloodb brain barrier. All right? So it it has a number of docking sites that allow it to engage the memory system. You know what stress will engage your memory system, but that over time will start to deteriorate these structures. So if somebody hasn't been sleeping well, you know, I'm not just saying this to make them feel better. You don't want to send them into a panic. >> Um, >> and all of these systems can be recovered. Uh, >> you know, when Matt went on Rogan, I think it was an important like truly important It was [ __ ] I'll say it was seinal like he has saved that one episode has probably saved >> thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands of years of combined human life. >> Yeah. Oh, I agree. I mean I think that the um the challenge and I think that Matt would say this. I'm sort of borrowing his words is that he sufficiently scared everybody. There were fewer things to offered to do to promote good sleep at that time >> and there were more of a lot of like here's what happens if you don't sleep. >> Mhm. Yeah. The stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. That like overoptimizer obsessor thing. >> And you want to give people a sense of of real agency, right? Yeah. Dimming the lights if you're light sensitive in particular and, you know, limiting caffeine. I mean, all the things that are sort of obvious to us now. The morning sunlight thing, I think most people don't tether to their sleep because it's not obvious how doing something in the first hour of your day to be more alert and spike cortisol uh creates a situation, you know, 14 hours later where you are a better sleeper. So, you know, over time, I mean, Matt's started to adopt that. I mean, I think he he also pointed out the detriments of alcohol and cannabis on sleep, which I, you know, which I echo. Um, I think also if you think just back even 6 years, 7 years, we weren't aware of the number of over-the-counter compounds that can be helpful for sleep. You know, people were still thinking about drugs, prescription drugs for sleep, which, you know, have their place for certain people, but most people hadn't considered mag 3 and8, theine, chamomile. Now, I would add to that um saffron, um tart cherry, we know can increase >> epigenine, >> epigenine and chamomile extract. Yeah, similar um >> lemon balm. >> Lemon bomb, skull cap. You know, it sounds kind of crazy, right? It sounds like we're we're behind the counter at some like amazing shop, right? >> Eye of m and a [ __ ] wizard tail. >> Exactly. Right. I mean, I didn't come here to do an AGZ plug, but I basically I've I've played around with a number of different non-supplement things for sleep over the years cuz I'm an experimentter um in and out of the lab. And um I mean I can tell you a wild story from high school where the girl sitting behind me, I remember her name, it was Aaron Krenard. Um her her mom uh had some tablets, some Chinese medicine tablets, and I took one. She's cuz I was having some issues sleeping and she gave me one. And I the whole night I was wide awake hearing music blaring from behind my head and I think I was in a pseudo sleep state. >> Thought I was awake. I was like that's really scary. But it I was like, "Wow, there are compounds that really work for for sleep." And then um you know there are things like the the peptide pinealin I experimented with a bit. Um not a not a lot of human studies at all um some interesting rodent studies may regenerate the pineales in the in the pineal it gives me like 2 hours a night of REM sleep but I will say having completely halted pineal and I did a short run experiment with it. I will say that the the formulation that's in AGZ has me sleeping with double the amount of REM sleep and at least a third more slowwave deep sleep every night. And I can only drink about 2/3 of that stuff before it it's almost like too much. Not because it's too much volume, but because my any more in my drinks are just too elaborate. And you know what's magic about it? I think it's it has a bunch of different things in it. So again, I didn't come here to to plug AGZ, but I think that they really nailed it in the sense that in the last 10 years, the scientific community, the health and wellness community has really come to the conclusion that there are things that can nudge your sleep in the right direction. So just being told like if you don't sleep, you're going to die of dementia is scary. You want to give people agency. In other news, if you're feeling tired, you might not need more sleep, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated. 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I usually care about the box more than that. drink drinklement.com/modernwisdom. What would you say to people who are struggling to fall asleep that maybe they've done most of the things sort of through the day that you're supposed to? They're not taking caffeine too late at night. They're maybe having a hot shower. The room's cool. It's quiet. It's dark. They've seen some morning sunlight. But calming down a racing mind at night is a challenge that I think a lot of hard charges will deal with. >> What are some strategies for slowing that down? >> Yeah. Well, one thing that I think is really important is that if somebody's very health conscious and a hard charger, they're they're very likely eating pretty clean. And one of the challenges for many people, not all, uh to falling asleep is that their starchy carbohydrate intake is just not high enough. you know, if you if you go on a very low starch diet, like let's say you just go, you know, meat, fruit, vegetables, or you go pure keto, um you'll have a lot more energy. Some people who follow that kind of regimen can sleep well. Some people like myself find that unless I have some rice or oatmeal at some point during the day, especially if I'm doing resistance training, it's actually very hard to fall and stay deeply asleep. And if I just add, you know, I guess you call it porridge, we call it oatmeal. Um, but have a a a small amount of starch in the form of whatever starch is fine for you. I I eat starches. I realize this is heretical in the in the in the health and wellness space, but um you'll have some rice or some homemade pasta or some sourdough bread or, you know, or oatmeal or something. If you're having trouble falling asleep, take a look at how much starch you're having. I don't recommend gorging yourself with starch late in the day. But having some starchy carbohydrates in your final meal, which probably comes what 2, three hours before sleep or something like that can certainly help a number of people fall and stay asleep. I've heard that many times. >> I certainly know I did meat and fruit as a part of trying to fix my health because u brain inflammation was really high. I was getting a lot of brain fog, memory loss. One of the things that I found that could counteract that a little bit was going very very low carb. >> Mh. But that also impacted my sleep and I felt wired but tired, very adrenaliney all the time. Sure. Like sort of always on as if I and my caffeine was limited as well because I was trying to limit stimulants and I always felt on edge sort of ambient anxiety thing and it impacted my sleep fragmentation was [ __ ] horrendous and like well can I have a rice cake or like two rice cakes an hour before I go to bed to try and sort of kink me into this a little bit and experimented with a bunch of that. Yeah, it's uh if you are carnivore, meat and fruit, keto, um I wonder what the net effect is when you account for what's happening to sleep. And I'm sure that many people can sleep well on low carb of different stripes, >> but I I've one couldn't. And then I'm like having to weigh this up like how how many how much carbs can I have before brain inflammation makes me feel a little bit more slowation more tired and I need to have some in order to make me So that was a >> yeah it becomes a little bit of a of a devil's dance. I mean if we return to our discussion about cortisol from earlier cortisol's job is to deploy energy into the body and for the brain under conditions of stress or just getting up in the morning. I mean the transition from sleep to awake is a massive state shift. It's a normal healthy one, but it's a massive state shift in terms of mobilization requirements and thought requirements and just the ability to linearize your your thought, which is nerd speed for the ability to think, not dream, right? Or be unconscious essentially. >> So, when you have low circulating glucose or energy stores, cortisol's job is to mobilize glucose. So, when you're on a low carbohydrate diet, your baseline cortisol is a little bit higher. This actually has been examined. Okay, so here's the deal. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet for a period of time, I think in this case it was 3 weeks or more, your cortisol curve that high in the morning, low in the afternoon and evening kind of normalizes a bit. It's still a little bit higher at every point than it normally would be. But if you suddenly switch from eating carbohydrates, when I say carbohydrates, I mean starchy carbohydrates. Okay, well let's leave aside sugar and fructose and etc. which of course is a form of sugar. But if you shift from a sort of standard macronutrient distribution of you know 40 30 or whatever it is where you're eating starches to a low carbohydrate diet your cortisol levels go up >> significantly. This has been explored over time they normalize. So the I think the important thing for people to remember is when we talk about comfort foods people have taken that that phrase to mean uh junk foods pizza ice cream. Uh-uh. Those aren't the comfort foods that were originally described as comfort foods. The comfort foods that were coined comfort foods are starchy, warm foods which guess what suppress cortisol because when those foods are available, your your brain and essentially your adrenals know that you don't have to mobilize from stored sources. It's already circulating. So, it makes perfect sense. So, I mean, this is just one kind of uh you asked for like what people could do. I think take a look at your nutrition. Are you exercising too late in the day? Can you move that to the morning? Can you re You never want to tell people reduce the intensity because frankly, you know, as Dorian Yates has been saying so beautifully late uh lately, like reps in reserve are results in reserve. You know, we could talk about that. Uh um but you know, I think most people are probably not pushing hard enough, but some people are just pushing way too hard in the gym, way too late, and then their cortisol levels are elevated. Makes perfect sense why you couldn't sleep. So, I would say look at look at your diet. Make sure you're getting enough starches at some point throughout the day. maybe even taking in a few starches in the couple of hours before sleep and just see how your sleep does. There's some interesting data although you people should talk to their doctor about taking very low dose 1 milligram lithium uh I think it's the oritate form um in order to encourage the ability to fall asleep and get more deep sleep. But of course we're talking about lithium here. So people need definitely talk to your doctor. Um there's some other things too. you know, look at your lighting environment, of course, but I think for a lot of people, the major issue with falling asleep is that they can't forget about the position of their body. And this is where the data becomes super interesting. There are some technologies that are being spun up right now, some of which I've had the opportunity to dabble with. Um, and I have no financial relationship to, but I sure wish I did because it is so cool. Imagine a sleep mask that could put you to sleep. >> Okay. >> Okay. How would it do that? Well, it turns out that eye movements are not just present during rapid eye movement sleep, but one of the prerequisites for falling asleep is that you forget about your body position. You're not like, "Oh, this is uncomfortable. That doesn't belong there." You shut down what's called propriception, your awareness of body position. So, there's actually some interesting data and here I'm cluing from a few places. I want to be fair because what I'm about to say sounds kind of kooky, but this works for many, many people who are having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep. You can try this tonight. I do this often. It works for me. You keep your eyes closed or you close your eyes. You move your eyes relatively slowly to one side, then the other side, one side, then the other side. Then you move your eyes in a counterclockwise circle, and then a clockwise circle, then up, then down. And then you sort of do a kind of faux crosseyed attempt. You sort of look down towards the bridge of your nose and you exhale, which is going to slow your heart rate down. Now, what is all this nonsense about eye movements? Did I just do this as a joke to to uh see if you would do it? The the truth is if you do this when you're trying to fall asleep, your vestibular system, which is essentially in working in concert with your eyes, uh, for reasons we could talk about, but your cerebellum and your vestibular system are essentially transitioning from where you need to be very aware of your body position and make adjustments all the time to one in which you're forgetting about body position. And we know, and there are great data showing that a very slow rocking of a bed will help put you to sleep. When you rock back and forth, your body doesn't have like a little metronome in it. It says, "I'm rocking." It's your eye movements that compensate in the opposite direction, which tell your cerebellum, "Hey, we're rocking." This is why if you're on a boat and this and the horizon's going like this, your cere you get seasick because you can't orient to kind of dead zero for, you know, pitch, yaw, and roll. And so, anyway, I don't want to get too technical here, but if you have trouble sleeping, try what I just described a few times. Many people find that it helps them fall asleep. because you stop thinking about your body position. >> And of course, bed coolness, room coolness, all can help. But what I just described can be very very helpful for a number of people whose minds are racing because if their mind is racing, you also need need to give people something to do with their mind. You can't just say like don't think about it or stop thinking or just go to sleep. That doesn't work. You can say just wake up, but you can't say just go to sleep. There's a weird asymmetry built into our autonomic nervous system that way. >> It's so funny. Uh, two things that I found because wide but tired has been kind of the [ __ ] summary to the last 18 months for me uh fighting with the health stuff. Uh, one from Matt which is a mind walk. Do you take me through this? >> Yeah. You go through a walk that you you're very familiar with. >> Has that been helpful? >> Wonderful. >> Oh, great. >> One of the things that I found by doing that uh so for the people that didn't listen to the episode, they can go back and listen to the one I did with Matt a few months ago. Brilliant. Um, basically you can imagine that you're going for a walk somewhere that you know unbelievably well and try and do it with as much resolution as possible. So I go to the cupboard. I open the cupboard doors. I've got my shoes in there. I take them out. It's my right hand that reaches in. I put them on the floor. I get the shoe horn. Everyone needs a shoe horn. Left foot in. Right foot in. I get the key. I know the sound of the key. I close the doors. I turn around. I go toward the door. I put it in. I turn it. Like that's the feeling of the door. I get outside. I feel a brush like all of that stuff. Uh and what at least what I found is when I'm falling asleep, the sort of I'm on a journey, this is an adventure thing is like reading fiction and the I have problems to solve. This is executive function is like reading non-fiction. And for me, the former helps me fall asleep way more than the latter. So that's the first thing. The second thing is resonance breathing. Uh, I think this, if I was to pick, if I was to flick a little bit of money onto the roulette table of the next five years of health, I think HRV resonance breathing is going to be [ __ ] huge. Uh, and there's a couple of products, one in particular that I'm super super excited about. It's this cool lamp. So, imagine a a bedside lamp and on the top of it is a little divot, like a little pocket, and that's got a stone in it. You take the stone out. The stone's got an FDA HRV sensor. You just hold the stone in your hand and you can either turn the light of the lamp on or off and sounds and all the rest of the stuff, but it does 3 6 9 12 minute sessions with like a super high fidelity sensor. And it means if you're struggling to fall asleep on a night time, you can just sort of grab it, put it in your hand, do the breathing based on a like a tactile um vibration coming from the stone, too. So, it can all be silent. So, if your partner's in the bed next to you, you can do that. And it knows when you hit resonance as well when you get into that maximum veagal tone and then you just pop it back on the top and the top of it is an induction charger for the stone. I was like this is >> the [ __ ] sickest. >> Who makes this? >> It's a company called M Ohm. Uh it's currently currently in dark mode I think. M.alth. >> Not anymore. >> Uh well stole the world. >> That's true. I don't even know if you can buy I don't think you can buy them. Um so but yeah Jay Wilds who's my sleep coach from Absolute Rest. He's Andy Galpins guy. Um Jay's a part of it and I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got one and I was like this [ __ ] rules because HRV resonance breathing is great and makes you feel really good. But if you're going to use elite HRV and you've got to put the like strap thing around your arm or your wrist and then you got to press it and you got to connect the Bluetooth and it's got to be up to you and you got your phone in front of you and all the there's no just standalone pick it up and go of this and the fact that it's a lamp. It looks really beautiful. The un all the rest of the [ __ ] Anyway, uh I've been using that. So between those two, the mindwalk thing for me was was very very powerful. Um but some days you need a more like physiological intervention >> and uh the resonance breathing. Those two things for me I think if I'm struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime. But the eye movement uh stuff I think has got has got a lot of legs. So So stack all of those together. I'm going to be crosseyed imagining that I'm going for a walk holding a stone in my hand. >> Excessively crosseyed. It's just more like you sort of look it's like you're sort of looking down and uh you know there are these nuclei in the brain stem that literally control levels of wakefulness when you look up you it's it's essentially activating the arm of your autonomic nervous system which makes you more alert is wild and eyelids open. It's really interesting and and when you look down and when and bring your eyelids down you're act you're actually pedaling on the on the circuits that promote sleepiness or at least that are more parasympathetic. I mean, it makes it makes good sense. >> In other news, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now. Dude, you tried to fast ball me that. That was down the plate and I've just show Otani. I've been drinking AG1 for as long as I can remember. It is the best all-in-one drink that I've ever found and that's why I'm such a fan of them and that's why I partnered with them as well. I have got my mom to start taking it, my dad to start taking it, and all of my friends as well. And if I found anything better, I would switch. But I haven't. Why do you keep throwing it at the mic? Stop throwing at the mic. See? Anyway, uh over 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients. Got probiotics and prebiotics. Also NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And in the throat. In the throat. How dare you? >> I hit the [laughter] I hit the >> Ah. Ah. This isn't even an ad read anymore. It's just a war zone. Oh, okay. Okay. Anyway, if you too want something to throw at your friends or a tasty uh blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients designed to drink first thing in the morning in one scoop, it's here. Go to drink1.com/modern wisdom for stuff. Thank you. Talk to me about this uh raised head for glimpyatic clearance thing cuz I've if you if anyone's got an eight sleep with the mattress raising functionality. One of the things it does for sleep is it actually raises your head a little bit. Is that >> that's good >> related to what we're talking about here. You want head above feet. Head >> I think they designed that for um for snoring but it has other other benefits. So um without doing an entire lecture on the lymphatic system because we did a solo on that recently in my podcast. I mean, I'll just say the lymphatic system is amazing. It's amazing. And I I liken it to the microbiome where 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you talked about the microbiome, people were like, "That's just crazy." Like fermented low sugar foods, like this is like health food lunacy. Now, I mean, they're probably close to, you know, maybe 500 million or a billion dollars even in federal grants. Certainly in the US and around the world looking at the microbiome, it's important for everything. Mental health, physical health, we just know this, right? The gut is so important. The lymphatic system, I think, is going to follow a similar trajectory. And all the stuff that we hear about rebounding, you know, bouncing on a trampoline or skipping rope and all of that stuff turns out to be absolutely true. Or lymphatic massage, which is essentially a way of clearing the >> I love lymphatic massage. >> You know, it's interesting because lymphatic massage for those that are accustomed to deep tissue massage. >> Feels like nothing. >> It feels like nothing. But the lymphatic the lymphatic vessels run so superficially that if you press on them too hard, you actually you you cinch them off. >> It feels like you're being stroked by somebody. Yeah. So, I think they talk about a light brushing and then that, you know, maybe a little bit more motion. There are deeper lymphatic vessels that can take more pressure, but people who are trained to do this do it right. And there's some tutorials online that there's a a a great account. I don't know the guy, but he was referred to me by uh Kelly Starret tells me the the um stop chasing pain guy. He has this big six. I don't want to describe them here because I'll get them wrong, but he has a number of videos on Instagram and YouTube. The big six describes ways that you can encourage lymphatic massage. I always thought that the the tapping here was kind of silly. It's actually because the the lymphatic ducts drain back into the um essentially dump all the lymph that's been surveiled by your immune system etc. uh back into the the vascular system just below your clavicles. Oh, >> funny. >> And as another point, then we'll get to glimp clearance. >> Um I gave a a shout out to someone I've never met, don't have any association with um you know, business-wise or anything. This Anastasia beauty fascia is this woman I think of Middle Eastern, excuse me, is this woman of Eastern European. um certainly not Middle Eastern uh uh appearing of Eastern European um origin talking about non-surgical non Botox um interventions for facial um augmentation you know for for you know higher cheekbones and clearing away puffy puffiness underneath the eyes for men and for women but mostly what you see there are women but what you find is that the before and afters that these people list off and they insist that I think they take an oath or something that they're not doing any injectables or surgeries are striking and it's lymphatic drainage from the face and from the scalp and from uh around the jaw and you go this is I mean it is unbelievable okay so in any case the glimpmphatic system >> is glimpymphatic lymphatic is it the same thing >> so they're they're analogous so for many many years it was thought that there was no lymphat lymphatic system in the brain it was thought that it was actually for many years we thought that the brain was immune privilege turns out that's not true you have all sorts of immune genes and proteins in the brain But it turns out and this was discovered some years ago 2012. It was actually discovered prior but as science goes it was kind of suppressed and then it was finally discovered that the during sleep in particular deep sleep the story goes the spaces around the vascule of the brain get bigger. Okay you have these little cell types in the brain called aststerytes. They're among the different types of ga and they have these little N feet and they literally push the brain tissue out and away from the arteries and vessels and capillaries allowing more cerebral spinal fluid which is circulating in your brain all day long and collecting the waste from your cells. And mind you, there's a lot of waste from your brain cells because your brain is the most metabolically active organ. And then that needs to get washed out and actually goes out near the surface of your brain underneath what's called the meningis. And then it flows down and then and then drains into the vascular system. If people can remember nothing else about lymphatic drains, remember this. Muscular movement clears lymph in the body. Okay? So, you need to walk low-level muscular contraction. It, you know, essentially moves the the lymph up because it's fighting gravity. These are one-way valves. It brings it in from your limbs and it essentially dumps it back eventually into the blood supply. Inactivity of the body is what drives glimpmphatic clearance in the brain. now and and so it's when you're essentially immobilized during sleep that you get the maximum amount of lymphatic clearance. Sleeping on your side, right or left side doesn't seem to matter with the head slightly tilted does seem to be the preferable position. So all you back sleepers like me, you know, some people um >> you're a back sleeper. >> I have been a back sleeper >> with that neck, >> huh? >> With that neck? >> Unless I'm spooning. I'm I'm a back sleeper. Yeah, yeah, I'm a back sleeper. So, um, but I've I've been working on sleeping on my side and I heard actually maybe Andy Galbin's involved in some studies where subjects wear a fanny pack so that they can't sleep on their back. They have to sleep on their side. >> He sent me from Absolute Rest this huge [ __ ] off roll thing which looks like soft furnishing couch. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, this was it it's a big roll that goes down the middle of your back. So, there's no way that you can be on your back at all. So that's more >> calling it a fanny pack or a bum bag is a wild disservice to how like colossal this thing is. It's a >> you're just going to have to hire somebody to spoon you, Chris. It just means that you'll have to give into >> I mean it's interesting that you mentioned that [laughter] you sleep well on your side because your own hubman sleep doll. >> Uh I like I like sleeping on my side. Um and it does feel good to to uh hold somebody. Um, I suppose if you're a back sleeper, you know, I I do use the nasal strips to open up my breathing. >> Have you tried intake? What do you use? >> I just I order some nose strips that online I >> Let me Allow me to [ __ ] fix your nose strip problem. Everyone has a nose strip problem if they're not using it. So, these guys, they've got patents on it. Uh, instead of it being a flexible disposable thing, this is a hard 3D printed piece of plastic that's got magnets attached on both sides and then you put two magnet patches on the skin of your nose and then you >> But no magnets up my nose. >> No, it's all on the outside. So, two patches on the outside and then you snap this non-disposable thing on and it's I'm not kidding. It must be three times, four times, five times stronger than the normal ones. And that's like [snorts] >> great. Yeah, because I have pretty good um respiration through my nose, but years ago I stupid accident actually in a lab and I cracked a sinus stood up, hit a freezer door and it was a there's a whole story there sometime when you talk about over not beers since neither of us drink. Do you drink? >> Uh intermittently. When did I have I had beers recently. When did I have beers? After the show. Thank you. I had beers after No shame in that. I I haven't had alcohol in a long time. But um but we could talk about some of the you know uh sto injury stories are always fun um offline but um yeah I think that for glimpymphatic clearance that the data are very clear that you want to if you can sleep on your side you're still going to get glimpy clearance if you sleep on your back have your head slightly elevated not too much but keep in mind that you know your body is fighting the the lymphatic clearance in your legs is fighting gravity so in theory you want to be if you want to be super a little bit bo but not too much Right now, what we do know is that if you sleep in a chair, these studies have been done in various sleep labs. If you sleep in a chair like on a on a flight or something like that, you would think, well, you must get a lot more um glimpmphatic clearance. And you you probably do, but you probably get a lot more uh lack of lymphatic drainage from the body. So, there's some really nice pictures in in these studies. Every mammal, it seems, puts its head down to sleep. I think giraffes actually just kind of like drop their forehead onto the ground. Um, but there are no animal no mammals that and someone will probably tell me I'm wrong here and they'll I'd love to see see the examples because I love animals. But, um, the argument that's been made in these in these papers is that every mammal puts its head down to sleep. And if you think about take a picture of yourself sometime before sleep and after sleep or worse, take a picture of yourself after one really terrible night's sleep. Just look at your face. A couple of things become clear. You look blo you'll look bloated. the bags under people's eyes, that's buildup of lymph, >> okay? It's, you know, a couple hours later that that's what that is. It's buildup of lymph, which is why this anesthesia beauty fascia thing is about learning to kind of increase the portals for lymphatic drainage. And it has a lot to do with the fascia because um they run so closely together. They of course the vessels of course at different depths relative to the fascia. But so that's a lot of what um lymphatic drainage for for aesthetics is. But um look at yourself after after sleep. Your brain fog, the the brain fog you feel after lack of sleep, the buildup of crap and is is within the cerebral spinal fluid. It's all the ammonia, the carbon dioxide, all the some protein fragments that have built up during the day. And the more active you are with your brain, the more they build up and the more they need to be cleared out at night. So it's and then what's in equally impressive if you ask me is take a look at that picture of yourself sleepd deprived. You get a good night's sleep the next night, take a picture of yourself the next morning, you look like a completely different person, including the the brightness of the eyes. So, it turns out around the iris of your eye, that black dot in the middle and and around it, you can actually see when people haven't slept well, there's actually a change in color of the eyes that has to do with the accumulation of lymph in the anterior chamber of the eye. And the posterior chamber of the eye, which is where the light sensing tissue is, the retina, actually shares the same glimpmphatic clearance system as your brain. And by the way, everything I'm talking about for brain, for lymphatic clearance, is true for spinal cord, too. So for all this stuff about motor learning and people are so concerned about their spinal cord, all the athletes are thinking, "Yeah, I need a brain, but mostly need a spinal cord." Just kidding. But you need both. But the idea here is that when people look tired, the eyes look tired. It's not just in the eyelids being hooded. The eyes look glassy. They don't look quite right. and then they they sleep well and their life comes back in the eyes. It's because they've cleared the lymph from their eyes. >> Who knew that the ultimate looks maxing solution was to just get a better night's sleep and raise your head a bit, >> right? Well, I think >> is a pillow enough or >> Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to. It's not too much. What you don't want is your head tilted back. And that's also of course a risk for apnea, right? I mean, this is, you know, why all the bodybuilders and big guys drop dead in their sleep, you know, often is because of just basically esphyxiating themselves. So, I do think fixing snoring is important. Um, the nose strips sound great. These nose magnets. >> I'm about to try a uh mandibular device. You like a special mouth guard to try and adjust. Uh, >> do you have apnea >> a little? Yeah, it's remind induced apnea. So, it only happens in >> you and I should take a trip up to Stanford um together. Seriously, that there's a couple up there um Paul Erlick who wrote the population bomb many years ago. I think he would say it probably didn't pan out. But and um and Sandra Khan who's um uh I think is in cranial facial surgery or orthodontics or something. They were the ones that wrote the book Jaws, not the Jaws with forward by Robert Seapolski. Um Jared Diamond I think wrote wrote the introduction. These are heavy hitter serious science academics and they were the ones that talked about the you know the transition to to soft foods to packet based foods to baby food has created this kind of massive explosion in the industry for orthodontics and um >> so was Nester's work downstream from them James Nester's >> yes yeah Nester's kind of the his book was kind of the modern iteration of a lot of what they were saying but you know they are I think they're coming out with another book that's really pushing this thing that the nasal breathing thing is real. The ability to I I can't quite do this, but can you close your mouth and put your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth without having to kind of curl it back behind your teeth? Is there space for your tongue on the roof? >> A little my pallet I could do with a bit of expansion because I had >> six teeth removed as a kid. >> Like four from the top and two from the bottom, I think. So, I mean, Max, who isn't here, uh uh my videographer had uh really he's going through two or three really serious dental procedures and with one of them, he was trying to do it through Invisalign, and it was a slow pallet expander. Invisalign do a pallet expander now. He's like, "Dude, this is going to take like [ __ ] three years for me to do this, but they can do it a little bit more aggressively." Sounds like he's a kind of extreme case cuz Khan and and Erlic have this association with um you know the the mewing guy, you know. >> Is that true? Is that real? >> Well, the mewing thing is is it plays into this notion of of getting your nasal breathing right? It's like you know close your you know like like close your put your tongue on the roof of your mouth and then can you swallow while you know pushing the I'm describing this you know coarsely you know that the problem is you know anytime you get a figure like that and I've never met him. I think his name is Mike MW, right? Um MW um anytime you get somebody who's extreme off of the the normal thrust of of a one branch of medicine, it's that person um is either going to be ostracized or they're going to have to go through some serious gymnastics to get acceptance. Look, my colleague David >> Spiegel, vice chair of psychiatry at uh at Stanford, right? Very serious scientist, clinician. His father and him developed hypnosis as a tool for pain management, smoking sessation, anxiety, even people going through chemotherapy. And the data are beautiful. They had >> 25% of people that do hypnosis for smoking sessation have it in one session for life. >> It's amazing. I mean, it's a brain plasticity accelerator. But had it not been David, right, who's um very thoughtful in how he approaches these discussions, how he frames it with science, how he explains what's going on and just his like and I'm not saying MW isn't isn't this way? I don't know him. Haven't haven't met him although I've read some of his work, you know, but David has a special gift of the ability to frame what for many people be like hypnosis, are you kidding me? As a brain plasticity accelerator, >> gentle convincing demeanor in David. >> Yes. and also broad training in all of psychiatry and in acceptance of other branches of medicine. He's not saying this is the way and this is the only way and there's this problem with my tribalism. I'm here to fix the field. No, he's he's saying here here's one tool in the toolkit and there are other tools in the toolkit. He's also and again I'm not saying anything about MW in uh tacitly here. David Spiegel is exceedingly smart. Like he he's he's on a whole other level of intellect and yet he doesn't talk over anybody. He's extremely kind. So, you know, bedside manner and how you bring your stuff forward is very key, >> especially if you're going to be a uh revolutionary or somebody that's at the sort of cutting edge, cutting frontier of this stuff. No, I I I agree. I um I've been thinking about this a lot this year. What do we need to know about the neuroscience of making habit setting more easy? I imagine that there must be some really interesting >> Oh, man. [clears throat] Uh, I just had James Clear on the podcast and it's so interesting when you sit down with somebody who's like the habits guy. Um, and you compare it against the neuroscience and and so there there's sort of two ways into this. Um, you know, and James has done a magnificent job of explaining things that people can do to improve their habits and reduce bad habits. The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand mechanism, it gives them flexibility over the so-called protocols. And I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves. Let's face it, if you want to go online now and just say, "What are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep?" And you get a list, you put those on your refrigerator, put them next to your bed. Why doesn't everyone just do that? Yep. It's because the the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information. >> Okay. So, in fairness to to to James and and the incredible work that he's done, I'm going to just kind of look at this a little bit through the lens of neuroscience. And I'm really glad that we're we're talking about this because um one of the things that he said that I think is so so true is that the thoughts and by extension the emotions but really the thoughts that you have right now your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days. So one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention and a lot of habits have to do with I don't want to procrastinate, I want to do this. We can talk about exercise, but let's talk about cognitive stuff. It's very very clear that if you have a hard time getting into a bout of work or even um staying focused, there's a there's a very good chance I believe that your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating. I'm a big advocator for boring breaks and I'm a big advocator for silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons. Let's think about on the back end. Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you you're not reflexively doing. You want to create this habit. It's very clear that neuroplasticity, yes, requires alertness, requires focus. You need sleep later that night. I've been beating that drum for a number of years. It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post-arning reflection, walking to your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information. And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones. You're constantly bringing in new sensory information. all the data. I did an episode on how to best study and learn. I went to the data to find out because I have my methods, but that doesn't mean they're the best best methods. Reading, rereading, note-taking, highlighting, it's all fine. But it turns out the biggest lever is to self- test at some point away from the material. So testing is not just something for evaluation of others. It's a way that we should think, you know, yeah, how much can I remember about that conversation? What was tricky? Okay, I don't remember that piece. I'm going to go back and look it up. All learning is, and this will sound like a giant duh, but all learning is anti-forgetting. How do we know this? Because if you have people read a passage one, two, three, four, five times versus one time and they self- test. One time in self- testing significantly better. >> You ever had Peter C. Brown on the show? >> No. >> Author of Make It Stick. >> No, but I like the the title. >> You need to bring Peter on. Peter was episode I would guess like 30 on Modern Wisdom. You'll be a,030. Um, and the best synopsis that I got from him, learning how to learn was learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure. >> Yes. Beautiful. Right. >> [ __ ] money. >> Exactly. >> And that's that's the >> exactly. And and this house forgetting curve. That's >> guys like him, guys like James Clear, they have a real When I say unconscious genius, I mean clearly they put thought into and structure into what they teach. But the neuroscience supports everything you just said, which is what he just said. And reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve, even if you don't remember, even if you're still puzzled by it, is so vitally important to the anti-forgetting process. Okay. Now, in terms of actually being able to focus, actually being able to do work, it's so clear that thoughts, and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman named Jenny Gro, who's it's spelled gr at Duke University who's a neuroscientist been studying sensor sensory integration for a long time. You know, I I've long thought about and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are. So sensations are the physical stimula in the environment, photons of light, mechanical pressure, odor, volatile odorants in the environment that lead to, you know, sight, touch, smell, etc. How that gets converted into chemical and electrical signals in the brain, we understand as a field. We understand sensation. We understand perception. Perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to. Okay? We understand emotions now more as a subset of something that we think of more broadly as states that are set by your autonomic nervous system. how alert you are, how not alert you are, and then emotions are kind of layered on top of that, right? Lisa Feldman Barrett has beautiful descriptions of these and so on. And there's some debate about what emotions really are, but we we know what they are neurobiologically and psychologically and behaviors. We know what they are, right? There's a behavior, and then there's the don't go behaviors, the suppression of behavior, and then there are memories, right? But for the longest time, it's been unclear what are thoughts like like what are they? Are they just like spontaneous geysering up of of of memories or like what's going on there? And Jenny Grow, I think, has the absolute best description of these. If and and this is based on experimentation. If we seed some idea, so let's say I say to you, let's not talk about cats cuz I'm a dog person, but I say, "Okay, okay, Chris, um, and this isn't a trick question, I promise, cuz it's always weird when people start doing this. I'm not Oz Pearlman or something. I'm not going to like tell you your pin pin code." Um, [clears throat] think think about a dog. Okay. Um, what kind of dog [clears throat] is it? >> Golden retriever. >> Golden retriever. Okay. So, as you think about the golden retriever, like what other things come to mind about the golden retriever? >> It's got a little necker chief on. >> Okay. >> Rednecker chief. >> Great. Rednecker Chief. Uh, like what else about Golden Retriever? >> Fluffy. >> Fluffy. Okay. So, there's a a tactile thing. Okay. Um, anything else about Golden Retrievers? This is very specific to you. >> Bouncing up and down, rolling on its back, smells a little bit, but I like it. >> Great. Okay. So, there's a I like it. You like that? Okay. So, Jenny grows and others data point to the fact that thoughts basically start with some seed element, some noun, some pronoun, some thing, some event. And then what the brain does is it is essentially starts to call on more and more sensations and starts layering those in more and more prior sensory events. It's red handkerchief. Okay, Brandon, it's fluffy. There's a tactile. And that thoughts really are the layering on of more and more sensory memories. And thoughts are really a layering of the senses in in abstract thought space. Now, this is not meant to, you know, make something from nothing. But it's so important that we understand this because you think what is the ability to think? Well, the ability to think is is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things. And so that's what that's how we navigate through environments, which is what Jenny Gro's main work is about. How you find yourself in space. I can't look at everything in this garage. I have to focus on certain things. Find the Phillips head screwdriver. Go over there. And you're discarding all the other information. Now, when you think about sitting down to do work or to learn something, prepare a podcast. It is so important that you limit the number of sensory inputs coming in not just during that event but before because the sensory um stimulus that kind of sets off this cascade of layering in more and more sensory memories and understanding is begun before you sit down to read your book. This is why you read a portion of a book and then like wait I I wasn't even paying attention. You your brain is still working with the sensory inputs from before. It's not thinking about them consciously. So this is vitally important. If you go back and you look at the history of attention and thinking and I have you can find these incredible pictures that they would give kids who had trouble probably had ADHD or just kind of rambunctious boys in most cases and they literally gave them helmets with two eyeholes so they couldn't look at anything else. I couldn't hear anyone else right used to be you know kid with the hoodie on and the and the cap and you and you'd write. Now what have we done? The challenge is that we've brought an infinite number of sensory experiences into the thing that you're looking at. Oh wow. >> So we've cons we brought the we brought all the sensory inputs through the device that you're holding. >> So the narrowing of your perspective hasn't helped you to narrow the distractions. >> That's right. Cognitive space is still infinite even though your spatial the spatial limitation of where you're placing your attention is very restricted. So the fact that you have so many competing thoughts has everything to do with that and it also has everything to do with what you were doing in the 10 or 15 minutes before you sat down to try to work. Now, in China, they're doing some very interesting experiments of having kids stale stare literally at a at a focal point on the wall for a number of minutes before beginning their work. Sounds a little extreme, a little military, but one thing that I've been doing before I prepare to do any writing, any podcasting, any work, is I I try and make myself as bored as possible. I try and remove as much sensory input as possible. I might think about my breathing because it's hard to not think about anything, but I really have started to limit the amount of sensory information coming into my space. I have an entire floor of where I live now. I live in kind of an odd structure now, but uh the entire bottom floor is a no phone zone. Once or twice I brought my phone down there, but it's a no phone zone. I'm going down the stairs, there are no phones in there. >> I'm trying to figure out how I can have no internet there. I have this little tent sauna that I use now with with incandescent lights that I love because I couldn't use my my barrel sauna where I was at. It's a I think it's sauna space. Makes these incredible. I like them because they they get hot right away and it's got the red light. I go in there, it's in a in a it's it's grounded and there's no Wi-Fi in there. The phone goes dead the moment you go in there. >> So, you're in a mini Faraday case. >> Yeah. And I don't like bringing the phone into the store. >> Are you in the same place that I went to or is this a new one now? >> No. So, I actually converted a art gallery into a living space. I've always wanted to do this. So, now I have my No, it's not the same space. I have my gym. I've got an upstairs loft where where I live. And then the downstairs is a is a work space. I have I have an octopus now. I have a tank with an octopus in it. Although, it's a bit shy. So, I'm probably going to >> You're becoming increasingly esoteric. [laughter] >> Um anyway, uh and I have my my discus fish and my gym and my uh been doing all the illustrations for my books. I spent a lot of time drawing down in the basement. I mean, I've always wanted to do this at some point. I was like, yeah, you have to live in an art gallery at some point if if you're able. Um you know, and um and okay, so but that's my unique kind of weird space, but doesn't matter if you're in an empty box. If you are not good at at clearing the slate before you try and focus, you're going to have a very hard time for understandable reasons. In fact, I'm amazed that anyone can think at all. I'm amazed that anyone can focus at all. I don't believe everyone has ADHD. I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from. And once you understand, you go, "Oh, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed and not take in any sensory input?" No. But am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device? In fact, Mike Easter, the author of The Comfort Crisis, told me something super scary >> when he came on the podcast. He said that the person who developed these um algorith uh the people, excuse me, who developed the algorithms for social media um borrowed heavily from the casinos. And I didn't realize that some years ago slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income, maybe like 10 20%. Now it's 80%. And it was one guy who watched his kid playing video games who realized that the kids would play video games for hours and hours and hours and what they were playing for was novelty. And so they switched the slot machines in casinos on his suggestion to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was because they're now electronic, you can get a near infinite number of combinations of of novel items. And people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning. the brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning. And so at some level, like I love social media, teach on social media. I I I partake in it. Um as a consumer and a creator there, but I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go, okay, I need to read this book. I need to write this chapter. I need to do this drawing. And you'll notice once you drop into that trench, the brain has these attractor states. It's like a ball bearing on a flat surface. As you get more into a thought trench or activity trench, it's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a a deep valley and it's actually hard to leave. You'll notice you you're walking out and unless you pick up your phone, you'll still be thinking about that. And this is how the brain works. The brain is not working in step functions. The brain you're none of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long. And none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily. You just have to ride that that sort of layering on of thoughts going from bored to sensory input to deeper and deeper and then work for bouts of you know 90 minutes or a couple hours and then give yourself a little bit of time pause reflect and it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation but people are like texting in between. It's it's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think. The good news is as Gogggins would say nowadays it's very easy to be spectacularly good in pretty much any field. you just have to do what no one else is doing. Now, he's an extreme case and I I have immense admiration for David. I mean, he's just so David, you know, but if you want to be the best in your class at anything, best in class at pretty much anything, it's to become so much easier now. You just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are doing. Before we continue, if your sleep's been off, taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times, or feeling groggy in the morning, Momenus' sleep packs are here to help. They're not your typical knock you out supplement just overloaded with melatonin. Just the most evidence-based ingredients are perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. That's why I take these things every single night and why I trust Momentsus with my life or the very least my sleep because they make the highest quality supplements on the planet. What you read on the label, it's what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 30-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it totally risk-f free. Use it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemus.com/modernwisdom. That's live momentous.com/modern wisdom. >> The bar has never been set so low. >> It's so sad. And yet it's an exciting opportunity for people. >> Dude, I I get it. like the rampant fragility that seems to be destroying your classroom or your country or the world with constant distraction and people not being able to focus or deal with a little bit of discomfort or resilience is not great. But from a selfish perspective, that widespread fragility is your competitive advantage. And if you're one of the people, you're not going to be able to change the world. Certainly not before you've changed yourself. And that means that the first step is ah this is an opportunity for me. I can step into this. So, you mentioned that you sort of touched on some of the bad habits that distract people. I've always been interested in this from a neuroscientific perspective. Is it truly possible to deprogram bad habits or once those neural pathways are down, is that locked in for life? Are you just creating deeper fishes somewhere else uh in order to replace those ones? How do you think about getting rid of bad habits, the process of of overcoming those? Yeah, I think um you know if we look at the data on neuroplasticity, it's much easier to reactivate a pathway that was laid down early in life even if it's been suppressed. Here's a beautiful data of a guy named who was actually my next door neighbor in my lab before he retired Stanford showing that you know if once learning takes place those those maps are forever there. Uh you can um unveil those maps again later. The kind of like never forget to ride a bike kind of thing. But when you're talking about bad habits and then you get into sort of contingencies like rewards and and and punishments, you know, um these days because of my own um interests and trajectory, you know, I think a lot about, you know, the the seven deadly sins and and the virtues, right? I mean, if you look at any of the sins, okay, they're all very hypothalamic in nature, right? They're the extremes of hypothalamic function. In fact, if you could probably map the seven deadly sins onto the hypothalamus and say that nucleus, the ventromedial hypothalamus, those neurons are responsible for rage, for unbridled rage. Okay? Those neurons are responsible for unbridled sexual activity. I'm not talking about merged with violence. I'm just saying independent of that. Those are are consummatory behaviors. So, eating, hyperasia, these are anorexia, you know. So, I mean, all about I have a question on that because envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good. Yeah. So you right and I hadn't thought about that but you envy is probably not easily mapped to a hypothalamic nucleus. Um >> isn't that an interesting insight? Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn't something that can be enjoyable at low or high dose. >> Yeah. Um our good friend Paul Ki talks often about how much of the um ills of the world are based on people's envy. When people don't have um when they have an uncomfortable feeling, they most people will turn that into self-destruction or destruction of others. And people who are successful in life transmute those uncomfortable feelings into self-support and creating things and supporting others. Same feelings, divergent paths. Um and envy uh you know Paul has said many times is is the enemy of all of all personal development right? You see something you I always had noticed you know coming up in science if um if something bad happens to somebody we we most of the time unless we really dislike them but even then you kind of go a sucks you know like really feel bad but if something good happens for somebody you know immediately how you feel about that person. Are you happy for them or or is there that feeling of like [ __ ] Yeah, exactly. You know immediately how that's such a good litmus test. Yeah. How do you feel when this other person wins and when somebody else loses? I I guess even with that it's an interesting one like is there sort of weird sense of satisfaction or are you like [ __ ] like I wish that person was okay or whatever it might be. Okay. Uh bad habits. >> Yeah. But with bad habits, I mean, so I think about the, you know, the sins and bad habits mapping to hypothalamic nuclei because I'm me and that's my nerdy perspective. But then you also think about the virtues, right? And and overcoming bad habits or the virtues, they I mean I believe that most people are inherently good. I do I it may be true, young may be right that we have all things inside of us, but I think most people are inherently good. I think there are a subset of people that given the opportunity to do things and not get caught, they would do really bad things. But I don't think that's most people, okay? Or most dogs by example. Cats I'm still on the on the fence about. >> Cats can [ __ ] >> Sorry, cat people. I know some nice ones, but um but in all seriousness, I I think that the the bad habits thing involves breaking bad habits involves a lot of top- down control. Prefrontal cortex suppressing the activity of these hypothalamic and other subcortical neurons. And how do we know this? Well, we if you want to summarize how the prefrontal cortex works, you'd say it's the sh structure in the brain. It's the no, don't reach for that cookie. It's the no, don't say that thing. It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus don't do the thing. It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus and other structures are um creating some internal uh activation of the autonomic nervous system. That kind of vibration of you want to do it. It smells so good. It tastes so good, you just want to I don't know why I did it. This kind of thing. So that top- down control can be learned. And the beautiful thing, and this answers your question more directly, the beautiful thing is that at some point that top- down control is not required anymore unless you do the thing you're not supposed to do and then it requires top- down control again. Now, the reason I'm so interested these days, one of the reasons I'm so interested in spirituality and notions of of God, etc., is that you know the virtues also I believe can start to arrive through things that are outside of us. Now I realize that sounds very unscientific but if you look at the science around religious belief or belief in higher power or the notion that humans don't have all the answers not even the collective consciousness what you find is that for everything from recovery from addiction to recovery from immense immense loss I mean the kinds of losses that go way beyond uh you know a death of a family member although that's intense you know death of all one's children for instance horrible things that people have been put through almost without fail. Moving through that with any kind of um sense of self-preservation and not engaging in just self-destruction, which is what most people do, almost always involves some notion of top-down control from outside. You know, being being um encouraged or even instructed to do the right thing, feeling as if something is coming through oneself. Now, we often hear about this in the creative process. People like Rick Rubin and I'm a big Twilight Tharp fan, the choreographer will talk about, you know, it's it most creatives will talk about sort of downloading things from outside of them. It kind of moves through them as opposed to arising purely within them because of all that sensory experience. But they can get into kind of these higher realms of spirituality. But when we're talking about breaking bad habits, overcoming immensely difficult scenarios that normally would throw people into complete self-destruction or just giving up, which is a bad habit in in its own in its own right, it it's as if the the top- down control is so immense like the going against oneself that's required is so immense that when people hand that over to God, whether or not it's Christ or whether or not some other form of God that they that they are, you know, that they're attached to, you It seems as if they get some relief from the process and yet it's very effective. And you can't deny this, right? Just as a phenomenon. I mean, let's take off our hats as scientists and people with kind of parse things like the it how could it be that the the thing that's hardest for humans to do for themselves becomes far easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves? It's it's a it's a wild mind that neuroscience doesn't really understand. But but you know what we're really talking about let's say this were alcohol and I'm not an alcoholic fortunately but let's say I had immense difficulty in refraining from alcohol and this would be the precise environment in where this would where alcohol would be attractive. The amount of top down control that's required is immense for somebody that's recently sober. They have to you know hopefully they're in 12step. They have to call their sponsor. They it can be an jarring anxiety. That anxiety eventually subsides. I mean, alcoholics eventually can hang out in bars and not have a drink, but there's a long period of time where they can, and many never will be able to do that. But the notion of a higher power is is central to almost every alcoholic at least who goes through AA getting sober. It's that it's a it's a almost a prerequisite. And in some sense, it is a prerequisite. And it's so brilliant that it is because it takes away the need for constant top- down control. You give that over to something else. this notion of a higher power. For some people that's God. For some people it's Christ. For some people it's you know just general higher power because 12step is very agnostic as to you know what people consider higher power. But I think it is not a coincidence that the Bible writes in these kinds of things about sins and virtues and the need not just good works but avoiding sin and acknowledges in some sense that it's in some cases near impossible for people to do on their own. And yes, community can help and yes, reward processes can help. And yes, punishment can help. These all work. We know this. You can see this in animal learning studies where humans are different is that they can as far as we know humans are unique in their ability to give this top-down restriction process over to some other entity and it makes it easier not harder and it makes it more concrete somehow not more abstract. The only abstract piece of it is that you know you you can't shake this entity's hand at least not in the standard sense. >> What do you think's going on there? I, you know, as usual, you always ask the question. Um, which is why I I'm stomped, right? I mean, it's I mean, I'm trying to parse what could be going on, but it always lands me back in neural circuits and neural structures. I mean, I'm excited by some of the data that are starting to look at how consciousness might involve things from outside the brain and, you know, maybe multiple brains. And [gasps] all I know is that um, having spent nearly three decades thinking about and researching and talking about neuroscience that you know we know a great deal about how sensations, perceptions, thoughts, memories, you know, emotions and behaviors are constructed, right? What we do and um and yet we don't know how this piece comes about. But this piece has been central to the human historical perspective and human experience. And I don't think we're any longer in a place where we can even talk about human evolution without this. Right? I think humans evolved in the context of this. And that's why I don't see them as mutually exclusive. >> Much more a part of our history than the anterior mids singular cortex is. >> Yes. In fact, no one needed to know that the anterior midsulate cortex existed to know that there's this thing called tenacity and willpower. I think that the fun twist is that um it's a highly plastic structure that we can engage and grow and um and that reinforces the the sets of behaviors that are that are involved and I think um adaptive, right? But I I absolutely think there's something real there. And I say that completely as a scientist, right? I mean, I'm used to immunustaining for proteins and running westerns and you know like recording from neurons and you know looking at neural circuits using any number of labeling techniques. I mean I'm a man of science. But there's just no doubt in my mind that this process of giving over to the understanding there's something much greater than us and that we are not in total control at least not in total control that feels very comforting to me because of the way it's I've seen it help so many people and you know I don't I won't be shy about it's helped me tremendously. I mean I'm I'm in a very serious prayer practice daily now every night before I go to sleep without fail. I'm going on a couple years now where I've not missed a single night. I'll get out of bed if I fall asleep and do that. It's it's it's like a and then also just prayer is a thing. Let's say it's just purely neurobiological. Let's say there there's nothing outside of us that you know that in in the real sense. I don't believe that. But let's just assume for a moment. Well, then my neurobiology seems to be responding to all this very very well. And I don't think I'm alone with that. In fact, I think there are too many burdens in life for anyone to be able to navigate life extremely well without these notions of higher power. I I don't think people can do it. And if and you could show me the most successful, wealthiest people in the world and I would say um yeah, but they are highly deficient in this area. Not because I'm judging them, right? We all deficient in some area, but um I I it must be it has to be because there's this huge gap in the in in the knowledge set. I've never thought that. I've never thought of that paradox. The fact that for a lot of people, billions of people, relinquishing control, the exact opposite of what it is that for most of the habits, okay, we're going to suppress the anterior midsulate cortex. We're going to use our our cognition to limit our distraction. We're going to narrow our focus. All the rest of it, it's intention. It's lean in. It's agency. It's taking control. And then there's this other bit that literally billions of people and up until a hundred years ago almost everybody did assume was the seat of where their motivations and their discipline and for a while with the bicamal mind maybe even the voice inside the head came from. That was the thing that was real. That was the that was the source of this. >> We evolved in that in that context. >> Yeah. >> The brain >> independently, right? This was convergent evolution from a like 50 million [ __ ] different corners of the universe. >> Absolutely. And and and you know, it's my you know, I love teaching science. I I love learning and teaching science. I hope that's obvious to people. I um but it's my one wish for for people that at some point in their life they at least explore the possibility and um and get morning sunlight. But the um [laughter] but but you know, >> be open to faith and get morning sunlight. Like I I just hit 50 recently and and I will say um if I look back on my life I I sure I wish I had done certain things differently. I mean who who doesn't, right? This notion of like no regrets like yeah I wish I had made certain decisions not others. Um but by and large I'm very very happy with the decisions I made by and large. And I was happy to discover resistance training and running and neuroscience and you know cuttlefish and ferrets. I had a pet ferret and um I don't recommend bulldogs and I have the the an amazing relationship to family and friends and I'm very blessed in my personal life and my romantic life is feeling awesome these days and and it's just like it's overwhelmingly positive despite a lot of strain and hardship. But the one thing that I wish that I had done earlier was to stop resisting the voice in my head that said, you know, I think I think there's a God and I'm going to pray. I kept pushing that away. I was like incompatible with my notion of what it meant to be uh a scientist. It was it was just incompatible with with things. I just kept pushing down and yet at the same time wishing for it. And recently on my 50th birthday, I had to give a an uncomfortable toast cuz believe it or not, I'm somewhat introverted, especially in large groups. I'm happy to talk science and talk like this with you. But um and I and I said it then and I'll say it again now. Like I'm 50 and for the first time in my life, my entire life, I've experienced sustained times of real deep peace like just peace like just the like everything's okay everything is as it should be not just some little mantra that you say when you're on the big sir coast like and why I think it's because I stopped fighting so hard to try and control everything inside me and in my life and as a consequence everything has become much easier still challenging but much much easier here and it's 100% because of giving over to notion of higher power. I'm very direct about is God higher power for me, right? Reading the Bible, this kind of thing, prayer, I mean these are practices. This isn't just I believe in God. These are practices. Those are faith-based practices. And it's become a source of of immense um intellectual stimulation for me and also just relaxation. And it's really it's my wish for anyone that's like struggling or doing well because I I'm certain that it it holds so much power and again even if it turns out and I'll never know but even if it turns out that it's all filtered through you know standard neurobiological mechanisms you know um okay I'm good with that but in the meantime like I'm going to keep praying like and you can look at examples all around and all through history where people have said similar things in in circumstances far more challenging than mine and they'll always point to the same thing. I mean, people are are pretty um can be pretty irrational, but at the same time, humans are also pretty miraculous in what they're able to build and develop. And this whole thing of, you know, God and religion has not been discarded. If anything, it's growing, right? I mean, you know the data on that better than I. So, anyway, I don't have a whole lot more to say about that. >> You said something to me uh over 3 years ago now. Uh you said it's all internal. Uh can we revisit that? >> Yeah, I guess now I would say it's all internal except for the stuff that's coming from from outside the um [clears throat] uh human human awareness. Mhm. >> Yeah. But it's all internal in the sense that um good good on you for remembering that. Um it's all internal in the sense that, you know, I think that the big mistake that I made for a number of years was trying to find the thing that comes from outside that's going to change things. And you know, Lord knows I love caffeine and I love doing certain activities and um and learning. But at some point you realize that the the ability to um like withhold uh like reflect reflexes that you don't want to have like you know getting your temper sparked or something. You know people say no one can make you feel anything. Now you say that's crazy. People can make you feel things all the time. You know that the ability to not speak from your first thought but your second or your third. You know you hear these kind of cliches right? But all of that ability comes from inside. It's from doing internal work. And it's kind of amazing how much we can accomplish, and I'm certainly not the first to say this, how much we can accomplish by just stopping and listening and going, "Wow, like my brain's crazy. It's like all these thoughts, all this stuff. Oh, too much input coming into this." Like, I've got to shut down this thought path. also realizing that, you know, because these thoughts layer on themselves, our sensory sensory memories layer on top and can feed our thoughts. I mean, that Jenny Gro's description of how thinking works makes you think that yeah, like if if you're ruminating on something that really bothers you, you you probably do want to distract yourself unless you're really going to work on that thing that you really can feed thoughts like embers and a fire. And it's important to not do that if it's not adaptive. A quick aside, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus, and your performance. But most people have no idea where those are or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter, more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over a 100 biomarkers and their team of expert physicians analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. 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The satisfaction that you get for finishing a hard workout, the love that you feel from being with the people that you care about, the peace that you have for lying in a hammock in a, you know, sunny spring afternoon or whatever, at no point are you being sort of flicked different neurochemicals and sensations like this is a part of your system. >> Yeah. And if you hit the system hard like you know like the thing I absolutely um suggest people never do is you know something like methamphetamines right is going to what a thousandfold increase in dopamine within moments. I mean I is that what that is? >> Yeah. As compared to or even more as compared to cocaine which I think is like 200 um you know like a 200x and I mean it's a or maybe a doubling. I mean I forget the exact numbers but there's this chart that will often put up. methamphetamine is going to you're you're basically going to dump as much dopamine as you ever could in that moment and then the trough is obviously proportional to that. It's kind of fun too to think about how because of conversations from me and you and others and Matt Walker like the world kind of understands dopamine now. Do they understand the nuance of every little bit of every one of the four different pathways and there's probably five um etc. No. Like but that's okay. Like do they do people not understand everything about cortisol melon? No. But I think the world is is now armed with a lot better knowledge of their own physiology and psychology and how those merge. I also think that we're starting to understand actually on the way over here my producer and close friend Rob was talking about this that you know um everything now is gambling. Social media is a form of of essentially gambling for dopamine. um you know likes and follows um you know markets you know I mean my team their team the politics I mean I a good friend has said you know that all addiction is gambling you know all addictions maybe are gambling um in different forms um I would say it all boils down to the same neural circuits of anticipation and and reward anticipation and the scariest thing was I have a good friend Ryan Suave who works with addicts and and He's trauma therapist as well. Incredibly talented guy. And he said that um you know the scary thing is he's known many gambling addicts that get addicted to the shame from losing. >> Oh wow. >> And he said that >> you're not chasing the wins anymore. You're chasing the losses and the way that you feel about yourself after you've lost. >> Yeah. It's almost like the wins were not big enough and so they're just chasing the self-shame and the hatred and the It's really sad. Gambling addicts struggle big time. Coffeezilla just did a a huge new video um about gambling and and sort of how endemic it is. And there's banking apps that allow you to gamble inside of the app now. And he's done I learned an awful lot about gambling from from watching a bunch of the videos he's done in the past. And uh it really is kind of wild to me that it's legal. And the only way that I can say I'm sure like you we've been offered like an unlimited number of gambling sports betting partnerships and stuff like that. >> I like gambling actually a little bit but I don't have a problem with it. >> I don't have a problem with it either which is exactly why it's [laughter] >> we should go to Vegas. Um >> but it's kind of it's kind of mad to me that that those that that this is legal and you know [ __ ] don't hate the player. You know, the game is is much bigger than any individual person that's contributing to it. Like, fair play, but it's it is really [ __ ] destructive for for some people, but then so's alcohol. So's driving fast cars or motorbikes or >> the hypothalamus isn't going anywhere, right? I mean, everyone's got one. And so, you got to find the things that allow you to be adaptive and functional in life, not crater the things you've created. And also, um, to feel like you're in the hunt. I mean, the hunt was the original gamble, right? Hunting for animals, hunting for food, hunting for mates. >> Seeing that thing grow closer on the horizon, working out the anticipation of it coming towards you. I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. >> Surviving a storm probably felt like a big win at some point. I mean, um, you know, like the number of, uh, women who used to die in childbirth and then they were, you know, and then someone solved that puzzle, right? Was it handwashing? I think had a lot to do with it, right? I don't know if this story is true, but that the the story goes that um there used to be a ton of of death and childbirth. And uh some of the same physicians who were trying to figure out why were um handling and dissecting the cadaavvers of these these poor women who died in childbirth and then delivering babies the same afternoon without handashing in between because we didn't understand bacteria. >> We didn't understand the importance of handwashing. I don't know if that's true. That's what's been reported. But once they started washing their hands between essentially doing autopsy and delivering babies, uh, rates of death in childirth went down. >> So I I wrote this, uh, article about, uh, the Cassandra complex. Do you know the Cassandra complex? >> No. >> Oh, dude, this is >> And I don't know anyone named Cassandra. >> Uh, well, let me uh, maybe you do. >> Well, yeah. [laughter] Uh, allow me to teach you about the Cassandra complex. There are few feelings worse in this life than being right but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth, or important area of focus only to be castigated for how short-sighted, xenophobic, judgmental, outof touch, leftwing, right-wing, or alarmist you are. The Cassandra complex is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them. And they're often dismissed, ignored, or even ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, a figure in Greek mythology. The god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but after she rejected his advances, he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her warnings. She foresaw the fall of Troy, warned everyone, and was met with scorn. The city burned anyway. Rachel Carson in her book 1962, Silent Spring, warned about the environmental damage caused by pesticides. She was mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists, but her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT. Ignes Samilewise in the 1840s realized that doctors were transmitting child bed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands. He begged his colleagues to adopt handwashing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum. Decades later, germ theory proved him right. >> Wow. >> Let me give you this. I'm going to the one the best example of the Cassandra complex I [ __ ] love is the uh comparison between Capernicus and uh Galileo. So obviously people that are right but early get uh mocked, castigated, you know, pushed to one side which is um incentive for someone to not speak up if they feel like they are telling the truth but that the world is not going to be sufficiently receptive to it. And uh Capernacus and Galileo like so great as an example of this. Capernicus in the early 1500s quietly proposed something radical. The earth orbits the sun. Humans once the unmoving center of God's design were now spinning through space on a planet among many. But Capernacus hesitated. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His great work de la revolution came out only as he lay on his deathbed likely to avoid the wrath of the church and academia. His truth was too disruptive and so for most of his life it went unheard. Galileo a century later took that same Capernac spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, and the imperfections of the moon's surface. All evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught. The church responded with fear. Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition, forced to recant under threat of torture, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it is not surprising that Capernicus kept his mouth shut given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra complex. Being right isn't enough, and being early can feel like being wrong. Wow. Yeah. I mean much lesser example than what you just described, but you know, the glimpmphatic system was discovered many years earlier by a woman at NIH. Um, oh, excuse me, at University of Maryland. Um, a larger, more powerful scientific group tried to repeat the experiments, made a method methodological flaw, couldn't repeat it. Everyone believed them. there's no lymphatic system in the brain. Fortunately, she became an NIH program officer, which is somebody who has some degree of control over where funding gets directed and funded the work that later um verified her her findings. But it it was purely by virtue of the fact that the power structure was arranged in a certain way. This happens a lot in science. Yeah, I think you'd enjoy Chris that, you know, everyone thinks of Darwin and natural selection and um but there was another guy, Alfred Russell Wallace, who essentially discovered all of it in parallel >> um and should have been elected to the Royal Academy and all of this stuff um as well like like Darwin, but um was not in the club in the in club and Darwin knew it and actually was very from what I understand very conflicted about not sharing the credit. Yeah. >> Um, >> it was only because of that rivalry that Darwin ended up pushing his study out, his work out, right? I think he he had it he sat on it for a while. He wanted to work on it more. He had a little bit of sort of hypervigilant uncertainty and insecurity about himself and then finally upon hearing, oh, I might not I might be beaten to the punch published. Is that right? >> Yeah. Nobody associates Alfred Russell Wallace with the theory of evolution, natural selection. I mean, most people don't even know who it is. I mean, because my dad's a physicist and because I grew up in science, I I um I know a lot of these stories. I mean, I know a story of I'll keep this intentionally vague. There's a very very famous and accomplished physicist that probably should have won a Nobel Prize, but he made one error, which is that he stole the girlfriend of one of his graduate students, married her. That graduate student did reasonably well. It must be very uncomfortable to work in the lab where your girlfriend is now sleeping with your boss. went on um he went on to marry a Swedish woman um and uh let's just say that guy that stole the girlfriend never won a Nobel Prize. Uh the Swedish community is very close-knit, you know. So, I mean I mean the number of sto I could tell you story after story after story like that, but I try and avoid those stories um even though they're true. Um, I'd much rather tell stories about the great scientific discoveries that were made, right? So, when stuff goes right, because, you know, that stuff's very enticing. It's the drama that we, you know, are drawn to as humans, just naturally, we have a proclivity for for that. But, but I think that there there's so many stories of people making incredible discoveries through serendipity and hard work and things like that. So, I mean, that's the good stuff. And and so I always try and if I mention a story like that, I like to balance it out and remind people that I do think that most scientists are well-intentioned. I do think most physicians are well-intentioned. I just had a guest on the podcast, David Fagenbomb, who's a physician >> at UPUPEN >> um and scientist. And you know, he was a football player, big dude, Jack. He's like 63 Jack. He's playing football. He's in medical school and he gets this Castleman's disease, which is a cancer-like um disease of the of the lymphatic system. He's told that he's going to die. He He basically was near dead. And then he decided to just start trying all these already approved prescription drugs that nobody thought had anything to do with Castleman's or cancer. And he's alive now 11 years later. >> And he's developed this not for profofit called Every Cure where they is completely not for profofit. and his lab focuses on taking all the diseases that we have like 14,000 diseases we have no treatments for and taking existing approved drugs that basically stand to make companies very little money because they're all in generic form now and using AI and doing these things in combination they've saved kids from nonverbal forms of brain illness they've saved people adults and and children from um from cancers turns out that women who have breast cancer surgery that involves lidocaine as a local anesthetic have a 30% less less chance of getting a you know of having a recurrence. Um different uses for aspirin for colon cancer. I mean you know and so repurposing old drugs for >> exactly >> current and so his belief as a physician as a as a card carrying member of that community is that the field of medicine has many cures in hand and excellent treatments in handin for the things that people are struggling with you know. So then when I hear this stuff about well lowd dose lithium everyone's you know maybe pinging that once a year for offsetting the the potential for Alzheimer's or now we're hearing a lot about the particulate and certain air pollution you know might be one of the primary uh players in in causing dementia you know when I hear this stuff it's like we need to be testing existing medication so the field of medicine the fields of science you know as having been in this field of science for a long time although now I'm in public education still faculty member at Stanford The the key thing to understand is that is it is a business of people. >> It's there's a sociology to the business just like there's a sociology of podcasting in media which you know is a a discussion into itself but this is actually what really made me understand Rogan a lot better. I remember at one point some years back um I I asked him I'm like where where does your kind of like belief or skepticism in certain things come from? And he just looked me dead in the eye and he just said, "Cuz I know people." And he, anyone that knows Rogan knows he has a lot of different kinds of friends and he interacts with a lot of different types of people. He's not narrow. He's extremely broad in his interactions, not just on his podcast. And I realized in that moment I was like, "Okay, got it. >> He casts this really wide net, but he has a very >> selective filter about what he integrates." And it's because he understands people the the you know good and bad aspects of people. Yeah. >> And and I think that's the kind of acumen that that is only developed through life experience. And if you're a scientist or you're a physician and you're very entrenched in your field, you can be the best oncologist, the best opthalmologist, the best neurologist. And if you're considered the best because of your knowledge within that silo or even multiple silos, but you don't have life experience and know people from different areas of life, I guarantee you are not the physician I want to be treated by or that I want a family member treated by. >> Yep. >> Because you have to understand not just the information and the source of the information in terms of paper and rigor and laboratory. You have to understand the motivations and almost the personality types of the people behind that work. >> It's so true. I mean, this was the beautiful baptism of running nightclubs for so long. I met a million people in person. Imagine >> and their and their inhibitions are down because they're they're >> and their and some things are tuned up, you know, aggression or or or uh openness or their humor or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to do. It really reveals and kind of I guess uh exaggerates the who people are. But [ __ ] like you become really really good at judging people and really really good at assessing this person's motivations. How how sort of real is this? It's been a couple of times on the pod where I've sat down with someone and I'm like I don't know what I think about this person and after I've sat down with them like I know and I know in one of a couple of directions I'm like that was good or whatever but like I >> we're not you didn't believe what they were saying. We're not going to go we're not going to go fast. >> I've I've had that experience. I won't mention the guests obviously. I would say 95% of 98% of our guests I've felt that way. There was there's only one or two instances that that I got any kind of inkling that like they weren't as sure as they sounded or something of that sort. But but I think that that's the that's the good thing about podcasting is that it's not just an interview, right? Like you can ping people for ideas and you can ping people around those ideas. cuz you're not trying to you're not trying to catch them in anything, but you really I mean uh it's funny cuz we're sitting across from it's it's like how you would get to know anybody. You would sit across from them and you would talk to them, right? >> It's in the smallest I I use this example of um watching musicians on stage. So, one of the things that I find coolest about anybody that does does anything a lot is not them doing the main thing, it's their transition activities within the thing. So, for instance, I spent a long time at university. If you put a pen in my hand, it just immediately starts moving through my fingers. I can't >> You're one of those. My students, if I look out, I kind of blur my vision. I'm not teaching in the classroom much these days, although soon I will again. And um it's like it's like watching a bunch of propellers. >> A Mexican wave of pen twirling. Yeah. I I just because I did I put a pen in my hand and I do that. Um one of my friends, Zach, the way that he takes if he bing if one of his guitar picks goes while he's playing, he's warming up for me on tour. um if one of his guitar picks goes like the way that he [ __ ] like just just seamlessly snags another one like that's what's [ __ ] cool because that is this moment of unconscious betrayal of pattern would be a way to think about it. Um a drummer that like snaps a stick and you'll just see and he'll switch seamlessly or he'll be playing he was playing the uh high hat with his right hand and his right drumstick goes so he'll switch and you'll see him move with his left and then he And then it's back out and you're like, "Dude, that's so [ __ ] cool." I love seeing people that are the the way that the guys will set up their cameras. Like, I'll see the guys taking a shot and they'll need to change something ding ding ding ding ding and I'm like, "You just did six things in two seconds." >> It's like hyper proficiency. >> It's so [ __ ] cool, right? I think that's so sick. Um, I I want to touch on what you said before, which was sort of the the fixation that uh people have, groups, different groups have on stuff. What do you make of the attempt of legacy media to turn get more high quality protein into a political issue? I think this has been one of the most interesting patterns to see that like protein has become politically coded somehow. And obviously this is kind of for the health and wellness industry kind of old hat now to talk about like protein is prioritizing protein is something that you probably should consider or at least be aware of. But yeah, what what do you make of the fact that um protein consumption has become politicized >> and resistance training for a little while? Although I think the wave caught to stimulate the idea that everybody, men, women, young and old, should be resistance training. So you can no longer like um kind of bro science resistance training. [gasps] Although I I I have to say even though I have respect for certain elements of bodybuilding, I do think that the the body the the the bodybuilding culture I think has kind of um distracted from what's possible with resistance training as a positive health stimulus. A lot of people are still averse to it >> because you look at people who are bodybuilders and don't exactly see the picture of health. >> Yeah. And I think it's also the the way that bodybuilding changes the entire relationship to food in general and to life in general. And it and and any look anything that's so look I I I think Darian Yates is an amazing athlete, right? I can think of him as an athlete and what he did and the way he did it and I knew Mike Mener and he was the one that >> You knew Mikeens? >> I knew Menser. >> No way. >> He was He sold me my first training program by phone. I can tell you the story. I'll I'll tell you that in a moment. >> New Mener, I write about him in my my book that comes out uh later this uh later next year. Um New Mener had a lot of conversations about Mensor, not just about resistance training, but also about school and philosophy. He was one of the people that really encouraged me to get serious about my academics. >> Yeah. Mike Menser was part of your origin story. >> Yeah. Mike Menser who I well I'll just I'll I'll get back to the the trad thing. But yes, I signed up for a program. He he's the reason why still to this day, you know, since I was 16, 50 now, as I mentioned, >> still train three maybe four days a week. Not one set to failure, but you know, keeping set volume low. Um, one thing that isn't advertised a lot, Mike didn't talk about it in his seminars, is that a lot of what determines total set number is how well you can like really direct the effort toward the muscle you're trying to target. So, some people are exceptionally good at that. I think Dorian was other people like no matter how hard they try and curl with just their biceps and forearms and anterior delts, like it's going everywhere, you know? And so, a lot of it is about being muscle connection. Oh, one thing he was very clear about is that as you get better at training, the neural component of of contracting the muscles that you're trying to contract, you actually can get by with fewer sets because you're able to direct more intensity to those muscle groups. So, over time, I found, yeah, I I probably do somewhere between six and eight sets per muscle group. But with two, I can not slaughter the muscle, but I can I can get where I need to go. >> But I like training, so sometimes I'll do more. But yeah, Mensor was great. I signed up for this program. My mother was like I was 16 year old maybe even 15 years old and she was like why is this grown man calling the house because back then you do like a phone consultation and Mike didn't talk Mike barked he'd be like listen and the only thing you know and he would say he's like and the number one thing is you don't want to listen to anyone else besides me he told me he said he said most people in gyms are explicative morons he said they're morons he kept saying these people have the intelligence of a toad and he would just like yell and yell and then he'd recommend these >> six sales call and then he'd recommend these anaran books. And then the only I even had some sleep issues when I was in college cuz my dorm was really loud. You know what you know the advice he gave me? This is so wild. And I have a friend from college who's now a fertility doc here in in um in LA and he remembered this story. Um Mener, this is terrible advice. He said, "Get a jug of white wine and just have like a half mug of white wine. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll fall back." Didn't First of all, it doesn't work at all. >> Okay, so like hit and miss for >> Oh, listen. Mike Mike was an extreme guy, but but he g he actually said he says stay away from anabolics, which I did. He said, "Enjoy learning to train hard. Enjoy your training hard." [snorts] >> He said, >> even though he wasn't a fan of cardio, like get out and live life. And he said, "And read books." And we he gave me this book list. And and to that day, I still follow the same. Yeah. Mike Mike was amazing. And then when he died, I heard later I was very was very sad. I mean, we'd been touched a little bit because I was in Santa Barbara and he was down in LA at that time. Okay, so Menser, um, >> protein politicization, what's going on? >> Well, traditional media is like we'll take anything at this point as an attempt to gulp for air because they're they're really struggling, right? I mean, there are some decent journalists in traditional media, right? There are I think that they um but they'll not just by quote unquote politicizing something gives them something to say about it, right? One gram of protein per pound of lean or desired body mass is kind of the the standard thing now. Some people less, some people a little bit more. Okay, fine. Fine. Um I think we all get that. That's the goal. If you get a little less, you're probably fine. If you get a little more, you're probably fine. If you get tons more, you're probably not fine. You get tons less, you're probably not fine. Animal protein is clearly superior as a as a pro quality protein to calorie ratio, right? You give me an 8 oz piece of steak or you have to eat half a jar of peanut butter, which is not protein. It's a bunch of fat with a little bit of protein in it. Okay. So, why do they policize it? Well, because they're struggling. They're struggling big time in terms of how to generate revenues. I mean, people expect to get their news. Two things have certainly happened. I believe Ezra Klein on this that people are no longer digesting their news as local news as much. It's more national level news and international level news. And look, putting your name in a title or Rogan's name in a title or, you know, is going to generate clicks. And if you and saying great things about people, kind things about [laughter] people generally doesn't get >> He's such a nice guy. >> Doesn't Yeah. I mean, listen, I've had a few nice articles written and some of the health magazines will pull protocols and things and I love it. and and you know I would say things in the health section of the New York Times very often parrot what I've covered and other people have covered and they do it differently but you can often predict what they're going to cover by looking at the various health podcasts Peter's Peter was just on 60 Minutes Peter says I text I texted him about it and he said uh >> as he said uh nice to see nice to see traditional media not um accusing me of something unspeakable for once. Yeah, I mean they seem to focus a bit much on like how much he charges his clients and this kind of thing as >> I mean the fact that he said that that was a sort of clean and fair interview despite the fact that there is some [ __ ] going on in there. >> Yeah, it just goes to I mean >> well listen they're they've to say they're losing power is an understatement. They've lost power. >> They to some degree there's still some trust there from a number of people. Um, and to some degree, you know, every topic, health topic in particular, seems to go through the same arc. It's like nobody knows about it except in niche cultures. Let's just take the glimpmphatic system. Nobody knew about it. This one woman discovered it. It was not suppressed, but it was kind of knocked back. Then it came out as all the rage then 20 a few years ago. The study, not as much glimpy clearance as we thought. And you you occasionally someone say, "Oh, it's not a not a real thing." One mouse study, one mouse study didn't see it, right? Right? And I know the history of the glimpmphatic research. So it's very clear it's there. Okay. So then the the arc is okay. Exciting exciting exciting. Take dopamine dopamine nation on beautiful work. Then about 18 months later it's well it's not you know it's just in my listen creatine. The next look you can guarantee that in eight weeks or six months or whenever it is it's going to be creatine not as important as we thought for brain. >> [laughter] >> There's just the natural arc, right? And then it's the yes, the things that work still work and the things that don't don't. It's very rare for anything to sort of capture and then just get get completely obliterated. >> Like I was talking about delaying caffeine by, you know, 90 minutes or so. If you crash in the afternoon, it's a great thing to try. Then there was, so it was got a lot of positive attention. Then there was the push back, show me the clinical trial, show me the benefits. It's like, no, it's show me whether or not you crash in the afternoon. Try it if you want or don't. Like, hey, easy. It's it's a suggestion. It's grounded in me mechanistic science. But even the [clears throat] even the coffee accounts on YouTube were pissed off about this. Listen, the big thing that I guess the the direct answer to your question is you're taking their paycheck. >> Do you know how much these reporters make? You're taking their paycheck. The irony of it is if you look at some of the advertisements in traditional media, it's like Fendy bags and like all these like fancy things and and in some cases dietary supplements. So they are our competitors, >> but and this is the critical caveat. They're competing with us. I never think about what they're doing. I never look. I don't care if somebody's saying I'm like, "Okay, I'm never going to modify my content on the basis of what any of these traditional media houses are doing." They are in the chase position now >> 100%. Now does that mean that we will always be, you know, leaders in the space? No. one has to be very careful to not assume that, right? There's some kid, some guy or gal someplace who's going to take my lunch someday. That's the way, you know, and I'm not a kick out the ladder from you. I don't give I don't hop on an Instagram live and give people a hundred suggestions about how to get their content out more broadly from based on what I know. I'm just not that way. I was weaned in a culture of science where you train people. My students are now on the job market or have labs, etc. That's the way it's done. But traditional media are competitors of podcast. That's why they've started podcasts. >> You and I are very fortunate that we started podcasts in the in I wouldn't say the first wave, but like if we were making analog second wave punk based I mean listen >> when did yours launch? >> Uh 2021. >> Did it really? >> Yeah. January 2021. >> [ __ ] hell. I thought it was before that. >> In 2020 I was going on a lot of podcasts. I went on like 30 podcasts and prior to that I was starting to teach a little bit on Instagram and that kind of thing. But I mean podcasting is growing like crazy. I mean, I I want to encourage people to make content, but the content that I think is most important is not content about content. This is the this is the really dangerous hook for people. Content about content. And also, you'll find that the people who have very successful podcasts tend to be people who are successful in something else first. You certainly have that. Lex, me, Rogan, Rick Rubin, I mean Theo, Whitney, it goes on and on. I mean, Tim Dylan, etc. like and there's a bridge there's a natural overlap between what people were trained to do and what they're doing in their podcast but there are very few podcasts I mean I'm sure there there are some that are just like someone decides like I'm a podcaster so the the person who wants to be influential for lack of a better phrase in media they want to teach they want to teach science they want to encourage thinking and make a living doing it encourage health practices make a living doing it I would encourage them to go do something else first that they really enjoy because that the structure of that and and and that very thing is going to inform their content. Very few people are going to like if they start giving out degrees in in in media. >> Um I in sort of social media I I don't think it's going to be very useful. Whitney Cummings got the best take on this. She says in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life >> so good. And it's one of the challenges you get as people become more successful that their ability to generate new ideas decreases because their life is increasingly out of touch. It's the comedian who only talks about dinners, shows and airports and hotels on stage because that's the entirety of their life experience or their craft or or sorry Gingro or their craft. I mean you said I'm leading an increasingly eccentric life. I mean the reason I have a pet octopus I always wanted one. had cuttlefish. I love aquarium. I'm draw I have this art project with someone who's a kind of >> Are you going to try and justify buying an octopus as like inspiration for >> I'm going to teach an octopus how to use an iPad. >> Okay. >> And I'm going to decode what the camouflage patterns of the octopus mean for thinking. >> Is that mimic octopus? What is it? >> No. Well, right now I have a I have an Indonesian octopus that's not very interactive. I want a Pacific two spot. This is a whole thing. It's going to open up some some trauma for me. But [laughter] no, I'm just kidding. I'm getting a new new octopus soon. A Caribbean Day octopus is is probably on the way. But but the the the idea is actually to use AI to try and deconvolve what the octopus is thinking and maybe even communicate with the octopus. They are very smart. I had 40 cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego. They are so smart and they're also sephopods, cousins of the octopus. So, but the reason I'm doing that, the reason I have my art projects, the reason I extended my book for a year to add more studies is because I like learning and I, as my uh a friend of mine said, he's a very intelligent guy. Um he's a tattooer among other things. He's an exceptional artist and he said, "People with interests are interesting." Correct. >> You know what's not interesting? Other people's failures, other people's minor wins. Like there's nothing more boring than that. Yeah. >> It but it hooks in the short term. So social media I think of as a very we should go up to clouds rest sometime and hike clouds rest in yosi it's beautiful but there's this very narrow rock bridge out to the top and on either side it's slide to your death slide to your death and so I'm always doing I don't get down on all fours but it's it's uh it's precarious but it's beautiful when you get to the top and it opens up into a big flat spoon you're above half dome it's gorgeous I go there as often as I can but on either side you fall to your death and I always think of the internet and much of life like this on one side is the this fault to your death that is numbing out by going online >> and the other one is drama >> like >> like who's I mean I don't want to name names cuz I don't want to give it any like recently there was an online drama in the fitness community and I was like I unfollowed a bunch of accounts I was like this is the most boring stupid thing I've ever seen in my entire life and this is seeding my thoughts >> this is seeding my and like I got to go back to reading good books I'm going in my basement, you know. So, you're allowed to unfollow accounts that you're not learning from or that are pulling you into either numbing out or drama. >> The drama piece is very serious because it gives the illusion that there's something meaningful there. But you realize this is just like it's it's nothingness. >> It is that's a fascinating way to look at it. Uh it is kind of the empty calories of the content world that you leave this >> Mhm. >> having been given the sort of simulacum of learning something. But if somebody said okay after watching this 10-minute half hour, 1 hour expose or deconstruction, what do you know that you didn't know at the start? you go well I like know about what this person and this person said to each other about each other and how the interplay and look deconstructing someone's psychological profile understanding how human motivations work I'm fascinated by the way that sort of social interaction hierarchy status games all of that stuff but I'm not learning that I'm not reading the status game by Will store >> well you're a thinker I mean so when I mention this rock bridge I mean that my it's the visual I keep in mind when I'm trying to get into solid work or solid thinking or going on social media like there's a narrow band of of very useful things to learn and participate in. I think that >> infinity of [ __ ] >> you know numbing out or or drama on either side the fall to the death um little by little but what I what I think is that because you are somebody who thinks deeply about human nature I mean I listened to your episode with Scott Galloway and I'm not just saying this what they call glazing on I we used to just call it kissing somebody's ass so I'm not trying to kiss your ass cuz but like this is it was an awesome episode and your command of of of statistics and data and understanding your ability to frame it and remember things it's it's world class. Thank you. >> And and you do that through hard work, but also through life experience. So I do think that living life in a way where you're collecting data, so to speak, and you're understanding things is wonderful. But I guess what turned me off to this one particular drama in such a strong way was it's yet another example of something I've seen thousands of times before. There was no new learning for me there except that humans are just being humans. And so at some level like there's at some point the the novelty of life, the excitement of life, the the enriching parts of life are about new experiences. Sometimes it's about experiencing the same thing and go, "Oh yeah, this is a general theme of me or of them or of life and and understanding human nature." But at some point you're like, "This is just yet another drama on the schoolyard. This is just this is reminds me of and it's sometimes useful to make the parallels. This is like in junior high school when so and so said something about so- and so do and so you go there's no new data. This would be like running you know I publish it some papers I don't want to do those experiments again >> because if especially if I get the exact same result right now if I get a different result that's different but I'm seeing the same thing again and so I think in order to develop a healthy relationship to social media which is really a big slice of life now for many people of [snorts] all ages >> and a skill that's only been around for 10 years >> right I mean I think you have to be be extremely conscious of of like when it got you and why you know I mean you had a nightclub you couldn't you might have to respond to a catastrophe or something happening but like you can enjoy yourself there too but you were there to work you were able to navigate that chaotic environment and get things done >> well a good example of this uh you know postnut clarity uh after culation the devil's laughter can be heard I think Schopenhau said that um an equivalent is postcontent clarity so after you've finished consuming a thing how do you feel do you feel uh enlightened, hopeful, peaceful. Do you want to ring your mom and say that you miss her? Do you want to talk to your friends? Or do you feel like the world's out to get you and that there's less than is needed for everybody and you shouldn't really trust people and you're a bit sort of tight and tense and your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears. Well, here's my litmus test. After I spend a bit of time on social media, I ask myself later, do I remember anything from being on there? you know, the the reflection. Was there any learning? Did I learn anything? Listen, I learned some things from your discussion with Scott. I still got a little bit more to go in the discussion, so don't quiz me on it just yet. But I intend to think about it. In fact, this morning I went out for a run. I listened to a podcast of somebody that I'm not particularly big fan of, but I wanted to get the their perspective. And I thought a bit about some of the things that you and Scott had discussed >> and I was reflecting on it, right? because it's a that's learning and that's the anti-forgetting process. I can't recall something I saw on social media yesterday that was very stimulating. But I watched that 60 Minutes episode and it gave me some ideas and insights about what's going on in the world or what might not be going on in the world. And you know, thinking about your experiences is so critical to placing value on them, making them meaningful for you. What I'm not interested in is just an endless deluge of sensory input that goes nowhere, especially if it impedes other things. >> So, a little bit more reflection, 10 minutes, 1 minute, 5 seconds of just asking, did I remember anything you said? >> Do I want to do that again? >> As opposed to just the infinite wheel you mentioned. I think this is a [ __ ] great take. um the arc of something new gets introduced, there is excitement, there is reaction, there is criticism, and then usually acceptance presuming that this thing is like true or valid or whatever. >> Yeah, like creatine, right? It's been around forever. I was laughing so hard. >> That's what I want to talk about. So, um what do you think is the next frontier for public acceptance? Cuz I would say vitamin D3 was >> check. >> Yeah, that that's already done. It's it's gone through the cycle. Correct. It's out. >> We should actually plot this out. It' be fun to do a post. We should do a post together, which is, by the way, um public careers follow the same trajectory. You show up, people are like, "Who's this person?" Then it's like, "Oh, you're very exciting." Then then there's always a here's the flaw. And then and then there's a very simple equation as to whether or not that they are going to continue and continue to have popularity. Very simple equation. Was the sort of event more useful or interesting than what they contribute? And if the answer is, yeah, that was actually more exciting than any one thing they'd ever said in terms of usefulness, then they're gone. >> Yeah. That owned by >> they fade out at different rates, their half life and it disappears. But if what you're providing is useful, if the person is if they still people still want you around, so to speak, it outlives that. I mean, this recent drama, I don't want to dance around it too much, but this recent drama, I was like, this is nothing could be more trivial or stupid. But I realized the reason it's probably I'm not pretending this and I don't wish ill on anyone, but it's probably going to pseudo end the career of this online person is because it was much more interesting in its drama than any value ad that they were they had given. That's interesting. >> Yeah. And and they and they had projected a fair amount of arrogance in their delivery of content and things. And if you do that, you're setting yourself up, right? That's a very that's a big attractor early on. >> Oh, people people like a a sort of deserved downfall of the person who's out of touch 100%. >> Yeah. There's no coming back from that in a real way. >> Okay. So, vitamin D3 been through the cycle. Creatine is in the cycle, right? Creatine is so vitamin I would say vitamin D came first, >> then protein, >> right? Protein. And the protein thing is politicized a little bit too because there's something about meat that's considered right which is um and then >> creatine. You know the reason that creatine I don't think is going to get politically coded is it's been so heavily pushed by women for women. Ronda Patrick a lot of like Kelly Leesque if you know her um >> super hardcore femaleled audience. >> It's important for women despite the fact you're probably going to gain you know three pounds of of weight. Mhm. Water. Water weight. >> Yeah. Weight. Um you're going to scale is going to be heavy. Maybe you're going to look a little bit fluffier, but you can get rid of it by stopping it, right? It's, you know, it's like having a scale that's off. It's like as soon as you >> Curves are in. >> Yeah. Exactly. Um >> one way in which things are not mimicking the 90s when everything was super wafy. I mean, I came up in the '9s when it was like the the expectation on women was really exceeding. >> You know, the environmental security hypothesis. >> Sit back. Let me give you this one. So um there is evidence to suggest that men prefer thicker women during times of economic downturn and thinner women during times of economic uplift. So if uh the study original study was done on students that were in halls of residence and they were eating at um uh you like uh dinner time together where it would be provided by the halls of residence and they showed men images of women of varying sizes uh before they ate and after they ate. multiple iterations all over the place. Before men ate, they preferred the bigger women. After men ate, they preferred the thinner women. And you can track the um >> there's an alternative interpretation. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um you can track the sort of uh public popularity of body size, not shape, waist to hip ratio always remains the same typically, uh but of body size overall to how the economy is doing. And it's called the environmental security hypothesis. Basically, the human behavioral ecology stuff. Macken Murphy taught me about this University of Melbourne. He's brilliant. He's out of Candace Blake's lab. And what it seems is happening is if you feel secure in your environment, you are not queuing for a mate or well, she can survive a tough time of a famine because times aren't that tough. Resources are abundant. Therefore, I don't need a woman who can signal that she can get extra calories and is more sort of metabolically uh well reserved. You might be able to say uh the opposite is also true. And this tracks, the economy tracks with the preference of body size. >> Wild. Wild. I love I love your command of this literature. It's awesome. I mean, I just remember the '9s being a time of very like wafy models and uh because I was, you know, came up through the skateboarding thing, you know, when I departed from, you know, biology before I went back to it. And our I mean, they had models like Kate Moss who were extremely thin. And then um and actually and friends of ours who were skateboarders in New York like in Washington Square Park, our friend Peter BC was kind of discovered in New York and ended up in Calvin Klein ads. He was like skinny skateboarder, right? I mean he became a firefighter. So now he's like he's Jack appears still around a super good guy. But um and really into his health now and stuff, but we can kind of chuckle about the fact that like in the '9s like that was the look, right? It was the Kurt Cobain look and it was that whole thing. And the larger guys are like you it was it wasn't Mark Wahlberg back then. was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, remember? And he was in the Calvin Klein ads with Kate Moss. >> Look at his size now. >> And he was and well, he was pretty built then by by those standards. So, but now compared to the sort of typical sort of expectation of of muscularity in in men, >> that big flation thing is huge. You watch bigger, stronger, faster, Mark Bell's thing back. >> Oh, yeah. It's a great movie. Watch it some time ago. Yeah, >> it's 20 2007 I think. Anyway, so uh D3 >> Yeah. >> protein, right? >> Creatine. Creatine's in it. >> Creatine's made the cut. Although I think because it's a powder and they're trying to put in gummies and they the flavored versions are really the flavored Momentous version, by the way, is awesome. It's like I always had >> like the little pastel thing, right? It's like a chewable uh >> tastes like sweet tarts. It they taste too good. >> They've just Yeah. >> Uh Jeff sent me. In fact, I had the >> candy with creatine >> with one gram of like a >> one gram. Problem is I So I I've been taking creatine since I was probably 15 16. I do a I actually do the loading thing where I take like 30 40 grams a day for a week and then cut back to 10 grams a day. >> Um and then I do a wash out every 16 weeks or so where I stop taking it completely. I know this is very unconventional for a week and you drop some weight. It's actually interesting to see how much strength you hold on to in that week. >> This is what I am without the assistance of 10 grams of creative. >> I just do it for me. I I don't >> Well, look, you're talking to the school of [ __ ] Mike Mensy. You're allowed to do. Okay. What's What's next? What do you think next? Magnesium. >> Okay. >> Magnesium 3inate or bislycinate. I know there are multiple forms, you know, you malate for soreness, you know, etc., etc. Citrate, laxative, you know, I would say um but bislycinate and and 3 and8 cross the bloodb brain barrier more readily. Um I would say pre-leep, you know, 30 60 minutes before sleep. But you know I had our chair of ottoarangology head and neck surgery at Stanford okay came on my podcast obviously studies the hearing system and she said that magnesium is protective against hearing loss first of all hearing loss low-level hearing loss is associated with dementia less sensory input okay deaf people can be obviously very cognitively strong but they have other ways of of bringing in sensory input but partial hearing loss strongly correlated with with dementia hearing loss very common after concerts in industrial workers, things like that. Magnesium protects against hearing loss. Why? The endolymph in which the hair cells that vibrate in response to sound. The that endolymph is like a thick kind of fluid, viscous fluid is magnesium is is a prominent feature of that endolymph and it gets depleted by very loud sound to some extent. But encouraging more magnesium in the endolymph is protective against hair cell loss, which is hearing loss, which is permanent. Even though it's low level, it accumulates over time. So magnesium, magnesium for cognition, magnesium for sleep. The whole argument that there's less magnesium in the soil nowadays because of the way farming is done. It's just been depleted. So you can get less of the >> vro and the your kale of yesterday is not your kale of today, [laughter] so to speak. Um so I think magnesium supplementation is going to go through a wave of like h they're just talking about that like Chris and Andrew are talking about that on podcast. This is bro then it's going to show up. Oh wow. Like you know we've got the um you know chair of autoangology head and neck surgery at Stanford talking about magnesium supplementation to offset things like tinidis maybe a bit but also protect against hearing loss etc etc and then it's going to be like magnesium everyone should be taking magnesium and then you know what'll happen someow you know it's only an 11% difference in this population etc etc I think this is one moment where revisiting just very briefly the data on alcohol is worthwhile it's been so many years of alcohol isn't a problem then alcohol is actually good for you one or two drinks a night. As long as it's red wine, then it's bad for you. And then recently it was no, it's actually not that bad for you. And then now finally Stanford, Keith Humphre and and colleagues at Stanford did an analysis of all those previous papers and essentially found that the control groups in those studies that concluded moderate drinking is good for you were completely off. They were they were comparing sick people to less sick people in one case. And it turns out that when you when you normalize for the for proper controls and you look at all the studies, you do the meta analysis without fail. Zero is better than any one or two per week, you're probably fine. Still do all the things that you're supposed to to promote your health. Moderate drinking is bad for you in terms of elevating cancer risk. Certainly disrupting sleep and microbiome and a bunch of other things that aren't good. If you want to drink, drink. But we are now landed squarely in zero is better than any. And those aren't my data. Those are data from the best people for analyzing the large scale studies, the smaller studies across the board. And that I can refer you to the the the analysis of the analysis. It's quite solid. >> That Lancet article, that Lancet study from what 2016 17. So, I the reason that my company in the UK is called Six Month Sober Limited is because the first thing that I ever did before I even launched the podcast was I was like, elective sobriety as somebody who didn't have a um drinking problem was so [ __ ] beneficial to me as a productivity strategy as a guy in his 20s that because Northeast of the UK club promoter stopping drinking was [ __ ] revolutionary a decade ago. like wiied. Oh my god. Like he's crazy. It's like the you know Brian Johnson [ __ ] penis injections like the Ben Greenfield crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like oh my god like why are you doing this thing? Uh now you know Lo and No is very sort of common >> and I was like I want to get other people to do this. I think that would be cool. And I was like if I can teach people to go sober for 6 months that would be [ __ ] sick. Uh, and instead of registering it as like Modern Wisdom Limited before I did Modern Wisdom, I was like, I'll do I'll do six months sober and like I'll teach people that this is like real good for them. And I was I onetoone coached four people through I think six months of it to like test whether or not my approach had done. It was daily coaching and people would follow this course and do all the rest of it. But yeah, that Lancet thing was like the my foundational uh scientific justification, but it's like okay, these are all of the reasons that the outcome is good. As you said, it's like just do the thing and see if you feel better. Like do do push your caffeine by 90 minutes and tell me if you don't have a crash later that day. Like easy experiment. >> I don't need to explain to you the mechanism if you can get the outcome that you're looking for. The same thing is I learned from you. What is it? Um a a locomotion with lateral eye movement on a morning walk downregulates anxiety >> big time. And not if you're looking at your phone. >> I'd been doing that. I'd been doing morning walk thing from maybe Mark Bell's like postprandial thing for >> as long as I can remember. Right. Like my >> Stan Efering has been big on this. >> Yeah. My total like obsessive bro era when I had this ridiculously convoluted morning routine which like escape velocity me out of being the adult infant I was as a club promoter and like I'll do meditation and blood of gratitude and all the rest of [ __ ] And I was like if I wake up and I'm on the wrong side of the bed and I go for a walk and I come back like [ __ ] doesn't feel as hard as it did before. So, I didn't need you to tell me that it's because of the locomotion and the passage of stuff moving past you as your focal point stays the same and the lateral eye movement down. I'm like, I didn't. It's great that I now know the mechanism as you said earlier on because it sort of justifies the buy in. I have this sort of odd kind of investment and I'm almost more the fact that I found it myself then it gets justified by the science. I'm like [ __ ] yes. Like I >> Well, I think there's an interaction there. Look, I I mean the placebo effect is very real. The mechanism underlying what you're describing also very real independent of placebo effect. I think that what I'm referring to is the buyin of people understanding a bit of underlying mechanism for the things that clearly work. Like, do you need to understand that there are three forms of of a stimulus for hypertrophy, you know, damage to the muscle, >> hypertrophy? Yeah. Do you need to do? No. But can it inform better choices about training? Yes. Do you need to understand what those are in order to uh to grow a particular muscle group? No. But if you understand a bit of what's likely happening under the hood, it affords you tremendous flexibility. It's also, look, I also believe that knowledge and gaining knowledge, not only learning, but learning and doing is what humans thrive on. I I'm believe in the pursuit of knowledge, in learning. I mean, a lot of my podcast content, like I'd love to tell you the protocol for this, but it's actually just really effing cool. And if you don't think it's cool, that's okay. which is why you do your essentials thing, right? Which is kind of the stripped back >> protocols only critical science protocols only. But what you'll find is that >> people who do the buy in of learning a little bit about how something works. Hopefully they learn something about cortisol and sunlight and these kinds of things. >> It starts to make sense as to why you actually feel better when you you feel more energized. It's not it's not a placebo effect. What you're explaining is why it's not a placebo effect. That's a good So yeah, so you get more buy in. What I think is for me is cool and you you said it earlier on is if you know why this thing works. You can be a little bit more robust and flexible with how your strategy uh goes. You're not just do this thing. If you don't know why you do the thing or what the mechanism is even at a very basic level, as soon as you don't do that precise thing, you have no [ __ ] idea what you're doing. >> Or when things don't seem to go so right. So, for instance, if you exercise late in the late in the day and then the next morning you're like, I'm feeling sluggish. Like, is there something? No, actually, you had a cortisol bump last night. It's a negative feedback loop. Your cortisol is naturally suppressed. Get a bit more sunlight. The mechanisms, excuse me, the the protocols start to bridge together. What to do in case A, B, C, or D because you understand the the principle below it, which is cortisol at one time impacts cortisol at another time through this thing called the negative feedback loop. What Josh Weightkin, the great Josh Weightkin of, you know, >> I love that episode. Dude, I text >> you guys should sit down and have a conversation. >> I had to text you about it. I was like, "This guy, me and George, my housemate. Uh, I like have obsessed over Josh, the art of learning." Um, >> he's got another book in in progress. I I'm going to connect you guys cuz you guys would hit it off. I [ __ ] love it so well. He comes to the States pretty often. He lives out of out of Yeah. He moved down to the jungle at one point, but he talks about knowing like the principles below the principles. >> Yeah. >> Or underneath the principles. So the principles underneath the principles tie >> then being a practitioner as well of some of those principles, right? And then being connected to people in your field and related fields that deeply understand a stack of principles as well. >> That's what expertise really is. And this is why, and I'm not taking a dig at doctors, but this is why, listen, recently I had a weird medical thing. I took a new prescription drug because somebody said, then I had what I thought was a vestibular thing. Turns out it was low blood pressure. was diagnosed in one moment by a superb physician. By that afternoon, I was fine. But I could have just chased gone down the rabbit hole of I was getting all sorts of crazy suggestions about what to do. The look, just like they say in music, sport, I'll say it for podcasting and in medicine and science. There are levels to this [ __ ] Some people are way better because they have principles understood and underneath those principles are understood underneath they understand how they connect up and connect down and they know people that it's it's one thing for a physician to say this will handle your cholesterol. But more often than not, what a physician in one siloed aspect of medicine will suggest will create a side effect that will create a a job someday for another physician in a different silo. And it's just the way the training is done. And Fagen Bomb would say this is also the way that drugs are categorized. You know, this drug is for this, this, and this, and therefore nothing else. And you say, wait, no, that drug could potentially cure or treat many other things. And so he's exploring that in a serious way. And so, and and getting results, curing disease, literally. So, >> I think it's not to say that people with degrees are idiots. It's that let's hope not, right? I I spent a lot of time getting degrees. It's that just having degrees in some cases not always are necessary but not sufficient but most what is absolutely necessary and sufficient is to understand the major principles the principles below those and how those connect and then to be able to contact people and to talk to people and to be a practitioner like I it's very clear to me that your training as a nightclub owner >> informed you so strongly about human nature also about biology and not just because you were staying up late and sleeping into the day but that those the the the themes of what you experienced and learned are carried forward in the themes of every discussion that you have. And that's what being a real expert is. This is why Derek from More Plates More Dates love him. The first time I saw I was like, "What's this guy? What's this guy's credentials?" The guy's credentials are he's an he's what he's an actual expert, a true intellectual and a true expert practitioner. Understand something at every level of granularity. >> And [clears throat] Derek is a really good example. great example of uh uh like sufficient uh necessary but not sufficient given that he's outside of academia like he's not doing >> the academics are now going to him. >> Yeah. Watch Peter Tia who's a physician trained at Stanford and Johns Hopkins asking Derek about hormone holding each other holding each other >> and Peter is a super smart guy and he has his expertise and so what you saw there was people who have different stacks of principles connecting >> so cool I All right I I got to ask you this um you mentioned protein kind of the or at least it's >> vitamin D creatine uh vitamin D protein creatine I think it's going to be magnesium >> but what about diet and if I was to put my little bet down >> from what I'm the whispers, as Rick Rubin would say, that I'm hearing fiber. I think like the push toward fiber because it's kind of been the forgotten element of diet. I think that that I'm beginning to hear an awful lot more about that. I think in a in a nuanced way, I hope because here's the deal. I had Mike Snder, our former chair or maybe still current chair of genetics at at Stanford. He talked about blood sugar regulation. Incredibly smart guy. He's really into biomarkers and he's almost 80. You got to look at it. He looks like he's like 55. Incredible. Incredible health. And he and I were discussing that fiber, certain forms of fiber [clears throat] cause inflammation in some people. Why a lot of people say they can't eat a lot of vegetables and this kind of thing. Some fibers inflame the gut and body of certain people. Other fibers do the opposite. Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher Gardner ran a study looking at low sugar fermented foods versus fiber effect on the gut microbiome. The outcome was very clear. Eating low sugar fermented foods decreases the so-called uh inflamm they call it as opposed to genome etc. Proteom. Okay. So reduces inflammation bodywide. So eat low sugar fermented foods. Sauerkraut, the brine, kimchi, beer doesn't quite count. >> Kefir, >> what's that? >> Keir, these sorts of things. Yeah. So people can pick their favorite ones. I'm not a big kimchi fan only because it's it's cut too coarse. If they would shred it, I would like it, but it's like the I have a hard time chewing it. Maybe. >> Dude, cafe Cafe is Cafe is the hack for this. >> Cavier is great. Uh I love the full fat Bulgarian yogurt. I listen, I love Greek food, but Bulgarian yogurt makes makes uh >> You're a Bulgarian supremacist when it comes to the yogurt world. >> Careful. You call me a Bulgarian supremacist. It'll be [laughter] um the Bulgarian people seem like very nice people. I've known a few. Um but the point was that it Low sugar fermented foods reduce inflammation. They support the gut microbiome in a major way. The fiber group was divided. Some people who intentionally ingested more fiber had reduced so-called inflammatory markers, inflammation, and they looked at a lot of markers. The other half had greatly increased inflammation. This is why I think people like Paul Saladino and um forgive me what's the the original carnivore MD um uh big guy. Forgive me. Oh, darn it. He's been on Rogan. He's he's big jack dude. >> [ __ ] He could be anybody. >> He's just always eating a steak. >> Okay. >> Oh, forgive me. I >> [ __ ] Okay. >> Okay. Anyway, shout out to him. I think I think >> Sean Dr. Shawn Baker when they talk about vegetables causing inflammation, right? I think some people do experience inflammation from vegetables. I think look so I think fiber is going to make a big comeback but we're going to have to discern between what and uh Mike Snder really understands this best certain types of fiber are going to help people and harm others harm in the gentle sense you know increase inflammation which could be severe for some people autoimmune conditions etc other forms of fiber are going to be beneficial I don't think there are any I don't think there are any uh specific forms of fiber that everyone is going to tolerate well so this is going to be an issue if fiber is the next thing. I do think fiber is critical. Um I eat sauerkraut every day. I drink the brine off the sauerkraut. I actually drink the brine, then I put water back in it, add some salt, put it back in the fridge cuz I just like that after I go for a run or work out. It's just delicious, right? It's delicious. And also, if you go buy these fermented brines as a as a product, they're outrageously expensive. And you're supposed to have like this much. Okay? I'm a grown man. I'm not going to have this much of anything. Okay? Certainly not food or drink. when I'm have like a thimbles full of of brine. It's like, no, I want to drink the whole thing. Like, come on. So, you know, and it it greatly supports the gut and the healthy bacteria thrive in that environment. So, yes, I think this is the way it's going to go. If I were to say, okay, like what other things? Um, >> you know, melaton, we didn't talk about melatonin, which I'm not a huge fan of as you know, but melatonin had a run a long time ago. It's like a hormone in a supplement form and people were just downing this stuff. It's amazing it ever broke through. I mean, you can get 50 milligram, 20 milligram. >> It's crazy. And it's it and people will fight me all day on this and I'll fight right back um until they quit because it there are amazing animal data showing that it can suppress the the hypothalamic gonad axis like >> doesn't delay [clears throat] puberty in Yes. >> adolescence. Yes. And and it's also true that there's melatonin in all the cells of your body that are not light that are not suppressed by light but rather stimulated by light acts as an antioxidant. You don't want to be taking large amounts of melatonin in supplement form. maybe a tiny bit every once in a while. I was told uh not a little recently that after a flight a 5 milligram dose of melatonin was good and I was like what what yeah it's [ __ ] tons because 1 milligram is like pretty much bottom of the U of effectiveness right and then you get get over into more like [ __ ] going on and I'm like 5 milligrams why and that was the reason oh well you've been exposed uh when you're flying typically you've been in a little bit of a dangerous environment inflammation anti like antioxidant I'm like But is melatonin like the tip of the spear of the antioxidant world? >> I mean, it's a it's a player. I mean, as long as we're on this, I think that something that's not a supplement, but is likely going to and hopefully going to be in the main frame of discussion is that it's clear that long wavelength light, red light from sunlight, infrared, near infrared light is beneficial for us, right? It's low energy, but it can pass into our body. It does support mitochondrial health. It charges the mitochondria. I recently learned that the water surrounding the mitochondria actually absorb the red light the same way the ocean absorbs red light and that's why the ocean appears blue reflect. >> They're like little mini oceans. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you know the mitochondria were essentially got in they're back originated as bacteria that got into ukareotic cells. >> No way. >> Yeah. They have their own little genome. Yeah. They were initially not part of us. Some distant version of us. I >> I got to interject here. Just hold like keep that in your mind. No. >> Do you know how you inherit mitochondria? >> Through through mom. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. She's the >> How [ __ ] wild is that? >> Well, you want to know what you like the You seem to um I can >> sex >> to be Well, you seem to like sex differ. You're hyperfocused on mating and reproduction. So, let me um You should have kids, man. >> I can't wait. I'm ready. >> Kids are Well, you know, the two things. one one of the the only challenges I have with having you as a friend is that I have to constantly uh tell women in my direct messages that I'm not going to relay messages to you. Coming here today, I had several people [laughter] not the most. Anyway, a lot of women try to get uh to you through me. Um okay, the the second thing is in terms of of sex differences. >> What were we talking about here? >> Uh that uh your [ __ ] mitochondria comes >> Yes. Sorry. different different brain circuit turned on there. Um >> there's something now happening in England. Okay, this has been approved for mitochondrial diseases. So there are people who have mitochondrial diseases and they want to have children, right? And so they you know they don't want to pass along these mitochondrial diseases. The when the egg is fertilized the sort of splitting of of the egg into you know multiple cell types that forms the blastois which just means balls of a ball of cells which just be you know is the early embryo etc. it the mitochondrial DNA are intensely important for the physical pulling apart the spindles and things that pull those apart they come from mom okay so it's actually been solved that you can do three parent IVF >> to bypass but this is now being done so think about it as women age right and their ovarian reserve declines right so does the the quote unquote quality of the eggs we talk about quality of sperm because this is a definitely plays a role in terms of what are called day three crashes. You know, when the embryo doesn't get doesn't even become a blastois, it doesn't get past day three. That's typically attributed to the sperm. But a a lot of the process is coming from the spindle and therefore the mitochondrial DNA of mom. So there's now a process where you get two parents and let's say the woman has let's say she has a mitochondrial issue um genetic issue she doesn't want to pass on or let's say that she's you know in her um late 40s or early 50s or maybe even mid-50s. They can take eggs, presumably presuming she still makes eggs, take the nuclear DNA, put it into the essentially an egg that's had its nuclear DNA taken out but maintains its mitochondrial DNA and then fertilize with the milker obviously with the sperm from the from the father. You end up with a child that has the nuclear DNA of the intended mom and has essentially surrogate mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplas. cuz this is so [ __ ] >> that's actually being done. Okay, that's that was being done actually fairly often in from what I understand in Ukraine prior to the war. There were people in the United States traveling there. It's not legal here. >> They do it, I believe, in in some places in the Middle East in Mexico and certainly in England for mito for mitochondrial disease. >> So, this has been done. It works, but it brings up all sorts of interesting ethical considerations. >> Who is this child? Well, the child has the nuclear DNA of one mom and the and the mitochondrial DNA of a different mom. >> Dude, this is so sick. Yeah, I only learned about the uh mitochondrial only comes from mom thing like three months ago and I kind of not really been able to stop thinking about it. The reason is >> when you look at somebody and I'm going to use Kanye West as my example for this. Didn't think I was going to go there. >> You really want this podcast flag. We might as well invite Lex and Kanye in >> a sit down. Um, what I think about and this I total like the most bro science that we've done today is if you have a person who has the mitochondrial function of a [ __ ] V12 engine in a garage, mitochondrial function of a V12 engine, but the psychological chassis of a Honda Civic. you have this sort of crazy out there energy, but you don't necessarily have the handling to be able to sort of direct it. >> You described a lot of of teenagers and early 20s males. >> Well, yeah, of course. >> Especially where I went to school in Santa Barbara. >> Yeah. With the testosterone pumping. Um, but I just I thought about that when you go, okay, well, you've got this combining of psychological profile, but this almost uniheritability when it comes to mitochondria. Apparently, it's like 99 something%. M >> is [clears throat] that and I don't know if the other percent comes from the father or if it's like some weird like m I don't understand um what was it mito something I did a mitochondrial test um so I've sent off a bunch of cheek swabs which will be cool I'll get to see those when I come back home anyway I I just thought about mum could be like this powerhouse or the opposite you could have uh quite a low uh mitochondria function however that presents energy disposition all the rest of it but kind of the psychological predisposition of somebody that's like a [ __ ] hard charging go-getter, lots of conscientiousness, industrious, highly disagreeable, low politeness, all this stuff. I thought I just thought it was real interesting about how those combine. >> Well, you're still going to get it. Absolutely. You're still going to get genomic DNA from mom, right? You know, um those 23 chromosomes. I mean, you're going to get genomic DNA from mom and from dad. What's really a mindbend, no pun intended, is there's a woman whose laboratory is at Harvard um named Katherine Doolock who's a luminary in the field of neuroscience who uh did some beautiful experiments showing that different brain areas are genetically identical to mom or to dad. Even in you and me, you have entire brain areas that are 100% the genes from dad. It's not it's a myth that every cell is a is a 50-50 mix of genes from mom. >> Wow. >> Independent of the mitochondrial DNA piece, right? We're talking about genomic DNA. In fact, they did some marking studies and you could actually well, you see this two ways. You can do it if you mark the cells and you know, blue ones are mom and you know, etc. They do those kind of the studies. The more um convincing studies, of course, are where you have genes that are passed specifically through the Y chromosome, right? And you can actually either postmortem or in terms of the requirements of of having a gene present in a given brain structure, you can realize that you have brains where a given brain area carries the disease mutation and another brain area doesn't >> and even though it all came through dad on the Y chromosome, it should be everywhere. But it's not because you have some structures that are essentially purely xaxis domains that >> and they correspond to entire brain structures that drive of all things hypothalamic fat function. There's there's a condition of hyperphasia of of like um very obese kids they can't stop eating. This kind of thing comes through I forget if it's mom or dad. So these things show up in the human genetics. Um I mean human genetics is often more complicated than we think about in terms of mandelian genetics. You can get hypomorphs where you have kind of reduced gene expression as opposed to just lacking a gene completely. This exists and we could talk about this for hours, but um so when people say see an attribute and they say, "Oh, that you clearly got that from your mom or from your dad." That's actually could be true, >> right? That they're much more like their dad in certain ways and much like more like their mom in certain ways based because we're never going to know, but their brain is >> entirely actually separated out. Yeah, >> it very well could be. It's gonna be fun when your kids play with my kids and we can, you know, Lex Lex, that's you. That's >> Lex and I have this play. Well, we're not gonna have kids together. I don't want to give people the wrong impression. What I was referring to is the fact that Lex and I always have this discussion about timing uh the the delivery of our independently generated kids um >> so that they can grow up together. >> Well, he wants my he wants his kids to beat up my kids in jiu-jitsu. Okay. Uh I I have more a theory about um enrichment of uh sort of the engineering uh offspring versus the nurse. >> You're much more pro pro-social than him. He's very competitive in this regard. I see. >> Yeah. I I mean I'm competitive in certain things, but but mo mostly my >> trying to compensate for >> my interests are so you are so like uh some I don't really find many people looking at my collection of interests in an overlapping way. >> I'm going to beat him at octopus. the octopus training or whatever it is. >> Well, the octopus raising community is a little people are a little guarded, but um so so as a as a it's a whole thing, man. It's a whole different podcast, whole thing. But I did want to ask you something. Um I want to make sure. So you put out this video about your health journey or I guess it's your sickness journey and seek in search of you seem really good. Mhm. >> Um, can I wager a hypothesis >> cuz I've experienced this myself at at one point. Do you think that at some point, >> sounds like I'm leading the witness, but that it's possible to like that in pursuit of recovering one's health that along the way, cuz I've done this, you do something or take something that layers in another health thing that makes the like direction increasingly confusing. Like I took this on the suggestion of some conventional doc recently. I decided to try and knock down my apo a bit. It's a little high >> and it created a whole set of gallbladder issues for a couple days. I stopped taking it. I feel fine again and I probably don't need to take it in the first place. >> So I believe medications work. I think they can be very useful. I also think that some of them work so well >> that they can drive the system in directions we don't want to go. And so when I hear about these blood cleansing methods >> or I hear, you know, I I worry as as your friend, I worry a little bit that um listen, I don't want you to struggle with the symptoms of limes, but I do worry a little bit because these things are really extreme. >> Yeah. Okay. So, the health documentary that we put out, which is, you know, uh, episode one, the reason that I did that was I'd assumed at the start of last year, the day that I got the diagnosis, I knew that something was up. I knew that I was tired all the time. I knew that I wasn't recovered no matter how long I slept. I knew that I had brain fog and I knew that my mood was low. I'm like, uh, you know, maybe this is just getting older. Maybe it's something whatever. And uh the day that I started filming with my videographer was the day that I got a hey we've done an EKO test on your stool and it turns out that there's a line. We don't know if it's IGG or IGN. We don't know how prevalent it is when you got it. Don't know if it's Bella. >> It could have been way back when you got some almost certainly was vestigial. Um all of the stuff all of the basic [ __ ] that wasn't exciting I did right. I did >> doxycycline. >> Yeah. Doxycycline minyc like all of the usual treatments. This was not me jumping straight to going to Tijuana to have an intrajugular line put in and me live in a hospital. It wasn't me going straight to Vienna to get a a [ __ ] hypothermia treatment like teaser about what the next episode is. Um, it wasn't me going straight to those. I'd gone through all of the standard. It's Gabrielle Lion that's looking after me. She's and she is as like great physician western by the book as you're going to get, but she's just a bit more like integrative than most people would be. So, we're trying to make changes to diet and we're trying to make changes to Well, my training had to get backed off from like 10 out of 10 to 6 out of 10 for a while. And oh, well, maybe we need to do and then I had a [ __ ] um a migraine with aura that I thought was a stroke. I thought I was having a stroke. So, have you ever had a migraine with aura? >> No. >> Okay. You know what they are? >> It's like a ring. >> So, some people get it visually, but other people get it all and I get it all. So, I'm on an assault bike doing Norwegian 4x4. [ __ ] Ronda Patrick. And uh I'm my heart rate's coming back down. It's a minute 165, 165, something like that. And it's coming back down. And like it was as if someone shoved a piece of burning toast under my nose. Like that was all I could smell. >> That worries me because normally when somebody gets the sort of phantom smell of burning toast, we worry about temporal lobe seizures. And and and >> so immediately I go immediately. That's why I thought I'm like this is how I die. I die on an assault bike in on it gym Austin, Texas. This is how I [ __ ] got Yeah, but I was doing super badass, but it's it's it's in the right. >> Is that how I got I got taken out. >> You weren't just like on social media. >> That's true. So anyway, I immediately go and get a CT scan. No, it's not. I go in to get a what is it? A a transient eskeemic attack. TIA. Yeah. I'm like, we go and do another one with contrast. So now I've got [ __ ] gatalinium in me and I'm going to have to like detox the gal. >> You're giving people creatine after TAS now. >> It doesn't surprise me. neuroprotective any so like the amount of [ __ ] that wasn't included in that vlog that I went through like hundreds of sauna sessions with colostyamine or char like charcoal body wash as a binder to try and like get the mold out of me and >> so what you had mold and lime >> oh the litany of things mold >> I mean I saw that in the video but the mold was confirmed >> mold mold was through the roof I've done uh who does total tox can't remember who does the test anybody that's got it uh total tox is kind of the gold standard test >> we're going to need keate our metals after being in this garage. >> That's true. >> Smells like bumper in there. >> Heavy metals are in there. BPA are in there. But I mean, the the the >> the problem is, and I said this in the in the dock, if you do a huge battery of tests, loads of shit's going to come back and be out of whack. But if you don't feel bad, it doesn't matter. >> Yeah. If you have antibodies to chocolate or strawberries or you probably developed those as a kid, and I love >> dark chocolate and strawberries, but I'm sure I make antibodies to them. That doesn't mean I have a food allergy. >> Yeah. Right. So you if you do a lot of tests, stuff's going to come back and what you're doing is you're basically like a guess who Sherlock Holmesing your way through a list of potential suspects for why you don't feel good. And one of the problems that I found and have found since the doc came out, even though lots of people, especially people from like the MCFS community, chronic fatigue syndrome stuff, I had tinitus for a long while. Like that that community was like, "Fuck, like somebody is talking about this and they're saying it's kind of a silent like suffering that nobody really appreciates." And this was met at least in large part by people going Chris looks fine. This is all psychosmatic. It's in his head. It's because he's pushing himself too hard. it's because of blah blah blah. >> That makes it worse, right? And and I'm certainly not suggesting that. I mean, I think you're doing an important public health service by talking about these things. Um, you know, I think I'm hearing more and more lately from >> people, young men who took drugs for to avoid hair loss, post finansteride syndrome. >> You know, the medical [clears throat] community, the standard medical community thinks it's it's nonsense. But you talk to these guys that are having [clears throat] serious and at least till now permanent. Hopefully some of this stuff can be reversed. Sexual sexual health issues, psychological issues. I mean, it's cratered the lives of a lot of young guys. And there's actually a scientist out at a scientist physician out in Florida who I I may end up posting on the podcast. There needs to be more discussion about these things. I always thought that you could kill lime with high dose or just long last long duration doxycycline treatment. [clears throat] And you found it it helped or didn't help? >> Yeah, it it's it helped. But there's just when you start to get deep into these things called fish tests. You do a fish test for it. Um and I'm working with like Dr. >> like fluorescent in C2 hybridization. Yeah. >> Yeah. There's this uh Dr. Caren who is German guy who's like the number one on the planet. Matt Cook out of uh San Francisco, San Jose is the guy that's leading this like more name >> forward thinking. He does like he does a lot of stuff forward thinking sports medicine doc who's now doing peptide stuff and um just not quite right and not quite fixed. All of that is to be said I got inverse pretty privilege which is you look fine on the outside. You're in good condition. You're a young dude that seems to still be performing at an okay level. But it's kind of the same as saying to Usain Bold, "Oh, you ran a sub 10, you must be great." It's like, yeah, but I should be running like 9 954s or 95s and I know where I'm supposed to be at and I know where I want to be at and I don't want to like surrender to entropy in this way and just accept a lower standard of living for myself. And that was the the main thing I wanted to people people to take away was like there are so many people who don't have the inclination, the time or the resources like I do to be able to text you or a tear or [ __ ] Rhonda or whoever I want or or or Matt Cook or fly to take time off to go to Mexico or do all of this [ __ ] that are just like this is life now. This is my life now. Yeah, I'm just a bit more forgetful. I don't think I used to be that forgetful. Yeah, I fall asleep at 8 p.m. I don't think I used to fall asleep at 8 p.m. Yeah, like my mood's a little bit low, but maybe it's just because of and it's explained away and explained away and explained away by lifestyle, environment, psychological disposition, aging, something. And you're like, oh no, you there are chronic underlying infections that you've got >> and to treat them is so [ __ ] complex and so expensive. But the mold was the co COVID and mold were the two things that really [ __ ] pushed me over the edge. And then when you get into autoimmune, all you need for autoimmune is genetic predisposition, permeable gut lining, and environmental stressor. And if you live in a house with mold for two years, like I challenge anybody that's got those two to do the third and not get [ __ ] by. >> Is it true that that mold um is a prominent issue in Austin? I hear this. >> It's one of the highest Texas is one of the highest uh states for in the country. Is it the the you know hot humid days and for some reason this country decides your country >> decides that it's going to build houses out of wood. It's an organic material but while it's being built out of wood it's exposed to the elements. So it gets wet and hot and wet and hot and wet and hot and now the skeleton of the thing that you live in is has been wet and hot and now it gets covered in cladding while it's been wet and hot and sometimes it's wet as it gets cold. >> Yeah. I mean home design is something I I think a lot about from the lighting perspective. We didn't get into it, but like, you know, we hear so much about the benefits of red light, but, you know, long wavelength light can really offset some of the toxicity of of blue light, but it's not just about sleep. But, but going back to what you were just uh describing. Um, do me a favor. I'd love for you to talk to David Fagenbomb, who cured his own Castleman's through an intelligent approach of taking these already approved drugs to treat um, Castleman's. I mean, he cured himself. He's alive 11 years now. He's got kids. He's married with kids. he was going to die like dead. But he has this um not for profofit every cure where they use AI and and hardcore scientific methods basically. I mean not to sound loose about the what exactly they do, but he's a serious scientist and physician to try and decode different diseases and and try different existing drugs to uh to cure them. So I think it'd be worth talking to him. He's very open-minded and he understands the medical profession and he understands that if the solution hasn't been handed to you yet, um it's because people aren't aware of it, but it's very likely that it does exist. >> Yeah. >> So, I think it'd be a good conversation for you. >> I like it. I mean, look, if if I was to track my journey, uh we were here in this location a little at a different angle about 14 months ago or so, I think. And uh just after that, September of last year and sort of spring of this year were the two worst times for health. Brain was so slippery. I was so forgetful. It was insane. It was like trying to think through mud. Like I love the agility of my own thoughts. And the fact that that was taken from me through, you know, no fault of my own. Like [ __ ] hell. Oh god. You you were too hard charging. I focus on sleep. I I'm in bed for like at least >> Yeah, you're a vigorous guy. I I don't buy the like you're just pushing too hard. I mean there are there are ways in which people push too hard but you're >> like you said you're you have a you know 12-cylinder engine that's you you built yourself that to that and you came into the world presumably with some forward center of mass I feeling like you were born started nursing finished nursing and got into the world and started doing stuff. >> Yeah. So, but that period, the last time that we were here, you can even go back and watch the vlog from after we've recorded and I think I finish up with Eric and I'm outside and I'm like half asleep falling asleep on this couch and uh it was if if I two and a half years ago were a 10 if that was Chris at where he's supposed to be. 14 months ago I was at a four or a five and then the start of this year and for much of the start of this year I was like a three or a four. I would say I'm up to now I swing between uh seven and an eight and the fact that I was able to do the live shows in New York and Toronto last week and I've got LA coming up and then Boston, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Nashville and like it feels like this color back in the world cuz it felt very grayscale for a long time. I mean, there's a it's I say it in the dock, but there was a day when I forgot how to tie my shoes. Like, I looked down at my feet and there were laces that were undone and I didn't know the combination to tie my laces in to be able to get them to be in a bow anymore. And I'm like, I've gone from that, which was like a three out of 10, to now I feel okay and there's some color in the world and I can have fun with my friends and I can [ __ ] send it like and I can stay out after 11:00 without fearing that the next day is going to be ruined or not drinking. I'm 37. Should I be should I be treating myself with that much [ __ ] fragility? No, I don't think >> probably. I mean, it's it's I mean, it's almost like you're describing a kind of having a sort of dementia for a while. It felt like Have you ever taken an anticolinergic? >> No. >> So, I took one. This is [clears throat] funny. Uh during >> I like to stimulate the conergic system. >> Well, what you should do, but if you >> I'm not a big nicotine guy, but every once in a while, >> if you have overactive bladder syndrome, um which I and a lot of men developed during COVID because we were right next to our bathroom and we had nothing else to do. So, we were drinking fluid and going to the bathroom and drinking fluid and going to the bathroom. And I was like, I found myself urinating more frequently when I didn't need to. And I'm like, prostate problem. Like, this is going to the doctor. I tell him and he laughs. So in the UK in like 2020 he laughs. I was like, "Is this funny to you or what?" And he was like, "You would not believe how many men I've seen over the last couple of months that have come in with this problem. My business partner at the time in the nightclub stuff, Darren comes around. We have a meeting. It's the first meeting we've had in ages after I ruptured my Achilles. So my foot's up on this thing. And while we're having this meeting, he drinks half a glass of water and it's still in the back of my mind, right? Because I've just gone to see my doctor that week." during the meeting an hour and a half. He goes to the bathroom three times and I'm like, >> "Mate, are you uh you finding yourself urinating more frequently than >> That's not just from sitting too much." Because certainly during the pandemic, there was a lot of sitting >> at a standing desk. >> Oh, yeah. >> Uh anyway, you've drained the little muscle in between the bladder and the urethra to be like the sensitivity that you're supposed to be at, which as a [ __ ] podcaster, right? Is one of the primary things you need to develop beyond your working memory is your bladder. If you're going to be a podcaster or a touring musician, you got to learn how to you gota you learn how to hold your piss. >> So, one of the things that they give you is an anticolinergic which gets that uh little sense of things. >> Then you probably feel like you're floating. >> It's horrible. I >> that's what they used to give uh I mean this was the whole thing of witches, you know, like that to give them the they would take it to uh give themselves the sensation of flying. This taps into the um muscerinic system different than the nicotine colonergic system. So nicotinic colonergic system, it's the stuff of muscle [clears throat] movement and contraction and focus and all the reason people take nicotine. The muscerinic stuff is what you took. Uh muscerinic agonists are going to give you a sensation that you're floating. Uh it's going to make your pupil make your pupils about this big, but you're relaxed. Normally if your pupils are big, you're more alert. You're going to feel dissociated. This is this was actually recreational witch drug use. >> Dude, it [ __ ] sucks. You can't remember [ __ ] anyway. It felt like that. And I remember I was I was talking to Michaela Peterson at the time and I was like, "I'm being forgetful and I've got this thing." And obviously she was experienced from dealing with her dad and she was like, "Taken any new medications recently?" And I was like, "Um, yeah, like I've taken 10 milligrams a day of this anticolinate." She was like, rings me immediately. She's like, "Stop taking that stuff right now." >> Prescription drugs work very well to to hit the mechanisms they're supposed to hit, which is why they blast radius. >> They often listen, some of them are great. Some of them create real problems. I mean, I'm Yeah, man. Anyway, >> so it sounds like things were just getting layered in and layered in >> and you're fighting through this stuff and yeah, you're right. As you try to treat one thing, maybe something else comes up like if there was H pylori, candida, SIBO, uh le pylori treatment. Yeah, >> that's like four different antibiotics. >> Correct. Ruthless. All timed with different sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence. >> And you're a hard driving guy. So the thing about autoimmune stuff is like a lot of men, women too, but u a lot of men who tell me like, "Oh, I'm like got this weird skin thing or these like, you know," and they freak out. It's cuz if you're the kind of person who can push and not get sick too often, often times it means that your immune system can really ramp up in parallel with your kind of levels of drive and activity. These the I don't get sick people who always end up getting sick sooner or later, but the just push push push push push, you get high levels of interlucans and things that you end up you know, essentially deploying so so much cortisol but also anti-inflammatory molecules, right? It's not just cortisol that you can start, you know, getting skin conditions because your immune system people get likened planis. You really want to get scared. Look up lychen planis is some scary photos like a moss. >> Well, they're like um you're right, but it's it's an autoimmune condition where the immune system because of stress and excessively long days, etc. excessive caffeine, push, push, push. People will get um it's almost like looks like bruising um on the wrists. They can get them on their genitals, on the tops of their feet. People get very, very scared and it's actually just they're pushing themselves too hard. Some relaxation. Look, I think humans can tolerate a ton of stress provide they get enough sleep at night and sleep. Well, >> let me give you this. >> But but what you're telling me is you you're looking down at your shoelaces. You don't recognize them as shoelaces. Even this is how I know I'm too sleepd deprived. When I used to pull allnighters and I'd work on grants and papers really late, I'd look at the word 'the' and I go, "That's misspelled. That has to be misspelled." Like I'm like, "It's time to go to sleep." That was my I mean, just to show you how >> unhealthy perhaps I was is that was my red lining when I when the word 'the' looked [laughter] looked like I'm not sure if that's spelled correctly. I'm like, I'm sleep deprived. >> I think I think I'm going too far. But yeah, dude. I I have come to believe that there is basically no such thing as being overworked, only under rested. And um I was resting. I was going to bed. I mean, I can even show you my [ __ ] whoop data. And Andy's got it. All the team have got it in terms of that. I was Dude, I was in bed. I'm not kidding you. I was in bed from 7:00 p.m. till 7:00 a.m. for like weeks, months at a time. I'm like, I'm dedicating. So, and I'd wake up having been asleep for all this time and I'm like, I'm so drained. And it's not. Anyway, I'm now moving between like if it's a really [ __ ] bad one like a six up to a seven and sometimes up to an eight. And dude, when it's an eight, like today's probably a seven and a half. I woke up this morning the I'm at the W in West Hollywood. I'm like surrounded by I saw a homeless guy literally pissing into a wine bottle this morning and I'm like, "Hey, what's going on? The sun's shining. [ __ ] shit." >> The sun's always shining. >> Go to a Dunkin Donut. We have a serious um homeless/mental/addicted uh people. >> The world just felt like color. I'm like, [ __ ] this is so good. It's back in technical. It honestly feels a little bit like I like I kind of got a second. It feels like I died a bit. Feels like me, who I am, kind of died. And and now I've been so gentle with myself this year. I've gone to bed early and I've restricted my diet and I haven't had any fun and I haven't really adventured and I've worked and I haven't got to do new stuff. If I've just tried to hold on, you know, my I used to have this I still do this really long end of year review. I had two goals for this year. Usually it'd be a li meditation practice, training, muscle gain, strength, all this stuff. Two goals for this year. Fix my health. Don't let the show drop. That was it. If I got to the end of the year and I hadn't [ __ ] the show and my health was fixed, I'm like that would be and as I come into land, you know, we've got a few months left in the year. I'm like, I think we might just sort of bring this into land there. So, it's been a real it's been a real sort of [ __ ] adventure that I wouldn't wish on anybody, especially the hopelessness. Having hope, expectation, that being dashed, that really uh that really sucks. Like, that's the hardest part. Um, that you think that things are going to change or be improved and then they don't and then you have to deal with the expectation and then the the the disappointment and the disappointment was the worst thing. But uh if nothing else in kind of Brian Johnson's on the show later this week, Brian, very few people want to be Brian, but appreciate some of the things that he's learned by the stuff that he's done. I'm like, dude, if I can tell you 20 different modalities that I think didn't move the needle and two that did that at least there's a bit of silver lining on the fact and now obviously I'm hopefully on the trajectory of being back to being better. >> Seems like sounds like it. I'm being hopeful. >> It feels it feels like that to me. And uh you know I did to sort of round it out I I did Pers Morgan show a couple of weeks ago and Michaela came on and was talking about dad and Jordan's having a really [ __ ] rough time. >> How he's doing >> super rough like just not good. The answer is not good. And she finished up with like um so we think it's because of mold and we think maybe because of this autoimmune but then we also think that it might be because of demons and like that was what she left the conversation with. And then Pier turns to me and he's like, "Chris, you're [snorts] real. Think it's the work of the devil?" And I'm like, "I Why do I have to clean up this?" Like, this is her claim. This >> just said, "Yes." >> Well, look, my point is I understand why because it feels so [ __ ] cosmically unfair after a while that you're like, "This has to be a [ __ ] curse." Like, this feels so much bigger and greater and more painful than it should be. Uh, I can only attribute this to like some karmic retribution that is owed to me for some past slight some something. And that's when you start to ask yourself, >> you mean excessively hard on I mean, whatever the reasons. Well, let me let me ask you a question. Um, I mean, we're on a podcast, but in all sincerity, how can I and your other friends support you? And since we're doing this as a podcast, I'll also say, how can the people who listen support you? I mean, like, but really, I mean, do you want them uh I mean, I'll be praying for you. I decide that. Do you want people to pray for you? Do you want um They will be, but do you want people to send you suggestions? Do you want people to not send you, you know, often times when when somebody's struggling like my or anyone's impulses be like, I'm like, talk to Fagan Mom, do this. you know, we we all want to do that, but but I hear it's it's clear this is like, you know, what started as lime has it's opening up all sorts of doors and cupboards and stuff in there. And um I mean, I as your friend, I caution you against exploring whether or not you did something in a past life or did I I think you're um my understanding of you is that you're sufficiently in touch with your mistakes and your uh good choices. >> Overly in touch with you. >> No, no, I don't think overly. I think you you you're a you're an introspective person and and flagagillating yourself is is certainly not going to help. But um yeah, how can how can um how can I support you? >> You do already, man. You know, I had a a close runin over this weekend, which we'll we'll see whether or not that ends up surfacing. Uh perhaps relevant to our conversation about what's going on with with mainstream media and how they are uh garnering momentum by attaching themselves to industries and platforms that have momentum. Very interesting that it never happens before there's any status associated with trying to unear >> imagine that >> something. Um, you are, dude. Like, I I really cherish our friendship. Like, the fact that I can tech, you're one text away from like giving me a [ __ ] essay. You even sent me, this is to break the fourth wall how good of a friend you are. You knew that I was like sad and worried this weekend. So, not only did you give me a ton of different bits of advice, you then decided to peel off to give me like a miniature novel about a black ferret who repopulated an entire like female colony of ferrets and this entire >> He saved the species. save the and I'm like >> you're like Scarface. You're going to save the species. >> I appreciate you. I appreciate all of the stuff that you do for me. That that that's it. Um >> I really do. I really cherish that friendship. Uh >> likewise. >> When does the book come out? People want to know. >> September 2026. >> Let's [ __ ] go, dude. 12 months later, we're going to be back here. I can't wait. >> Would love to. Um yeah, I delayed it to add some things, change some things, and do some illustrations. And um I apologize in a real way for the delay, but I I'll make it worth people's while. And um thanks for the kind words. I you're an amazing friend, you know. I mean, I've been so fortunate to be part of this colleague set that we called, you know, podcasters and the more or less same vintage of podcasters, although you got into it before me. Um, I will be praying for you and I also will do everything I can in terms of my connections and resources in the medical and scientific community to try and figure out what's going on. I do think you're on the on the recovery slope now and um and I'll be praying that that that continues and do anything to support you. You're a equally if not more amazing friend. How do you quantify these things? Right. And um it's such a pleasure to be in the same field, to call you a friend, and you're going to beat this [ __ ] thing. No doubt. >> Thank you, man. Until next time. Thank you very much for tuning in, and congratulations for not being so Tik Tok that you switched off partway through an episode. Uh if you enjoyed that with Hubman, you will love this one with Ronda Patrick. Come on.