Why You’re Tired, Unmotivated, and Unfocused - Dr. Andrew Huberman (4K)

there's been a lot of controversy over the last few months The Internet's been a blaze with speculation I think it's important to get it up top what is happening with the state of the adenosine system research within the first 90 minutes of the day adenosine is an incredibly interesting molecule it exists in the brain and body it accumulates with the number of hours that you're awake so the longer you're awake the more adenosine accumulates it does many things in the brain and body one of the most important things that it does is to give us the sub subjective experience of feeling sleepy and the objective feeling of our body being fatigued of feeling literally heavier requiring more energy to move ourselves when we sleep and when we allow ourselves to go into states of deep rest that are similar to sleep we can talk about this the adenosine system is adjusting so that there's less effective adenosine circulating or bound to adenosine receptors okay so this sort of adenosine 101 there's a lot more to it but that's sufficient for what we need to talk about for now the drug the most commonly used drug the drug we're using now and that we're on right now caffeine which is consumed by it's estimated more than 90% of the world's adult population effectively works by blocking the adenosine receptor there's some Nuance there but we can think of it that way for Simplicity sake and in doing so it prevents the sleepiness inducing actions of adenosine however when caffeine wears off the adenosine that was around trying to bind to those receptors is still around in fact it's accumulated even more which at least partially explains the so-called caffeine crash or the dip in energy the fatigue that is is that we experience maybe 3 or 4 hours after consuming caffeine okay as I mentioned before when we go to sleep at night adenosine is cleared from our system there was a lot of debate over the years about why we sleep in fact the great Matt Walker wrote the book why we sleep and a lot of that has to do with the cell biology of regulating pottassium and other ions that are in neurons and for those that are interested in the cell bio ology it's about readjusting the amount of potassium inside and outside the cells which is happening on an ongoing basis but you can think of the time that we sleep as doing many things but one of the most important things is to bring those adenosine levels down whatever adenosine has accumulated to bring it back down such that when we wake up in the morning we feel alert okay there are a lot of reasons why we feel alert some of them we can call Pro alertness mechanisms like the release of cortisol some of them are about removing the break on wakefulness like reducing adenosine here we're talking about removing the break on wakefulness by reducing adenosine so let's say like what time do you go to sleep at night typically if you add your way 10 o'cl 10:00 and what time do you typically wake up in feeling great with no alarm clock 6:30 6:45 great so let's say you go to sleep at 10:30 and you wake up at your usual time chances are you will have cleared a lot but not all the adenosine that's required for you to wake up feeling very alert let's say you stay up a little bit later maybe you stay up until 11: maybe you wake up twice that night to use the restroom for whatever reason you consumed a bit more fluid maybe it takes an extra 10 minutes for you to fall back asleep the second time and then you wake up in the morning and you didn't get the total amount of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep that you're used to getting without question your levels of adenosine upon waking are going to be slightly higher than they normally would KS once you understand what adenosine does you think about that scenario it's kind of an obvious thing however most people don't sleep until they naturally wake up feeling refreshed most people are using an alarm clock most people are not going to sleep as early as they need to or sleeping as late as they need to or both so as a consequence when you wake up in the morning your adenosine levels are not zeroed out to the place where you would be maximally awake there is a lot of or some residual adenosine present what do people typically do do typically people get out of bed might look at their phone as you know I encourage them to go find Sunlight if the sun isn't out to turn on bright lights and then get outside and get sunlight in their eyes as soon as they can but chances are they're going to grab some caffeine they're going to get pour themselves a cup of coffee or they're going to have some if you're me your bmate they're going to perhaps have an energy drink all fine and good but now think about what we just said which is that what you're doing then is blocking the adenosine receptors effectively and whatever residual adenosine was there because you didn't sleep enough to clear it out persists plus you're now starting to accumulate more adenosine such that by mid morning that adenosine has accumulated the caffeine has worn off and maybe by early afternoon especially after a meal many not all people experience an afternoon crash in energy somewhere between 1 p.m. typically and 400 p.m. somewhere in there for me the trough in my natural energy levels in the afternoon is consistently between 2: and 300 p.m. regardless of how well I slept the night before many people also find a consistently placed trough in their energy independent of all this okay so what can we do some years back I started suggesting that people consider if they have an afternoon crashing energy that they delay their morning caffeine intake for 90 minutes after waking some years after that an academic review was published saying well there's really no evidence that that specific practice is necessary but I still think and I stand by the fact that it can be very useful for those that experience an afternoon crash Why why well two things first of all by delaying caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking there's an interesting phenomenon whereby even though you are out of bed and walking around you're not asleep if you don't block those adenosine receptors there's still clearance of adenosine occurring in part because residual rest you're sort of still asleep the other thing that works remark well to clear out residual adenosine is upon waking if you don't feel rested enough to do something I've talked also a lot about which is another one of these zeroc cost tools that has a growing amount of impressive science to support it which is non-sleep deep rest or nsdr also called Yoga Nidra which is its proper name the ancient practice is Yoga Nidra so we want to be fair to its proper naming a 10 or 20 or 30 minute Yoga Nidra or nsdr if you prefer done a on waking but before getting out of bed or maybe you go into the living room and put on your headphones or listen to an nsdr script they're available all over the Internet done by me done by a woman named Kelly boy who has a really lovely voice if you prefer woman's voice it's actually the one I typically use you will emerge from that feeling much more rested now Dr Matt Walker himself and I are collaborating on a project to evaluate how nsdr impacts brain states to see if it actually mimics sleep there's some beautiful studies already published out of Scandinavia showing that longer yoga NRA type practices non-sleep deep rest can replenish dopamine stores in an area of the brain called the basil ganglia which prepares you for mental and physical action so this is a very wellestablished tool from the sort of yogic perspective it's a it's a tool that's gaining increasing scientific evidence and it for everybody I know that has tried this who reports back to me about it it's a remarkably energetically replenishing exercise that requires no payment no nothing just 10 20 or 30 minute nsdr now what could be happening in that state in that state the body is still the mind is active which mimics very closely rapid eye movement sleep so the test that Matt Walker and I are doing with the the experiment is to see is having your body completely still but your mind active able to clear adenosine stores in the same way that being deeply asleep is my guess is that it's not the same but that it might be a Midway effect that's the hypothesis we could be wrong I look forward to seeing the results so by delaying your caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking but making sure that you hydrate get your electrolytes you know something like element which we both um both enjoy and make good use of you are clearing out the adenosine that is residual in your system now why do I also keep harping on this idea of going out and getting bright light in your eyes ideally sunlight but if especially on cloudy days but if it's not out yet you can turn on Bright Lights well when one does that you actually amp simplify the naturally occurring peak in cortisol that occurs soon after waking so about 30 minutes before waking your cortisol starts to rise it's part of the mechanism that wakes you up without an alarm clock as soon as you get out of bed and you start moving around that cortisol increases further your body temperature by the way is increasing in parallel when you view bright light and these are very well established studies in humans as well as animal models but in humans when you view bright light 10,000 Lux indoor light if you're using a Seasonal effective disorder treatment lamp or getting outside even on a cloudy day and looking toward the sun looking East in the morning without sunglasses Eyeglasses and Contacts fine you induce a near 50% increase in the height of that cortisol Peak that might sound like a bad thing because everyone's afraid of cortisol but that's not a bad thing It prepares your day prepares you for a day where your immune system is bolstered your energy and alertness is bolstered and your ability to learn and your mood I maybe said mood twice forgive me it are bolstered and in addition to that there are interactions between light and the adenosine System Light impacts the functional availability of the adenosine receptor in very interesting ways light increases bright light that is viewed by the eyes increases the height of that cortisol Peak and then the cortisol Peak also helps to counteract the adenosine system now in addition to that when we get when you get sleepy at night part of that effect is due to the increase in melatonin which is released from the pineal gland a psz gland midw you sort of deep in the v vestages of your brain when you view bright light at night or during the day and especially in the morning it quashes those melatonin levels so when you wake up in the morning and you haven't slept enough or even if you have your adenosine levels are still not to zero your melatonin levels are still not not to zero and your cortisol is rising so you've got a Pro wakefulness System cortisol that you can accelerate or amplify rather by viewing bright light you've got a anti- wakefulness system in the form of melatonin and a Denine that are pushing back on your wakefulness you're in this kind of like grogginess and you can further suppress those systems without caffeine by viewing bright light so viewing bright light both increases the pro- wakefulness systems in the brain and body and suppresses the anti- wakefulness systems in the brain and body both an Exel pushing down on the accelerator of wakefulness and mood and alertness and reducing break right otherwise you're sort of trying to drive with the emergency break on then if 16 to 90 minutes later you ingest caffeine now you're blocking the adenosine receptor sure that's fine I love caffeine I certainly drink a lot of caffeine and and enjoy it for all its effects and you're now in a position where the the Arc of your wakefulness is going to be a nice concert with the also increase in adenosine that's naturally going to accumulate throughout the day and again there's no requirement to delay your caffeine 60 to 90 minutes after waking but for people that experience a market afternoon crash it's an incredibly effective way to offset partially or eliminate that afternoon crash that's pretty much everybody who doesn't get tired in the middle of the afternoon tell you what I've done with Joo willink doesn't get tired period ever do you think he's got that genetic mutation I don't know you know I went down to visit him after his podcast I actually did a sauna session with his family and some of their family friends and they had heard that I've been pushing the heat on the sauna a bit more and by the way I don't recommend this unless you're very heat adapted I'm not great at the cold I put my cold Plunge at about 48 45 degrees Rogan and other people make fun of me for this um Lex is Russian so he doesn't have to cold plunge he was born into the cold of Siberia um there's a photo of this actually on the internet I um from the time he was young they were cold conditioning him it's why he has such a warm heart um but in terms of the heat I can I'm pretty heat tolerant so I've been cranking my sauna traditional sauna to about 210 220 but um mostly 2 210 I went down there and Joo challenged me to what he calls the factory reset protocol which is 30 minutes at 2:25 brutal and it and we had about eight or nine bodies in that sauna so it was probably claustrophobic it was probably hotter than that I was the one guy down on the floor all the others was men and women were sitting up there laughing at me and I almost tapped out and then they do a five-minute cold plunge and they go back and forth three times I did one round with them so I don't recommend it because if you're not heat conditioned you can give yourself brain damage um by the way for people that don't know if you put a towel over your head or you wear one of these B hats it actually insulates your brain so you're able to stay in longer people think oh it must be must be that much warmer but you're actually insulating the brain from the heat so um yeah so Joo um you know he's obviously tough he's you know legitimately battle tested um you know and at the same time it's remarkable to me how much energy he has he finished dinner so we did the sauna we did a 4-Hour podcast then we um did the sauna cold thing I just described then we did dinner and then he went off to see a cromag show starting at like 10 o'clock and then the next morning of course he posted his watch so he does seem to have more energy or he just forces himself to ignore whatever fatigue chronically that seems so unlikely to be able to continue to do that just sheer will that it feels like your body would eventually come in perhaps I'm not accounting for the will of Joo but uh yeah there's what is it it's a very small number of people but there is a genetic mutation that allows certain cohorts to exist on between sort of three and five hours sleep and that's just where they're at yeah very rare probably they have very fast adenosine clearance systems viewed differently perhaps they don't accumulate as much adenosine during the day um someone test Joo get his blood get his I imagine that when you try and get him with the needle it just you know B I've talked about some of these before but the the comments on YouTube about jao are the best the uh like when jao was born the doctor looked at his um parents and said it's a man when he does a push-up he doesn't lift himself he pushes the world away right he doesn't do push-ups he does Earth Downs that's I've seen that one and uh there are a bunch of other ones that are that are really amusing he's the new he's the new Chuck Nar yeah but I think those guys are selected for the teams in part through their ability to you know cognitively and physically push aside fatigue I think for most people you know they need 6 to8 hours of sleep per night unless growing teen years battling some illness that sort of thing um you know if if ever you're TP you're used to going to sleep at 10 p.m. or something and suddenly at 7 pm you feel incredibly tired you're probably battling something and you should go to sleep um you know I I need about six to eight hours but the other night I got nine I rarely get nine felt like a superum yeah typically for me it's about 7 hours and then I do this 10 to 20 minute non-sleep deep rest on the drive over here I did a 10-minute non sleep have you ever seen that Meme where it talks about the different hours of sleep that you have and it's got a sort of a face of a guy and it's uh zero is sort of face is falling off one hour his face is falling off and it it really accurately represents exactly how it feels six hours face falling off 7 hours face falling off eight great but for some reason and I totally agree with this 2 hours the gu [ __ ] super human the dude's and I'm what is it about that period it just seems like maybe it's the 90minut like up and down it allows you to really align that one sleep cycle and you're like well okay I if you're sleeping two hours you know that you're going to feel like [ __ ] you know that this is just okay I'm in I'm in sort of War mode yeah um but thinking about the team's guys Joo and well sorry just J what I think you're seeing in that somebody sleeps just two hours every once in a while and feels really great you'll notice that they get um hyperverbal it's a mild form of mania before the crash no way oh yeah oh yeah and you know we don't talk about this terribly much because rapid eye movement sleep is critical for removing the emotional load of previous day and previous day memories and experiences but rapid I movement sleep has also been used as a clinical treatment for depression right which is kind of odd because one of the primary symptoms of depression is waking up at 300 or 4 in the morning and not being able to fall back asleep again so you know there's a there's a kind of a mystery in the relationship between sleep and mood but I think it's fair to say that on average you need to get sufficient amount of sleep for you and for most people that means 6 to eight hours plus or minus two hours right depending on your age and what else you're dealing with in life and I think it's also fair to say that if ever you had to stay up all night or you only get two hours of sleep um you will probably experience some sort of hyper Mania for you and then or hypo excuse me hypom Mania um talking a lot feeling really energetic and then boom you're going get smashed yeah and then it crack yeah I mean I've tracked my sleep in one form or another for a decade uh sleep cycle the app on mobile which really great by the way if anyone's sort of on the road and needs to use an alarm sleep cycle is fantastic if you play pay for the premium I'm not a I'm not a partner no way affiliated I just want to give it a try I've used that thing for a probably a decade um I'm not a a fan of using your phone as an alarm clock but if you're on the road you I've been in hotels a lot recently it's a a good it um automatically triggers recordings when you begin to snore when you begin to sleep uh speak in your sleep and you can play those back and it it just records them and puts them on the cloud for the rest of time uh so I have a couple of friends who have full sentences entire conversations a very well-known podcaster and previous guest of this show has entire debates in his sleep um people should post them we should do the Sleep the actual sleep trying to get him to put them online because they are so funny uh but I love sleep cycle and that's great I think I've averaged over a decade about 6 hours 45 of active sleep um but I was a club promoter for a long time that 6 hours 45 was closer to probably 6 and now 7:30 so I'm kind of splitting the difference from my previous life to my to my new one one of my favorite tweets from you is don't ask people how they are doing ask how they are sleeping you'll learn a lot more yeah you you get a window into you know what's really going on for them because because we have this throwaway response to how are you doing I'm like I'm okay or I'm great or yeah I'm fine when you ask how people are sleeping it speaks to a bunch of previous day and week experiences and how they're integrating all that um you know the mighty Rick Rubin always asks how are you feeling which I really love I'll get these like text like how are you feeling and I'm like that's interesting and I start respond you know responding forces you to think a little bit um you know when we are emotionally troubled we sleep less well obviously um I mean I feel like there are a lot of us myself included that would like to just um take a long nap until after this upcoming election three month nap I mean it's really important to see what's going on back and forth but sometimes it just feels so emotionally distracting and um I think I I definitely chart my sleep I use the tracker inside of eight sleep um you know uh have you got that new thing that lifts your head up I do cuz I I have a snoring issue I didn't know I had a snoring issue yeah I I mean it's not terrible but I um I didn't know I had a snoring issue and then I started using the the nose strips that helps me yeah but then I made the mistake of taking one of those off far too quickly and I had a nice like linear size strip remove my nose that was good um they can help they actually can really help because it reduced the percentage of my night that I was snoring from something like 22% down to like 11% based on what the eight sleep report was yeah but now with the the new eight sleep it tilts you up uhhuh and and that really helps that really helps intake make great nose strips so there's a a hard piece of plastic it's a molded piece of plastic and then you put two magnets either side of your nose pulling your nostril and this [ __ ] locks you in and then Alex hosi who has two deviated SE SE is that why he always wears that correct I was wondering why he wears it in the daytime he can't breathe really very well without it it's like ones a 100% blocked and the other's something else and um he's found some other thing that goes inside your nose and opens it out from there he says he can only use it two nights in a row or else it starts to sort of cut away at the inner lining of his good he's like those two nights really really good breathing yeah getting a lot of oxygen to your brain during sleep is part of part is part of the the optimal sleep routine it's just that sometimes the number of different things that one needs you know earplugs eye masks you know nose it can get to be a bit much whenever I'm on the road I notice the the most important thing for me in hotels is to try and um get a hotel where where the window faces East in the morning and the window opens I have this weird kind of uh morning anxiety if I can't get fresh air so you can always go downstairs and go outside but the little things make a big difference I think this is one of the things that's so Dreadful about being on a plane for many hours is that you can't it's all the you know the short wavelength light the blue light plus you can't open the window then you're in an airport then you're in an Uber and you really think about just how unhealthy that is so as I you know I'm 49 next month and um I feel pretty good uh probably haven't been getting as much sleep as I should have this last year but getting more fresh air just that simple I can't even call it a biohack right just getting more fresh air in sunshine has made an enormous difference in my nighttime sleep the sort of advice that your mom would have given you just get more fresh air yeah she used to kick us out of the house we come home we watching cartoons or something and then she just say like all right you're you're leaving like we're kick I'm kicking you out for her own peace of mind and then you know 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back right now you can get a 20% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic docomo wisdom using the code mw20 a checkout that's Nom matic.com wisdom and mw20 a checkout just sort of related to what we've spoken about there how can people become a morning person or learn to get up early more easily and more regularly yeah um three days of pain the rest is easy so it takes about three days to shift the biological mechanisms to uh make you a morning person now if you are a very strongly genetically determined Night Owl that's a thing that's a thing so there are genetic mutations they call them polymorphisms that makes some people night owls they feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about 1: 2 or 3:00 a.m. and waking up somewhere around you know 10 11 a.m. or noon that exists not just during development or teen years but that exists not just for social reasons other people are true morning people they feel absolutely best going to sleep around 8:00 p.m. or 900 p.m. 10: p.m. would be late for them and they feel great waking up at 4: 5 or 6:00 a.m. okay most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between 10: and midnight and waking up somewhere between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. or so maybe 5:30 to 8:00 a.m. okay so those are three bins of the Night Owl the morning person and then the more typical schedule but it's heavily weighted toward that typical schedule if you look at the general population so if somebody wants to get up earlier you need to stack the four primary what are called zeit gers or timekeepers so named because some of the early chronobiologists that discovered this stuff and the underlying mechanisms were German as it were so the number one zit Gaber the number one way to shift your circadian clock which is this cluster of neurons that sits a few centimeters above the roof of your mouth is to view bright light at a time when you want to be awake aka the morning okay so that's why I say get outside look at the sun toward the sun don't force yourself to stare at it don't damage your eyes blink as needed no sunglass gles eye glasses corrective lenses and contacts are absolutely fine even if they have UV protection okay however if you combine that with another zeit Gaber the second most powerful zeit Gaber is exercise or movement so if you do some jumping jacks you skip some rope or even just take a walk while facing the sun now you're starting to stack different zeit gers and I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment if you then also add caffeine now this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes a go but if you were to add caffeine you can entrain as it's called the circadian clock to be alert at that time a bit more and I'll be honest if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning I need caffeine I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes if I need to jump right into exercise I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking 3 hours after waking or 11 hours after waking and a lot of people find that the same but of course exercise when you can because it's that important but if you want to quote andquot optimize your energy levels for exercise typically people will notice that has to do with your time temperature Rhythm Okay so we've got sunlight we've got exercise or movement of any kind it could be jumping jacks could be walking you don't have to do a full workout and then caffeine and in some cases food I'm not big on eating first thing in the morning I don't like to eat until 11 a.m. or noon that's when my first meal arrives for me just naturally that's when I get hungry it's all caffeine and hydration prior to that but if you were to eat something first thing in the morning you that's part of the way you entrain your circadian clock to wake up to essentially wake you up earlier and then the fourth one is a social Rhythm if you're interacting with other people you're going to entrain your clock to that as well way yes so there's a socially there's a social component to circadian entrainment now the pathways for these are from the eye in the case of viewing light to the circadian clock the supermatic nucleus in the case of caffeine it's more General in the case of exercise there's literally a brain stem to circadian clock connection a big super highway of neuronal connection that then it so-called entrains your circadian clock remember your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24-hour Rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap it just is what would call free run it would drift a little later each day this is what happens when you go to Vegas this is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the day uh the sunlight uh rising and setting cycle sunlight exercise caffeine and eating and social interactions bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zit gers so when I said it takes three days if tomorrow you want to start beginning the process of becoming an early riser you'd set your alarm for 5:00 a.m. no matter what time you went to sleep the night before you're going to get up and you're going to do the four things that I described maybe leave out food if you don't want to eat maybe leave out caffeine if you want to delay by 90 minutes it's going to hurt and then by the early afternoon you'll be dragging a bit and you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine which will then cause you to fall asleep later then you want to go to sleep at your now naturally slightly earlier sleep time the next day you'll notice you'll it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine I just described and by the third day you ought to be waking up with or before the Alarm by a few minutes or moments because your circadian clock has phase shifted okay it's phase Advanced as we say your circadian clock intrinsic to you generates a 24.2 or a 24.3 hour Rhythm it's not perfectly 24 hours and that we believe we don't know but the just so story is that it's that it's such that that you're able to then shift that clock in in one or the other direction you can phase Advance you wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier you can phase delay how do you phase delay well you're probably doing this already everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not so strict criteria of shift work which is are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after 900 PM are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 9:30 p.m. most people would say yes so the the Diabolical thing about the Circadian Timing System is that it requires a lot of bright light ideally from sunlight but a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person but it requires just a little bit of bright light even from an artificial Source after the hours of about 9:30 p.m. till 4:00 a.m. to quash your melatonin make it difficult to sleep or if you sleep to make that sleep not as effective there's a simple remedy however which is and this is a beautiful study published in science reports in 2022 if you view sunlight in the afternoon even for five minutes or so could be late afternoon could be sunset take off your sunglasses look in the direction of the Sun so now looking West you adjust the sensitivity of your retina the neuron in the back of your eye such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to suppress melatone and it reduces the Melatonin suppressive Effects by about 50% or offsets those so I think of this afternoon viewing as well first of all it's nice to look at a sunset if you're indoors in an environment like this even if there are bright lights on get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets this is especially important in Winter even if you can't see the Sun as an object get some sunlight in your eyes and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night partially and I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation so that that night you can be on your phone or watch Netflix and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much but it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat but let's you know unless like Rick rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses I've started doing that as well um but if you don't do that you I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening um he's very attached to for good scientific reasons uh to the sunlight thing but these are little things that take just moments right they're essentially zero cost that can really improve your sleep but that's how you become a morning person if you want to become a night person you do the opposite you view bright light between the hours of 400 p.m. and 1000 p.m. and there then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way your circadian clock making you want to wake up later the next morning I wonder if dogs count as uh social interaction absolutely and they have all of the same mechanisms we just described so I'm just thinking how can we stack that everything first thing in the morning morning walk yeah you if you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high North dog y social interaction moving around and then caffeine if you do or if you don't if you don't want it but uh if you have a dog that likes to run you're even better off because it'll force you to run you're have to CH if you have an English bulldog like I did you'd be lucky if you get out of bed by little bit yeah you're in their eyes are droopy they don't and um uh they don't like to move but it is the case that dogs will naturally Orient toward the sun you know and people always ask you know do dogs have the same mechanisms absolutely intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangling cells the one that project to the clock and carry all of this um thing about circadian entrainment to sunlight are present as far as we know in every extent Mamon species every Mamon species that's that's alive today um and you know this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opson the light absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye it's a very primordial system it's organized very differently anatomically in the retina and to me it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in in all of us in fact the one thing that no one can seem to defeat you're never going to biohack away is circadian biology this this you know fluctu 24-hour fluctuation in energy and Focus you know some people require less sleep but we we're all um more or less a slave to these mechanisms and you know it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest neuroplasticity occurs during sleep it pushed down adenosine you know it takes us through these natural e and cycles of cognition I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep you know the conscious mind obviously is not in control the unconscious mind can geyser up thoughts the brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols time and space are very uh very organized very differently dreams and there's a lot of information to be gleaned from dreams it's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean the kind of classic Freudian yungan um interpretations are certainly not going to be complete but you know I I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep and I think thanks to the great Matt Walker We Now understand that the whole thing of I'll sleep when I'm dead is a really dumb mindset and you know my team at The huberman Lab podcast we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping you know when we're in the peak of things we all encourage each other to like get rest you know get rest like we really prioritize sleep it's so essential one of the best little cliches there which is too much of a generalization but I think works is there's no such thing as being overworked only underr rested I like that I like that a lot I also think that you know we know a lot about the different stages of sleep we know less about the different stages of wakefulness I've recently started embracing my natural cognitive and physical cycles and I've come to realize and I think Ed melette says he does this but he does it he thinks of his day as consisting of three days um which is Awesome from The productivity standpoint I noticed that also because I he mentioned these time blocks so I just want You' you've got a new daily routine yeah what's your routine yeah so I came to realize by observation right I didn't force this this so this is something I observed in myself which is that from 6 a.m. until noon my brain is very capable my body is very capable of doing certain things far more easily than at other times of the 24-hour cycle so I consider that sort of you the first phase of my day sometimes I'm up by six sometimes it's 7 sometimes it's 8 usually it's about 6 6:30 so I consider that one opportunity block the second opportunity block is between noon or because I eat lunch typically around noon between you know 1 and 6:00 p.m. or noon and 6:00 p.m. it's our second opportunity block and then the third is between 600 p.m. and bedtime which for me typically is 10:30 but sometimes late I'm half Argentine sometimes I go to bed at midnight and I just go I'll take a nap the next day I me you have to live I mean come on so what I started to realize is that I can do really focused work in two but not three of those blocks consistently I also noticed that if I exercise early in the first block like between 6:00 a.m. and before 9:00 a.m. I have more energy all day long this is what I observed experimentally on myself but if I exercise starting at 9 or starting at 10 sort of halfway through that block the second opportunity block is diminished I'm kind of dragging maybe it's related to when I eat but that wasn't changing when I eat or what I eat so I do think that people could benefit tremendously not necessarily by following the schedule that I follow but by paying attention to their natural cognitive and physical rhythms and so as a consequence what I now do is I take a look at the day like for instance this is afternoon we sat down together here at 1 I think we're probably somewhere around 2 pm I don't know somewhere around there but I realized okay I could work before I got here in this early day block or this evening what I chose to do this morning was kind of more procedural things took care of some posting for our Monday episode took care of some phone calls I took a walk made took care of some email made sure I ate some food before I came here on the way here I did a brief 10-minute nsdr because I didn't sleep quite as much last night as I would have liked but I walked in feeling great and I don't get uh paid to endorse but I uh nor did um we have any kind of arrangement to say this but this new tonic energy drink I I'm it's got an eye on it I'm hyped um love it really tasty tast it tastes so good um so I can work two or of these three blocks and then the third one ends up being kind of a mish mash of procedural stuff so today the early part of of the day the 6: a.m. to noon block was kind of like handled doing non it's work but it's not like focused work stuff and I didn't train today because I trained yesterday um and today was a day off in any case hopefully we'll do some Sonic cold tonight so now we're working I'm focused and I imagine that you know 2 3 4 hours of this and my brain will have you know expended some pretty serious cognitive effort and then I'll take a little bit of I'll expect a sort of dip in energy I won't force it and then this evening I'll get some work done and then hopefully we'll do some Sonic cold so I'm very aware of the fact that I get S two opportunities from these three blocks now my ideal schedule would be to work in the first two block blocks really really hard still eat still train train early so it would be Train Early work in the first block so get it get the training done by 8 am no later work super focused work then eat something super focused work in the second block maybe do an nsdr to recover my mental and physical Vigor and then in the evening social time social time relax I've been watching a lot of documentary what have you been watching um I watched a Anthony Bourdain documentary yesterday I'm not I I obviously knew who he was um we have friends in common um he you know he's few well sadly passed away but um to took his own life which is tragic um but I was aware that you know because Joe's talked about him a lot um David Cho the artist has talked about him a lot and is in that documentary he also was part of the New York City you know' 70s 80 punk rock scene so the Ramones I'm a huge Ramones fan Joe Strummer like kind of of that ilk and um the documentary is called roadrunner and it's very very good and it's also very interesting to see how he was such a sensation Seeker you could almost feel feel him veering toward something and then you know and I've never watched any of his documentary yeah very very good and very very good have you seen just to interject have you seen uh World War II from the front lines no so this is uh Netflix Netflix have done at least two or three three colorized World War II documentaries in fact there's one that's World War I I saw that one yes so um a at least three World War II in color uh World War the Great War in color and something else all of these will be available on Netflix um watching archive footage something there's something distancing about seeing it in black and white it it sort of reminds you that it's not now and they've used a combination of AI and manual recolor to be able to sharpen the image everything's 4K the facial uh appearance of everyone the emotions that you can see on their face you the smiles the teeth and now in color as well to me just drives home that story in a a manner that I'd never I've never watched a documentary about something from that era and felt so emotionally connected to it um which is interesting so I I've really been enjoying that sh World War II from the from the front lines okay cuz the World War I um doc really liked I read all squad on the Western Front Of course when I was in school I I um fascinated by by World War I um yeah documentary is kind of an obsession I love the Oliver Sachs documentary uh I've seen some others recently about True Crime are you a true crime guy I used to watch that stuff when I was living alone and it was like then you're kind of like you you you checking closets and stuff I don't know if it's good for me to watch that stuff it can be interesting the one that they did about Richard Ramirez the nightstalker [ __ ] brilliant terrifying terrifying especially given that it's in Los Angel and just the Brazen nature of his of his a new one I just watched called American Nightmare yeah I don't want to see this man oh yeah it's really really interesting and harrowing uh but I I Shane Gillis warns that watching World War II documentaries is early onset Republican that's what he refers to having an obsession with World War II documentaries as early onset Republican so just need to track that in your mind if you start sort of magger in your sleep and your sleep cycle picks it up yeah unlikely but um but I'll um I'll look at it in an unbiased way how's that for the last three years now I have started my morning every single day with element it is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't each grab and go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium pottassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other junk sodium plays a critical role in reducing MUSC mus cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health regulating appetite and curbing Cravings that's why it's relied on by Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams and Andrew 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country is very important and I as a person with a vote need to be a active participant that's the whole reason for doing it and also this is exhausting and it's sapping an awful lot of my will to live and and I feel kind of overloaded um have you looked at any strategies spoken to anybody that has any psychological tools to be able to deal with a rapid media cycle sort of very activating stories basically can people psychologically manage this upcoming period what what would you suggest yeah I actually hosted a guest who is expert on the psychology of politics it was super interesting um and we looked at all of this through the lens uh a completely nonpartisan lens because we have listeners on both sides of the aisle and probably some who are undecided um first of all I the kind of the fervor around this upcoming election the intensity of everything certainly convinced me that I I'm never going to run for office despite some speculation out there from friends and family and some occasional calls from reporters um no um it's it's not my not my uh Arena um but it's obviously a very important one um you know and one of my concerns is that if the intensity around all of this continues to increase as much as it has I guarantee going to yeah that that young people who would consider running for office out of a genuine desire to serve might be dissuaded you know um you know because you hear these things like oh it's impossible to get anything done or in order to be effective you have to be this that and the other kind of person and and that's a terrible message it might be true but it's a terrible message because I think ultimately what you want in any field right whether or not you're talking about music or sport I mean we're seeing this with the recent Olympics or podcasting you want a big pool of people funneling into it so that you can discover the incredible talents and virtuosos and you know and so that's what you need is a bigger feeding bigger applicant pool right um to reveal talent and for a field to progress okay enough editorializing um I think the best thing that one can do to navigate this whole cycle is to pay careful attention to what draws attention and what I learned from this expert um is a political science Professor um is that what you're listening for and what people are Orient toward orienting towards is a dominance language but the dominance language over others is far less effective believe it or not in shifting people's minds than the dominance language associated with expressing one's true beliefs so uh their argument was if you look historically at presidential and other forms of election and by the way I'm I'm paraphrasing now so that you could predict who was going to win based on who told you what they really think and believe as opposed to telling people what they want to hear like I think that we have a sensor for when we're being told what people think we want us to hear versus what somebody really believes even if we disagree with them and you know this probably gets to our Origins as a old world primate species but we tend to put leaders into office who can communicate either through their words or through the you know tamber of their voice or through their gestures or a combination of things maybe it's redundancy and how often they hammer on a message what they really believe as opposed to flip-flopping you know according to what the polls say or blowing the wind right so I think we hear the words dominance language and we default to oh it's about one person kind of you know dominating the other person now ultimately it's a it's a CH it's a competition between mostly two people we have a third party in this country but um it seems to be boiling down to two at this moment um and so this thing about dominance language is often couched as dominance over the other in a given scenario over a given Topic in separate venues you know at one Gathering versus another but what this I I consider brilliant political science Professor was explaining is that it's really the dominance has really exerted and impacts voting at the level of one or the other candidate perhaps both expressing what they really believe about something in clear terms with conviction with conviction and it and it being true I think this is the sort of thing that they can't fake ultimately and that where people lose faith in a in a candidate is when that candidate you know says well at one point you know I said this but now I'm saying this and they don't give a reason that feels legitimate to their actual beliefs or they don't address it right or they don't address it or they simply us on the beliefs of the other candidate so my strategy in this current election is to put as I do for many not all things in life much to the dismay of people in my life a neuroscience lens a psychology lens a science-based lens on what's happening around me and I'm listening for does that sound true in the sense does it does it really sound like that candidate really believes that or does it sound like they're trying to tell me this or are they spending more time talking about what the other candidate believes or doesn't believe in an effort to sway me because because ultimately yes there does seem to be some and they this guest pointed it out as well that there's a there is a tendency to orient towards people that we recognize that um feel similar to people we grew up around but that's not actually the um thing that impacts voting in the end that ultimately the people who are undecided because there is always going to be a group of people who are voting against the other party period like a they're just literally voting against one party but there I do think that there's this group in the middle what um you know and I didn't quot this term but uh Dr Paul KY who was on my podcast psychiatrist and yours talks about the league of reasonable people which are which is has nothing to do with politics per se but this is a a group of people who are really evaluating evidence on the basis of what they see and what they feel and what they hear and trying to move away silence middle the silence middle that you know and so people that are trying to evaluate evidence and are really paying attention to does this person feel genuine do they really believe this do they or are they telling me this because it's what I want to here I think that's I think that's the way I plan to navigate this time how how will that help uh with psychological Health uh using that you know you're still going to be peppered with the story and the the the worry and the concern and oh here's a new and I've got to forget the last thing but it's still in my mind and there's a new thing and I got to spin all of these different news stories yeah great question in a very paulan uh way it gives you agency it gives you a sense of control over the fire hose of information that's coming at you you can say okay I'm gonna there's nothing there's nothing I can do about the fire hose there's nothing I can do about getting just blasted back with all this information but I'm going to apply a very specific filter to try and hear what people are saying about specific issues that matter and paying attention to whether or not they're telling me what they really believe you can disagree with them and vote against them or you can vote for them but ultimately the data show I as I understand that people ultimately are voting for the candidate that they believe has the greatest conviction and what I think has been lacking Frankin in the political discussion I say this as a citizen not as a political scientist but as a citizen who votes has been a clear picture of what the future could look like if a given candidate wins I want a vivid picture of the world they imagine I don't want this like like surface level stuff like imagine a day when this and that like like it's like they start each sentence correctly and then it just kind of goes to like it just kind of and you know as a scientist and somebody who's Public Health public science Communicator you know I I'm constantly under the scrutiny of like wait what exactly is the protocol what exactly justifies the protocol okay delay caffeine 90 minutes after waking if you crash in the afternoon well what's the the randomized control trial I'll be the first to tell you there isn't one I'll also tell you the mechanisms that support my statement now if you talk to Dr Lane Norton someone who I respect tremendously he's been on my podcast twice tremendous respect for him he'll tell you unless it's an a randomized control trial that doesn't meet his threshold and I'll tell you well you know I don't eat seed oils I avoid them most of the time because I like olive oil and butter I'm not afraid of them but you know it's not based on a randomized control trial I just feel better when I don't so I'll tell you my reasons for believing strongly why I suggest a or b or what I do does it meet the same standard that lane requires no but I'll tell you exactly what I'm grounding my statements on and what I want as a scientist what I want as a citizen is for the candidates presidential candidates all candidates just tell me what you believe tell me the rationale the rationale could be listen they're telling me to say this but just tell me what you believe and why and when you do that for somebody certainly when that's done for me I just feel an immense relief and an immense trust that the person actually understands their own process they're letting us look at the underlying mechanics and I also want to know what they Envision for the future right now I'm hearing very little about that I'm hearing a lot of aspirational things on the one side that are very vague I'm hearing a lot of um kind of like dogmatic language on the other side also pretty vague and so I want to know I want a list like send me the onepage PDF I want to know like what are your protocols for for making this a better country I think so that that's my threshold and I do get worked up about this but not enough to run for office I found uh this really interesting study that's been done recently stories don't care about your statistics in controlled experiments research has documented a pronounced story statistic Gap in memory the average impact of statistics on beliefs Fades by 73% over the course of a day the impact of a story Fades by only 32% so 73% average impact of statistics on beliefs 32% on a story so in short people's beliefs are more durably impacted by stories than statistics huge implications for how voters beliefs can be more easily swayed during the upcoming elections yeah I part of the reason I love you I I really mean that like you you are you have an unbelievable ability to find studies that are relevant that I would never find he here's why I believe stories are more impactful than just citing statistics the reason is that the brain organizes memories of all kinds in beginning middle and end and a graph has a structure but it doesn't really have a beginning middle and end now it can be a time course plot it can be a time course plot there are all sorts of caveats to this right and the scientist in me always has to mention all the caveats but we from the time that we are little children we organize things in terms of beginning middle and end the best example of this is the ABCs when you learn the ABCs you don't do ABC d e f g h i j k l m m p q r s t v WX YC was for a moment there I was worried I wouldn't remember yeah but I'm so far so good and and I've been drinking my newtonic so um so F but how do how do children learn the ABC a b c d e so the brain is learning the inflections it's learning what's procity right the inflections that the lilon the lilton fall of of voice and we know that this is one of the ways that we organize information my friends who are like worldclass musicians who sing who I always say like like I Remember lyrics really well and I always say oh what about that lyric and they go oh like I can't remember like and then they'll start with the first line and then all of a sudden they remember the whole song sequence that's right it's that's the way memories are organized they sort of Peel back you know like some people are very good at memorizing lists where acronyms can help us but in General we sequence our life on the basis of a beginning middle end type structure so you know I think when people um now the exception to this would be flash bulb memories like for instance uh a few about a month ago right one of the presidential candidates there was an assassination attempt on his life I think that was the first time since 911 that I recall everyone in the country being tuned into the same event online wild yeah I mean there may have been intervening things but wild you know there was an earth Quake this morning in Los Angeles did you feel it I was busy preparing and I had my airpods in everybody else went that was a little one I but I grew up in California this one was was kind of a it was a ripple not a rumble so usually if it's a bigger one you'll hear it like a train coming through the the environment in any case not a flash bulb memory right obviously not but you remember what you were doing but you know a few weeks ago we had or about a month ago during that assassination attempt we had a flash Bowl mem it was a I can recall it was a Saturday I was sitting on the couch you know my girlfriend and I were talking and then all of a sudden I was like oh my goodness you know she's like no oh my goodness you know and all of a sudden we're on our on the phone right exactly so you know flashball memories are an exception to what we're talking about and they grab all the context around them I remember when my mom P picked me up on 911 from school and I remember listening to it in the radio my my memory I know yours I really want to get into this later on about you have a very self-identified very good memory of Life Experiences going quite a way back into your youth yeah For Better or Worse yeah yeah I'm I'm I'm For Better or Worse I'm the opposite uh but I remember that one light bu memory like you a big important event yeah but yeah the story thing is so interesting and I think by the way sorry I mean to interrupt but you know that the origin of flash bulb memory is adrenaline you know it's adrenaline released from the adrenals and in the locus cerus sort of a quote unquote alertness Center although my Neuroscience colleagues going be like there he goes calling brain structures by the function but you know it releases epinephrine into the brain in kind of a sprinkling uh fashion you know that there's um we know and there's a beautiful review by James mcgau one of the leading researchers in in memory about this that you know dating back to Medieval Times if they wanted kids to remember something I'm not making this up they would I can it's an annual review of a neuroscience starts off by describing they would take kids they give them a tutorial typically was a religious tutorial back then then they' throw them into cold water so you got a spike in Adrenaline and then you remember what you had heard prior so it's you know when you have a spike in in Adrenaline the brain the nervous system knows something's different it cues the memory system so just to think about why that might be adaptive ancestrally uh any dump of adrenaline of that kind of size would probably be indicative of such a important Strategic Learning moment opportunity do not go near that cave that happened to have that bear in it again right we'll make sure that you actually hold is that the right so much so yeah so much so that there's what's called condition Place aversion so in fact if you see a drawing of that cave or you go back to that cave you start to experience some of the same sematic stuff what is the same sematic stuff well the nervous system is fairly nuanced but it's also crude you're you're releasing some adrenaline it's the increase in heart rate the increase in breathing it's like oh that cave now the issue becomes it's not nuanced enough that such that some people then they see any cave and then they think that could represent danger so you know the adrenaline system is a way to obviously C alertness very fast milliseconds fast but also to change the chemical millu of the brain so that whatever memories were or experiences were being charted in the brain now are locked into your memory so for instance let's say we were to walk out of here we walk out to the car and we're not thinking about something bad that could happen and all of a sudden CRA crack crack and someone gets shot right in front of us whoa okay now you know all sorts of things are going to happen okay hopefully no one's heard of it let's say it's a bad tragic incident now now the adrenaline released into your system grabbed and Consolidated the memories of this house of the lawn of walking out there this is why people who experience trauma often times have kind of um odd recol like seemingly odd or unrelated Recollections about the things leading up to an event okay so because ultimately what did you need to learn not to avoid streets not to avoid this street necessarily but like what were you doing your bra your brain is trying to grab something that's right what brought you to that location what things brought you to that incident and and of course some people dump these experiences more readily than others you know part of the logic behind a lot of not all but a lot of trauma therapies is to literally bring the brain and body back into a state of high high intensity and then to rescript the story others are designed to bring you back into the story but keep you calm so there's sort of two general approaches just as there are approaches to treating depression that involve you know bringing a lot of salience and emotion to the surface the cathartic approach these are tested um and some work very well as well as the use of drugs like ketamine you know FDA approved drug for dissociating your emotions while in the presence of MDMA right or MDMA which just recently uh day before yesterday did failed to pass approval by the FDA for the treatment of PTSD I didn't know about that yeah big deal in the in the community the psychiatric Community uh this could be summarized as um very impressive clinical trials showing up to 67 % um even remission of PTSD or significant reduction in PTSD from people that did two sessions of MDMA with a qualified therapist in a clinical setting but the FDA um had a number of different stated reasons including um lack of control group it's very hard to have a control in the sense that people can take no MDA as M MDMA excuse me methylene dioxy methamphetamine or but then they knew that they were in the control group right that PE this whole business of how do you blind people to the to the drug you know if you've taken MDMA you know it yeah and then there were some other issues sadly that seemed at least by my read not unique to MDMA therapies but that unfortunately it happened during the course of the trials which made the results not satisfactory enough for the FDA so I think that the effort needs to continue get another crack at this will they get another again yeah one hopes but you know there are a lot of people out there with PTSD and intractable types of of stress disorders that now are tractable with treatments like MD mate provided you have the right therapeutic support and that's the issue is you know these drugs without the proper therapeutic support can send people down bad trajectories and so this is the big this is the big thing and you can tell I'm kind of agonizing over this because you know we need to like the way these things move forward is we need to be very objective and say okay why did the FDA say no why we we can we can kick and scream about it but that's not going to do any good why did did they say no and then address those issues like a scientist you get a paperback you think it's the greatest paper in the world you get the reviews and they have issues with certain things you go well wait but but but and you just you have to go systematically until those issues are dealt with uh it's you're get the same result you're going to get the same result so we need to be very objective about this um and you know I look forward to a day when the FDA is satisfied based on the best criteria yeah yeah I'm not being political there I just like I think these drugs can really help people in the right circumstances um but it's been it's been a slog for the community of people trying to get these drugs through trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say that they're top quality but few can actually prove it which is why I partnered with momentus they make the highest quality supplements on the planet they're literally 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using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's L IV ment us.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout yeah one of my friends her husband has suffered with PTSD with alcoholism oh yeah get the switching out flavors wild Citrus you know what's weird is I I study the visual system I have an appointment in Opthalmology after all and I can see great at a distance I can read small text at but I'm actually running into trouble seeing things up close recently like if I put it here I'm blind to it well I told you last time about my lasic right and uh I can see absolutely everything ancestral trauma at 500 yards I'm I'm like Tim Kennedy um I'm sorry I'm not laughing at an I'm not laughing at it um at Tim Kennedy Lord knows I'm not laughing at Tim Kennedy Tim be don't hurt me I'm a fan um I'm just uh the fact that you could see uh trauma at 500 yards is a that's a high accuity Vision so my goodness I like Tim like he will come and find you I've got so I've got a story I'll tell you a story that uh he told me about him and Brian Ken and um's good too good happy days so uh Brian went over to the UK with them he was going to go uh surfing they were doing some sort of Adventure in the UK and Bri arrived late and Tim said um we're going to go swimming in the morning he's like no no Tim I'm I you know I just got in like my flight you've been here for a little bit longer and said we no grabbed him by the arm like that said no no we're going swimming in the morning looked him in the eyes and Brian's like oh Tim I don't want to I'm going to be tired I'm going to be whatever anyway Tim made the uh threat sufficiently plain that he wasn't joking so 6:00 in the morning Brian hears this little knock on his door six in the morning Brian so Brian pretends to be asleep Brian's an actor uh Brian's been in Hollywood Movies Big Hollywood movies comedian too right comedian and actor he and he said he channeled every single ounce of acting ability that he had so he's laid on one side and he even so give a like give a little snort here and there and he heard the door open and then he felt the bed move one side to the other like that it sort of rocked from left to right and then Tim's face came down to his ear and he said Brian do you know how many terrorists I've stood over when they pretended to be asleep I next thing you know he's in the water swimm correct and sure enough that you know you're talking about the CT dool Spike yeah that is a reliable way to give that would be the that's the ultimate alarm the Tim Kennedy alarm forget using sleep cycle forget everything that I said just pay Tim kendi to come and pretend that you're a terrorist yeah it actually raises an interesting and relevant biological point which is that you know if you wake up at 5: in the morning and you you know glance at your phone something I don't recommend doing and you see a troubling text message you'll be wide awake in a moment and that's adrenaline epinephrine in the brain we call it epinephrine in the body we call it adrenaline for uninteresting reasons but that structure of neurons that cluster in the in the brain stem called the um back of the brain area let's just stay with you know broad nomenclature um the locus cilus has there's clust of neurons that do many different things there but some of them provide you know these wilike uh axonal inputs as we call them in a kind of sprinkler fash to the brain and when there's something that alerts us um that we need you know it's triggering to us if you will it just it sprinklers the brain yeah it sprinklers the brain with uh with epinephrine adrenaline and boom the brain wakes up and then in parallel your adrenals release adrenaline and within um you know couple 100 Mill seconds you're you're up you're able to move and you're not thinking about fatigue and adenosine doesn't mean anything and you know and sometimes I think that the you know earlier we were only half half joking Joo about Joo willingston the sort of 4:30 a.m thing and waking up you know you can train these systems earlier we were talking about intraining the circadian clock to different stimula to become an early riser or a late shifted person as it were all of these neural circuits are subject to kind of um conditional plasticity right so like the alarm Boom Like You Can Be watch awake or in my case you're like hit the snooze right nothing's like the sleep that you get during a snooze it's so good it's so good but you know you can be conditioned to you can condition these Locus culus systems the adrenaline system we in fact we were talking about it a minute ago in the context of PTSD in the context of fear in the context of non- nuanced um alertness on the basis of a broad stimulus like you know you know if something terrible happened to you in a garage we're in this beautiful garage with all these cars around but if something bad happened to you in a garage it doesn't have to be that garage it can just be garages the smell of metal you know different sensory cues get embedded in those memories and then can feed into these alertness systems and this is why you know there's it's such a challenge to undo to unpeel a trauma or a or a chronic anxieties you have to sort of get to the the combination of things that that that is the combination lock that lets you undo it that was one of the most interesting things I learned from Paul Conti he I told him a story when I was 20 I was in a head-on collision with a snowplow at 60 MPH on the main artery Motorway of the UK going up to Scotland so they were driving the snowplow and they sort of listed gently across into our lane only CLI you're driving a little mg or something it was a Ford Focus with my business partner in and they only clipped maybe about a foot or so into the car uh but for him what we think happened was he was probably looking at something not looking like [ __ ] and what was that and just kept on going didn't even notice for us all hell broke loose and I said to Paul you know I had a little bit of travel anxiety for a short while after that and it dissipated about six weeks or so I was uncomfortable with a contraflow uh traffic so I I didn't like being on that lane I would always be on the on the other side of the road in the UK so on the other I would want to be on the uh outside Lane not the inside Lane and um he said one of the inter things about the way that trauma can repattern memories old memories is that you could have convinced yourself well I've never liked driving I've always been uncomfortable of this you can forget that there was ever a time before the incident interesting when you felt differently and this is where I think um first off our brains aren't always necessarily our best friends and and secondly the story what's the story that you're telling yourself what's the story that your brain is telling yourself about these memories Paul was adamant he said you absolutely could have begun telling us CU I like I love driving I miss not having a car in the US I finally did get a car at the start of this year and I really enjoy being back on the road the time where I get to listen to podcasts and I can't use my phone and yeah I really like it and uh but he said you know had it have been a more significant uh issue or had you dealt with it in a different way or you could have convinced yourself oh no I I've always been a nervous driver I've never enjoyed driving and then what you know how sort of infectious and pernicious is that kind of a memory you know these individual instances which I think are why it is so important to connect with those emotions to look at the things that are driving you what are your what are your unspoken assumptions about the world oh man so I I'm just wrapped with attention as you're talking so I have this notebook I I like these bound notebooks and I I started writing um kind of Journal format but then recently I started just jotting things down sometimes it's podcast notes and but the other day I had this thought it's going to seem very um oh this is a funny one you want to hear a funny one I do so I I a long time ago I used to make a joke but I decided to just script it out this is only a three-word entry it said you know my goal in life has been to go from like oi To Oi to just Peace So I have oi no I have oi and then I have no I have oi and then I have oi and then I have just like peace like that like basically aside from sleep like these are the three states that I can be in right so um in any case idiot aggression chill yeah yeah so so assumptions about the world so um the one that I woke up the other day um well I spent a lot of time the other day explaining to a friend that um because they were going through something that was really unfair and and we were par I'll get back to this but we were parsing the difference between mistakes misunderstandings and betrayals and how some people respond to mistakes and misunderstandings as if they were betrayals and some people um mix these up you know um so that was an interesting one but to me anyway but the the thing that assumptions about the world I know it's in here someplace um I wrote it down and it felt so true this is it this was the other morning I woke up I was like H I don't feel right like I don't feel right like I I've got all this stuff to do like something just and I was like I can't remember a time this is why what you just said queued me I can't remember a time when I woke up just feeling like there was nothing bearing down on me that day ever but now based on what you're telling me perhaps there was a time and I just don't remember M but then I I was lying in bed as I do keeping my eyes closed Rick Rubin taught me this trick not in the same bed but he taught me this trick he said if you wake up and you're having a dream right before you wake up and you want to remember the dream or you want to stay in a mental state keep your eyes closed and stay completely still however if you have you're having a nightmare or you don't like the way that you feel move your body there's something about the movement that dispels it absolutely and if you think about rapid eye movement sleep which is the most dream Rich sleep your body is paralyzed and the mind is active so I've started doing this and it's made it very easy for me to remember my dream so Rick who's not formerly trained in science but is Rick um gave me that tool and it works exceptionally well in my experience um but I woke up and I said you know maybe the illusion is the pain maybe the illusion is the pain maybe the mental anguish I feel maybe the the like the challenge of life like maybe that's the illusion right because we hear so much about how you know the the the pleasures are the Illusions these you know the now dopamine is a real thing and chasing dopamine is a real thing um at its extremes it's uh can be addiction at its less extremes it can be compulsions and it can also be a joyful life but I was thinking myself maybe pain is the illusion right maybe the idea that there's all this like Challenge and dis may maybe that's the thing that we're supposed to remove and then I I thought back to something that a friend who's a very very talented trauma therapist his name is Ryan Suave he's out in Florida um runs a trauma Treatment Center out there once told me he said yeah you know in some of the Buddhist Traditions they talk about that your work in this life is in part not completely is to is to burn down I think they call them I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong but someone will tell us in the com it's the scums Saras like burning down to the to the roots like the the the weeds of life like your your misperceptions about what things are and I started thinking about this especially after Martha Beck was on my podcast who I really love she said you know you're not here to suffer and I thought I'm not she was like you know you're not here to suffer you know i' I've endured a lot of suffering in my life more than some less than others but I think we all endure a lot of suffering largely as a consequence of what happens between our ears unfortunately some of us also because of things that actually happen to our bodies but we self-induced or otherwise but you know maybe we're not here to suffer maybe a lot of the suffering that we experience is this illusion that we create and so I started really I wrote it down maybe the illusion is the pain and so maybe we need to challenge this like maybe um it's okay to be joyful a little more joyful dud I have I have so much is that I mean it's great and wishy-washy no not at all I have so much to tell you so uh overthinking creates more problems than it solves definitely and uh unless you're solving a really hard problem correct uh but on average as everything um Joe hson do you know who he is Art of accomplishment phenomenal guy really interesting dude came on the Pod and um he has this very unique uh definition of efficiency and he thinks of joy as efficiency so efficiency is how much you get out for how much you put in right what is the return what is the output that you get for the input that you've had to expend and if you do something which is joyful you have to expend less and on the other side you get out more it's like what a lovely redefinition so Joy enjoyment for him is the ultimate version of efficiency that if you're using your passion if you're doing something which you find enlivening You Are by definition helping to make your system more efficient so his question while we were doing this podcast it was a virtual one uh and he said this is one of his favorite little cues that he asks he says what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable I love that what's this guy's name again Joe Hudson I'll I wrote down Joy is efficiency Joe Hudson Joe Hudson yeah not that it matters but what's his training is he a psychologist uh I would have it's very lengthy um okay so what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable and that is a cue 10% achievable and what he said there so I'll notice when when I said that just now I sort of shifted in my seat a little bit my back my t-shirt was a little creased under my lower back so I that and maybe I'll get a little drink I'll you know look after myself I'll look after my body maybe I'll allow the peripheries of my gaze to just sort of open out or maybe I'll take a little slightly deeper breath and I'll oxygenate a little bit more yeah we get like I'm having fun right now but we can have 10% more fun 10% just 10% more enjoyable loosen the bolts 10% so that's one thing the other thing uh an Insight that I've been thinking about a lot recently things are not what they are things are what we think they are M for inance doing a hard workout gives you a signature feeling you're laid on the floor panting heart rate at 180 sweating from everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth this is oddly enjoyable but if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while you were sat in traffic you'd call the ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack framing is everything this is a quote from Rory Sutherland do you know who that is one of the greatest living advertisers on the planet Vice chairman of ogal V advertising this is he's the only man I've ever heard swear in a TED Talk and this is a direct quote from his Ted Talk he says sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window the problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window you're an antisocial friendless idiot if you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette you're a [ __ ] philosopher the power of reframing things cannot be overstated it's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy that's like Alchemy it's kind of alchemy I like that um I'm both taking notes and listening very carefully yeah I think um people exist on a Continuum of um bias toward more joy or biased toward more pain and I agree that we have a lot of cognitive control over the middle range right because of course there are experiences that are awful traumatic unequivocably yeah um excellent or terrible there's no question about that we'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute but first I need to tell you about marrick health you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 1,6 last year and that was done without trt and under the guidance of mar Health Mar Health have the best most sophisticated and comprehensive service of anyone in fact I've Loved this process so much that I reached out to the owner so that I could partner with them on the show Dr Andrew hman is always talking about how important it is to keep on top of your blood work and if you've always thought oh yeah I really should work out what what's going on inside of my body marck health is the place to go with marrick's complete package you're able to get extensive lab work on over 100 carefully selected biomarkers giving you insights into your hormone profile your cardiovascular health organ function and much more stop guessing when it comes to your health and get the exact same panel and medical oversight I got plus a 10% discount by clicking the link in the description below or heading to Mari health.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's MK health.com /od wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I turned 49 next month trying to think about like what I've learned where I'm headed and I have unfortunately at times but also fortunately my memory is is very good my memor is very very good how good what's good um I mean I can close my eyes and hear conversations that I had with people in um with a fair degree of accuracy I believe how far does that go back oh I can remember um walks I took with my dad when I was five or six years old I can remember the the layout of my room and to like find detail when I was a kid I um faces I I have strong recollection of faces and and facial recognition I don't track time well you know as a professor we get some leeway but I you know I perpetually run late I don't track time um and until recently I didn't really have a sense of of death I I mean I knew it existed did I've had people close to me die all three of my academic advisers died you know suicide cancer cancer yeah the joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you I was going to say I'm the Nomine yeah and you know for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city or military I've had you know quite a few friends die um drug overdoses suicides you know and um it's kind of hard to know if it's on average more or less you know I was a teen in the you know in the late 80s early 90s and there weren't a lot of people T doing therapy there were no psychological meds for the treatment of different conditions maybe that's it who knows in any case um if I spend any amount of time thinking about anything of the past I can easily drift into it in fact until very recently very very recently much of my cognition each day was a battle between trying to Anchor in the present and thinking forward and being pulled into memories of the past kind of orienting toward the past such a rich opportunity to ruminate yeah and just and or seeing in you know even music from the past acting as a cue to the Past something happened in about in like the last8 nine months where I feel hyperfocused on the present very very little focus on the past very little I have Exquisite memory of the past but very little in fact one of my journal entries um was I was trying to think of and this is somewhat embarrassing because it's not the way I would have scripted it but I was thinking about from the time as early back as I could remember the different animals that I felt like I sort of um related to or embodied it you know when I was a kid I had the same voice I have now um they called me froggy you know because I was like the kid from The Little Rascals is a show that most people now don't know he like the kid talk like this and I had you know my Adam's Apple was out when I was a little kid I had herir on my Adam's Apple it's like there's a I have a I'm a heterozygote for a certain genetic mutation I overproduce Androgen from my adrenals um if you have two copies it can make you infertile fortunately I don't I have one copy um and it doesn't result in any other um like bodily differences or anything like that I'm very fortunate in that way and I'm I'm I'm I'm aware I can reproduce let's just leave it at that okay so but then you know there were different animals at different stages of My Life As I Grew and matured and experienced different things I was like at one stage of my life I felt very oriented towards the mustelids and then other times towards like a certain species of of cat and like I just I identified with them in a number of ways and then recently I was on this long run I do these long Sunday rucks and runs and and I was thinking to myself like where am I at right now and all of a sudden I just went oh [ __ ] this is about the least um exciting animal I could think about and I realized like right now at this stage of my life I don't know how long this will last I'm and this is very personal but whatever eff it like lately I'm just kind of opening up um on podcasts my own and others I realized and know it has nothing to do with butterflies I realize I'm in total caterpillar mode and it has nothing to do with becoming a butterfly not that that would be a bad thing it's that I'm able to orient towards the tasks of the day the day divided into three parts I can basic I basically have Vision about this far in front of me despite what I said a few minutes ago I can think about what I need to do I know where I'm headed I can move forward not backward but I can't seem to bring my thinking any further than that and it's so it's such a new place for me I can't think in I have to consciously try and think into the past I'm like that was yesterday that was yesterday I can't do it now I'm not in denial I can do it if I need to but for me this is a very functional way to be at this point in my life because of the enormous number of tasks in my life fortunately the enormous number of people that I love and that I want to spend time with and make time for but somehow I have just like so I drew it out I was like freaking caterpillar you know and we'll see what happens and you know and where this goes but you know the other animals in here um there was a rhinoceros phase that was interesting um moving very slowly but with a lot of force you know on anything that was in my way at one stage you know it's it there's been times when I've Ori felt like a raptor where I was just kind of like placed and really observant I spent an entire year speaking very little Believe It or Not people in my life will be like what year was that I didn't talk to you that year exactly you didn't talk to me that year and I didn't talk to you um if you're wondering where I was um so right now by sort of like identifying with this kind of mode of caterpillar vision and movement everything is in small increments you know I I even feel it in the way that I talk and the way I parse ideas I'm writing the bonus chapters from my book which comes out in April of next year like everything is line by line everything is iterative and I'm not oriented toward the past it's there if I need it it's like a book on a shelf I can go grab and look things up but I until now have existed very much in like sort of thinking about the losses of past the wins past identifying with that and um I don't know what caused this um I can't point to one single psychedelic Journey not that I've been doing a lot of psychedelics we could talk about that I was involved in some psychedelic trials but I don't think that's it I think it's that I've matured I think the brain matures your whole life I don't think we have childhood and adulthood and then death I think we have a developmental Arc that starts when we're born probably before we're born I mean after all you know we were embryos which who knows if we have Consciousness but we were alive right born and then we have a a developmental Arc and the great psychologist Ericson talked about at every stage of life from birth until death until one's 80s and 90s you're working out some core conflicts of agency versus you know autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do and you I forget the stages off the top of my head because it's not my area of expertise but look at my dad who's turning 81 in November who fortunately you know God willing is going to live another 20 25 years with immense vigor he's still cognitively super sharp and he's working out whatever it is you work out when you're 80 I'm working out whatever it is now but right now it's like Caterpillar vision and as a consequence the past while important and informs a lot of who I am and what I do it's like it's not like it's not in my Consciousness at all and I must say it's a great place to be because throughout my 30s I felt very stricken very like pulled in different directions based on past present and efforts toward the future so if anyone's I say this in part because if you're um struggling like kind of feeling stuck in your life story um there's great advantage to just letting some time pass old just getting older is the best as long as you train with weights three times a week run three times a week long medium and short it runs and you take a cold shower and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods and you try and get sleep and you limit your alcohol and you deal with any addictions you might have and you work on your tra was like you're going to have a great freaking life you know you're going to be healthier than 90% of people in the world right are you going to take gold at the Olympics are you going to be Cole Hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final 100 meters of the 1500 no unless you're Cole Hawker but like you can still have an amazing life and so I think there have been so many years where I've just been like God like this just feels like a battle this just feels like you know and I can't complain I've been given so many opportunities and gifts and like trying to make the best of those and share but like I just feel like listen if it's a freaking caterpillar it's a caterpillar and then I I got back from that run and I was thinking to myself oh know now I gotta like think about the butterfly thing and like this is turning out pretty soft and then I thought hey well that's pretty cool so I started I started researching caterpillars because this is me so I started reading about caterpillars they are amazing like some of them have adapted different poisons so that the birds that eat them don't die but literally survive and transmit the discomfort by feeding their young and then the young are like uh and they actually know they form a they form a permanent memory not to eat those caterpillars so I now look at caterpillars completely differently I spent a lot of time drawing caterpillars I haven't yet watched a documentary about caterpillars sure you'll find one but anyway I'll I'll avoid going down this hole um any more than I already have but I I think there's great wisdom in um trying to think about different animals and how we Orient toward them as people I certainly look at other people and think you know like what dog are they Etc and in part because I think that other animals in the absence of their kind of self-awareness are show they're displaying to us how different the biases of different components of the nervous system so like dogs that move their tails a lot and have a lot of spontaneous movement right like the Pitbull breeds versus a bulldog which doesn't move unless it has to they they have different spontaneous temperaments and then you look at people I have a colleague he's hung Arian he has a blab in Switzerland and the guy is all staccato movements and he's like this thin and has like 5% body fat naturally right and then I have other colleagues who like more resemble melted candles they don't move so much you know and they need to exercise more because I love them and you don't see many overweight 80y olds so it'd be nice to have you around longer so three times a week resistance training and cardio thinking about the last few months for you probably one of the most difficult periods that you've gone through I I I will say not not to undercut where I think we're going definitely a challenging time um based on what I perceive as a lot of Mis misunderstanding um uh but um fortunately or unfortunately for me I've been through a lot of hard times more than some less than others but hey it's all in reference to our own nervous system and um but definitely hard but but not the hardest time certainly not the hardest time the hardest time was probably years earlier when I had um so much less agency um and my community wasn't as um established but definitely not not um not a not a um a joyful time yeah talk to me about what you learned about yourself and your own psychology and the motivations and sort of dynamics of public scrutiny and pressure like that yeah so um if I may I'll I'll lathe into this from a bunch of perspectives and this is usually the point in a discussion like this where like audiences are like oh this is where he prepares The Diplomatic talk like look I've done a number of um sessions talking about this kind of stuff publicly and privately since then so like I'm I'm just just showing up to this how how it feels and um and my read with the with the understanding that um you know language is sometimes deficient at like conveying uh what's really going on but I'll do my best so I learned a couple things at a kind of basic um factual level um I learned that while there are wonderful aspects to Media um there are also a lot of lies in the media I just didn't I actually didn't know that or believe that before you hear about it but I didn't really understand that um stories literally fiction can be woven from lack of context or from outright lies and that for me was an eye opener it was like whoa like no that's not true that actually didn't happen that way or well yeah but you left off the second half of that sentence which would put it all in context and make this scene completely different I mean for a scientist it was extremely jarring because it was like I could see what they were doing but if you tried to do that in a scientific paper or in a talk you you you wouldn't be giving that scientific paper or talk you wouldn't make it 10 feet into the business because that's called cherry-picking it's data selection it's not what we do doesn't mean people don't have biases of conclusion biases of interpretation but you reveal those biases again as we talked about earlier you reveal the origins of your thinking and decisions you state your motivations so it woke me up to that um and that was a bit of a oh man like really like that's sucks like I I wanted to believe that all media was Pome in its intentions um I also learned that if you have a you know this is hard to say with um you know you know I say this with humility but if you're faing name clicks then you're a Target what's that mean it just means that if you know the bigger your platform the more the more attention your name or face draws and therefore your name and face is leveraged for clicks people are making money off of you it's a it's a profit driven business okay um I also learned that many people are very reasonable and they can see through BS they under they can see the the the like tody efforts or the the you know the attempt to spin a narrative that just isn't right isn't true and what I'm saying there is you know whereas I definitely had to um face stuff where I felt I was being badly misconstrued or misunderstood um our audience the podcast audience and people outside that audience reached out in droves um and supporters at all levels reached out in droves to say listen we see what this is like we love what you're doing we get it not a problem you know and that was great it also brought forward my friends and people in the community both podcasters and academics uh family and friends you know I mean basically the the the essence of it was when my dad and I who in the past we've had some challenges in our relationship but now are really good when he called me and said they tried to pit us against each other and I'm like yeah and he's like I can't believe it he I mean he at 80 he couldn't believe it and he's a very smart guy okay he's a theoretical physicist by training he's a first generation immigrant he's not here on accident he had to work his ass off to get here and he worked very very hard to provide for us as kids so he was like he was like I can't believe that they would do that I was like well this is apparently what they do and you know and he said I'll never forget what he said he said well he's he's very logical he's a physicist after all he said well one trial learning one what one trial learning meaning we're not g to make that mistake again so so that was the sort of the media side of it and then I also want to acknowledge that there are people in media and their um both journalists and news platforms that I think really are well-intentioned it also provided this amazing contrast for me and and then I'll get into the more personal aspect I promise but it made me realize why podcasting and podcasters like you and Joe and Lex and Whitney and David senra and Tim Ferris and ritual and on and on are so amazing Rick Ruben it's real like we're not pretending to be somebody else we're not doing this to get click sure you want the success of your platform but you're being used I'm being me Lex is being Lex Joe is being Joe and that's why it works and it's been so interesting to compare that and contrast that to traditional media which has its merits certainly but for which like it's become this kind of senatur of a thing where you're not sure what the motivations are and like why would they go after you you said this in a in a clip like why would they go after you well you generate clicks but they're going after you because you actually have you have two three four four five 10x their reach why because people know when something's real if somebody's being genuine even if they disagree with that person and we like realness we like authenticity we love that as humans we want that it's the artistic expression and it made me realize that like the obvious which is that we're in the Golden Age of podcasting right now and never before in my life have I sort of been in the Golden Age of something I you know came up early I want to be be involved in skateboarding friends made as professional skateboards I didn't okay I wasn't talented enough fine got into Neuroscience caught the wave in Neuroscience meaning at a time when you could you know I always funded my lab with grants I even still have some grant money you know and even though I still teach teaching again next spring you know I've definitely shrunk my lab down you know the media said oh you know he doesn't have a lab yeah I shrunk my lab down like what's that mean it just means I I my got my students in postto jobs I we published two papers including a clinical trial in 2023 but I've my lab down like so I teach and I'm still tenured at Stanford still your lab still going well I have Grant funds in a new department where we're doing some human clinical trials okay but I no longer run experiments on animals that was a very personal choice for me and also when you have students in post talks you need to be able to give them a certain amount of time in order to nourish their development and then they all all of them every one of my students in posts has gone on to jobs or positions they wanted so I I took care of my academic children I think they would say that if they don't I'll hear from them you know but um they're doing phenomenally well and I'm very proud of them they deserve the credit so it it made me realize that okay I this I'm still a neuroscientist I still read papers I'm still on editorial boards it's it's and yet right now we're in the Golden Age of podcasting this new form of media of people being themselves it's not like radio it's like radio but different it's not like television it's like television but different in fact this this Arc might be of interest to you I watched this documentary about game shows recently um hosted by Alex tbec the documentary frankly is far too long but it goes like this during the World Series when demaggio was making a effort towards the Home Run Record was the first commercial okay to sell a product and it was designed to grab the housewives and people that purchased things for the home okay back then then came eventually game shows and game shows were just an an excuse to sell products but they eventually found that the human narrative in the game shows The Price is Right host kissing the the contestant something that would never happen nowadays okay things have changed matured eventually it was the human story then it became reality TV shows right and then now I see social media as the reality TV show that we're all casting ourselves in on a daily basis and then podcasts are sort of the um the umbrella around and within social media right I mean I think Elon sitting down with Trump today right exactly um we didn't mention that just to really track back just in case you thought that things were going to come down Trump's back on Twitter right he did I know they released his account has he tweeted anything yeah today for the first time since his M shot what did he tweet uh a couple of videos one mocking kamla one bigging himself up and two announcements saying I'm going live at 8:00 p.m. tonight with Elon on X um but I wonder if correct the Rogan narrative because over the weekend there was this narrative that Rogan had endorsed um RFK and it turned out not to be true no he just said that he liked him which he said a million times before and then Trump POS social truth I don't know what you call it posted on Truth social uh I wonder how much Joe Rogan's going to get booed the next time that he goes to the UFC that may be fact check false I'm pretty I'm pretty sure that that's that but I mean that's a tonee uhan is the hero UFC yeah it's Dana White it's like like small Dana White and big Dana White happy birthday Joe his birthday was over the weekend um um so so the I guess the point is this that the you know the fans the listeners of a podcast are part of the podcast in a way that no medium has existed before because they can comment and give feedback in a way that has not been available before now that's that's the media side so gave me tremendous appreciation for all of that the side how do you personally deal with a furer like the one that you and also I'm particularly interested in the lessons that you've learned longer term but what does it feel like to wake up that day you know you understand the neurochemicals you understand the hormonal response but you've got this just flood of phenomena going through you yeah so I and I I think one of the hardest things is being misunderstood and then understanding you know the motivations of the media or the motivations of the people that gave stories to the media the the blatant lies although there was a portion of of what was said that was absolutely true and that's the part that I was overly doting on my Bulldog that is absolutely true that's absolutely true but well what I decided to do is what I've done at numerous times in my life when things felt potentially overwhelming which was to get a committee of people around me that I really trust and rely on their Optics when I couldn't rely on my own so that meant my podcast producer Rob Moore that meant other people including my family were amazing um people from my high school you know was interesting because um they interviewed many people from my high school but discarded with those uh narratives because they were positive they interviewed uh many former girlfriends of mine who I was in touch with regularly and still am who were very positive and they discarded with those narratives and you're not looking for yes people but you're looking for people that can really help steer you through something and help you see where hey like maybe you need to pay attention to this aspect of your life a bit more or that a little bit more but you know what no there's a thick black line here and that's simply false um Lex fredman literally showed up in my home showed up I just looked up there's Lex jacket and Ty hey what's up brother he's there so my home during that week and the weeks following the weeks following consisted of many people coming to stay um I recall very clearly one day walking out into the yard I had taken a little nap and must been 15 or 20 people there including my good friend Tim Armstrong other people there supporting me just being there right um we also continue to work in that time we release solo episodes we release posts we release podcasts we were not going to stop working how are you able to get yourself into the right mode of Mind are you not have you not got split brain problem there you half of you is over here the other half's trying to be professional um I learned in that time but I took some tools from prior to Prior experiences to um take five to 10 minutes um take the first couple of minutes and meditate concentrate on one's breath try and get as present as possible your mind complet is always flitting to these other things that are trying to distract it realizing every time you can hold on to your present cognition bringing things present for a millisecond longer you're doing that much better ratcheting back and then getting into action doing generative work teaching science and health information because that's why the people listen to The huberman Lab podcast I don't think they listen to it to hear anything about my personal life or attempts to malign my past story I will also say there were some things that infused a focus and energy into me that I didn't anticipate that were very beautiful for instance you know one of the narratives that was getting spun out there is that my backstory about growing up in the skateboarding thing getting into fights that maybe that had been constructed which is categorically false those are true stories in other words and uh Steve rugie the guy who was my team manager at Thunder and spitfire skateboard companies back then uh wrote to me and he said yeah you know I got this Outreach from reporters and they kept kind of trying to pull and get me to change my account of you calling me from being locked up and saying hey Steve like I'm in this place and me saying you're the most normal person I know and that whole thing and he's like and I don't understand why they're doing that and I was like I don't know either and he's like well I told them the truth I told them exactly what happened you called me I remember where I was at the deluxe office he okay fine and then he goes and I told him that I'd put you on Thunder and spitfire and I was like do you realize what you just did for me from the time I was 14 years old I was still uncertain whether or not you would put me on the team and I was too embarrassed to ask and he's like of course you were on the team and I was like oh man I waited my whole life to hear that 30 years so there was is like you know these things that had kind of vexed me for years like was I really part of that or was I not part of that team like so what ended up happening is people from my past showed up not just my family Jim Theo from the world skateboarding Steve rugi people from my past people from my present and then I just got Outreach from men and women in droves some very high high-profile people very very high-profile people some lesser profile some no profile reaching out by email by phone by text showing up at my home and encourag me encouraging me to continue on the mission and at that point I was booed by the fact that I'm like okay you know people can see they can see the truth they understand context being warped they understand lies versus truth and they understand that a single-sided story is never ever ever the right way to resolve issues and so it was amazing to see and then what happened was we started growing and I was like oh my goodness you hear about this you're going to grow from this I always thought that just meant psychologically and internally but then it was like we grew then the next thing I know I'm on Jimmy Fallon okay some people might have thought that came came about before uhuh next thing you know we're a Jeopardy question like all of a sudden like things started growing and then I started realizing let's just get back to work was that the fast period in the show's growth history uh among I don't know cuz I don't track the numbers that closely I decided early on to remove my dopamine circuits from the numbers I do my own Instagram I do my own Twitter um and I manage I don't have someone manage my comments I manage all that myself um so yes if I say thank you in the DMS that's me but it was definitely among the sharpest inflections I've ever experienc I think Joe said something similar about the CNN horse Pac dwma scenario Mario that although you know might feel back he he he had a sort of a onew punch he had his Infamous nword video and the CNN thing within six months of each other uh but he said the quickest period that they've ever had was the CNN thing so if if you were one of the sensations I imagine you must have is indignation this isn't true and I want to correct the record as you said one of the worst things is being misunderstood was it a strategic decision to not issue a statement here we go here's the 4H hourong breakdown you know you've got the tools you've got the platform you've got the the followers why not yeah get it out there yeah well I certainly was tempted um at times but the consultation I got and what I eventually arrived at was that no matter what I would say that well first of all there were elements to some of that that needed to remain priv it um to protect other people um so in that sense there were a few things I had to take on the chin to protect other people's lives um not their actual lives but their their well-being um the other piece was that it was made very clear to me and I to I wholeheartedly agree that um the media will cherry-pick statements and clu together things they're still doing it in order to spin a narrative right um that makes it such that no matter what you say it won't be understood the way you want it to be understood and that was extremely frustrating to me extremely frustrating to me in fact last night late at night I had a conversation with a male friend and colleague with whom we had a misunderstanding this gets to something I mentioned a little bit earlier not a betrayal not a mistake a misunder understanding and we actually didn't speak to one another for about a month and a half and it was very frustrating for me end for them and then he and I I wouldn't even say hashed it out last night we just brought to the table I said listen I think there was a misunderstanding not a mistake not a betrayal I own my part and I'm sorry and I've learned you say you're sorry that was it you say you're sorry and he said the same thing he goes you know I I think I overreacted and I said I didn't say no you didn't or anything even though I have my feelings about it and he said I'm sorry and I said we're good we're good we had done the work internally right now unfortunately when things are done at scale you don't get that opportunity you don't get like an media scale and I think also um personally I mean obviously I'm human there was the need for reflection on the things that of past and present that I wish I had done differently um and that I you know you make the change you know and you move forward I'll also say and um people can roll their eyes if they want or they can come up with any theories they want but um prayer was extremely grounding for me in that time um just to not meditation not seeking approval validation and support of others although you know support from others was critical um as was constructive critique but prayer to just spend time in prayer listening to any messages that I needed to hear about what needed changing in me in my personal life in my family life in my work life in my public facing life and that was honestly the the Cornerstone that that was the center of it all that that was the piece that allowed me to go okay you know what um this sucks there's Silver Linings there's misunderstanding outright lies lack of and you know what I see all that I see the changes that need to be made I see where I also draw a thick black line and say no that's not that and we're not going to pretend it is and prayer was the thing that help me calibrate my compass 10 times a day and it wasn't just praying like oh please make this stop or anything like that you know please it was more help me see with Clarity this is the way I would do it and again people can decide what they want I'm not telling anyone what to believe it was like you know literally on my knees God please help me see and feel and think with the kind of clarity that's going to allow me to make the best decisions now and going forward let me get through this morning making the best possible decisions given what's happening I'm turning over all control and agency over the things I can't control to you and I'm going to put every ounce of effort I can into trying to continue teaching people about and health and becoming a better person as I go and that's still my prayer among other things um before I go to sleep at night I'm on my knees at the side of the bread prayer kind of guy since the new year since just before the new year before that it was kind of in my head a little bit kind of here or there um and before every podcast I just went in the bathroom now and prayed before this I go there for privacy not because it's the bathroom but and um I know for people thinking like okay this is a scientist now he's he's kind of claiming the God thing I'm not claiming anything like for me this has been the most powerful thing that I've ever experienced because it's it's just given me peace and and a and a compass and a Rudder forward even if I have to be at caterpillar levels of of of you know Horizon View like this far out in front of me inching forward um you know I'm just grateful to God I'm grateful to God for the chance to keep going forward what would be your advice to somebody who's going through an emotionally intense period it seems to me like if I was to try and deconstruct the not to make protocols out of a a nightmare scenario but uh social um cohesion groups around you not being on your own too much yeah and if you you know I'm I'm blessed to have a huge network but I'll say this um um I have that Network because I put work into that Network yeah some of these people I work with but you know Jim Theo didn't show up at my house because I'm a podcaster he showed up there the same way he did two years before when I got slammed to the concrete in life he showed up when I was 14 and I was a dep depressed kid sitting at the embarked arrow with a busted foot because I couldn't skateboard and he just sat with me and gave me a book to read and encouraged me to write you know you know I took what Jim did for me and did it for other people so I like to think perhaps it was God kind of returning the the energy returning the favor you know I people you you build your support system in good times and when they're down you support them and you don't do it because you might hit bad times you will hit bad times and that's one reason to do it you you just do it and um so there's that um so if you're up build your support network doesn't have to be huge but make it strong make it strong by doing the right thing setting examples and you know uh if it's medium fine if it's huge fine um you definitely I definitely use tools right the physiological side Works to limit stress get sleep I didn't rely on pharmacology to get sleep I know some people need to I just didn't want to go that route once um months earlier I took a little it was prescribed to me I took a half Xanax to try and sleep and the sleep I got felt like crap I woke up I was like I'm not doing that again um I use breathing tools I use nsdr I use um some supplementation to sleep um but sleep is key you win by sleeping that was one of our Motts during that time in all times when we're out on the road doing lives it's like we're going from one city to the next and we're podcasting and we're doing amas and we're busy and we're talking all day and go go go like we we're like we're sleeping and we don't drink and we're we're serious we're like professional athletes right so there's that um training hot cold uh definitely did some hot cold in really stressful times I'll pair back on training a bit um I train as preparation so for me lifting three times a week I love training you know I do my legs I do my torso I do my arms and calves and neck okay sure I do my long run I do my medium run I do my Sprint day I do the cold and heat but I do that not as a means I do that in part as a means to an end so that when it's time to Sprint for the airplane when it's time to take a week and just lean all your physical and mental energy into a crisis you can do that and then I go back to training would mean I I think I would have struggled I think I would have struggled to uh regulate without uh training each day listen um taking a walk getting a good shower getting your haircut you know these things make a difference um the other thing is I learned to be able to call on people to pick up the phone you know and say Hey listen like I'm I'm spinning here I can't make sense of this strategy or that strategy what do you think and then writing down what that person said taking a few things and then just going inward right you there is this tendency especially with text to constantly be um you know increasing the size of your committee I'll say this was interesting some people came to me immediately and said you should do blank and I was like really and they're like absolutely do blank and then I didn't do blank and then a week later they're like oh you absolutely did the right thing you should do exactly the opposite of blank and then I realized I was like oh goodness you know like um not that I'm never going to listen to advice from that person again but they were just saying stuff so you need to be a selective filter and it can be very hard and I will say anyone going through a crisis of any kind any kind you need a committee however big or small and if you don't have people you need people in books you need people in podcasts and um um you know I'm not a recruiter but um you might give prayer a try because there's real peace at the center there and from that peace you can see the right decision and from that right decision you can make the right decision for that circumstance and there just too many circumstances to say you should always say this or you should never say anything this kind of thing what I do know is that um God forbid if they come for you Chris or anyone like we got you like I don't know what the best advice will be in those circumstances but we got you like and we got you because you're a truly good person with your heart out there being you right up until now you've just been being you and that's why you're successful and yeah I mean I got calls from you know people can guess the names and there were some names also I couldn't believe it I was like these are people with enormous stature that like I thought we're probably would fall on the opposite end of the spectrum would be calling me to yell at me and in fact we're like you're doing all the right things don't let it get to you keep going think about X Y and Z but and I was like whoa so what you will find in hard times like those God willing they won't happen to you is that you'll find your inner resolve the world will come to you and show you who your real friends are who your real supporters are and I wasn't counting off who stuck their neck out for me and who wasn't it was beautiful to see people who did and the ones who didn't I get it like they have their own incentives they needed to do whatever it is they needed to do I think uh I I regretted not uh messaging you that day and the reason that I didn't was it's kind of like when it's somebody's birthday and you think [ __ ] does he really need an additional thing so I texted Rob instead like Rob can be the filter and he passed it to me and thank you and listen it's also a felt thing and you raise a very important point that goes and I hope people hearing this can understand that the reason to have this discussion is not about me it's that we all are going to go through these sorts of things at different scales and in different contexts is that you know it's like when somebody dies everyone's like my condolences so sorry so sorry the time to reach out to them is also afterwards and you know again call me non-scientific fine I have enough science under my belt and um to be totally confident in what I'm about to say which is like last night in my prayers I prayed for somebody who had posted something about losing their mom I actually didn't know his mom but I just like it came to me I was like you know like we all flooded in and there condolences thoughts and prayers but like he's probably hurting like crazy right now and so you pray for that person now you say well how does that prayer impact them I don't know but I believe in that and you reach out to somebody by text they just checking in and this is the beauty of what you do and it's the beauty of what podcasters do in general which is you're creating things in perpetuity the AI is going to be trained on these conversations you know your great grandchildren will be able to glean Knowledge from things that you've shared and I think that putting that out into the world in a way that other people can benefit from is is nothing short of spectacular you know when I was a junior Professor I'd listen to the Tim Ferris podcast at that time it was just that and like I I remember thinking like he this podcast is like my friend in a city where I don't know anyone um you know now I'm fortunate to call Tim a friend right I could actually call on Tim but I think that the lone the loneliness and isolation that people feel especially people that are striving and don't have a big Network can sometimes feel so overwhelming but I was that guy I was that kid who didn't have anyone to call or I was confused about something that was happening and I didn't have the network of people to call you build that over time but and what people being themselves out there in the world mainly podcasts um it's like I really care I hope that if bullet Bust or cancer takes me out tomorrow that some of the things that I've shared hopefully many of the things that I've shared could help people now and going forward that's a real thing it's not it's not about selling us a an advertisement or a supplement like that's incidental it's it's about the material so um I you know I'm I'm kind of spooling now but I like within me I feel immense gratitude I wouldn't change the experience of the last year for anything I don't want to experience it you know for its own sake but what it brought me was huge gifts and yeah it grew us like crazy but [ __ ] I mean if I could have done it a different way I would but you know God served up this meal just the way he did you know have I ever told you my idea of the Lonely chapter I told you about this no but I feel like I've had a few of those yeah so uh I learned this with Alex hosi uh last year and the lonely chapter describes a time in which you're growing you're changing as a person and you're now so different that you can no longer resonate with your old set of friends but you're not sufficiently developed that you've got the new set of friends that you're going to grow into and this is the lonely chapter and the problem with it is that you're always the the desire to sort of regress back to where you were is always going to be there and you're going to have you're going to have uncertainty there's not even the promise of Glory or success or Triumph when you get through the other side what am I pushing toward you know I I you're telling me that I'm not going to go out on this night out with my friends which I've done for the last five years or 10 years in the town that I grew up in or went to University in or whatever you telling me that I'm not going to do that because I'm going to get up and I'm going to meditate or read who even knows if meditation works right like you've got all of these questions in your mind and all of your friends and all of the Dynamics and the the The Temptations pull you back toward that it pulls you back toward the old version of life so this lonely chapter is a period through which I think everybody needs to squeeze anybody that decides to go from a place they are to a place that they want to be is going to have to let go of people who can't go there with them and this isn't a value judgment about the people that are doing the personal growth thing are better than the people that are already fine as they are and are happy leading a different sort of life it's that if you know that there is something that you're meant to do if you know that there's something that you're meant to change you will have to let certain groups friends routines places activities Recreations that you do you're going to have to let those go and there is this you know the rocky cut scene lasts for 90 seconds in the movie but it can last for 5 years in your life and you have no idea whether or not it's even going to work and that's the bit that always got to me the bit that always got to me was I didn't even know if it was there was going to be any glory on the other side it's like ordering an Uber and never knowing if it's going to arrive or not you think well I'm just stood here doing the thing but I don't know if it's going to come out on the other side and I can promise you anybody that has done anything moved from any place they were to any place that they want to be has gone through this lonely chapter and I think about uh personal growth like the velocity of a rocket that's taking off so you you've got people moving and as you start to take off you can begin to move a little bit more quickly and as you start to pull away from people there's a tension between the two of you because sometimes your behavior especially if it's positive and you're moving yourself in a more developed Direction can throw into harsh contrast the behavior of the people who maybe aren't doing that and then you start to sort of become friends with someone that's AB you and then the worst or one of the really difficult Sensations is if you then do that and you go past somebody who previously you were with and there's this sort of sense well I'm on the journey too but maybe I'm not moving in the same kind of way you are uh and I came up with this idea of personal growth guilt like Survivor guilt uh you know somebody comes back from war and they were sat in the back of the Humvee and the piece of shrapnel That was supposed to kill them and killed all of their buddies hit the engine block and they come back and they feel like they should still be back there but they're not and it's almost the same with the personal growth stuff that I I I I feel like I'm almost sort of betraying this older version of me this past version of my life that I should be there I and there's this scene in The Matrix that Alex talks about where uh Neo doesn't know if he wants to move forward he doesn't know if he wants to uh take the journey that he's called to and he opens the door and Trinity says you've already been down that road Neo you know where it takes you and you know that's not where you want to go back to uh and I I I think about that I think about that a lot that lonely chapter and for me it lasted for a good amount of time transitioning from being you know a guy in his 20s that does the reality TV thing does the the the party boy thing and then goes okay uh I need to I decide to stop drinking which 10 years ago was revolutionary especially as a club promoter it's now very common to do L and no but pretty diff different back then and all of the incentives were for me to go back to partying oh why are you doing that you're going to be boring on a night out I realized that that you know if you need to drink to be around your friends you don't have friends you have drinking partners and the most if the only way that you can bear to be around your friends is to drink then you really need to find yourself a better social network and all of the things I used to leave the front door of a nightclub and I would sit and I would wedge my phone into the top of the steering wheel so I have you know a party with 1500 people there all I it's my party my company right and I would leave to go watch a Lander Boton School of Life philosophy videos and it was evident that I just had this odd sort of discordance in my mind I was being ripped away from where I was to where I am and uh yeah I think you know the lonely chapter is one of the most important insights that has come out of the show over the last 18 months because it's reassuring to I think a huge portion of podcast listeners why is it that people resonate and have this parasocial relationship with some bloke that's on the other side of the planet and I think it's because while they're struggling to resonate with any of the BLS that or girls that are around them where they live and you know you end up finding solace in this person that speaks to you because you struggle to find solid sort of personally so yeah the overarching lesson is just keep going the lonely chapter is a feature not a bug of personal growth it is a it's the cost of doing business if you want to develop yourself yeah I I love that you know I I recall in high school when getting hurt skateboarding realizing I didn't have a future there which fortunately was a good thing for me I it was God again intervening saying nope you're going to get broke off again you're not going to this is not going to be your p following a high school girlfriend to college and then realizing after the first year that you know drinking and getting in fights was not a good path and get my life in order and then studying a lot at a school where at that time people weren't terribly studious and it was incredibly isolating I even lived alone lived with my girlfriend or I lived alone and being very isolated and then in graduate school felt more social connection but then as a junior Professor you know there are boundaries between you and the people you work with and those are important boundaries and so not having many male friends and you know my fortunately at the time my my romantic partner who I'm still good friends with um you know was was a great source of of family and support but feeling cut off from Friends of other types and and then again you know in this more recent iteration of of entering the podcast world but then you find your community I also think while uh this I totally agree we you can look to podcast to books um also to people who are no longer alive you know mentors like the great Oliver Sachs who I've never met but I've reached out to people that knew him and that have given me information about him that's given me you know gotten me through many hard times based on his life experience his biography his autobiography um this why I like biography and autobiography so much you can uh feel a kinship with people why David sra's show is so great that's one of the reasons Founders podcast is so great I just got to meet senra himself recently he's a just amazing amazing podcast he's amazing um highly recommend that podcast you know Rick rubin's been a great source of support um Tim Armstrong's been an enormous source of support Jim Theo's been an enormous source of support Joe Rogan's been an enormous source of support Lex Friedman's been a big source of support you've been a great source of support Whitney Cummings you and on and on and people showing up and people from entirely other Industries um investors people in um let's just I I want to because it's only fair to protect their identities people in uh media that are not of the podcasting ilk for instance um people who I never thought I would meet you know explaining the commonalities of of their experience you know and if you're wondering okay well then you know those are all these people but who's going to come for me well I'm going to and Chris is going to you know when you're coming up and you're in your thing like reach out right I mean it's it's kind of incredible the way that humans will move in to support one another when they need it good humans good humans and it's kind of incredible how good humans help lift each other up even when we don't know each other right and I don't want to get into it here because it's not appropriate for here but where I look at people that have really just disappeared not not always but a lot of times it's like their motiv their motivations weren't right in the first place something happened to them and they're gone and you go what happened to them and it's like so you know again there are exceptions to this but I don't know their heart probably wasn't in it their heart probably wasn't in it or you know there was enough of a terrible circumstance there that it had to go that way but you know I think it's just a you know I heard from a former postto of mine recently and another one both of whom are professors now and through the philanthropy arm of my podcast and some donors I'm able to support scientific research we do this like we don't do it for public recognition we do it because I want to support the best science and we're able to do that and I can't tell you the the the joy just pure joy that it brings me to hear about them and their students that they're mentoring like there's a passage of this stuff over time and look none of us live forever except Brian Johnson just kidding I and by the way if people want to know my take on Brian I've known Brian for a long time we go way back um and I think it's wonderful that he's doing what he's doing and I think he's um you know I don't know him well enough to say like people always want to know like what's he you know I think it's great that somebody's exploring the field of longevity from the perspective he is and other perspectives so for that for that matter got to give you my take on Brian so I was at I was at uh I've seen Brian in person maybe two or three times I was at ratan the an island off Honduras with him okay uh at the start of this year and then I did a Jeffersonian dinner oh yeah breakfast with him very Bay Area to do a Jeffersonian dinner yeah well he brought he brought some of the Bay Area over and I had some of his nutty pudding and um I had to sit down with him and um the way that I think of Brian is kind of like a scout in an army so it wouldn't do to have an entire Army filled with Scouts it would be a pretty shitty Army uh but I'm more than happy to have that one guy who apparently is built to be a scout go up that really dangerous Hill over there that maybe there the views beautiful uh or maybe slip and catastrophy occurs or something and come back and tell us what he found I love that thank you he a bit of an astronaut correct yeah you expend time and effort and resources and and all of that finding out stuff I'm you know I'm all I'm all for him doing that uh and I'll take the you know top 20% or whatever that gives the 80% of the of the insights from him um yeah he's part of this incredible tapestry that's being built of public facing health and science information you know never before in human history has health and science information been dispersed um in the way that it is now through podcasts through traditional media from Physicians from scientists from ancient uh wisdom stuff I mean I can sit back from all of it see Brian see my position in the field see the Lane Norton see the people that attack us see the the FDA see the um the NIH and I can look at and you know I mean listen I was on a grants review panel until you know a little over 12 months ago I was a regular member on there I've reviewed grants written grants fortunately gotten many grants funded plenty of Grants didn't get funded to I like I understand the process and I understand people's different orientation and and realize that we're all after the same thing we're all we all want to live longer healthier lives with more Vitality like we're all after the same thing and what I'm interested in is the overlap in the ven diagrams so if you call it yoga NRA or nsdr if you're talking about REM sleep and the Dynamics of spindle waves in the brain or you're talking just about your dreams and you're doing a dream journal ultimately I'm interested in the practices that are true now that have always been true and that can evolve through technology that are going to allow us all to be healthier mentally physically Etc that's the mission so you you nailed it you want a Brian Johnson on the mission you want a Lane Norton on the mission I like to think you want an Andrew huberman on the mission you want Chris on the mission you want all these people on the mission and the FDA and the NIH and you want the arguments what you don't want and what I see is incredibly counterproductive is people taking the stance that only their view is the appropriate one as long as people voice their motivations and their logic for proposing what they propose it's mostly all good except the stuff that's dangerously dangerously bad okay that's not good but listen I I chuckle at the idea that any one of these perspectives is going to be the perspective and um in fact I throw my head back and laugh because if you look historically all you have to do if you if you really are having trouble sleeping or if you really want a dense book The Prince of medicine is a beautiful book that talks about galin and how our understanding of the human body in medicine really evolved from really people being allowed to do more and more in terms of human dissection and analyzing the human body something that wasn't allowed prior because of rules about dissecting human bodies and the understanding that government bodies plus funding plus curiosity have all you know been these competing forces and that the the acceleration of science and medicine is now taking place at a rate that is unprecedented crisper brain machine interface and yes I'll say it psychedelics and supplementation they're just compounds people go supplements none of that's regulated yeah and you could also have a conversation about ssris which have huge value but can also do huge damage so any qualified psychiatrist tell you that so right now we are on an accelerated path and I think the the challenge for most people is they're drinking from the fire hose and they don't know which filters to put up and so all I can say is it's super exciting right it's super super exciting but you want to argue about these different orientations about as much as you want to argue about what genre of music is best there's just no answer right most people love Taylor Swift and there are people that also love other forms of music and you're always going to find outliers at at the extremes so unless something is dangerous right I think that most most of the ideas I see out there warrant further exploration and some are just really darn good so I I'm glad that Brian came up because I think he represents one spoke on the wheel and it's and it's an important one in the in his absence I think the field will progress less quickly um you know I just wish that um people would look at things through these lenses um I also think for the generation coming up that were weaned on social media it's very important that they uh realize something that David Goin has said I just feel like it's appropriate to say this right now right now because most of what's Happening online is a consumer-based environment he I think he said it's easier than ever to become extraordinary now that it's hard to overstate the power of putting away the phone and doing some writing or putting away the phone and doing some musical training or putting away the like it's and then using social media as a place to put your efforts out into the world as opposed to place your efforts while standing there obliviously in the real world like the the people that realize that the direction of flow needs to be from Real World into electronic world and out as opposed to the other way are going to be the ones that are going to succeed in life barring some accident or injury you're almost guaranteed success relative to your peers it's that simple I remember we've spoken about this before but I remember when nmn rapy NAD sublingual mix it in the yogurt do all of this stuff I remember when that was you know going to make us all live to 150 and what is the state of the world of longevity drug supplements now what's happening with that yeah I just did an episode with petera so here's the deal as I understand it Peter is pretty bullish on rapy um remember that mtor which is expressed at very high levels in essentially all cells of the brain and body during development declines across the lifespan mtor mamalian Target of rapamycin that's named after the drug that targets that receptor Romy targets the uh uh mtor um and in some sense mimics fasting okay this is broadly speaking keep in mind that the studies showing extension of life in different species including mice um show that being fairly dramatically sub maintenance caloric extends lifespan but you're also potentially um sub happiness when you're that sub caloric um potentially pretty weak IM immunologically too potentially potentially physically weak okay so yes starving yourself Within reason can extend your lifespan but you also starve yourself of joy and vigor right I mean at some point you are sub caloric enough that testosterone levels plummet in men and women libido plummets fertility plummets in men and women so you know it's a trade-off um I don't take rapamycin I don't take Metformin I don't even take berberine which is poorman's metformin it um makes me very hypoglycemic for reasons that make total sense based on the mechanisms of metformin and berberine um I do take sublingual nmn but it's very important but I don't take it to extend my lifespan I take sublingual nmn and by the way I have no affiliation to any supplement company that sells nmn I take it because it has for me in my experience again this is not a randomized control trial this would not meet Nan criteria Lane Nan criteria uh it causes my hair to grow very very fast which is odd but other people I know who've taken it report the same effect Nails very thick and gives me a lot of mning energy yeah me too yeah so that's the reason I take it um but I don't expect it to make me live longer now the history around NN is worth paying attention to it was David Sinclair that popularized nmn remember nmn is a precursor to NAD NR is the precursor to nmn so there's a phosphate group that gets removed people um that are not David Sinclair um are are fairly bullish about NR being preferable to nmn but the people who are proponents of NR true niagen Associated folks Etc tend to focus more on the anti-inflammation effects of NR and point to the fact that NR has been shown to convert to NAD in cells more readily than nmn now all I know is that when I take sublingual NN my hair grows faster my my nails grow thicker and faster two effects that I wasn't seeking but that I'm okay with um and I have more morning energy I've also taken NR and I didn't notice any tangible effect I don't take it because it's very expensive relative to NN and even though I probably could afford it I didn't subjectively feel much which is not to say it isn't worthwhile people might be interested in taking it the nmn was popularized because David Sinclair started talking about it on various podcasts and then he started a company that is evaluating it as a drug in a clinical trial therefore the FDA said the nmn could not be sold as a supplement that's the way the laws work but then supplement manufacturers continued to do so and it does not seem like the FDA is clamping down on it at least not hard because you can go on Amazon or you can go to any one of these different companies and buy nmn if you wish so that's the story there in terms of other things to oh and why don't I take Rapa m uh not enough human data and honestly my goal is to live to be 100 or 110 with Vigor and I'm not so interested in living to be 150 Atman uh no not interested in plummeting my blood sugar berberine not interested in plummeting my blood sugar gives me headaches unless I'm eating a lot of carbohydrates with it the only time I've taken bourine and I might take it again is I used to do cheat days I don't any longer where I could eat a dozen donuts if I take 500 milligrams of berberine first I feel fine otherwise I feel like my eyes get blurry and I want to pass out that's kind of fun to do every once in a while but if I don't eat a lot of carbohydrates or sugar with berberine then I get a massive hypoglycemic headache and I feel like it almost feels like my head is made of of stone it's it's very strange feeling I don't like it um other things for longevity taking good care don't get hit in the head um avoid excessive stress you know all the all the basic kind of like uh things that we all know so the longevity field is a peculiar one I mean it could be that Brian is onto something with the exomes and with the again I don't want to throw out things that I'm not aware that he's doing I think it's some PRP exosomes I do red light I think there's enough data for red light therapy whole body red light um you know yep naked in front of the panel 10 minutes five minutes facing five minutes from behind or facing away um as it were um for sake of Eye Health we the data from Glenn Jeff's lab showing that red light therapy um especially in the early part of the day May offset some age related Vision decline that this is my colleague Glenn Jeffrey at University College London beautiful studies he might be a fun person for you to talk to um he's been in the game a long long time um red light therapy for mitochondrial Health um you know these sorts of things and then um you know dosing with stress appropriately but not overdoing stress making sure to get enough sleep um having a joyful life I Love This Joy is efficiency and Longevity perhaps as well you know I'm bolstered by observing um my dad who who you know might have a glass of wine every once in a while but never drank very much who exercises but never overdid it who always worked nine to five and then would put down the pen and he's a theoretical physicist after all and would focus on walks and getting sunlight and thinking he would often take walks and think about science he would tell me but didn't overwork himself but was very very consistent I think he just filed like like more he's in excess of 70 patents and he's going strong you know he was also somebody that in the moved to the United States in the era of the 1960s and told stories about people you know passing joints and he was like no like I worked my butt off to get out of a you know a country where they didn't support science he had this opportunity from the Navy to come here and study on scholarship and decided you know he's sort of like all drugs bad kind of guy whereas I think nowadays I and others have a a kind of a more adapted Nuance view of things like cannabis probably okay for some probably good for others and probably terrible for others so I think that moderation goes a long way including in exercise I mean if you look at people who marathon and ultra um they don't age as well as in my opinion as people certainly better than people that are sedentary but when you look at for instance um people who are very heavily muscled they don't age very well you look at people who do a ton of ultra endurance they don't age terribly well you look at some of the older sprinters out there older gymnasts I'll pass you a clip of this guy he's 98 years old I sent this to Rick Rubin the other day and we were just blown away a guy doing a two two fingers of each hand doing a pull-up I think the guy's Chinese and then doing a skin the cat so rolling his feet in you know shoulder extension skin the cat then back out and then a chin up and then walking away from it now he looks 98 at the level of his skin sag and his face and his and his gate but holy moly does he have grip strength and flexibility and I want be that guy at 98 I don't know what he's doing in the other domains of his life but I'm pretty sure it's impressive what is the reason for the concern on Ultra athletes is that free radicals I've heard that I don't even know what they are it's just stress I mean and I think at some and you know I went up to the Olympic track and field trials in Oregon and it was amazing and I met some of the the best marathoners in the world and I know cam haes well as you do and he you know and cam pushes himself hard I think that again better that that than to to be sedentary I think for cam I can't speak for him but I don't think he has a choice but to push himself that way um but and and he's pretty I don't think he's pushing he's being pulled he's being pulled yeah well and he's got it up I don't I think he's it's all coming through him I know I I know probably some people are like oh God here we go again with that whole thing but there's something about when you access these sources of of of guidance and energy that are outside you that um feel bigger than you and are bigger than you um if nothing else we we we can agree on that um cim carries a fair amount of muscle as well which I think it's protective against some of the muscle wasting that occurs when people are running really far really long you know over and over and over it's stress stress see that guy that ran the entire length of Africa no but that's super impressive world's first world first guy uh the yeah from the cape Cape Town you know the absolute bottom to Turkey and it can't be a a straight line J run for a run for a year this is some Forest Gump kind of stuff correct um and Ross Edgley do you remember Ross he swam around the UK was the first man to ever swim around the UK so he's just completed he would be great I'm going to try and twiddle the dials on Rob to see if you guys want to speak he's just completed the world's longest single distance nonstop swim how far 300 miles without touching land without stopping without sleeping it was 50 over 50 hours eating in the water pooping in the water the first time he had to go to fish first time he had to go to the bathro he's got like a butt flap on his thing uh he missed the butt flap so then just churned his uh poop for the you know next 50 hours as he did this swim uh apparently they they cut him out of it and he was there was like this sort of gray dust inside of him which is what if you churn your own feces for long enough apparently that happens um but Ross SW it was first man around the UK amazing so he did 6 hours on 6 hours off for 6 months amazing 6 hours on 6 hours off for 6 months the human you know that the human spirit is like one of these things I just marvel in I'm curious Chris um what what do you see as your long Arc have you thought are you like I'm in caterpillar mode I'm thinking I'm thinking about the microplastics episode that I'm preparing like what um well now I'm focused on where we are right now but but you know in a book and some other things in the in the not too distant future but like do you how old are you 36 man you're young I I mean you look young but um so do you do you have aspirations for politics are you be great great no no no no very flatteringly Rogan and cam hay said that they would vote for me if I ran for president but they can't because he's British uh no none of that um we could run in in the UK yeah I'm sure that I mean the UK is a whole other a whole other challenge at the moment that I don't intend on stepping foot into um one of the interesting things that I've learned I think over the last two and a half years since moving to America is if there's ever a period of sort of rapid growth or development um optionality in life opens up so rapidly and the potential universes Branch so quickly that any real long-term plan is kind of pointless at this is maybe a cope because I struggle with long-term planning I know that the way that you're supposed to live the most fulfilling life for my productivity bro background is to write your obituary and then you know you're in 25e eons and then you're in seven-year phases and then you're in one-ear Sprints and you're in 90-day blocks and you've got your daily actions which contribute to you so on and so forth I've never been able to really think more than about six months ahead and the last two years I I would have never thought two and a half years ago that I would have been Liv in America that I would have been doing this sort of a thing that the show would have been where it was I would have had the opportunities I would and um especially if the things that you want to have happen start to happen to you the pace is so unimaginable that you need to learn to develop the skill to say no to things that you would have only dreamt to have had the opportunity to have been in the room to have pitched to have said yes to 6 months ago and you're it's like reverse honic adaptation you're permanently having to set your Baseline of what you should expect from yourself from your life from the way that you show up and the challenges completely change so uh I know that I want to have a family I know that I want to be a dad I'm very excited about that um I know that I love learning and having these sorts of conversations uh I know that it's incredibly gratifying to be seen as a appear by people that you also admire and that you aspire to emulate uh you know that's unbelievably cool I think that especially be I grew up in you know a town in the UK famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England and then it lost that so it didn't really even have that the name of the town Stockton onas and it's just you know classic Northern working Town nothing spectacular there apart from the railway was actually invented there but uh when I was growing up I didn't have a massive number of Role Models like the person I wanted to be like but I had a lot of people like the person I didn't want to be like so I came up with this idea of the reverse role model which is if you are in a kind of a role model desert we hear about food deserts if you're in a role model desert that's not great but I think more people's lives are sideswiped by making errors than by Expediting success and it meant that I was able to grow up and say well I don't want his relation relationship with his family and I don't want the way that he uses alcohol to cope with his problems and I don't want his issue that he's got with gambling uh and it creates these sort of way markers in the ground not ones that you go to but ones that you avoid sort of helps you to map out the Mind sweeper territory and uh can can I just in uh one thing that's extraordinary about what you're saying um is uh deserving of a neuroscience analogy um I started off as a developmental neurobiologist so I teach embryology and brain development to medical students and graduate students among other things in neuroscience and one of the things that we learned over the last 20 30 years is that the brain the nervous system so brain and spinal cord without question the most complex and incredible object in the entire universe without question right I mean just think about what human brains have created in terms of other Technologies those are all the the product of the the brain right elon's Rockets X this podcast everything here these cars like are the product of this object this you know you know 2 and a half PBS or whatever you know depending on the size of someone's head and brain the nervous system starts off from you know you have sperm Meats egg what happens before that is it varies but it has certain uh required uh elements sperm eats egg and then there's duplications of the cells and some of those cells become Limbs and some of the cells become fingernails Etc but a certain number of those cells become designated as nervous system and then you have literally trillions of neurons nerve cells that are independent of one another little spheres that need to connect to one another in immensely precise ways in order for you to be able to see the world around you to smell the world around you to make sense of when milk is coming when food is coming to form traumas and to have dopamine related reward experience a big mystery in the field of brain development for over a century was how is it that the neurons find the right connections given the Exquisite Precision that allows for all these incredible abilities of the brain the most magnificent object in the universe and for a long time it was thought that oh there would be what are called chemoattractants there would be things that would lead the neurons to steer in the right direction and wire up and indeed those chemot tracts exist they go by the names of things like netrin which means to guide or ephrine or Etc but Far and Away by I would say by an order of magnitude most wiring in the nervous system occurs by selective repulsion in other words by neurons growing out looking for something to connect to and chemical labels saying uhuh not here uhuh not here nope not here and neurons trying so hard to form connections wherever they can and these as they're called repellent not repulsive cuz because repulsive seems like you know but repellent forces Corridor them into progressively more precise and more precise and more precise connection so that by time a baby is born after nine months or so the wiring of the brain and spinal cord is such that they're ready for life and then more wiring occurs and most of the wiring that occurs after we're born the so-call neuroplasticity is a selective removal of connections as oppos to the formation of new connection and so as you're describing your experience of growing up in this town whose name I can't remember right now St Stockton the origin of the the the train yes you describe all these repellent forces I don't want to be like that I don't want to be like that I don't want to be like that and it highlights such a key principle which is that you know we think of a really good life as being the consequence of selective decisions for you know running toward not away from type decisions but I think what raise is incredibly important and is not discussed enough which is that so much of a good life a right life an incredibly successful life involves the no definitely not that definitely not that and a selective pruning and a selective repellent mechanism away from the wrong territory and so forgive me for waxing poetic on brain development in relevance to your life experience because your life experience is is far more you know um rich in terms of what it means but I think that um if ever there was an analogy for H how you've emerged and the trajectory that you've taken um it's the wiring of the central nervous system yeah I think uh avoiding catastrophe is significantly more profitable than trying to expedite success Amen to that there's this idea from mathematics which is never multiply by zero so if you take 20 multiplied by three multipli by 400,000 multipli by 1.3 multipli by zero you get zero so you can do all of the good work in the world you can boom avoid eating seed oils and you don't put any [ __ ] sun lotion on your testicles and you get all of your light in the morning some sunscreens are safe despite what the internet says I believe in some sunscreens I lost friends for saying that but it's what was your thing about uh uh people will lose so much sleep and friends over debating seed oils oh goodness seed oils are the sunscreen thing look mineral-based sunscreens everyone agrees are safe except the few people that don't like sunscreen at all but I'm not one of those people I believe in sunscreen I wear zinc oxide sunscreen but according to the internet you find all sorts of lies about the opposite so anyway uh yeah so you and you multiply by zero uh you've done all of this stuff you've been resistant training three times a week listen to the hubman lab even subscribed on whatever your thing is podcast thing and got the additional AMA and then you decide one day to just drive without a seat belt on or what happened to me two weeks ago heading to the podcast I've got to get my run in I love running I'm going to take a quick run I run down my street I'm live on a hill I run into the park nearby run into a podcast van we hang out for a little bit jog together I split off and head home and I'm heading home and I'm thinking how am I going to get home do my five minutes meditation hour and get ready and make it to the podcast studio in time I'll just do my meditation now brilliant idea Professor huberman so I close my eyes while you're running yeah and I'm striding up the hill and it's a big wide Street and I'm thinking and all of a sudden BR and I go right into a box truck and I'm thinking ah now I've been hit before I boxed a little bit skateboarded I've hit my head I'm not tough but I've hit my head you know I reach up I'm like oh and there's enough blood on my hand I'm like oh boy it's a big one it's a big one and then I feel it gape I'm like oh boy so it turned out it was like o OC bone exposed not good no bueno ran right into a parked box truck okay hey I'm the absent-minded professor at times um meditate when you get home folks fortunately I have a friend who I know through training and friend common friends his name is Jason diamond and he's one of the world's best facial plastic surgeons I didn't care so much about a scar but he assured me we can do this without a scar he said you have to get in and get it stitched up within six hours you're kidding so I go to his Clinic fortunately they flushed it out he wasn't there that day meanwhile Rob's waiting at the studio with the guest from Stanford amazing amazing Professor named Jam Zaki who's brilliant um and they put a couple injections in novakaine suture me up and you know a week later I'm I'm pretty good week ago yeah Jason and his Clinic are absolute phenoms yeah it did he did he explain to you the importance of the 6 hours to avoid infection to avoid infection it's the infection that gets in there they um you know flushed it put some local antibiotic all I put on it was a little bit of um Neosporin poporn after it was stitched got the Stitch out stitches out a we it's so it's been it's been uh a week and four days yeah you're like Wolverine yeah normally I don't heal that well now I will say this for the record I've been experimenting with bpc 157 for which there are basically zero human data tons of animal data and anyone that's taking BBC 157 by the way you don't want to take it continuously and if you're going to take it get it from a compounding pharmacy and get it prescribed by a doctor because there's a lot of contaminated versions out there I would never take an oral version it can cause an it does cause angiogenesis growth of of blood vessels so if you have a tumor you could cause angiogenesis of the tumor so um but I do take I was taking it um subq yep and I do heal noticeably faster when taking bpc157 um but were I not to have had that injury and I had a little bit of a calf thing I was trying to repair I would not take bpc 157 continuously just to take it and nowadays I hear about a lot of young guys just taking it the same way they just take testosterone cypionate which is just foolish uh two stories I ruptured my achilles three four years ago uh I took tb500 in bpc 157 for the six weeks after that so you tore your Achilles complete Detachment yeah full rupture I mean you can even you can even see if you lean over there you can just oh he's not lying that thing looks like a zipper I've got the scar it looks like a zipper the scar to show it um so how do you do that playing Cricket the most British way oh yeah that's a confusing sport yeah um so I did that TB 500's bpc 157 um six weeks and the recovery was very good it was also during a pandemic I had nothing else to do and I was Beyond milit psychotic like probably 95 to 98% compliance with sets reps recover everything everything did you curious because there's no clinical studies on this so when I talked to Peter AA about BBC 157 he's like no clinical data but then you talk to let's just say um xgame athletes or let's say you're me and you talk to Olympic athletes bpc is still allowed right it's natur gastrointestinally I don't think it's allowed in the Olympics I will tell you that many many athletes used and use bpc 157 to recover from injury more quickly tb500 is very uh restricted but bpc 157 seems to be less less restricted yeah um yeah I I worry about any conversation about this only if people think oh I'm just going to take this so I can like grow recover bigger biceps like don't like just cancer is nothing you want is this that's the second this is the second thing I want to tell you about so Chase who isn't here today uh lead strategist for us uh he had started to hear about some of the great uh effects that you get from bpc 157 I think that he took an oral uh version of it yeah those are out there have you heard about this uh anthia response where it just creates a persistent feeling of hopelessness that is inescapable no but that sounds horrible don't do it folks taking bpc157 or injecting testosterone cp8 because you just want more gains than recover in the gym is absolutely foolish you know I've talked about these things before you know I was 45 before I touched anything and you need to bank sperm if you want kids you need to take HCG if you want to maintain sperm production you need to keep dosages low I also did an experiment where I went on and then went off I would not take these things continuously um unless you're working with a physician and they say you need it I'm living proof that you don't need to do it continuously and I would also say that when it comes to bpc 157 the angio enic effects are really the most concerning again you could get vascularization of tumors the one peptide is that sorry is that mediated whether you take it orally or subq nobody knows so I was going to ask did you inject it locally into the cuz I wasn't injecting my eye no I was shooting uh your typical uh sort of Love Handle uh spots uh tb500 just because I was trying to get it as close so it was sort of the fat on the inside of your calf I was shooting it in there just Cas it maybe some sort of there's probably some local effect here's what we know about bpc157 it's from the animal studies it seems able to detect injury in some very interesting way and lead to fiberblast a certain kind of cell type relevant to tendon Etc it's actual Achilles tendon ruptures in the mice or the rats that they're using right so I thought well God if if it's ever going to work for anything and sciatic nerve as well and what's also interesting is there are a couple peptides that I think are going to be discussed more and more you know bpc 157 and OIC are the ones you hear the most about those are after all both peptides as is insulin by the way um for Sleep pinealon which is related to Regeneration and support of the pineal gland very interesting maybe we talk about this in a year or so when there's more data cagen things that are um relevant to the Trek one pathway and can accelerate nerve growth not track track receptors bdnf not that pathway but Trek one um there's a lot of of Interest now Brian Johnson very interested and others interested in cerebral Lon which is sold in Europe but not the US I'm taking cerebral Lion at the moment are you yeah how does it how do you feel I've only shot it once so that's I am so you're taking cereal lion yeah okay I've taken once I've never tried it no so I've I've used it once uh I need to shoot again I have to say I just get nervous with IM injections generally to [ __ ] big old needle to be shooting in and it's a why why use a big needle uh because it's a pretty hefty um dose it's five mil five Ms five mil oh my goodness you're not going to put that through an insulin pen you know unless you're going to draw it up each time you know five individual injection that reminds me it takes we didn't close the hatch on NAD have you ever done an NAD infusion yes number of times yeah and it feels like an elephant is stepping on your legs and you're getting kicked in the groin have you tried that with uh what's the stuff that stops you from one zran yeah I don't like taking medication if I can avoid it so I just you did it without the ZR I did I do it but I don't in I didn't Infuse it that fast now I will say this I've done NAD infusions you feel horrible while it's going in you feel better afterwards but it's always hard to dissociate from the you know saline that you're bringing into your system because a saline dri pretty good could be we don't know so there's a a place in Austin cuya which I go to which is really great great SAA it's cold punch and the salt baths there are great too the flotation Texs so they do the NAD infusions and they'll do it with zran so I'm there with James uh newtonic guy in my housemate Zach and she says do you want the thing to stop you feeling I was yeah yeah of course and classic three guys in a row we just start opening up the Taps on this thing to the point where it's just pouring in yeah the the the idea here that Chris is uh referring to is that when you do an NAD infusion they'll offer to give it to you over the course of three hours two hours one hour I heard and this is just lore that Rogan does it in like 30 minutes I think it do the faster you go in you put it in the FAS you infuse the um the more painful it is and if you don't take the zran it's called something like that the ant nausea medication you feel like you want to vomit you feel irritable but then when it's done the moment it's done it's you definitely feel better I just don't know what the source of the effect is but the the rationale there is that unlike NR NR nmn which need to be converted which need to be converted excuse me to NAD uh the direct infusion of NAD either by some lingual electrooptic patch or by um you know IV infusion is supposed to get into your cells more readily but again um and it tends to be pretty expensive it's it's not it's you know a couple hundred bucks or more yeah I haven't been doing NAD infusions consistently um you know these days I I'm back to real Basics I mean I still do you the basics I will give you my uh review on what I'm doing at the moment but right now uh bpc 157 uh thymus and Alpha uh are you injured thymus beta what's the rationale I'm doing this mold detox very aggressive mold detox so mold detox yeah I've heard this like that people who are like a number of people that I know from Austin claim particularly a bad thing in Austin so I haven't spoken about this The Damp damp nights hot days yeah I haven't spoken about this on the show yet we're kind of tracking everything uh and I'll bring it up at some point but um that cerebral icing um uh m c so I've got a peptides is a very important part I'm also doing ozone therapy if you ever tried that no so uh half a pint of blood is taken out of you put into a uh a bag with an anti-coagulant and then a um antimicrobial gas is pushed into the bag so it almost looks like it's carbonating your blood do sci-fi oh this is I've got everything I'm doing 25 gr IV you don't even live in Los Angeles no no but there's places alive and well in Austin it's phenomenal for this uh glutathione IV um phosphasal choline uh red light therapy lymph massage everything to try and fix I've got the my brain frog you look healthy thank youp I don't I don't feel it but uh it's it's working along one thing that I uh did want to loop back to that you mentioned earlier on you're teaching an undergraduate course how how is that not going to be the most oversubscribed cues out of the I mean you like people go to see you do talks in Australia how are you able to organize a course at a university is surely that's just going to be everybody in their sister is going to come along yeah we'll see what happens the um you know I've talked consistently I I've never taken a sabatical a formal sabatical I have sabatical time accured um where I could not teach but during the uh pandemic we were mostly remote teaching I was directing our course in neur anatomy for medical students and teaching I did some in-person lectures last year I did a remote lecture um because my main appointment is in the medical school you know you either have to teach or do research in order to fulfill your um obligation so you know at Stanford we have the option to teach undergraduate courses and I spoke to my chair U my new chair um I'm in three different departments now but the the chair I'm currently under and we decided I would teach a undergraduate course in um neuroscience and health in particular it's also going to have some guest lectures and we're going to make it a big course so anywhere from 400 to 600 students I've taught lectures that big before when I was you got theaters of that size oh yeah yeah they're amp you know they're not really Amphitheater but yeah certainly big enough um when I was before I was at Stanford my lab I trained at Stanford as a postto but then when I was a junior Professor meaning before I got tenure I was at UC San Diego and I taught a course that called neural circuits in health and disease evening course started as 50 students and very quickly grew to 400 students so I'm familiar with this kind of format we read papers we evaluate papers we have guest lectures um I'm also getting some help from the students this I was going to say how many are you going to have for this probably going to need somewhere between six and eight Tas um and what's interesting is that it's a [ __ ] platoon it's like Seal Team sick yeah and the Tas are amazing I mean that they handle so much of the work uh related to kind of the the mechanics but obviously as an instructor you need to coordinate that and when I directed the neuron Anatomy course I had a um Tas and there there was a laboratory component as well where they dissect brains and things of that sort um again all made more difficult by the pandemic situation it was really complicated but they're phenomenal so it worked out um I've reached out to some of the students who are helping me devise the curriculum which is going to be a lot of fun you know learning from the students like what are the things that you really want to understand um and they are phenomenal I mean obviously Stanford students as our students elsewhere just like phenomenal what age will these be so undergraduates I suppose when I went to college I'm a fall baby so I was born late September so when I went off to college I was still 17 I turned 18 my first month in school because we're on the quarter system as is Stanford so they're going to be somewhere between 18 and 22 um it's going to be a lot of fun we're going to get people in from computer science and AI we're going to get people in from obviously Neuroscience bioengineering chemistry psychology ology um you should come up for a lecture um it's going to be a little bit of a challenge we we are definitely going to be checking IDs at the door I was going to say there like a [ __ ] capacity problem people going to be sneaking in you're going to have to have a Turn Style yeah we well um I don't want to give away too much about this but we will have a format um by which uh enrolled students will be like it'll be clear who those are and and you know but we're not going to announce the location of the course like each day or anything so wow but yeah it's a lot of fun people often want to know like you know can I come to Stanford and see your your space and this and you know unfortunately that can't happen I heard I heard a rumor but these are going to be filmed I should say that that very likely Stanford media is going to put these out there separate from the podcast if they ever wanted to get some free plays on YouTube that's a a pretty easy way to do Bob spolsky's lectures at Stanford are some of the most popular the number of times that you see introduction to evolutionary biology that one famous photo of him in front of the board yeah uh yeah how compatible have you found the life of a influencer very well-known podcaster with being a sort of responsible and in-depth researcher do is is that challenging to navigate those two things yeah so keep in mind in um just to give people an orientation of how this went you know in 2019 I started posting Clips to Instagram just CA in 2020 I started going on podcasts I think I went on close to 30 podcasts in 2020 including Rogan Rich Roll and Lex freedman's podcast Whitney Cummings podcast and then we launched the podcast the hubman Lab podcast in January 20121 from the time I've been 19 years old I've been a student and working in a laboratory I started my laboratory as an assistant professor when I was 35 I got tenure when I was 40 and I've been at Stanford since I was 40 I'm 49 tenured there and I ran my laboratory to pretty big capacity I had at one point I had a lot of students and posts and technicians and things that sort during the pandemic I definitely Shrunk the size of my research laboratory in part that was related to the pandemic in part it was related to the fact that I was doing more and more public facing work the huberman lab as a research lab still exists but we do human clinical trials and we published a paper in 2023 with my collaborator David Spiegel who's in the department of Psychiatry where we started doing those experiments remotely people wearing [ __ ] bands and other devices to monitor their sleep sleep and HRV Etc while they were doing specific practices to mitigate stress currently I'm involved in the generation of experiments in humans to evaluate non-sleep deep rest as it relates to patterns of activity in the human brain those are experiments that are spinning up with Matt Walker they'll be done at Berkeley as well as studies at Stanford through the department of Opthalmology and some other departments looking at visual repair so this is a long-standing interest of mine trying to understand and cure glaucoma the second leading cause of blindness in the world second only to cataract so I still have research funds and so the huberman lab exists now in that realm working with clinicians So Gone are the days we now only recently what you might read but gone are the days now where you can walk into my laboratory and see mice that Express green Foles protein and glow that was not long ago where that was true or we had brain bow ice that glowed 12 different colors not developed by me but developed by others but we use those tools where people were recording from neurons using extracellular electrodes we've recorded from human brain in collaboration with Dr Eddie Chang at UCSF recording from the human insula while people are in VR looking at great white sharks that I filmed while doing V so I've been involved in a number of different styles of research and I still am very much interested in research I'm still on advisory uh excuse me editorial committees and so forth these days because of the demands of the podcast and the fact that we're soon launching in addition to the standard podcast 30 minute what we call Essentials 30 minute versions of the podcast in addition to the long form okay um because I'm also writing the bonus chapters on my book which is out next April because I am going on podcasts and still very much involved in science philanthropy through scom my company and through a bunch of other venues and I'm very much interested in lobbying for advancing treatments for the PTSD and other psychiatric challenges because I'm spread over a lot of things I'm basically restricted to doing one or two studies per year or two and I'm fortunate to have excellent collaborators and clinicians and post talks that can carry that work but we still have to look at data and analyze data and write papers so you know I I think one of the people who's been very important as an example but also a mentor I've never said this out loud was from an early stage uh the Dr Robert spolski has been very generous with advice about how to navigate these sorts of things about being public Ing and transitions from laboratory and teaching Etc and I must say that Stanford has been wonderful in their support of the podcast they've been wonderful in support of me evolving this new course curriculum they've been wonderful in terms of um embracing these new types of philanthropy to bring Laboratories other than mine um the kind of financial support that allows them to do really cutting edge science so you know one of my missions and this wasn't discussed much um publicly but it should have been is you know the during the Obama Administration there was the brain initiative it infused over hundred million into brain research during the Trump Administration that followed that funding was maintained although it changed names just this last year or so the brain initiative was cut the budget was cut by approximately 40% and as a consequence a lot of Neuroscience Laboratories were not able and are not able to do the important work that they need to do to develop treatments for Alzheimer's for Parkinson for eating disorders for addiction and on and on autism Etc so a a big part of my effort these days is to raise awareness and money from donors but also from scom my company the parent company of the hlp to bring money to researchers so they can do that work and you know I'm very passionate about this because as somebody who wrote grants for years as somebody who ran a laboratory for years and still does although in a more minor extent the academic has to work two jobs they have to work like a demon to raise the money to be even begin to do the work and oftentimes the best work takes years to evolve and many granting agencies sadly will not fund work until it's already basically done believe it or not so I've become very very passionate about raising more money for the best science and one of the things I love about doing science philanthropy is that I can direct money to Laboratories very quickly in fact I have one rule for giving funds to a laboratory first of all right now we're only funding human work not animal work second of course the work has to be of excellent uh value and quality but the Grant application has to be one sentence and no more you write me two sentences you're not getting the money I don't want to budget I trust the best researchers to do excellent work and then we give them the funds and they are unrestricted meaning they have to spend them on research but they can do the great work they want to do what's the coolest sentence that you've received oh um we've given money to Joanna Stein glasses laboratory at Columbia University School of Medicine and her stated goal is to find a cure for anorexia nervosa the most deadly of all psychiatric illnesses period now that's a Grant application and it's one that I was happy to fund and that we're going to be happy to continue to fund and it's been marvelous to see these billionaire donors and hundreds of Millions ion hundreds of million dollars in worth donors put their money into the pot they've now Forex our initial contributions to to from scom and it's continuing to grow and it's like it's just all the like the ecosystem is perfect you know where can people go if they want to throw some money at the yeah so we fund it in part through our premium channel which I do these amas um if people want to give to scyon philanthropy directly they can if people are of uh have money that they want to put towards science and they want to bypass all of that they can um they could do that by contacting um Let me give the proper name um it would be Ian ATS with 2 msom media.com um you know that this is not money that I'm seeking for my own laboratory this is me acting as a hub to distribute money to excellent Laboratories and you know so this is an very important mission in my life because I can tell you as a researcher who wrote grants for years that the amount of time and energy that talented researchers put into raising money to be able to do their work is extraordinary and it's not that with money you can do successful science necessarily but you can afford a lot more risk-taking healthy risk-taking in science and you just get more time to develop and analyze data and you know we have a dir of of funding in this country there's more funding for research than anywhere else in the world the UK is pretty good as well um Germany's pretty good as well Switzerland is well there are other countries but you know the more money that goes into research the the faster cures are found we know this we know this from every disease that's ever been looked at where there's time energy a healthy dose of emotion and money you get cures for the most challenging diseases this is absolute fact I've been thinking about this sort of a little bit of a juer position that I see happening with you maybe recently or maybe it's always been there but burbling below the surface which is between cerebral horsepower sort of cognition rational Material Science and intuition something which is a little bit more sort of ephemeral it's kind of embodied it's uh there's no language for good Instinct in a way as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about thinking thinking about science and how it works what is your advice for people on how to follow intuition more how to blend the the cognitive with the intuitive MH yeah um yeah I can feel ideas in my body um and it's like I remember driving as a graduate student to visit friends in San Francisco because I was in Graduate School North of San Francisco and feeling in my left arm so weird uh feeling in my left arm that I was going to do something new and I ended up doing some writing for a some music right about music for a skateboarding magazine that L and led to a set of ideas that eventually led to this the podcast philanthropy and so on um the nervous system because it includes the brain and body I think has a more ancient um form of of response and acts as more of a Rudder in the in our sort of sematic awareness in our body our thinking obviously can be very structured and and I indeed try and train up both here's the exercise that I think is very useful and it's going to seem really squishy and new Agy but it was given to me by the Great Martha Beach who triple degreed from Harvard who then developed a bunch of self-help personal development tools to figure out right path right life for whoever you are listening to this and the exercise that I did based on one of her books years ago was you sit quietly and you imagine something terrible something really terrible and You observe and feel how your body responds to that the feeling of contraction that pre that precedes the movement of your limbs or covering up then you relax it a bit you shake that off and maybe at a different time maybe a few minutes later so you do that several times maybe for 5 10 minutes set a timer then you do the opposite you start imagining things that are absolutely the word that comes to mind is is very Martha beckian um delicious to you things that just feel so good right and and don't limmit yourself and you experience in a way preceding any bodily movement how your body your face your nervous system responds to that and what you're doing is you're tapping into the more in some sense crude more broad but in other ways more sensitive aspects of your nervous system to detect yes versus no you know so many of the circuits of the brain work in a yum yuck me kind of fashion where you either want to move towards things yum away from things what we call aversion um yuck or meh kind of neutral right ambivalence the body has the option to move toward to remain where it's at or to move away and paying attention to the signals that precede those intuitive decisions and practicing them through these you know she has this perfect day exercise which has been very very useful to me I've started doing it again where you take 10 minutes and you just know limits you just go perfect day what what is your perfect day and you just allow that to come up what is the bed you wake up in where you look around the room what's there allowing surprise and unanticipated things to enter the room you know maybe you wake up alone maybe with one person maybe with two people maybe you have a dog maybe you have a cat maybe you have a fish but you let some of that geyser up from your unconscious mind the as Paul kti would say the unconscious mind carries a wisdom based on your prior experience Maybe even the experience of people before you that your conscious mind can work with but you need to be able to access it sometimes through dreams but this perfect a exercise that Martha talks about allows this emergence of what's inside you and the directions that are really right for you okay there's there's no limits on this now what you're watching for in these different exercises is again how your nervous system responds before the action that you would take so you're withdra you're withhold holding action so you're not going oh that feels terrible and you're not going oh that feels great you're paying attention to the neural signals that precede the impulse to do that and you're playing with it and I would say this is a great way to build your intuition and to learn to respond to it when you're conscious and moving through space the other day I was on a phone call and I was just all of a sudden I realized like I don't want to be on this phone call I don't know what's happening I don't want to be on it I thought yeah Andrew like quit being such a wuss like like don't be so emotional and I realized I was like this is very energy draining to me and I got off the phone call other things moving toward I think that intuition in science my dad talks a lot about this when we talk talked Einstein talked a lot about this not to put us in the same bin at all but you know there was one there's a story about Einstein I know because my dad talks about him all the time where someone gave him a picture to to sign an autograph a picture of Einstein and Einstein put an arrow to his nose and said the source of all my ideas like his you know he could sense like where things were um you you need to develop a everyone needs to develop a sense for themselves of what steers them in a particular direction what are the somatic signals again the somatic signals the signals of the body are more crude in the sense that they are more divorced from language but they are more sensitive it reminds me of the neural retina we have two systems of vision in the retina as humans one that is the rod system which is very sensitive it's the one you use at dusk and at night to sense if there anything in your environment it's very sensitive it can detect one Photon one Photon but it has very poor Acuity it's not very nuanced at the level of seeing boundaries or edges but it will tell you if something is moving from behind a tree to get you the cone system as we call it is far less sensitive the cone system in contrast is far less sensitive okay it can't detect such subtle differences in luminosity but it is exquisit good at deciphering boundaries and color in fact it's the system that allows for tri trichromacy which is what allows us to see this as yellow um and dogs see this probably as kind of a blunted orange or a burnt orange because they are dichromats not Tri chromates so I think I know that within the body we have a sense of intuition that we can learn to listen to the signals are very very sensitive you're like a tuning fork to your environment most people learn to suppress this and we override it with thinking and cognition people that can combine thinking and cognition with this more coarse language of the body are able to parse their life experience in the direction they're going to go in with exquisite sensitivity and when you read [ __ ] you don't even need to read you can just listen to something Rick Rubin says or you could do do better and read his book what you realize is that Rick is somebody who he's like a a sens for music when he talks about his taste He's Able I he has this incredible ability to get really let things waft over him and experience them and go yes more of that and less of that he's like a he's a conductor and he can say more of that do more of that but what's so unbelievable about Rick so spectacular is that when he steps away from that experience he's boundaried he's still himself so it's kind of like empathy but he can engage and disengage it in a very adaptive way which is why he can create LL Cool J Beasty Boys Slayer there Rick I mentioned Slayer because he gives me a hard time about not listening to Slayer Slayer right you know Adele and on and on he's able to to sense what is good what is extra good and that's what taste is in the same way that you know somebody who is expert in wines how you pronounce somier what do you somier the s or the or the chef or the food taster or the neurosurgeon they they know the precise movements they know the chemistry in the ingredients that's part of their training but ultimately it's the Gestalt it's the whole picture that's taken in you sip the wine right you have to understand how the cut that you make in a neural circuit leads to changes AC Network wide brain wide body wide and so being able to straddle those two levels of analysis is really the essence of being an a virtuoso right and I'm not calling myself that I'm referring to these other people that way right a virtuoso is somebody that can embrace all the levels of granularity in an exploration all the details but also the macroscopic picture and then combine those in a way that that's really um unique and I think that you know the basic training of anything is a is a layering up of formal training I do believe that that most people need a formal training and then at some point you get to a level of expertise where your intuition is guiding you because it's grounded in all that knowledge it just it it comes forward in in in what look like very simple blocks but those simple blocks are built on incredible depth of knowledge and understanding and for myself you I spent a lifetime exploring biology in the nervous system that's where my depth of expertise exists but why are we now soon going to do in addition to long episodes shorter episodes well some people only have 30 minutes and they want to know how to sleep better and they don't want to have to listen to four episodes at four hours long so I want them to know the basic things to do so I think H having the offering and the understanding of different levels of granularity is key and you do this Chris listen three years ago I said to Rob I go in addition to all the podcasters that are already doing phenomenally well I said David senra Founders podcast and Chris they're the ones that are going to be next next level in a year and I'm not saying I I have a crystal ball but boom you guys are killing it and I know that you're pointed at the Sun and you're just going to continue along this trajectory it's like it's a felt thing because I can tell by the number of different topics the number of different venues the the emphasis that you put on production how you treat your team the Nuance that you put the way that you articulate the the emphasis that you put on like the details of like you know what's in your energy drink down to like the milligrams of this this is like when you meet someone who runs a laboratory they know at the beginning where everything is placed at some point they don't even know where the antibodies are because it's not their job to know it's the students job to know but they knew how to know that when they needed to and so I don't care if you're talking about yoyo ma Rick Ruben you Rogan LAX it's it's all the same thing and what you need to what people need to understand is that you have to get the formal rigorous training or if there's no degree in what you do it's just hour upon hour upon hour upon hour and then eventually it starts to look like kind of shorthand and just natural but that's built on deep deep deep expertise if you never learn the rules of the game there's no such thing as breaking the rules you're just playing the wrong sport that's right so you have to have that grinding yeah I mean you know my background in in NTI we always wanted our guys to come up from being a guest Lister that's what we did we gave out wristbands in the rain in the cold asking people where are we going toon night darling and after 6 months then you get to stand on the front door and then after you stand on the front door you get to work out how the TS work and then after you've done that and you work all the way up and I think that there's something very reassuring about hearing somebody maybe they don't know as much as the audio engineer or as the Director of Photography or as the producer or as the whatever but they can hold the conversation they go I I was there when it was at a lower resolution and now you're beyond my skill set but I can hold the conversation and all the way up and there's a kind of uh respect that that commands and I really like that I've always wanted to sort of embody that and develop that in myself and uh I guess there's some disadvantage many disadvantages to kind of being obsessive and and very attentive and very Vigilant but there's a ton of advantages as well huge advantages I mean my friend Eddie changen is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF okay he's one of if not the best neurosurgeon in the world at least in the top three he's constantly evolving his craft as is Joe you know and this might seem um as if it's some sort of uh promotional thing but I just want to point out you know because it's relevant to the conversation we're in and some of the things that have surfaced you know like in terms of like sponsors that I'll work with no I didn't say you can go from a two to a seven that was AI you know I didn't promote that company you know there's a lot of AI and [ __ ] out there using our face name and likeness but the sponsors that I work with whether or not it's ag1 eight sleep element these sponsors the reason I work with those sponsors is yes I use those products AG since 2012 but in addition in particular with ag1 and eight sleep they are constantly improving the product they're making you know it's very interesting to see how the the companies that are doing best are the ones that come under the most scrutiny and are also the companies that are doing the most Innovative iteration year after year after year after year why because they've been in the game a long time and they continue to iterate on more or less the same thing over and over and over now some people would say Okay creatine monohydrate right I'm not involved in any company that promotes creatin monohydrate I take creatine monohydrate I have since I was 17 years old um at that time everyone said it was going to blow out your kidneys or whatever but anyway I read about it in a uh mm2000 issue for those of you that remember I was like well this stuff really works turns out doesn't destroy your kidneys okay it's also good for cognition it turns out but you know does [ __ ] monohydrate need to be evolved no it's a single ingredient type of formulation that some people might find benefit from no require to take it I'm not selling it anyway but when it comes to things that are blends of things or it comes to a sleep technology so like ag1 like at sleep and again people might think oh this is just a you know an ad in Disguise no I will only work with companies that are telling me yes we're constantly working to make the Purity better and better and better 99.9% isn't good enough we're constantly trying to make a cooling bed better it's now going to help you offset snoring amazing the sleep tracker on eight sleep is exquisitely good it's laboratory grade sleep tracking the the the companies that succeed over time like apple I mean I'm from the Bay Area after all like you know like apple or you know we see YouTube I mean they're constantly updating things constantly updating the algorithms Instagram constantly meta you know and a is evolving and so I am an absolute fanatic about anything that mimics the scientific process which is you come up with a hypothesis you develop something or you develop a technology ol and you're constantly trying to improve on that technology over and over and over which is why I use these things why I know they're going to continue to get better and why I already believe in their value now and this is I think something that's often lost in the discussion about oh does this really work is it yes and the point is that you want to surround yourself with colleagues with sponsors if you need them or use them with people in your life that are that are really you know we hear the word optimization but that are optimizing for the now that also includes a balanced life right it's reasonable about you know what you can do in a given day and that are constantly trying to do better these are the things and products and people that evolve Health that evolve science that evolve creative activities and you know I can even look to Rick as somebody or my friend Tim Armstrong Tim writes a song every day he had platinum records back when he doesn't need to do that but people who are just obsessive about their craft and Lead balanced lives and are healthy these are the people that we need to look to Joe too I mean h four three or four three hour podcasts per week okay plus UFC plus standup plus he has a family plus he's a healthy guy and he just did the special the special was super entertaining I could feel the catharsis in some of that um and you can be sure he works like a demon yes he does the C plunge yes he does his training all the like I know you do I know Rick does I know I do I know Whitney does I know senra does I know you know there many other examples uh and so forgive me for not naming J shett works extremely hard to make their craft better and better and better and so for people coming up it doesn't mean you have to devote 12 hours a day to it or 100 hours a week but you you got to put in you got to you know chop wood carry water I think everybody needs to pay the entry price at some point know chop wood carry water everyone's got to do it yeah uh and there are no there are very few uh shortcuts to the top is that not what it says on uh the steps of the Mother Ship going up to the main stage have you ever been backstage okay I think it says uh It's a Long Way to the Top If you're going to do something but I I think so it's from the ACD to S it's a long way to maybe probably I mean it's on it's on brand with everything else Andrew Cuban ladies and gentlemen dude I really appreciate you I love getting to catch up uh it's it's so interesting sort of seeing where all of this is going what you're doing with Andy galpin's show what you're doing with Matt Walker what you're doing with Rob with the buck I my prediction is that you're going to do something I know that your mum does kids books there's definitely good yeah good intuition uh there's definitely some kids content and um ideas I've I've had a long-standing interest in um animation and puppets and um that's about all I can say about that right now because it's poorly formed I'm not I'm not being cryptic it's still still needs iterating but I've had Outreach some from some amazing puppeteers and some amazing animators and I'm super excited I also just want to say you know I'm both extremely grateful to you and I kid you not I am extremely in awe of what you've done and what you continue to do you showed up like a force and you are doing it and I I feel a little bit I I've said this before you know how in an Indiana Jones movie uh the big sort of ceiling is coming down and it's he's gonna get crushed underneath and sprinting sprinting sprinting sort of does a little slide underneath I feel like and then grabs his hat yeah and then gets the Hat I feel like me and that hat are kind of just sneaking in at the last thing and then now we're we're moving under our own steam well whatever you're doing it's awesome and um I really appreciate you having me here today I every time you pop up on my screen I'm like yes like I'm going to learn something from you I'm going to learn something it's your openness and also the fact that you have this razor likee mind to be able to pull things out I wish I was as succinct I can't even say the word I wish I was as succinct as you um and I agree with those other guys I I I wish you could uh run for president but since you can't you're just going to have to keep podcasting for us so thank you so much for doing it I appreciate you man if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full length 2-hour master class on how to build muscle with Dr Mike is Rell right here go on