#1042 - Dr Andrew Huberman - How to Reclaim Your Brain in 2026

25:45Your cortisol curve that high in the morning, low in the afternoon and evening kind of normalizes a bit. It's still a little bit higher at every point than it normally would be. But if you suddenly switch from eating carbohydrates, when I say carbohydrates, I mean starchy carbohydrates. Okay, well, let's leave aside sugar and fructose and etc. Which, of course, is a form of sugar. But if you shift from a sort of standard macronutrient distribution of, you know, 40, 30, 30, or whatever it is, where you're eating starches to a low-carbohydrate diet, your cortisol levels go up significantly. This has been explored.

26:18Over time, they normalize. So I think the important thing for people to remember is when we talk about comfort foods, people have taken that phrase to mean junk foods, pizza, ice cream. Uh-uh. Those aren't the comfort foods that were originally described as comfort foods. The comfort foods that were coined comfort foods are starchy, warm foods, which guess what? Suppress cortisol. Because when those foods are available, your brain and essentially your adrenals know that you don't have to mobilize from stored sources. It's already circulating. So it makes perfect sense. So, I mean, this is just one kind of, you asked for like what people could do.

26:55I say, take a look at your nutrition. Are you exercising too late in the day? Can you move that to the morning? You never want to tell me to reduce the intensity because frankly, as Doreen Yates has been saying so beautifully lately, like reps in reserve are results in reserve. We could talk about that. but you know i think most people are probably not pushing hard enough but some people are just pushing way too hard in the gym way too late and then their cortisol levels are elevated makes perfect sense why you couldn't sleep so i would say look at look your diet make sure you're getting enough starches at some point throughout the day maybe even taking in a few starches in the couple of hours before sleep and just see how your sleep does there's some interesting data although you people should talk to their doctor about taking very low dose one milligram lithium i think it's the orotate form in order to encourage the ability to fall asleep and get more deep sleep.

27:44But of course, we're talking about lithium here. So people need to definitely talk to your doctor. There's some other things too, you know, look at your lighting environment, of course, but I think for a lot of people, the major issue with falling asleep is that they can't forget about the position of their body. And this is where the data becomes super interesting. There are some technologies that are being spun up right now, some of which I've had the opportunity to dabble with. And I have no financial relationship too, but I sure wish I did because it is so cool. Imagine a sleep mask that could put you to sleep.

28:16Okay. Okay. How would it do that? Well, it turns out that eye movements are not just present during rapid eye movement sleep, but one of the prerequisites for falling asleep is that you forget about your body position. You're not like, oh, this is uncomfortable. That doesn't belong there. You shut down what's called proprioception, your awareness of body position. So there's actually some interesting data. And And here I'm kludging from a few places. I want to be fair because what I'm about to say sounds kind of kooky, but this works for many, many people who are having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep.

28:46You can try this tonight. I do this often. It works for me. You keep your eyes closed or you close your eyes. You move your eyes relatively slowly to one side, then the other side, one side, then the other side. Then you move your eyes in a counterclockwise circle and then a clockwise circle, then up, then down. And then you sort of do a kind of faux cross-eyed attempt. You sort of look down towards the bridge of your nose and you exhale, which is going to slow your heart rate down. Now, what is all this nonsense about eye movements? Did I just do this as a joke to see if you would do it? The truth is, if you do this when you're trying to fall asleep, your vestibular system, which is essentially working in concert with your eyes for reasons we could talk about.

29:35But your cerebellum and your vestibular system are essentially transitioning from where you need to be very aware of your body position and make adjustments all the time to one in which you're forgetting about body position. And we know, and there are great data showing that a very slow rocking of a bed will help put you to sleep. When you rock back and forth, your body doesn't have like a little metronome in it that says I'm rocking it. It's your eye movements that compensate in the opposite direction, which tell your cerebellum, Hey, we're rocking. This is why if you're on a boat and the horizon's going like this, you get seasick because you can't orient to kind of dead zero for pitch, yaw, and roll.

30:14And so anyway, I don't want to get too technical here, but if you have trouble sleeping, try what I just described a few times. Many people find that it helps them fall asleep because you stop thinking about your body position. And of course, bed coolness, room coolness all can help. But what I just described can be very, very helpful for a number of people whose minds are racing because if their mind is racing, you also need to give people something to do with their mind. You can't just say like, don't think about it or stop thinking or just go to sleep. That doesn't work. You can say, just wake up, but you can't say, just go to sleep.

30:47There's a weird asymmetry built into our autonomic nervous system that way. It's so funny. Two things that I found because It's wide but tied has been kind of the fucking summary to the last 18 months for me, uh, fighting with the health stuff. Uh, one from Matt, which is a mind walk. Is he taking me through this? Yeah. You go through a walk that you you're very familiar with. Yeah. Has that been helpful? Wonderful. Oh, great. One of the things that I found by doing that, uh, for the people that didn't listen to the episode, they can go back and listen to the one I did with Matt a few months ago.

31:15Brilliant. Um, basically you can imagine that you're going for a walk somewhere that you know, unbelievably well and try and do it with as much resolution as possible. So I go to the cupboard, I open the cupboard doors, I've got my shoes in there, I take them out to my right hand that reaches in and put them on the floor, I get the shoehorn, everyone needs a shoehorn, left foot in, right foot in, I get the key, I know the sound of the key, I close the doors, I turn around, I go toward the door, I put it in, I turn it, like that's the feeling of the door, I get outside, I feel the brush, like all of that stuff.

31:46And what, at least what I found is when I'm falling asleep, the sort of I'm on a journey, this is an adventure thing is like reading fiction. And the I have problems to solve, this is executive function is like reading nonfiction. And for me, the former helps me fall asleep way more than the latter. So that's the first thing. The second thing is resonance breathing. I think this, if I was to pick, if I was to flick a little of money onto the roulette table of the next five years of health. I think HRV resonance breathing is going to be fucking huge. And there's a couple of products, one in particular that I'm super, super excited about.

32:27It's this cool lamp. So imagine a bedside lamp and on the top of it is a little divot, like a little pocket, and that's got a stone in it. You take the stone out, the stone's got an FDA HRV sensor. You just hold the stone in your hand and you can either turn the light of the lamp on or off and sounds and all the rest of the stuff. But it does three, six, nine, 12 minute sessions with like a super high fidelity sensor. And it means if you're struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, you can just sort of grab it, put it in your hand, do the breathing based on like a tactile vibration coming from the stone too.

33:03So it can all be silent. So if your partner's in the bed next to you can do that and it knows when you hit resonance as well when you get into that maximum vagal tone and then you just pop it back on the top and the top of it is an induction charger for the stone i was like this is the fucking sickest who makes this it's a company called ohm ohm uh it's currently currently in dark mode i think ohm.health not anymore uh well yeah you just told the world that's true i don't even know if you can buy i don't think you can buy them um so but yeah jay wiles who's my sleep coach from absolute rest he's andy galpin's guy um jay's a part of it and i think i'm the first person outside of the company to have got one i was like this fucking rules because hrv resonance breathing is great and makes you feel really good but if you're going to use elite hrv and you've got to put the like strap thing around your arm or your wrist and then you got to press it and you got to connect the bluetooth and it's got to be up to you got your phone in front of you and all right there's no just standalone pick it up and go of this and the fact that it's a lamp it looks really beautiful the unbox all the rest of shit anyway i've been using that so between those two the mind walk thing for me was was very very powerful um but some days you need a more like physiological intervention and uh the resonance breathing those two things for me i think if i'm struggling to fall asleep on a night time but the eye movement uh stuff i think has got has got a lot of legs so stack all of those together i'm going to be cross-eyed imagining that i'm going for a walk holding a stone in my hand not excessively cross-eyed.

34:30It's just more like you sort of look, it's like you're sort of looking down and, uh, you know, there are these nuclei in the brainstem that literally control levels of wakefulness. When you look up, it's, it's essentially activating the arm of your autonomic nervous system, which makes you more alert as well. And eyelids open. It's really interesting. And, and when you look down and when, and bring your eyelids down, you're actually, you're actually peddling on the, on the circuits that promote sleepiness, or at least that are more parasympathetic. I mean, it makes good sense. In other news, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years.

35:04Dude, you tried to fastball me that. That was down the plate, and I've just Shohei Otani'd it. I've been drinking AG1 for as long as I can remember. It is the best all-in-one drink that I've ever found, and that's why I'm such a fan of them. And that's why I partnered with them as well. I have got my mom to start taking it, my dad to start taking it, and all of my friends as well. And if I found anything better, I would switch, but I haven't. Why do you keep throwing it at the mic? Stop throwing it at the mic. see anyway uh over 75 vitamins minerals and whole food source ingredients it's got probiotics and prebiotics it's also nsf certified meaning that even olympians can use it and in the throat in the throat how dare you i hit the side i hit the oh ah ah this isn't even an ad read anymore it's just a war zone oh okay okay anyway if you too want something to throw at your friends or a tasty blend of 75 vitamins minerals probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients designed to drink first thing in the morning in one scoop it's here go to drink ag1.com modern wisdom for stuff

36:18thank you talk to me about this uh raised head for glymphatic clearance thing because i've if you if anyone's got an eight sleep with the mattress raising functionality one of the things it does for sleep is it actually raises your head a little bit is that that's good related to what we're talking about here you want head above feet yeah i think they designed that for um for snoring but it has other benefits. So without doing an entire lecture on the lymphatic system, because we did a solo on that recently in my podcast. I mean, I'll just say the lymphatic system is amazing. It's amazing. And I liken it to the microbiome where 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you talked about the microbiome, people were like, that's just crazy.

36:59Like fermented low sugar foods. Like this is like health food lunacy. Now, I mean, they're probably close to, you know, maybe 500 million or a billion dollars even in federal grants, certainly in the U.S. and around the world, looking at the microbiome, it's important for everything, mental health, physical health. We just know this, right? The gut is so important. The lymphatic system, I think, is going to follow a similar trajectory. And all the stuff that we hear about rebounding, you know, bouncing on a trampoline or skipping rope and all of that stuff turns out to be absolutely true. Or lymphatic massage, which is essentially a way of clearing.

37:30I love lymphatic massage. You know, it's interesting because lymphatic massage, for those that are accustomed to deep tissue massage. It feels like nothing. It feels like nothing, but the lymphatic vessels run so superficially that if you press on them too hard, you actually cinch them off. It feels like you're being stroked by somebody. Yeah. So I think they talk about a light brushing and then that, you know, maybe a little bit more motion. There are deeper lymphatic vessels that can take more pressure, but people who are trained to do this do it right. And there's some tutorials online. There's a great account.

37:58I don't know the guy, but he was referred to me by Kelly Starrett, tells me that the stop chasing pain guy has this big six. I don't want to describe them here because I'll get them wrong, but he has a number of videos on Instagram and YouTube. The big six describes ways that you can encourage lymphatic massage. I always thought that the tapping here was kind of silly. It's actually because the lymphatic ducts drain back into the, essentially dump all the lymph that's been surveilled by your immune system, et cetera, back into the vascular system just below your clavicles. And as another point, then we'll get to glymphatic clearance.

38:29I gave a shout out to someone I've never met, don't have any association with, you know, business-wise or anything, this Anastasia beauty fascia is this woman, I think of Middle Eastern, excuse me, is this woman of Eastern European, it's just certainly not Middle Eastern appearing, of Eastern European origin talking about non-surgical, non-BOTOX interventions for facial augmentation, you know, for, you know, higher cheekbones and clearing away puffiness underneath the eyes for men and for women, but mostly what you see there are women. But what you find is that the before and afters that these people list off, and they insist that I think they take an oath or something that they're not doing any injectables or surgeries are striking.

39:14And it's lymphatic drainage from the face and from the scalp and from around the jaw. And you go, this is, I mean, it is unbelievable. Okay. So in any case, the glymphatic system is glymphatic lymphatic. Is it the same thing? So they're analogous. So for many, many years, it was thought that there was no lymphatic system in the brain. It was thought that it was actually for many years, we thought that the brain was immune privilege. Turns out that's not true. You have all sorts of immune genes and proteins in the brain. But it turns out, and this was discovered some years ago, 2012, it was actually discovered prior, but as science goes, it was kind of suppressed.

39:49And then it was finally discovered that the during sleep, in particular, deep sleep, the story goes, the spaces around the vasculature of the brain get bigger. Okay, you have these little cell types in the brain called astrocytes. They're among the different types of glia and they have these little end feet and they literally push the brain tissue out and away from the arteries and vessels and capillaries, allowing more cerebral spinal fluid, which is circulating in your brain all day long and collecting the waste from your cells. And mind you, there's a lot of waste from your brain cells because your brain is the most metabolically active organ.

40:27And then that needs to get washed out and actually goes out near the surface of your brain underneath what's called the meninges and then it flows down and then drains into the vascular system. If people can remember nothing else about lymphatic drains, remember this, muscular movement clears lymph in the body. Okay, so you need to walk low-level muscular contraction. It essentially moves the lymph up because it's fighting gravity. These are one-way valves. It brings it in from your limbs and it essentially dumps it back eventually into the blood supply. inactivity of the body is what drives glymphatic clearance in the brain now and and so it's when you're essentially immobilized during sleep that you get the maximum amount of glymphatic clearance sleeping on your side right or left side doesn't seem to matter with the head slightly tilted does seem to be the preferable position so all you back sleepers like me you know some people um you're a back sleeper i have been a back with that neck huh with that neck unless i'm spooning i'm a black Okay.

41:26Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My back sleeper. So, um, but I've been, I've been working on sleeping on my side and I heard actually maybe Andy Galpin's involved in some studies where subjects wear a fanny pack so that they can't sleep on their back. They have to sleep on their side. He sent me from absolute rest, this huge fuck off roll thing, which looks like soft furnishing. That's probably what it is. Yeah. Well, I mean, this was, it's, it's a big roll that goes down the middle of your back. So there's no way that you can be on your back at all. Okay. So that's much more calling it a fanny pack or a bum bag is a wild disservice to how like colossal this thing is.

42:05It's a, you're just going to have to hire somebody to spoon you, Chris. It just means that you'll have to give in. Well, I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that you sleep well on your side. I mean, you're on Huberman sleep, sleep doll. I like sleeping on my side, and it does feel good to hold somebody. I suppose if you're a back sleeper, you know, I do use the nasal strips to open up my breathing. Have you tried intake? What do you use? I just, I order some nose strips that online I can't recall. Let me, allow me to fucking fix your nose strip problem. Okay. Everyone has a nose strip problem if they're not using it.

42:40So these guys, they've got patents on it. instead of it being a flexible, disposable thing, this is a hard 3D printed piece of plastic that's got magnets attached on both sides. And then you put two magnet patches on the skin of your nose and then you - But no magnets up my nose. No, it's all on the outside. So two patches on the outside. And then you snap this non-disposable thing on. And it's, I'm not kidding. It must be three times, four times, five times stronger than the normal ones. And that's like - Great. Yeah, because I have pretty good respiration through my nose. But years ago, a stupid accident actually in a lab and I cracked a sinus.

43:17I stood up, hit a freezer door and it was a whole story there. So now we talk about over not beers since neither of us drank. Did you drink? Intermittently. When did I have, I had beers recently. When did I have beers? After the show. Thank you. I had beers after the show. No shame in that. I haven't had alcohol in a long time, but we could talk about some of the, you know, uh, story, injury stories are always fun, um, offline, but, um, yeah, I think that for glymphatic clearance that the data are very clear that you want to, if you can sleep on your side, you're still going to get glymphatic clearance.

43:53If you sleep on your back, have your head slightly elevated, not too much, but keep in mind that, you know, your body is fighting the lymphatic clearance in your legs is fighting gravity. So in theory, you want to be, if you want to be a little bit bow, but not too much. Right now, what we do know is that if you sleep in a chair, These studies have been done in various sleep labs. If you sleep in a chair, like on a flight or something like that, you would think, well, you must get a lot more glymphatic clearance. And you probably do, but you probably get a lot more lack of lymphatic drainage from the body.

44:24So there's some really nice pictures in these studies. Every mammal, it seems, puts its head down to sleep. I think giraffes actually just kind of like drop their forehead onto the ground. Um, but there are no animal, no mammals that, and someone will probably tell me I'm wrong here. And, and they'll, I'd love to see, see the examples because I love animals. But, um, the argument that's been made in these, in these papers is that every mammal puts its head down to sleep. And if you think about, take a picture of yourself sometime before sleep and after sleep or worse, take a picture of yourself after one really terrible night's sleep.

44:58Just look at your face. A couple of things become clear. You look, you'll look bloated. the bags under people's eyes that's buildup of lymph okay it's you know a couple hours that's what that is that's what that is it's buildup of lymph which is why this anastasia beauty fascia thing is about learning to kind of increase the portals for lymphatic drainage and it has a lot to do with the fascia because um they run so closely together they court the vessels of course at different depths relative to the fascia but so that's a lot of what um lymphatic drainage for for aesthetics is, but look at yourself after, after sleep, your brain fog, the brain fog you feel after lack of sleep, the buildup of crap and is, is within the cerebral spinal fluid.

45:39It's all the ammonia, the carbon dioxide, all the, some protein fragments that have built up during the day. And the more active you are with your brain, the more they build up and the more they need to be cleared out at night. So, and then what's an equally impressive, if you ask me is take a look at that picture of yourself, sleep deprived, you get a good night's sleep the next tonight, take a picture of yourself the next morning. You look like a completely different person, including the brightness of the eyes. So it turns out around the iris of your eye, that black dot in the middle and around it, you can actually see when people haven't slept well, there's actually a change in color of the eyes that has to do with the accumulation of lymph in the anterior chamber of the eye.

46:18And the posterior chamber of the eye, which is where the light sensing tissue is, the retina, actually shares the same glymphatic clearance system as your brain. And by the way, everything I'm talking about for brain for glymphatic clearance is true for spinal cord too. So for all this stuff about motor learning and people are so concerned about their spinal cord, all the athletes are thinking, yeah, I need a brain, but mostly in your spinal cord, just kidding, but you need both. But the idea here is that when people look tired, the eyes look tired. It's not just in the eyelids being hooded. The eyes look glassy.

46:46They don't look quite right. And then they, they sleep on their life comes back in the eyes. It's because they've cleared the lymph from their eyes. Who knew that the ultimate lux maxing solution was to just get a better night's sleep and raise your head a bit? Right. Well, I think - Is a pillow enough? Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to, it's not too much. What you don't want is your head tilted back. And that's also, of course, a risk for apnea, right? I mean, this is, you know, why all the bodybuilders and big guys drop dead in their sleep, you know, often is because they're just basically asphyxiating themselves.

47:15So I do think fixing snoring is important. The nose strip sound great using those magnets. I'm about to try a mandibular device, like a special mouth guard to try and adjust. Do you have apnea? A little, yeah. It's REM induced apnea. So it only happens in REM. You and I should take a trip up to Stanford together. Seriously, there's a couple up there. Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the Population Bomb many years ago. I think he would say it probably didn't pan out. And Sandra Kahn, who's, I think is in craniofacial surgery or orthodontics or something they were the ones that wrote the book jaws not the jaws with forward by robert sapolsky um jared diamond i think wrote the introduction these are heavy hit or serious science academics and they were the ones that talked about the you know the transition to soft foods to packet based foods to baby food has created this kind of massive explosion in the industry for orthodontics and was nesters work downstream from them james Nestor's.

48:19Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Nestor's kind of the, his book was kind of the modern iteration of a lot of what they were saying, but you know, they are, I think they're coming out with another book that's really pushing this thing that the nasal breathing is real. The ability to, I can't quite do this, but can you close your mouth and put your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth without having to kind of curl it back behind your teeth? Is there space for your tongue on the roof? A little, my palate, I can do with a bit of expansion because I had six teeth removed as a kid, like four from the top and two from the bottom, I think.

48:51So I mean, Max, who isn't here, my videographer, he's going through two or three really serious dental procedures. And with one of them, he was trying to do it through Invisalign and it was a slow palate expander. Invisalign do a palate expander now. He's like, dude, this is going to take like fucking three years for me to do this, but they can do it a little bit more aggressively. Sounds like he's a kind of extreme case because Khan and Ehrlich have this association with, um, you know, the, the mewing guy, you know, is that true? Is that real? Well, the mewing thing is, is it plays into this notion of, of getting your nasal breathing, right?

49:31It's like, you know, close your, you know, like, like close your mouth, put your tongue on the roof of your mouth. And then can you swallow while, you know, pushing the, I'm describing this, you know, coarsely, you know, that the problem is, you know, anytime you get a figure like that, and I've never met him, I think his name is Mike Mew, right? Mew. Anytime you get somebody who's kind of extreme off of the normal thrust of a one branch of medicine, that person is either going to be ostracized or they're going to have to go through some serious gymnastics to get acceptance. Look, my colleague, David Spiegel.

50:04I love David. Vice chair of psychiatry at Stanford, right? Very serious scientist. clinician. His father and him developed hypnosis as a tool for pain management, smoking cessation, anxiety, even people going through chemotherapy. And the data are beautiful. So 25 % of people that do hypnosis for smoking cessation have it in one session for life? It's amazing. I mean, it's a brain plasticity accelerator. But had it not been David, right, who's very thoughtful in how he approaches these discussions, how he frames it with science, how he explains what's going on and just his like, and I'm not saying Mu isn't, isn't this way.

50:44I don't know him. Haven't, haven't met him. Although I've read some of his work, you know, but David has a special gift of the ability to frame what for many people would be like hypnosis. Are you kidding me? As a brain plasticity accelerator. Gentle, convincing demeanor in David. Yes. And also broad training in all of psychiatry and an acceptance of other branches of medicine. He's not saying this is the way, and this is the only way. And there's this problem with my field. Tribalism. I'm here to fix the field. No, he's saying here's one tool in the toolkit and there are other tools in the toolkit.

51:15He's also, and again, I'm not saying anything about Mu tacitly here. David Spiegel is exceedingly smart. Like he's on a whole other level of intellect and yet he doesn't talk over anybody. He's extremely kind. So, you know, bedside manner and how you bring your stuff forward is very key. Especially if you're going to be a revolutionary or somebody that's at the sort of cutting edge, cutting frontier of this stuff. No, I agree. I've been thinking about this a lot this year. What do we need to know about the neuroscience of making habit setting more easy? I imagine that there must be some really interesting - Oh man.

51:56I just had James Clear on the podcast and it's so interesting when you sit down with somebody who's like the habits guy and you compare it against the neuroscience. And so there's two ways into this. You know, and James has done a magnificent job of explaining things that people can do to improve their habits and reduce bad habits. The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand mechanism, it gives them flexibility over the so-called protocols. And I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves.

52:35Let's face it. If you want to go online now and just say, what are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep? And you get a list, you can put those on your refrigerator, you put them next to your bed. Why doesn't everyone just do that? It's because the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information. Okay. So in fairness to James and the incredible work that he's done, I'm going to just kind of look at this a little bit through the lens of neuroscience. And I'm really glad that we're talking about this because one of the things that he said that I think is so, so true is that the thoughts and by extension, the emotions, but really the thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days.

53:23so one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention a lot of habits have to do with i don't want to procrastinate i want to do this we talk about exercise but let's talk about cognitive stuff it's very very clear that if you have a hard time getting into a bout of work or even staying focused there's a there's a very good chance i believe that your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating. I'm a big advocator for boring breaks and I'm a big advocator for silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons. Let's think about it on the back end.

54:06Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you're not reflexively doing. You want to create this habit. It's very clear that neuroplasticity, yes, requires alertness, requires focus. You need sleep later that night. I've been beating that drum for a number of years. It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post-learning reflection, walk into your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information.

54:41And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones. You're constantly bringing in new sensory information. All the data, I did an episode on how to best study and learn. I went to the data to find out because I have my methods, but that doesn't mean they're the best methods. Reading, rereading, note-taking, highlighting, it's all fine, but it turns out the biggest lever is to self-test at some point away from the material. So testing is not just something for evaluation of others. It's a way that we should think, you know, yeah, how much can I remember about that conversation?

55:13What was tricky? Okay, I don't remember that piece. I'm going to go back and look it up. All learning is, and this will sound like a giant duh, but all learning is anti-forgetting. How do we know this? Because if you have people read a passage one, two, three, four, five times versus one time and they self-test, one time and self-testing significantly better. You ever had Peter C. Brown on the show? No. Author of Make It Stick? No, but I like the title. You need to bring Peter on. Peter was episode, I would guess, like 30 on Modern Wisdom. You'll be 1 ,030. And the best synopsis that I got from him, learning how to learn, was learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure.

55:56Yes. Beautiful. Right. Fucking money. Exactly. And that's the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Guys like him, guys like James Clear, they have a real, when I say unconscious genius, I mean, clearly they put thought into and structure into what they teach. But the neuroscience supports everything you just said, which is what he just said. And reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve, even if you don't remember, even if you're still puzzled by it, is so vitally important to the anti-forgetting process. Okay. Now, in terms of actually being able to focus, actually being able to do work, it's so clear that thoughts, and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman named Jenny Groh, who's spelled G-R-O-H at Duke University, who's a neuroscientist, been studying sensory integration for a long time.

56:48You know, I've long thought about, and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are. So sensations are the physical stimuli in the environment, photons of light, mechanical pressure, volatile odorants in the environment that lead to sight, touch, smell, etc. etc. How that gets converted into chemical and electrical signals in the brain, we understand as a field. We understand sensation. We understand perception. Perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to. We understand emotions now more as a subset of something that we think of more broadly as states that are set by your autonomic nervous system, how alert you are, how not alert you are.

57:27And then emotions are kind of layered on top of that. Lisa Feldman Barrett has beautiful descriptions of these and so on. And there's some debate about what emotions really are, But we know what they are neurobiologically and psychologically. And behaviors, we know what they are, right? It's a behavior. And then there's the don't go behaviors, the suppression of behavior. And then there are memories, right? But for the longest time, it's been unclear what are thoughts? Like, what are they? Are they just like spontaneous geysering up of memories or like what's going on there? and Jenny Groh I think has the absolute best description of these if and and this is based on experimentation if we seed some idea so let's say I say to you let's not talk about cats because I'm a dog person but I say okay okay Chris um and this isn't a trick question I promise because it's always weird when people start doing this I'm not Oz Perlman or something I'm not gonna like tell you your pin pin code um Um, think about a dog.

58:23Okay. What kind of dog is it? Golden Retriever. Golden Retriever. Okay. So as you think about the Golden Retriever, like what other things come to mind about the Golden Retriever? It's got a little neckerchief on. Okay. Red neckerchief. Great. Red neckerchief. Like what else about Golden Retriever? Fluffy. Fluffy, I'll say. So there's a tactile thing. Okay. Anything else about Golden Retrievers? This is very specific to you. Bouncing up and down, rolling on its back. Smells a little bit, but I like it. Great. Okay. So there's, I like it. You like this? Okay. So Jenny grows and others data point to the fact that thoughts basically start with some seed element, some noun, some pronoun, some thing, some event.

59:07And then what the brain does is it essentially starts to call on more and more sensations and starts layering those in more and more prior sensory events. It's red handkerchief. Okay. It's fluffy. There's a tactile and that thoughts really are the layering on of more and more sensory memories and thoughts are really a layering of the senses in an abstract thought space. Now, this is not meant to, you know, make something from nothing, but it's so important that we understand this because you think, what is the ability to think? Well, the ability to think is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things.

59:45And so that's what, that's how we navigate through environments, which is what Jenny Groh's main work is about how you find yourself in space. I can't look at everything in this garage. I have to focus on certain things, find the Phillips head screwdriver, go over there, and you're discarding all the other information. Now, when you think about sitting down to do work or to learn something or prepare a podcast, it is so important that you limit the number of sensory inputs coming in, not just during that event, but before. Because the sensory stimulus that kind of sets off this cascade of layering in more and more sensory memories and understanding is begun before you sit down to read your book.

1:00:23This is why you read a portion of a book and then like, oh wait, I wasn't even paying attention. Your brain is still working with the sensory inputs from before. It's not thinking about them consciously. So this is vitally important. If you go back and you look at the history of attention and thinking, and I have, you can find these incredible pictures that they would give kids who had trouble, probably had ADHD or just kind of rambunctious boys in most cases. And they literally gave them helmets with two eye holes so they couldn't look at anything else. They couldn't hear anyone else. Right. Used to be, kid with the hoodie on and the cap and you'd write.

1:00:54Now, what have we done? The challenge is that we've brought an infinite number of sensory experiences into the thing that you're looking at. So we brought all the sensory inputs through the device that you're holding. So the narrowing of your perspective hasn't helped you to narrow the distractions. That's right. Cognitive space is still infinite, even though the spatial limitation of where you're placing your attention is very restricted. So the fact that you have so many competing thoughts has everything to do with that. And it also has everything to do with what you were doing in the 10 or 15 minutes before you sat down to try to work.

1:01:30Now, in China, they're doing some very interesting experiments of having kids stare literally at a focal point on the wall for a number of minutes before beginning their work. Sounds a little extreme, a little military, but one thing that I've been doing before I prepared to do any writing, any podcasting, any work is I try and make myself as bored as possible. I try and remove as much sensory input as possible. I might think about my breathing because it's hard to not think about anything, but I really have started to limit the amount of sensory information coming into my space. I have an entire floor of where I live now.

1:02:02I live in kind of an odd structure now, but the entire bottom floor is a no phone zone. Once or twice, I've brought my phone down there, but it's a no phone zone. Going down the stairs, there are no phones in there. I'm trying to figure out how I can have no internet there. I have this little tent sauna that I use now with incandescent lights that I love because I couldn't use my barrel sauna where I was at. I think it's sauna space, makes these incredible. I like them because they get hot right away and it's got the red light. I go in there, it's in a... it's grounded and there's no Wi-Fi in there.

1:02:32The phone goes dead the moment you go in there. You're in a mini Faraday cage. Yeah, and I don't like bringing the phone into the sauna. Are you in the same place that I went to or is this a new one now? No, so I actually converted a art gallery into a living space. I've always wanted to do this. So now I have my, no, it's not the same space. I have my gym. I've got an upstairs loft where I live. And then the downstairs is a workspace. I have an octopus now. I have a tank with an octopus in it, although it's a bit shy. So I'm probably - You're becoming increasingly esoteric. Um, anyway, uh, and I have my, my discus fish and my gym and my, uh, doing all the illustrations for my books.

1:03:07I spent a lot of time drawing down in the basement. I mean, I've always wanted to do this at some point. I was like, yeah, you have to live in an art gallery at some point if you're able. Um, you know, and, um, and okay. So, but that's my unique kind of weird space, but it doesn't matter if you're in an empty box. If you are not good at, at clearing the slate before you try and focus, you're going to have a very hard time for understandable reasons. In fact, I'm amazed that anyone can think at all. I'm amazed that anyone can focus at all. I don't believe everyone has ADHD. I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from.

1:03:41And once you understand, you go, oh yeah, it makes perfect sense. Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed and not take in any sensory input? No. But am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device? In fact, Mike Easter, the author of The Comfort Crisis, told me something super scary when he came on the podcast. He said that the person who developed these algorithms, the people, excuse me, who developed the algorithms for social media borrowed heavily from the casinos. And I didn't realize that some years ago, slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income, maybe like 10, 20%.

1:04:15Now it's 80%. And it was one guy who watched his kid playing video games who realized that the kids would play video games for hours and hours and hours and what they were playing for was novelty. And so they switched the slot machines in casinos on his suggestion to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was, because they're now electronic, you can get a near infinite number of combinations of novel items and people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning. The brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning. And so at some level, like I love social media, teach on social media.

1:04:50I partake in it as a consumer and a creator there, but I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go, okay, I need to read this book. I need to write this chapter. I need to do this drawing. And you'll notice once you drop into that trench, the brain has these attractor states. It's like a ball bearing on a flat surface. As you get more into a thought trench or activity trench. It's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a deep valley. And it's actually hard to leave. You'll notice you're walking out and unless you pick up your phone, you'll still be thinking about that. And this is how the brain works.

1:05:26The brain is not working in step functions. The brain, none of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long. And none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily. You just have to ride that, sort of layering on of thoughts, going from board to sensory input to deeper and deeper, and then work for about 90 minutes or a couple of hours, and then give yourself a little bit of time, pause, reflect. And it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation, but people are texting in between. It's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think. The good news is, as Goggins would say, nowadays, it's very easy to be spectacularly good in pretty much any field.

1:06:04You just have to do what no one else is doing. Now, he's an extreme case, and I have immense admiration for David. I mean, he's just so David, you know, but if you want to be the best in your class at anything, best in class at pretty much anything, it's become so much easier now. You just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are doing. Before we continue, if your sleep's been off, taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times, or feeling groggy in the morning, Momentous' sleep hacks are here to help. They're not your typical knock-you-out supplement just overloaded with melatonin.

1:06:39It's just the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. That's why I take these things every single night and why I trust Momentus with my life or at the very least my sleep because they make the highest quality supplements on the planet. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it totally risk-free. use it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back.

1:07:08That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35 % off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below by heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom. That's livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom.

1:07:30The bar has never been set so low. It's so sad. And yet it's an exciting opportunity for people. Dude, I get it. Like the rampant fragility that seems to be destroying your classroom or your country or the world with constant distraction and people not being able to focus or deal with a little bit of discomfort or resilience is not great. But from a selfish perspective, that widespread fragility is your competitive advantage. And if you're one of the people, you're not going to be able to change the world, certainly not before you've changed yourself. and that means that the first step is, ah, this is an opportunity for me.

1:08:07I can step into this. So you mentioned that you sort of touched on some of the bad habits that distract people. I've always been interested in this from a neuroscientific perspective. Is it truly possible to deprogram bad habits or once those neural pathways are down, is that locked in for life? Are you just creating deeper fissures somewhere else in order to replace those ones? How do you think about getting rid of bad habits, the process of overcoming those? Yeah, I think, you know, if we look at the data on neuroplasticity, it's much easier to reactivate a pathway that was laid down early in life, even if it's been suppressed.

1:08:46There's a beautiful data of a guy named Eric Knudsen, who was actually my next door neighbor in my lab before he retired at Stanford, showing that, you know, once learning takes place, those maps are forever there. You can unveil those maps again later. They kind of like never forget to ride a bike kind of thing. But when you're talking about bad habits, and then you get into sort of contingencies like rewards and punishments, you know, these days because of my own interests and trajectory, you know, I think a lot about, you know, the seven deadly sins and the virtues, right? I mean, if you look at any of the sins, okay, they're all very hypothalamic in nature, right?

1:09:22They're the extremes of hypothalamic function. In fact, you could probably map the seven deadly sins onto the hypothalamus and say, that nucleus, the ventromedial hypothalamus, those neurons are responsible for rage, for unbridled rage, okay? Those neurons are responsible for unbridled sexual activity. I'm not talking about merged with violence. I'm just saying independent of that. Those are consumatory behaviors. So eating, hyperphagia, these are anorexia, you know, so I mean, all of the - What about, I have a question on that because envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good.

1:09:54Yeah. So you, right. And I hadn't thought about that, but your envy is probably not easily mapped to a hypothalamic nucleus. Isn't that an interesting insight? Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn't something that can be enjoyable at low or high dose. Yeah. But our good friend Paul Conte talks often about how much of the ills of the world are based on people's envy. When people don't have, when they have an uncomfortable feeling, most people will turn that into self-destruction or destruction of others. And people who are successful in life transmute those uncomfortable feelings into self-support and creating things and supporting others.

1:10:37same feelings divergent paths um and envy uh you know paul has said many times is is the enemy of all of all personal development right you see something you i always noticed you know coming up in science if um if something bad happens to somebody we most of the time unless we really dislike them but even then you kind of go oh that sucks you know like really feel bad but if something good happens for somebody you know immediately how you feel about that person are you happy for them or is there that feeling of like, yeah, exactly. You know immediately how you feel. Great, that's such a good litmus test.

1:11:13Yeah, how do you feel when this other person wins and when somebody else loses? I guess even with that, it's an interesting one. Is there a weird sense of satisfaction or are you like, fuck, I wish that person was okay or whatever it might be. Okay, bad habits. Yeah, so with bad habits, I mean, so I think about the sins and bad habits mapping to hypothalamic nuclei because I'm me and that's my nerdy perspective. But then you also think about the virtues, right? And overcoming bad habits or the virtues, they, I mean, I believe that most people are inherently good. I do. It may be true, young may be right that we have all things inside of us, but I think most people are inherently good.

1:11:51I think there are a subset of people that given the opportunity to do things and not get caught, they would do really bad things. But I don't think that's most people. Or most dogs, by example. Cats, I'm still on the fence about. Cats can fuck up. Sorry, cat people. I know some nice ones. But in all seriousness, I think that the bad habits thing involves, breaking bad habits involves a lot of top-down control. Prefrontal cortex suppressing the activity of these hypothalamic and other subcortical neurons. And how do we know this? Well, if you want to summarize how the prefrontal cortex works, you'd say it's the shh structure in the brain.

1:12:27It's that, no, don't reach for that cookie. It's that, no, don't say that thing. It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus and other structures are creating some internal activation of the autonomic nervous system, that kind of vibration of you want to do it. It smells so good. It tastes so good. You just want to. I don't know why I did it, this kind of thing. So that top-down control can be learned. and the beautiful thing, and this answers your question more directly, the beautiful thing is that at some point that top-down control is not required anymore unless you do the thing you're not supposed to do and then it requires top-down control again.

1:13:08Now, the reason I'm so interested these days, one of the reasons I'm so interested in spirituality and notions of God, et cetera, is that the virtues also, I believe, can start to arrive through things that are outside of us. Now, I realize that sounds very unscientific, But if you look at the science around religious belief or belief in higher power or the notion that humans don't have all the answers, not even the collective consciousness, what you find is that for everything from recovery from addiction to recovery from immense, immense loss. I mean, the kinds of losses that go way beyond, you know, a death of a family member, although that's intense, you know, death of all one's children, for instance, horrible things that people have been put through.

1:13:54almost without fail moving through that with any kind of um sense of self-preservation and not engaging in just self-destruction which is what most people do almost always involves some notion of top-down control from outside you know being being um encouraged or even instructed to do the right thing feeling as if something is coming through oneself now we often hear about this in the creative process people like rick rubin and i'm a big twyla tharp fan the choreographer will talk about you know it's most creatives will talk about sort of downloading things from outside of them it kind of moves through them as opposed to arising purely within them because of all that sensory experience but they can get into kind of these higher realms of spirituality but when we're talking about breaking bad habits overcoming immensely difficult scenarios that normally would throw people into complete self-destruction or just giving up which is a bad habit in its own its own right.

1:14:52It's as if the top-down control is so immense, like the going against oneself that's required is so immense that when people hand that over to God, whether or not it's Christ or whether or not some other form of God that they are, you know, that they're attached to, you know, it seems as if they get some relief from the process and yet it's very effective. And you can't deny this, right? Just as a phenomenon. I mean, let's take off our hats as scientists and people kind of parse things like it. How could it be that the thing that's hardest for humans to do for themselves becomes far easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves?

1:15:32It's a wild mind bend that neuroscience doesn't really understand. But, you know, what we're really talking about, let's say this were alcohol, and I'm not an alcoholic, fortunately, but let's say I had immense difficulty in refraining from alcohol, and this would be the precise environment where alcohol would be attractive. The amount of top-down control that's required is immense for somebody that's recently sober. they have to you know hopefully they're in 12-step they have to call their sponsor there it can be a jarring anxiety that anxiety eventually subsides i mean alcoholics eventually can hang out in bars and not have a drink but there's a long period of time where they can and many never will be able to do that but the notion of a higher power is is central to almost every alcoholic at least who goes through aa getting sober it's that it's a it's almost a prerequisite and in some sense it is a prerequisite.

1:16:22And it's so brilliant that it is because it takes away the need for constant top-down control. You give that over to something else, this notion of a higher power. For some people, that's God. For some people, it's Christ. For some people, it's just general higher power because 12-step is very agnostic as to what people consider higher power. But I think it is not a coincidence that the Bible writes in these kinds of things about sins and virtues and the need, not just good works, but avoiding sin and acknowledges in some sense that it's in some cases near impossible for people to do on their own.

1:17:00And yes, community can help. And yes, reward processes can help. And yes, punishment can help. These all work. We know this. You can see this in animal learning studies where humans are different is that they can, as far as we know, humans are unique in their ability to give this top-down restriction process over to some other entity and it makes it easier not harder and it makes it more concrete somehow not more abstract the only abstract piece of it is that you know you you can't shake this entity's hand at least not in the standard sense what do you think's going on i you know as usual you always ask the question, which is why I'm stomped, right?

1:17:40I mean, I'm trying to parse what could be going on, but it always lands me back in neural circuits and neural structures. I mean, I'm excited by some of the data that are starting to look at how consciousness might involve things from outside the brain and maybe multiple brains. And all I know is that having spent nearly three decades thinking about and researching and talking about neuroscience that, you know, we know a great deal about how sensations, perceptions, thoughts, memories, you know, emotions and behaviors are constructed, right? What we do. And, um, and yet we don't know how this piece comes about, but this piece has been central to the human historical perspective and human experience.

1:18:23And I don't think we're at any longer in a place where we can even talk about human evolution without this, I think humans evolved in the context of this, and that's why I don't see them as mutually exclusive. Much more a part of our history than the anterior mid-cingulate cortexes. Yes. In fact, no one needed to know that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex existed to know that there's this thing called tenacity and willpower. I think that the fun twist is that it's a highly plastic structure that we can engage and grow, and that reinforces the sets of behaviors that are involved, and I think adaptive.

1:18:57right but i i absolutely think there's something real there and i say that completely as a scientist right i mean i'm used to immunostaining for proteins and running westerns and you know like recording from neurons and you're looking at neural circuits using any number of labeling techniques i mean i'm a man of science but there's just no doubt in my mind that this process of giving over to the understanding there's something much greater than us and that we are not in total control, at least not in total control. That feels very comforting to me because of the way I've seen it help so many people.

1:19:36And I won't be shy about it. It's helped me tremendously. I mean, I'm in a very serious prayer practice daily now. Every night before I go to sleep, without fail, I'm going on a couple of years now where I've not missed a single night. I'll get out of bed if I fall asleep and do that. It's like, and then also just prayer as a thing. Let's say it's just purely neurobiological. Let's say there's nothing outside of us that, you know, that in the real sense, I don't believe that, but let's just assume for a moment. Well, then my neurobiology seems to be responding to all this very, very well. And I don't think I'm alone with that.

1:20:10In fact, I think there are too many burdens in life for anyone to be able to navigate life extremely well without these notions of higher power. I don't think people can do it. And you could show me the most successful, wealthiest people in the world, and I would say, yeah, but they are highly deficient in this area. Not because I'm judging them, right? We are all deficient in some area. But it must be, it has to be, because there's this huge gap in the knowledge set. I've never thought of that paradox, the fact that for a lot of people, billions of people, relinquishing control, the exact opposite of what it is that for most of the habits that, okay, we're going to suppress the anterior mid cingulate cortex.

1:20:58We're going to use our cognition to limit our distraction. We're going to narrow our focus, all the rest of it. It's intention, it's lean in, it's agency, it's taking control. And then there's this other bit that literally billions of people, And up until a hundred years ago, almost everybody did assume was the seat of where their motivations and their discipline. And for a while with the bicameral mind, maybe even the voice inside the head came from. That was the thing that was real. That was the source of this. We evolved in that context. The brain evolved in that context. Independently, right?

1:21:36This was convergent evolution from 50 million fucking different corners of the universe. Absolutely. And, and, and, you know, it's my, you know, I love teaching science. I love, I love learning and teaching science. I hope that's obvious to people. I, um, but it's my one wish for, for people that at some point in their life, they at least explore the possibility and, um, and get morning sunlight, but the, um, but, but, you know, Be open to faith and get morning sunlight. I just hit 50 recently. And I will say, if I look back on my life, sure, I wish I had done certain things differently. I mean, who doesn't, right?

1:22:12This notion of like no regrets. Like, yeah, I wish I had made certain decisions, not others. But by and large, I'm very, very happy with the decisions I made, by and large. And I was happy to discover resistance training and running and neuroscience and, you know, cuttlefish and ferrets. I had a pet ferret. And I don't recommend bulldogs. And I have an amazing relationship to family and friends. And I'm very blessed in my personal life and my romantic life is feeling awesome these days. And it's just like it's overwhelmingly positive despite a lot of strain and hardship. But the one thing that I wish that I had done earlier was to stop resisting the voice in my head that said, you know, I think there's a God and I'm going to pray.

1:22:55I kept pushing that away. It was like incompatible with my notion of what it meant to be a scientist. It was just incompatible with things. I just kept pushing down and yet at the same time wishing for it. And recently on my 50th birthday, I had to give an uncomfortable toast because believe it or not, I'm somewhat introverted, especially in large groups. I'm happy to talk science and talk like this with you. But, and I, and I said it then, and I'll say it again now, like I'm 50. And for the first time in my life, my entire life, I've experienced sustained times of real deep peace, like just peace, like just the, like, everything's okay.

1:23:34Everything is as it should be, not just some little mantra that you say when you're on the big circus. And why? I think it's because I stopped fighting so hard to try and control everything inside me and in my life. And as a consequence, everything has become much easier. It's still challenging, but much, much easier. And it's 100 % because of giving over to notion of higher power. I'm very direct about it. It's God higher power for me, right? Reading the Bible, this kind of thing, prayer. I mean, these are practices. This isn't just, I believe in God. These are practices. Those are faith-based practices.

1:24:14And it's become a source of immense intellectual stimulation for me and also just relaxation. and it's really it's my wish for anyone that's like struggling or doing well because i i'm certain that it holds so much power and again even if it turns out and i'll never know but even if it turns out that it's all filtered through you know standard neurobiological mechanisms you know um okay i'm good with that but in the meantime like i'm gonna keep praying And you can look at examples all around and all through history where people have said similar things in circumstances far more challenging than mine.

1:24:59And they'll always point to the same thing. I mean, people can be pretty irrational. But at the same time, humans are also pretty miraculous in what they're able to build and develop. And this whole thing, you know, God and religion has not been discarded. If anything, it's growing, right? I mean, you know the data on that better than I. So anyway, I don't have a whole lot more to say about that. You said something to me over three years ago now. You said it's all internal. Can we revisit that? Yeah, I guess now I would say it's all internal, except for the stuff that's coming from outside the human awareness.

1:25:45Yeah. But it's all internal in the sense that, good on you for remembering that. It's all internal in the sense that,

1:25:56you know, I think that the big mistake that I made for a number of years was trying to find the thing that comes from outside that's going to change things. And, you know, Lord knows I love caffeine and of doing certain activities and learning. But at some point, you realize that the ability to withhold

1:26:22reflexes that you don't want to have, like getting your temper sparked or something. People say, no one can make you feel anything. And I say, that's crazy. People can make you feel things all the time. The ability to not speak from your first thought, but your second or your third. You hear these kinds of cliches, right? but all of that ability comes from inside it's from doing internal work and it's kind of amazing how much we can accomplish and i'm certainly not the first to say this how much we can accomplish by just stopping and listening and going wow like my brain's crazy it's like all these thoughts all this stuff oh too much input coming into this like i've got to shut down this thought path also realizing that, you know, because these thoughts layer on themselves, our sensory memories layer on top and we feed our thoughts.

1:27:08I mean, Jenny Groh's description of how thinking works makes you think that, yeah, like if you're ruminating on something that really bothers you, you probably do want to distract yourself unless you're really going to work on that thing, that you really can feed thoughts like embers and a fire. And it's important to not do that if it's not adaptive. a quick aside if you have been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be the problem they play a huge role in your energy your focus and your performance but most people have no idea where those are or what to do if something's off which is why i partnered with function because i wanted a smarter more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body twice a year they're in lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers and their team of expert physicians analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better.

1:28:03And unfortunately, getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands, but with Function, it's just$499 and you can get an additional$100 off, bring it down to$399. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save$100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Well, also, as you said, when we first spoke, if you finish a marathon in first place, nobody is coming along and dripping dopamine into the back of your brain. That's right. It's all internal. This is self-generated stuff.

1:28:41The satisfaction that you get for finishing a hard workout, the love that you feel from being with the people that you care about, the peace that you have for lying in a hammock in a, you know, sunny spring afternoon or whatever, at no point are you being sort of flicked different neurochemicals and sensations. Like this is a part of your system. Yeah. And if you hit the system hard, like, you know, like the thing I absolutely, um, suggest people never do is, you know, something like methamphetamines, right. It's going to, what, a thousand fold increase in dopamine within moments. I mean, I, Is that what that is?

1:29:16Yeah. As compared to, or even more as compared to cocaine, which I think is like 200, um, you know, like a 200 X and I mean, it's, or maybe a doubling. I mean, I forget the exact numbers, but there's this chart that on a Lemke will often put up and methamphetamine is going to, you're, you're basically going to dump as much dopamine as you ever could in that moment. And then the trough is obviously proportional to that. It's kind of fun too, to think about how, because of conversations from me and you and others and Matt Walker, like the world kind of understands dopamine now. They understand the nuance of every little bit of every one of the four different pathways and there's probably five, et cetera.

1:29:49No, but that's okay. Like, do people understand everything about cortisol? No, but I think the world is now armed with a lot better knowledge of their own physiology and psychology and how those merge. I also think that we're starting to understand, actually on the way over here, my producer and close friend Rob was talking about this, that everything now is gambling. social media is a form of uh essentially gambling for dopamine um you know likes and follows um you know markets you know i mean my team their team the politics i mean a good friend has said you know that all addiction is gambling you know all addictions maybe are gambling um in different forms um i would say it all boils down to the same neural circuits of anticipation and and reward expectation and yeah and the scariest thing was i have a good friend ryan suave who works with addicts and and he's trauma therapist as well incredibly talented guy and he said that um you know the scary thing is he's known many gambling addicts that get addicted to the shame from losing oh wow and we said that you're not even chasing the wins anymore you're chasing the losses and the way that you feel about yourself after you've lost yeah it's almost like the wins were not big enough and so they're just chasing the self-shame and the hatred and the it's really sad.

1:31:09Gambling addicts struggle big time. Coffeezilla just did a huge new video about gambling and sort of how endemic it is. And there's banking apps that allow you to gamble inside of the app now. And he's done, I learned an awful lot about gambling from watching a bunch of the videos he's done in the past. And it really is kind of wild to me that it's legal. and the only way that i can i'm sure like you we've been offered like an unlimited number of gambling sports betting partnerships and stuff like that i like gambling actually a little bit but i don't have a problem with it i don't have a problem which is exactly why it's for yeah we should go vegas um but it's kind of it's kind of mad to me that that those that this is legal and you know fucking don't hate the player you know the game is is much bigger than any individual person that's contributing to it like fair play but it's it is really fucking destructive for for some people but then so is alcohol so is driving fast cars on motorbikes or the hypothalamus isn't going anywhere right i mean everyone's got one and so you got to find the things that allow you to be adaptive and functional in life not crater the things you've created and also um to feel like you're in the hunt.

1:32:33I mean, the hunt was the original gamble, right? Hunting for animals, hunting for food, hunting for mates. Seeing that thing grow closer on the horizon, working out the anticipation of it coming towards you. I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer. Surviving a storm probably felt like a big win at some point. I mean, you know, like the number of women who used to die in childbirth and then they were, you know, and then someone solved that puzzle, right? It was a handwashing, I think had a lot to do with it, right? I don't know if this story is true, but the story goes that there used to be a ton of death and childbirth and some of the same physicians who were trying to figure out why were handling and dissecting the cadavers of these poor women who died in childbirth and then delivering babies the same afternoon without hand washing in between because we didn't understand bacteria.

1:33:24We didn't understand the importance of hand washing. I don't know if that's true that's been what's been reported but once they started washing their hands between essentially doing autopsy and delivering babies uh rates of death in childbirth went down here it is so i i wrote this uh article about uh the cassandra complex do you know the cassandra complex no oh dude this is and i don't know anyone named cassandra ah well let me uh maybe you do well yeah uh allow me to teach you about the cassandra complex there are a few feelings worse in this life than being right, but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth, or important area of focus, only to be castigated for how short-sighted, xenophobic, judgmental, out-of-touch, left-wing, right-wing, or alarmist you are.

1:34:07The Cassandra complex is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them, and they're often dismissed, ignored, or even ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, a figure in Greek mythology, the god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but after she rejected his advances, he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her warnings. She foresaw the fall of Troy, warned everyone, and was met with scorn. The city burned anyway. Rachel Carson, in her book 1962, Silent Spring, warned about the environmental damage caused by pesticides. She was mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists, but her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT.

1:34:45Ignaz Sammelweis, in the 1840s, realized that doctors were transmitting childbed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands. He begged his colleagues to adopt hand washing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum. Decades later, germ theory proved him right. Wow. Let me give you this. The best example of the Cassandra complex that I fucking love is the comparison between Copernicus and Galileo. so obviously people that are right but early get uh mocked cast get you know pushed to one side which is um incentive for someone to not speak up if they feel like they are telling the truth but that the world is not going to be sufficiently receptive to it and uh copernicus and galileo like so great as an example of this copernicus in the early 1500s quietly proposed something radical The earth orbits the sun.

1:35:43Humans, once the unmoving center of God's design, were now spinning through space on a planet among many. But Copernicus hesitated. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His great work, De la Revolutionibus, came out only as he lay in his deathbed, likely to avoid the wrath of the church and academia. His truth was too disruptive, and so, for most of his life, it went unheard. Galileo, a century later, took that same Copernican spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, and the imperfections of the moon's surface, all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught.

1:36:17The church responded with fear. Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition, forced to recant under threat of torture, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it is not surprising that Copernicus kept his mouth shut, given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra complex. being right isn't enough and being early can feel like being wrong. Wow. Yeah. I mean, much lesser example than what you just described, but you know, the glymphatic system was discovered many years earlier by a woman at NIH. Um, oh, excuse me at university of Maryland, um, a larger, more powerful scientific group tried to repeat the experiments, made a methodological flaw, couldn't repeat it.

1:37:04Everyone believed them. There's no lymphatic system in the brain. Fortunately, she became an NIH program officer, which is somebody who has some degree of control over where funding gets directed and funded the work that later verified her findings. But it was purely by virtue of the fact that the power structure was arranged in a certain way. This happens a lot in science. I think you'd enjoy, Chris, you know, everyone thinks of Darwin and natural selection, but there was another guy, Alfred Russell Wallace, who essentially discovered all of it in parallel and should have been elected to the Royal Academy and all of this stuff as well, like Darwin, but was not in the club, in the in-club.

1:37:48And Darwin knew it. And actually was very, from what I understand, very conflicted about not sharing the credit. Yeah. It was only because of that rivalry that Darwin ended up pushing his work out, right? I think he had it, he sat on it for a while, he wanted to work on it more, he had a little bit of sort of hypervigilant uncertainty and insecurity about himself. And then finally, upon hearing, oh, I might be beaten to the punch, published. Is that right? Yeah, nobody associates Alfred Russell Wallace with the theory of evolution, natural selection. I mean, most people don't even know who it is.

1:38:22I mean, because my dad's a physicist and because I grew up in science, I know a lot of these stories. I mean, I know a story of, I'll keep this intentionally vague. There's a very, very famous and accomplished physicist that probably should have won a Nobel Prize, but he made one error, which is that he stole the girlfriend of one of his graduate students, married her. That graduate student did reasonably well. It must be very uncomfortable to work in the lab where your girlfriend is now sleeping with your boss. went on um he went on to marry a swedish woman um and uh let's just say that guy that stole the never won a nobel prize uh the swedish community is very close-knit you know so i mean i mean the number of stories i could tell you story after story after story like that but i try and avoid those stories um even though they're true um i'd much rather tell stories about the great scientific discoveries that stuff goes right.

1:39:19That's when stuff goes right, because, you know, that stuff's very enticing. It's the drama that we, you know, are drawn to as humans. Just naturally, we have a proclivity for that. But, but I think that there, there's so many stories of people making incredible discoveries through serendipity and hard work and things like that. So, I mean, that's the good stuff. And, and so I always try and if I mentioned a story like that, I like to balance it out and remind people that I do think that most scientists are well-intentioned. I do think most physicians are well-intentioned. I just had a guest on the podcast, David Fagenbaum, who's a physician at UPenn and scientist.

1:39:53And, you know, he was a football player, big dude, Jack. He's like 6 '3", Jack. He's playing football. He's in medical school and he gets this Castleman's disease, which is a cancer-like disease of the lymphatic system. He's told that he's going to die. He basically was near dead. And then he decided to just start trying all these already approved prescription drugs that nobody thought had anything to do with Castleman's or cancer. And he's alive now 11 years later. And he's developed this not-for-profit called Every Cure where they is completely not-for-profit. And his lab focuses on taking all the diseases that we have, like 14 ,000 diseases that we have no treatments for, and taking existing approved drugs that basically stand to make companies very little money because It's an all generic form now.

1:40:37And using AI and doing these things in combination, they've saved kids from nonverbal forms of brain illness. They've saved people, adults and children from cancers. Turns out that women who have breast cancer surgery that involves lidocaine as a local anesthetic have a 30 % less chance of having a recurrence. Different uses for aspirin, for colon cancer. I mean, you know, and so his belief - old drugs for current unanswered. So his belief as a physician, as a card-carrying member of that community is that the field of medicine has many cures in hand and excellent treatments in hand for the things that people are struggling with.

1:41:19So then when I hear this stuff about, well, low-dose lithium, everyone's maybe pinging that once a year for offsetting the potential for Alzheimer's, or now we're hearing a lot about the particulate and certain air pollution might be one of the primary players in causing dementia. You know, when I hear this stuff, it's like, we need to be testing existing medication. So the field of medicine, the fields of science, you know, as having been in this field of science for a long time, although now I'm in public education, still faculty member at Stanford, the key thing to understand is that it is a business of people.

1:41:54There's a sociology to the business, just like there's a sociology of podcasting and media, which, you know, is a discussion to itself. But this is actually what really made me understand Rogan a lot better. I remember at one point some years back, I asked him, I'm like, where does your kind of like belief or skepticism in certain things come from? And he just looked me dead in the eye and he just said, because I know people. And he, anyone that knows Rogan knows he has a lot of different kinds of friends and he interacts with a lot of different types of people. He's not narrow. He's extremely broad in his interactions, not just on his podcast.

1:42:31And I realized in that moment, I was like, okay, got it. He casts this really wide net, but he has a very selective filter about what he integrates. And it's because he understands people, the good and bad aspects of people. And I think that's the kind of acumen that is only developed through life experience. And if you're a scientist or you're a physician and you're very entrenched in your field, You can be the best oncologist, the best ophthalmologist, the best neurologist. And if you're considered the best because of your knowledge within that silo or even multiple silos, but you don't have life experience and know people from different areas of life, I guarantee you are not the physician I want to be treated by or that I want a family member treated by.

1:43:17Yep. Because you have to understand not just the information and the source of the information in terms of paper and rigor and laboratory. You have to understand the motivations and almost the personality types of the people behind that work. It's so true. I mean, this was the beautiful baptism of running nightclubs for so long. I met a million people in person. And their inhibitions are down because they're drinking. And some things are tuned up, you know, aggression or openness or the humor or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to do. It really reveals and kind of, I guess, exaggerates who people are.

1:43:55But fuck, like you become really, really good at judging people and really, really good at assessing this person's motivations. How sort of real is this? It's been a couple of times on the pod where I've sat down with someone and I'm like, I don't know what I think about this person. And after I've sat down with them, like I know, and I know him one of a couple of directions. I'm like, oh, that was good or whatever. But like, I, we're not going to go. You didn't believe what they were saying. We're not going to go. We're not going to go. I've had that experience. I won't mention the guests, obviously I would say 95 % of 98 % of our guests.

1:44:31I've felt that way. There was, there's only one or two instances that, that I got any kind of inkling that like they weren't as sure as they sounded or something of that sort. But, but I think that that's the, that's the good thing about podcasting is that it's not just an interview, right? Like you can ping people for ideas and you can ping people around those ideas. You're not trying to, you're not trying to catch them in anything, but you really i mean it's funny because we're sitting across it's it's like how you get to know anybody you would sit across from them and you would talk to them it's in the smallest i use this example of watching musicians on stage so one of the things that i find coolest about anybody that does does anything a lot is not them doing the main thing it's their transition activities within the thing so for instance i'd spent a long time at university if you put a pen in my hand it just immediately starts moving through my fingers.

1:45:24I can't. You're one of those. I know my students, if I look out, I kind of blur my vision. I'm not teaching in the classroom much these days, although soon I will again. And, um, it's like, it's like you're watching a bunch of propellers. A Mexican wave of pen twirling. Yeah. I can't, I just, because I did put a pen in my hand and I do that. Um, uh, one of my friends, Zach, the way that he takes, if he, if one of his guitar picks goes while he's playing, he's warming up for me on tour. Um, if one of his guitar picks goes like the way that he fucking like just just seamlessly snags another one like that's what's fucking cool because that is this moment of unconscious betrayal of pattern would be a way to think about it um a drummer that like snaps a stick and you'll just see and he'll switch seamlessly or he'll be playing he was playing the uh high hat with his right hand and his right drumstick goes so he'll switch and you'll see him move with his left and then it and then it's back out and you're like dude that's so fucking cool i love seeing people that are the the way that the guys will set up their cameras like i'll see the guys taking a shot and they'll need to change something and i'm like you just did six things in two seconds it's like hyper proficiency it's so fucking cool right i think that's so sick i want to touch on what you said before which was sort of the the fixation that uh people have groups different groups have on stuff what do you make of the attempt of legacy media to turn, get more high quality protein into a political issue.

1:46:51I think this has been one of the most interesting patterns to see that like protein has become politically coded somehow. And obviously this is kind of for the health and wellness industry, kind of old hat now to talk about like protein is prioritizing protein is something that you probably should consider or at least be aware of. But yeah, what do you make of the fact that protein consumption has become politicized. And resistance training for a little while, although I think the wave caught to stimulate the idea that everybody, men, women, young and old, should be resistance training so you can no longer like kind of bro science resistance training.

1:47:30Although I have to say, even though I have respect for certain elements of bodybuilding, I do think that the bodybuilding culture, I think, has kind of distracted from what's possible with resistance training as a positive health stimulus. A lot of people are still averse to it. Because you look at people who are bodybuilders and don't exactly see the picture of health. Yeah, and I think it's also the way that bodybuilding changes the entire relationship to food in general and to life in general. And look, I think Darian Yates is an amazing athlete, right? I can think of him as an athlete and what he did and the way he did it.

1:48:08And I knew Mike Menser and he was the one that - You knew Mike Menser? I knew Menser. No way. He sold me my first training program by phone. I can tell you the story. I'll tell you that in a moment. That's sick. New Menser, I write about him in my book that comes out later next year. New Menser had a lot of conversations about Menser, not just about resistance training, but also about school and philosophy. He was one of the people that really encouraged me to get serious about my academics. Mike Menser was part of your origin story. Mike Menser, who I'll just, I'll get back to the trad media thing.

1:48:40But yes, I signed up for a program. He's the reason why still to this day, you know, since I was 16, 50 now, as I mentioned, still train three, maybe four days a week, not one set to failure, but, you know, keeping set volume low. One thing that isn't advertised a lot, Mike didn't talk about in his seminars, is that a lot of what determines total set number is how well you can like really direct the effort toward the muscle you're trying to target. So some people are exceptionally good at that. I think Dorian was. Other people would like, no matter how hard they try and curl with just their biceps and forearms and anterior delts, like it's going everywhere, you know?

1:49:17And so a lot of it is about being able - Mind's muscle connection is - One thing he was very clear about is that as you get better at training, the neural component of contracting the muscles that you're trying to contract, you actually can get by with fewer sets because you're able to direct more intensity to those muscle groups. So over time I found, yeah, I probably do somewhere between six and eight sets per muscle group, but with two, I can not slaughter the muscle, but I can get where I need to go. But I like training. So sometimes I'll do more, but yeah, Menser was great. I signed up for this program.

1:49:47My mother was like, I was 16 or maybe even 15 years old. And she was like, why is this grown man calling the house? Because back then you do like a phone consultation and Mike didn't talk, Mike barked. he'd be like listen and the only thing you know and he would say he's like and the number one thing is you don't want to listen to anyone else besides me he told me he said he said most people in gyms are explicative morons he said they're morons he kept saying these people have the intelligence of a toad and he would just like yell and yell and then he'd recommend these six sales and then he'd recommend these anoran books and then the only i even had some sleep issues when i was in college because my dorm was really loud you know what you know the advice he gave me this is so wild.

1:50:25And I have a friend from college who's now a fertility doc here in, in, um, in LA. And he remembered the story. Um, Menser, this is terrible advice. He said, get a jug of white wine and just have like a half mug of white wine. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll fall back. First of all, it doesn't work at all. Okay. So like hit and miss. Oh, listen, Mike, Mike was an extreme guy, but, but he, he actually said, he said, stay away from anabolics, which I did. He said, enjoy learning to train hard. Enjoy your training hard. He said, even though he wasn't a fan of cardio, like get out and live life.

1:51:02And he said, and read really good books. And he gave me this book list. What a sick time. Yeah, I still follow the same. Yeah, Mike was amazing. And then when he died, I heard later, I was very, it was very sad. I mean, we'd been touched a little bit because I was in Santa Barbara and he was down in LA at that time. Okay, so Menser. Protein, politicization, what's going on? Well, traditional media is like, we'll take anything at this point as an attempt to gulp for air because they're really struggling, right? I mean, there are some decent journalists in traditional media, right? There are. I think that they, but they'll not just by quote unquote politicizing something, gives them something to say about it, right?

1:51:42One gram of protein per pound of lean or desired body mass is kind of the standard thing now. Some people less, some people a little bit more. Okay, fine, fine. I think we all get that. That's the goal. If you get a little less, you're probably fine. If you get a little more, you're probably fine. If you get tons more, you're probably not fine. You get tons less, you're probably not fine. Animal protein's clearly superior as a quality protein to calorie ratio, right? You give me an eight ounce piece of steak or you have to eat half a jar of peanut butter, which is not protein. It's a bunch of fat with a little bit of protein in it.

1:52:12Okay, so why do they politicize it? Well, because they're struggling. They're struggling big time in terms of how to generate revenues. I mean, people expect to get their news. Two things have certainly happened. I believe Ezra Klein on this, that people are no longer digesting their news as local news as much. It's more national level news and international level news. And look, putting your name in a title or Rogan's name in a title is going to generate clicks. And if you, and saying great things about people, kind things about people generally doesn't get. He's such a nice guy. Doesn't. Yeah.

1:52:50I mean, listen, I've had a few nice articles written and some of the health magazines will pull protocols and things. And I love it. And, and, you know, I would say things in the health section, the New York times very often parrot what I've covered and other people have covered and they do it differently, but you can often predict what they're going to cover by looking at the various health podcasts. Peter's it's our Peter was just on 60 minutes, Peter at Tia. I texted him about it and he said, as he said, nice to see, nice to see traditional media not accusing me of something unspeakable for once.

1:53:20Yeah. I mean, they seem to focus a bit much on like how much he charges his clients and this kind of thing. I mean, the fact that he said that that was a sort of clean and fair interview, despite the fact that there is some fuckery going on in there. Yeah. It just goes to, I mean. Well, listen, to say they're losing power is an understatement. They've lost power. To some degree, there's still some trust there from a number of people. And to some degree, every topic, health topic in particular, seems to go through the same arc. It's like, nobody knows about it except in niche cultures. Let's just take the glymphatic system.

1:53:59Nobody knew about it. This one woman discovered it. It was not suppressed, but it was kind of knocked back. Then it came out as all the rage. Then a few years ago, there's a study. not as much glymphatic clearance as we thought. And occasionally someone's like, oh, it's not a real thing. One mouse study, one mouse study didn't see it, right? And I know the history of the glymphatic research. So it's very clear it's there, okay? So then the arc is, okay, exciting, exciting, exciting. Take dopamine, Dopamine Nation, Anna Lemke's beautiful work. Then about 18 months later, it's, well, it's not, you know, it's just in mice.

1:54:33Overblown, devalues. Listen, creatine, the next, you can guarantee that in eight weeks or six months or whatever it is, it's going to be creatine, not as important as we thought. There's just the natural arc, right? And then it's the, yes, the things that work still work and the things that don't don't. It's very rare for anything to sort of capture and then just get completely obliterated. Like I was talking about delaying caffeine by, you know, 90 minutes or so. If you crash in the afternoon, it's a great thing to try. Then there was, so it was got a lot of positive attention. Then there was the pushback, show me the clinical trial, show me the benefits.

1:55:08It's like, no, it's show me whether or not you crash in the afternoon, try it if you want or don't like, Hey, easy. It's a suggestion. It's grounded in mechanistic science, but even the, even the coffee accounts on YouTube were pissed off about this. Listen, the big thing that I guess the direct answer to your question is you're taking their paycheck. Do you know how much these reporters make? You're taking their paycheck. The irony of it is if you look at some of the advertisements in traditional media, it's like Fendi bags and like all these like fancy things. And in some cases, dietary supplements.

1:55:41So they are our competitors, but, and this is the critical caveat, they're competing with us. I never think about what they're doing. I never look, I don't care if somebody said, I'm like, okay, I'm never going to modify my content on the basis of what any of these traditional media houses are doing. They are in the chase position now, 100%. Now, does that mean that we will always be leaders in this space? No, one has to be very careful to not assume that, right? There's some kid, some guy or gal, someplace who's going to take my lunch someday. That's the way, and I'm not a kick out the ladder from you.

1:56:21I'll hop on Instagram live and give people a hundred suggestions about how to get their content out more broadly based on what I know. I'm just not that way i was weaned in a culture of science where you train people my students are now on the job market or have labs etc that's the way it's done but traditional media are competitors of podcasts that's why they've started podcasts you and i are very fortunate that we started podcasts in the in i wouldn't say the first wave but like if we were making now second wave punk i mean listen when did yours launch uh 2021 did it really yeah january 2021 fucking hell i thought it was before that but 2020 i was going on a lot of podcasts i went on like 30 podcasts And prior to that, I was starting to teach a little bit on Instagram and that kind of thing.

1:57:01But I mean, podcasting is growing like crazy. I mean, I want to encourage people to make content, but the content that I think is most important is not content about content. This is the really dangerous hook for people. Content about content. And also you'll find that the people who have very successful podcasts tend to be people who are successful in something else first. you certainly have that lex me rogan rick rubin i mean a theo whitney it goes on and on i mean tim dylan etc like and there's a bridge there's a natural overlap between what people were trained to do and what they're doing in their podcast but there are very few podcasts i mean i'm sure there are there are some that are just like someone decides like i'm a podcaster so that the person who wants to be influential for lack of a better phrase in media they want to teach they want to teach science, they want to encourage thinking and make a living doing it, encourage health practices, make a living doing it.

1:57:58I would encourage them to go do something else first that they really enjoy because the structure of that and that very thing is going to inform their content. Very few people are going to, like if they start giving out degrees in media, in social media, I don't think it's going to be very useful. Whitney Cummins got the best take on this. She says, in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. So good. And it's one of the challenges you get as people become more successful, that their ability to generate new ideas decreases because their life is increasingly out of touch. It's the comedian who only talks about dinners, shows, and airports and hotels on stage because that's the entirety of their life experience.

1:58:44Or their craft. Sorry, Ginger, but or their craft. I mean, you said I'm leading an increasingly eccentric life. I mean, The reason I have a pet octopus is I always wanted one. I had cuttlefish. I love aquarium. I have this art project with someone who's a kind of - Are you going to try and justify buying an octopus as like inspiration for - I'm going to teach an octopus how to use an iPad. Okay. And I'm going to decode what the camouflage patterns of the octopus mean for thinking. Is it a mimic octopus? What is it? No. Well, right now I have an Indonesian octopus that's not very interactive. I want a Pacific two spot.

1:59:17This is a whole thing. It's going to open up some trauma for me, but I'm getting a new octopus soon. Caribbean day octopus is probably on the way. But the idea is actually to use AI to try and deconvolve what the octopus is thinking and maybe even communicate with the octopus. They are very smart. I had 40 cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego. They are so smart. And they're also cephalopods, cousins of the octopus. So, but the reason I'm doing that, the reason I have my art projects, The reason I extended my book for a year to add more studies because I like learning. And I, as my, uh, a friend of mine said, he's very intelligent guy.

1:59:56Um, he's a tattooer among other things. He's an exceptional artist. And he said, people with interests are interesting. You know, what's not interesting other people's failures, other people's minor wins. Like there's nothing more boring than that. Yeah. But it hooks in the short term. So social media, I think of as a very, we should go up to clouds rest sometime and hike clouds rest in Yosemite. It's beautiful, but there's this very narrow rock bridge out to the top. And on either side, it's slide to your death, slide to your death. And so I'm always doing, I don't get down on all fours, but it's, it's, it's precarious, but it's beautiful when you get to the top and it opens up into a big flat spoon.

2:00:34You're above half dome. It's gorgeous. I go there as often as I can, but on either side, you fall to your death. And I always think of the internet and much of life like this on one side is the, the fall to your death that is numbing out by going online. And the other one is drama. Like, like who's, I mean, I don't want to name names cause I don't want to give it any, like recently there was an online drama in the fitness community. And I was like, I unfollowed a bunch of accounts. I was like, this is the most boring, stupid thing I've ever seen in my entire life. And this is seeding my thoughts.

2:01:08this is seeding my ability and like i gotta go back to reading good books i'm going into my basement you know so you're allowed to unfollow accounts that you're not learning from or that are pulling you into either numbing out or drama the drama piece is very serious because it gives the illusion that there's something meaningful there but you realize this is just like it's it's nothingness and it is that's a fascinating way to look at it uh it is kind of the empty calories of the content world that you leave this having been given the sort of simulacrum of learning something but if somebody said okay after watching this 10 minute half hour one hour expose or deconstruction what do you know that you didn't know at the start you go well i'd like know about what this person and this person said to each other about each other and how the interplay.

2:02:00And look, deconstructing someone's psychological profile, understanding how human motivations work. I'm fascinated by the way that sort of social interaction, hierarchy, status games, all of that stuff. But I'm not learning that. I'm not reading The Status Game by Will Storr. Well, you're a thinker. I mean, so when I mentioned this rock bridge, I mean, it's the visual I keep in mind when I'm trying to get into solid work or solid thinking or going on social me like there's a narrow band of very useful things to learn and participate in i think that infinity of bullshit you know numbing out or drama on either side the fall to the death um little by little but what i what i think is that because you are somebody who thinks deeply about human nature i mean i listened to your episode with scott galloway and i'm not just saying this where they call glazing on it we used to just call it kissing somebody's ass so i'm not trying to kiss your ass because but like this is there's an awesome episode and your command of of of statistics and data and understanding your ability to frame it and remember these, it's world-class.

2:02:58Thank you. And you do that through hard work, but also through life experience. So I do think that living life in a way where you're collecting data, so to speak, and you're understanding things is wonderful. But I guess what turned me off to this one particular drama in such a strong way was it's yet another example of something I've seen thousands of times before. There was no new learning for me there, except that humans are just being humans. And so at some level, like there's at some point that. the novelty of life, the excitement of life, the enriching parts of life, are about new experiences.

2:03:33sometimes it's about experiencing the same thing and go oh yeah this is a general theme of me or of them or of life and understanding human nature but at some point you're like this is just yet another drama on the schoolyard yeah this is just this is reminds me of and it's sometimes useful to make the parallels this is like in junior high school when so-and-so said something about so-and-so and so you go there's no new data this would be like running you know i published some papers i don't want to do those experiments again because if especially if i get the exact same result right now if i get a different result that's different but i was seeing the same thing again and so i think in order to develop a healthy relationship to social media which is really a big slice of life now for many people of all ages a skill that's only been around for 10 years right i mean i think you have to be extremely conscious of of like when it got you and why you know i mean you had a nightclub you couldn't you might have to respond to a catastrophe or something happening, but like you can enjoy yourself there too, but you were there to work.

2:04:34You were able to navigate that chaotic environment and get things done. A good example of this, uh, you know, post nut clarity, uh, after copulation, the devil's laughter can be heard. I think Schopenhauer said that, um, an equivalent is post content clarity. So after you've finished consuming a thing, how do you feel? Do you feel, uh, enlightened, hopeful, peaceful? Do you want to ring your mom and say that you miss her? Do you want to talk out to get you and that there's less than is needed for everybody and you shouldn't really trust people and you're a bit sort of tight and tense and your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears well here's my litmus test after i spend a bit of time on social media i ask myself later do i remember anything from being on there you know the reflection was there any learning did i learn anything listen i learned some things from your discussion with scott i still got a little bit more to go in the discussion so don't quiz me on it just yet but i intend to think about it.

2:05:31In fact, this morning I went out for a run. I listened to a podcast of somebody that I'm not particularly big fan of, but I wanted to get their perspective. And I thought a bit about some of the things that you and Scott had discussed and I was reflecting on it, right? Because that's learning and that's the anti-forgetting process. I can't recall something I saw on social media yesterday that was very stimulating, but I watched that 60 Minutes episode and it gave me some ideas and insights about what's going on in the world or what might not be going on in the world. And thinking about your experiences is so critical to placing value on them, making them meaningful for you.

2:06:11What I'm not interested in is just an endless deluge of sensory input that goes nowhere, especially if it impedes other things. So a little bit more reflection, 10 minutes, one minute, five seconds of just asking, did I remember anything useful? I want to do that again, as opposed to just the infinite will. You mentioned, I think this is a fucking great take, the arc of something new gets introduced. There is excitement, there is reaction, there is criticism, and then usually acceptance, presuming that this thing is true or valid or whatever. Yeah, like creatine, right? It's been around forever.

2:06:45I was laughing so hard. That's what I want to talk about. So what do you think is the next frontier for public acceptance? because I would say vitamin D3 was - Check. Yeah, that's already done. It's gone through the cycle. Correct, it's out the other side. We should actually plot this out. It'd be fun to do a post. We should do a post together, which is, by the way, public careers follow the same trajectory. You show up, people are like, who's this person? Then it's like, oh, you're very excited. Then there's always, oh, here's the flaw. Fall from grace. And then there's a very simple equation as to whether or not that they are going to continue and continue to have popularity.

2:07:20Very simple equation. was the sort of event more useful or interesting than what they contribute. And if the answer is, yeah, that was actually more exciting than any one thing they'd ever said in terms of usefulness, then they're gone. That owned by the scandal. They fade out at different rates. Their half-life disappears. But if what you're providing is useful, if the person is, if they still, people still want you around, so to speak, it outlives that. I mean, this recent drama, I don't want to dance around it too much, but this recent drama, I was like, nothing could be more trivial or stupid, but I realized the reason it's probably, I'm not portending this and I don't wish ill on anyone, but it's probably going to pseudo end the career of this online person is because it was much more interesting in its drama than any value add that they were given.

2:08:07That's interesting. Yeah. And they had projected a fair amount of arrogance in their delivery of content and things. And if you do that, you're setting yourself up, right? That's a big attractor early on. People like a sort of deserved downfall of the person who's out of touch, 100%. Yeah, there's no coming back from that in a real way. Okay, so vitamin D3 has been through the cycle. Creatine is in the cycle, right? Creatine is currently - So I would say vitamin D came first. Then protein. Right, protein. And the protein thing is politicized a little bit too, because there's something about meat that's considered right-wing.

2:08:38Right-coded, yeah. Which is, and then - Creatine. You know the reason that creatine, I don't think, is going to get politically coded is it's been so heavily pushed by women for women. Rhonda Patrick, a lot of like Kelly Levesque, if you know her, super hardcore female-led audience. It's important for women, despite the fact you're probably going to gain, you know, three pounds of weight. Water weight. Yeah, weight. Your scale's going to be heavy. Maybe you're going to look a little bit fluffier, but you can get rid of it by stopping it, right? It's like having a scale that's off. It's like as soon as you - Curves are in.

2:09:14Yeah, exactly. It's the one way in which things are not mimicking the 90s when everything was super wavy. I mean, I came up in the 90s when it was like the expectation on women was really exceedingly harsh. Do you know the environmental security hypothesis? Sit back. Let me give you this one. So there is evidence to suggest that men prefer thicker women during times of economic downturn and thinner women during times of economic uplift. so if the study original study was done on students that were in halls of residence and they were eating at um you know like a dinner time together where it would be provided by the halls of residence and they showed men images of women of varying sizes uh before they ate and after they ate multiple iterations all over the place before men ate they preferred the bigger women after men ate they preferred the thinner women and you can track the um alternative interpretation.

2:10:08Yes, yes, yes, yes. You can track the sort of public popularity of body size, not shape, waist to hip ratio always remains the same typically, but of body size overall to how the economy is doing. And it's called the environmental security hypothesis. Basically, the human behavioral ecology stuff, Mack and Murphy taught me about this University of Melbourne. He's brilliant. It's out Candice Blake's lab. And what it seems is happening is if you feel secure in your environment. You are not queuing for a mate or while she can survive a tough time of a famine because times aren't that tough. Resources are abundant.

2:10:44Therefore, I don't need a woman who can signal that she can get extra calories and is more sort of metabolically well reserved, you might be able to say. The opposite is also true. And this tracks, the economy tracks with the preference of body size. Wild, wild. I love your command of this literature. It's awesome. I mean, I just remember the nineties being a time of very like wafy models. And, uh, cause I was, you know, came up through the skateboarding thing, you know, when I departed from, you know, biology before I went back to it and our, I mean, they had models like Kate Moss who are extremely thin.

2:11:20And then, um, and actually in friends of ours who were skateboarders in New York, like in Washington square park, our friend, Peter BC was kind of discovered in New York and ended up in Calvin Klein ads, you know, like skinny skateboarder. Right. I mean, he became a firefighter. So now he's like, he's Jack, appears still around. He's a super good guy. But, and really into his health now and stuff, but we can kind of chuckle about the fact that like in the 90s, like that was the look. It was the Kurt Cobain look and that whole thing. And the larger guys are like, you know, it wasn't Mark Wahlberg back then.

2:11:49It was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, remember? And he was in the Calvin Klein ads with Kate Moss. Look at the size of him now. Well, he was pretty built then by those standards. So, but now compared to the sort of typical sort of expectation of muscularity in men. That big flation thing is huge. You watch Bigger, Stronger, Faster, Mark Bell's thing back in the day? Oh yeah, it's a great movie. I watched it some time ago. Yeah, it's 2007, I think. Anyway, so D3. Yeah. Protein. Right. Creatine. Creatine's in it. Creatine's made the cut, although I think because it's a powder and they're trying to put in gummies and the flavored versions are really, the flavored momentous version, by the way, is awesome.

2:12:24It's like, I always had a hard - That's the little pastel thing, right? It's like a chewable - It tastes like sweet tarts. They taste too good. They've just - Yeah. Jeff sent me. In fact, I had their candy. Yeah. Creatine with one gram of like a one gram. Problem is, so I've been taking creatine since I was probably 15, 16. I do. I actually do the loading thing where I take like 30, 40 grams a day for a week and then cut back to 10 grams a day. And then I do a wash out every 16 weeks or so where I stopped taking it completely. I know this is very unconventional for a week and you drop some weight.

2:12:59It's actually interesting to see how much strength you hold on to in that. This is what I am without the assistance of 10 grams of creatine. I just do it for me. I don't. Well, look, you're talking to the school of fucking Mike Mence. You're allowed to do it. Okay. What's next? What do you think's next? Magnesium. Okay. Magnesium, threonate, or bisglycinate. I know there are multiple forms, you know, you malate for soreness, you know, et cetera, et cetera, citrate, laxative, you know, I would say. But bisglycinate and threonate cross the blood-brain barrier more readily. I would say pre-sleep, you know, 30, 60 minutes before sleep.

2:13:32But, you know, I had our chair of otolaryngology head and neck surgery at Stanford, okay? Came on my podcast, obviously studies the hearing system. And she said that magnesium is protective against hearing loss. First of all, hearing loss, low-level hearing loss is associated with dementia, less sensory input, okay? Deaf people can be obviously very cognitively strong, but they have other ways of bringing in sensory input. But partial hearing loss strongly correlated with dementia. you hearing loss very common after concerts in industrial workers things like that magnesium protects against hearing loss why the endolymph in which the hair cells that vibrate in response to sound that that endolymph is like a thick kind of fluid viscous fluid is magnesium is is a prominent feature of that endolymph and it gets depleted by very loud sound to some extent but encouraging more magnesium in the endolymph is protective against hair hair cell loss which is hearing loss, which is permanent, even though it's low level, it accumulates over time.

2:14:31So magnesium, magnesium for cognition, magnesium for sleep, the whole argument that there's less magnesium in the soil nowadays because of the way farming is done, it's just been depleted. So you can get less of it. Your kale of yesterday is not your kale of today, so to speak. So I think magnesium supplementation is going to go through a wave of like, eh, they're just talking about that. Chris and Andrew are talking about that on podcasts. This is Rose. Then it's going to show oh, wow, like, you know, we've got, you know, chair of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery at Stanford talking about magnesium supplementation to offset things like tinnitus, maybe a bit, but also protect against hearing loss, et cetera, et cetera.

2:15:08And then it's going to be like magnesium. Everyone should be taking magnesium. And then, you know, what'll happen? So, you know, it's only an 11 % difference in this population, et cetera, et cetera. I think this is one moment where we're revisiting just very briefly the data on alcohol is worthwhile. It's been so many years of alcohol isn't a problem. Then alcohol is actually good for you, one or two drinks an hour, as long as it's red wine. Then it's bad for you. And then recently it was, no, it's actually not that bad for you. And then now finally Stanford, Keith Humphreys and colleagues at Stanford did an analysis of all those previous papers and essentially found that the control groups in those studies that concluded moderate drinking is good for you were completely off.

2:15:46They were comparing sick people to less sick people in one case. And it turns out that when you normalize for proper controls and you look at all the studies, you do the meta-analyses, without fail, zero is better than any. One or two per week, you're probably fine. Still do all the things that you're supposed to promote your health. moderate drinking is bad for you in terms of elevating cancer risk certainly disrupting sleep and microbiome and a bunch of other things that aren't good if you want to drink drink but we are now landed squarely in zero is better than any and those aren't my data those are data from the best people for analyzing the large-scale studies the smaller studies across the board and i can refer you to the the the analysis of the analysis it's quite solid that lancet article That Lancet study from what, 2016, 17?

2:16:38So the reason that my company in the UK is called Six Months Sober Limited is because the first thing that I ever did before I even launched the podcast was I was like, elective sobriety as somebody who didn't have a drinking problem was so fucking beneficial to me as a productivity strategy, as a guy in his 20s, that because northeast of the uk club promoter stopping drinking was fucking revolutionary a decade ago like what do you oh my god like he's crazy it's like the you know brian johnson fucking penis injection like the ben greenfield that crazy yeah yeah it's like oh my god like why are you doing this thing uh now you know low and no is very sort of common and i was like i want to get other people to do this i think that'll be cool and i was like if i can teach people to go sober for six months that'll be fucking sick uh and instead of registering it as like modern wisdom limited before I did modern wisdom, I was like, I'll do so I'll do six months sober.

2:17:35And like, I'll teach people that this is like real good for them. And I was, I one-to-one coached four people through, I think six months of it to like test whether or not my approach had done. It was daily coaching and people would follow this course and do all the rest of it. But yeah, that Lancet thing was like the, my foundational, uh, scientific justification, but it's like, okay, these are all of the reasons that the outcome is good. As you said, it's like, just do the thing and see if you feel better. Like do push your caffeine by 90 minutes and tell me if you don't have a crash later that day, like easy experiment.

2:18:04I don't need to explain to you the mechanism. If you can get the outcome that you're looking for. The same thing is I learned from you. What is it? Um, uh, uh, locomotion with lateral eye movement on a morning walk down regulates anxiety. Big time. I not, if you're looking at your phone, I'd been doing that. I'd been doing morning walk thing for maybe Mark Bell's like postprandial thing for as long as I can remember, right? Stan Efferding's been big on this. Yeah, my total like obsessive bro era when I had this ridiculously convoluted morning routine, which like escaped velocity me out of being the adult infant I was as a club promoter and like I'll do meditation and a lot of gratitude and all the rest of the shit.

2:18:41And I was like, if I wake up and I'm on the wrong side of the bed and I go for a walk and I come back, like, ah, shit doesn't feel as hard as it did before. So I didn't need you to tell me that it's because of the locomotion and the passage of stuff moving past you is your focal point stays the same in the lateral eye movement down. I'm like, I didn't, it's great that I now know the mechanism, as you said earlier on, because it sort of justifies the buy-in. I have this sort of odd kind of investment and I'm almost more the fact that I found it myself, then it gets justified by the science. I'm like, fucking yes.

2:19:09Like I, well, I think there's an interaction there. Look, I mean, the placebo effect is very real. The mechanism underlying what you're describing also very real, independent of placebo effect. I think that what I'm referring to as the buy-in of people understanding a bit of underlying mechanism for the things that clearly work. Like, do you need to understand that there are three forms of, of a stimulus for hypertrophy, you know, damage to the muscle. Yeah. Do you need to know, but can it inform better choices about training? Yes. Do you need to understand what those are in order to, uh, to grow a particular muscle group?

2:19:40No. But if you understand a bit of what's likely happening under the hood, it affords you tremendous flexibility. It's also, look i also believe that knowledge and gaining knowledge not only learning but learning and doing is what humans thrive on i i'm i believe in the pursuit of knowledge and learning i mean a lot of my podcast content like i'd love to tell you the protocol for this but it's actually just really effing cool and if you don't think it's cool that's okay yeah which is how you work you do your essentials thing right which is kind of the stripped back protocols only hyper diluted critical science protocols only.

2:20:18But what you'll find is that people who do the buy-in of learning a little bit about how something works, hopefully they learn something about cortisol and sunlight and these kinds of things. It starts to make sense as to why you actually feel better when you feel more energized. It's not a placebo effect. What you're explaining is why it's not a placebo effect. That's a good, so yeah, so you get more buy-in. What I think is, for me, is cool, and you said did earlier on is if you know why this thing works, you can be a little bit more robust and flexible with how your strategy goes. You're not just do this thing.

2:20:55If you don't know why you do the thing or what the mechanism is, even at a very basic level, as soon as you don't do that precise thing, you have no fucking idea what you're doing. Or when things don't seem to go so right. So for instance, if you exercise late in the day and then the next morning, you're like, I'm feeling sluggish. like is there something no actually you had a cortisol bump last night it's a negative feedback loop your cortisol is naturally suppressed get a bit more sunlight the mechanisms excuse me the the protocols start to bridge together what to do in case a b c or d because you understand i understand the the principle below it which is cortisol at one time impacts cortisol at another time through this thing called the negative feedback loop what josh waitskin the great josh waitskin of you know i love that episode between dude you guys should sit down and have a conversation i had to text you about it i was like this guy me and george my housemate uh like i've obsessed over josh the art of learning um he's got another book in in progress i i'm gonna connect you guys because you guys would hit it off i fucking love it so well he comes to the states pretty often he lives out of yeah he moved down to the jungle at one point but he talks about knowing like the principles below the principles yeah or underneath the principles so the principles underneath the principles and then being a practitioner as well of some of those principles right and then being connected to people in your field and related fields that deeply understand a stack of principles as well that's what expertise really is and this is why and i'm not taking a dig at doctors but this is why listen recently i had a weird medical thing i took a new prescription drug as somebody said then i had what i thought was a vestibular thing turns out it was low blood pressure.

2:22:27It was diagnosed in one moment by a superb physician. By that afternoon, I was fine, but I could have just chased, gone down the rabbit hole. I was getting all sorts of crazy suggestions about what to do. Look, just like they say in music, sport, I'll say it for podcasting and in medicine and science, there are levels to this shit. Some people are way better because they have principles understood and underneath those principles are understood underneath. They understand how they connect up and connect down and they know people that it's it's one thing for a physician to say this will handle your cholesterol but more often than not what a physician in one siloed aspect of medicine will suggest will create a side effect that will create a job someday for another physician in a different silo and it's just the way the training is done and fagenbaum would say this is also the way that drugs are categorized you know this drug is for this this and this, and therefore nothing else.

2:23:26And you say, wait, no, that drug could potentially cure or treat many other things. And so he's exploring that in a serious way and getting results, curing disease, literally. So I think it's not to say that people with degrees are idiots. It's that, let's hope not, right? I spent a lot of time getting degrees. It's that just having degrees in some cases, not always, are necessary but not sufficient. But most what is absolutely necessary and sufficient is to understand the major principles, the principles below those and how those connect. And then to be able to contact people and to talk to people and to be a practitioner.

2:24:02Like I, it's very clear to me that your training as a nightclub owner informed you so strongly about human nature, also about biology, not just because you were staying up late and sleeping into the day, but the themes of what you experienced and learned are carried forward in the themes of every discussion that you have. And that's what being a real expert is. This is why Derek from More Plates, More Dates, love him. The first time I saw it, I was like, what's this guy's credentials? The guy's credentials are, he's an actual expert. A true intellectual and a true expert practitioner. Understand something at every level of granularity.

2:24:39And Derek is a really good example. Great example of like sufficient, necessary but not sufficient, given that he's outside of academia. Like he's not doing. The academics are now going to him. Yeah. Watch Peter Atiyah, who's a physician trained at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, asking Derek about hormone. And like holding each other, holding each other on a rope. Yeah, and Peter's a super smart guy and he has his expertise. And so what you saw there was people who have different stacks of principles connecting. It's so cool. Right? All right. I got to ask you this. You mentioned protein, kind of the, or at least it's.

2:25:14Vitamin D, creatine, vitamin D, protein, creatine. I think it's going to be magnesium. But what about diet? And if I was to put my little bet down from what I'm the whispers, as Rick Rubin would say, that I'm hearing fiber, I think like the push toward fiber, because it's kind of been the forgotten element of diet. I think that that I'm beginning to hear an awful lot more about that. I think in a nuanced way, I hope, because here's the deal. I had Mike Snyder, our former chair, or maybe still current chair of genetics at Stanford. He talked about blood sugar regulation, incredibly smart guy. He's really into biomarkers and he's almost 80.

2:25:53You got to look at it. It looks like he's like 55. Incredible, incredible health. And he and I were discussing that fiber, certain forms of fiber cause inflammation in some people. Why a lot of people say they can't eat a lot of vegetables and this kind of thing. Some fibers inflame the gut and body of certain people. Other fibers do the opposite. Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher Gardner ran a study looking at low sugar fermented foods versus fiber effect on the gut microbiome. The outcome was very clear. Eating low sugar fermented foods decreases the so-called inflamatome, they call it as opposed to genome, et cetera, proteome.

2:26:32Okay. So reduces inflammation body-wide. So eat low sugar fermented foods, sauerkraut, the brine, kimchi, beer doesn't quite count. Kefir. What's that? Kefir. Kefir, these sorts of things. Yeah. So people can pick their favorite ones. I'm not a big kimchi fan only because it's, it's cut too coarse. If they would shred it, I would like it, but it's like, I have a hard time chewing it. Dude, kefir, kefir is the hack for this. Kefir is great. I love the full fat Bulgarian yogurt. I listen, I love Greek food, but Bulgarian yogurt makes, makes a Greek yogurt. You're a Bulgarian supremacist when it comes to the yogurt world.

2:27:04Careful. You call me a Bulgarian supremacist. The Bulgarian people seem like very nice people. I've known a few. But the point was that low sugar fermented foods reduce inflammation. They support the gut microbiome in a major way. The fiber group was divided. Some people who intentionally ingested more fiber had reduced so-called inflammatory markers, inflammation, and they looked at a lot of markers. The other half had greatly increased inflammation. This is why I think people like Paul Saladino and forgive me, what was the the original carnivore md um uh big guy forgive me oh darn it he's been on rogan he's he's big jack dude fuck he could be anybody he's just always eating a steak okay oh forgive me i fuck okay okay anyway shout out to him i think i think sean dr sean baker yeah well they talk about vegetables causing inflammation right i think some people do experience inflammation for vegetables.

2:28:04I think, so I think fiber is going to make a big comeback, but we're going to have to discern between what, and Mike Snyder really understands this best, certain types of fiber are going to help people and harm others harm in the gentle sense, you know, increase inflammation, which could be severe for some people, autoimmune conditions, et cetera. Other forms of fiber are going to be beneficial. I don't think there are any, I don't think there are any specific forms of fiber that everyone is going to tolerate well. So this is going to be an issue if fiber is the next thing. I do think fiber is critical.

2:28:38I eat sauerkraut every day. I drink the brine off the sauerkraut. I actually drink the brine, then I put water back in it, add some salt, put it back in the fridge because I just like that after I go for a run and work out. It's just delicious, right? It's delicious. And also if you go buy these fermented brines as a product, they're outrageously expensive and you're supposed to have like this much. Okay. I'm a grown man. I'm not going to have this much of anything. Okay. Certainly not food or drink. Like what I'm going to have like a thimbles full of, of brine. It's like, no, I want to drink the whole thing.

2:29:06Like, come on. Okay. So, you know, and it, it greatly supports the gut and the healthy bacteria thrive in that environment. So yes, I think this is the way it's going to go. If I were to say, okay, like what other things, um, you know, melatonin, we didn't talk about melatonin, which I'm not a huge fan of, as you know, but melatonin had a run a long time ago. It was like a hormone in a supplement form. And people were just downing this stuff. It's amazing it ever broke through. And you can get 50 milligram, 20 milligram. It's crazy. And people will fight me all day on this and I'll fight right back until they quit because there are amazing animal data showing that it can suppress the hypothalamic gonad axis.

2:29:45Like - Doesn't it delay puberty in adolescents? Yes, and it's also true that there's melatonin in all the cells of your body that are not suppressed by light, by rather stimulated by light axis and antioxidant. You don't want to be taking large amounts of melatonin in supplement form, maybe a tiny bit every once in a while. I was told a little recently that after a flight, a five milligram dose of melatonin was good. And I was like, well, what? It's a lot. Yeah, it's fucking tons because one milligram is like pretty much bottom of the U of effectiveness, right? And then you get over into more like fuckery going on.

2:30:18And I'm like, five milligrams, why? And that was the reason. Oh, well, you've been exposed when you're flying. typically you've been in a little bit of a dangerous environment inflammation anti like antioxidant i'm like but is melatonin like the tip of the spear of the antioxidant world i mean it's a it's a player i mean as long as we're on this i think that something that's not a supplement but there's likely going to and hopefully going to be in the main frame of discussion is that it's clear that long wavelength light red light from sunlight infrared near-infrared light is beneficial for us right it's low energy but it can pass into our body it does support mitochondrial health, it sort of charges the mitochondria.

2:30:56I recently learned that the water surrounding the mitochondria actually absorb the red light the same way the ocean absorbs red light. And that's why the ocean appears blue. No way. Like little mini oceans. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the mitochondria were essentially got in their back, originated as bacteria that got into eukaryotic cells. No way. Yeah. They have their own little genome. Yeah. They were initially not part of us. Some distant version of us. I got to interject here. Just hold, like, keep that in your mind. Yeah. Do you know how you inherit mitochondria? Through mom. Yeah. Yeah. She's the mitochondrial dude.

2:31:29How fucking wild is that? Well, you want to know what? You like the, you seem to, I can. Sex differences. You seem to like sex differences and you're hyper-focused on mating and reproduction. So let me, you should have kids, man. I can't wait. I'm ready. Kids are, well, you know, two things. One, one of the only challenges I have with having you as a friend is that I have to constantly tell women in my direct messages that I'm not going to relay messages to you. Coming here today, I had several people. Anyway, a lot of women try to get to you through me. Okay. The second thing is in terms of sex differences.

2:32:05What were we talking about here? That your fucking mitochondria comes from - Yes. Sorry. Different brain circuit turned on there. There's something now happening in England. Okay. This has been approved for mitochondrial diseases. So there are people who have mitochondrial diseases and they want to have children. right? And so they don't want to pass along these mitochondrial diseases. When the egg is fertilized, the sort of splitting of the egg into multiple cell types that forms the blastocyst, which just means a ball of cells, which is the early embryo, et cetera, the mitochondrial DNA are intensely important for the physical pulling apart, the spindles and things that pull those apart.

2:32:46They come from mom, okay? So it's actually been solved that you can do three-parent IVF to bypass mitochondrial disease. But this is now being done. So think about it. As women age, right? And their ovarian reserve declines, right? So does the quote-unquote quality of the eggs. We can talk about quality of sperm because this definitely plays a role in terms of what are called day three crashes, you know, when the embryo doesn't even become a blastocyst. It doesn't get past day three. It's typically attributed to the sperm. But a lot of the process is coming from the spindle and therefore the mitochondrial DNA of mom.

2:33:21So there's now a process where you get two parents and let's say the woman has, let's say she has a mitochondrial issue, genetic issue she doesn't want to pass on. Or let's say that she's, you know, in her late forties or early fifties, or maybe even mid fifties, they can take eggs, presumably, presuming she still makes eggs, take the nuclear DNA, put it into essentially an egg that's had its nuclear DNA taken out, but maintains its mitochondrial DNA, and then fertilize with the sperm of the father. You end up with a child that has the nuclear DNA of the intended mom and has essentially surrogate mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplasm.

2:34:05Dude, this is so fucking cool. That's actually being done. Okay. That was being done actually fairly often in, from what I understand, in Ukraine prior to the war, there were people in the United States traveling there. It's not legal here. They do it, I believe in some places in the Middle East, in Mexico, and certainly in England for mitochondrial disease. So this has been done. It works, but it brings up all sorts of interesting ethical considerations. Who is this child? Well, the child has the nuclear DNA of one mom and the mitochondrial DNA of a different mom. Dude, this is so sick. Yeah, I only learned about the mitochondrial only comes from mum thing like three months ago, and I kind of not really been able to stop thinking about it.

2:34:44The reason is when you look at somebody, and I'm going to use Kanye West as my example for this. Oh, boy. Didn't think I was going to go there. You really want this podcast flag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We might as well invite Lex and Kanye in and have a full conversation. Yeah, I know. Sit down, Lex. What I think about, and this, I total, like the most bro science that we've done today is if you have a person who has the mitochondrial function of a fucking v12 engine in a garage mitochondrial function of a v12 engine but the psychological chassis of a honda civic you have this sort of crazy out there energy but you don't necessarily have the handling to be able to sort of direct it you described a lot of of teenagers and early 20s males well yeah Yeah, of course.

2:35:33Especially where I went to school in Santa Barbara. Yeah, with the testosterone pumping. But I just thought about that when you go, okay, well, you've got this combining of psychological profile, but this almost unheritability when it comes to mitochondria. Apparently it's like 99 point something percent is that, and I don't know if the other percent comes from the father or if it's like some weird like, I don't understand. What was it? Mito something. I did a mitochondrial test. So I've sent off a bunch of cheek swabs, which will be cool. I'll get to see those when I come back. home. Anyway, I just thought about mom could be like this powerhouse or the opposite.

2:36:07You could have quite a low mitochondria function, however that presents, energy, disposition, all the rest of it, but kind of the psychological predisposition of somebody that's like a fucking hard charging go-getter, lots of conscientiousness, industrious, highly disagreeable, low politeness, all this stuff. I just thought it was real interesting about how those combine. Well, you're still going to get it. Absolutely. You're still going to get genomic DNA from mom, right? You know, those 23 chromosomes. I mean, you're going to get genomic DNA from mom and from dad. What's really a mind bent, no pun intended, is there's a woman whose laboratory is at Harvard named Catherine Duloc, who's a luminary in the field of neuroscience, who did some beautiful experiments showing that different brain areas are genetically identical to mom or to dad, even in you and me.

2:37:00You have entire brain areas that are 100 % the genes from dad. It's not, it's a myth that every cell is a, is a 50, 50 mix of genes from mom. Independent of the mitochondrial DNA piece, right? We're talking about genomic DNA. In fact, they did some marking studies and you could actually, well, you see this two ways. You blue ones are mom and, you know, et cetera. They do those studies. The more convincing studies, of course, are where you have genes that are passed specifically through the Y chromosome, right? And you can actually either post-mortem or in terms of the requirements of having a gene present in a given brain structure, you can realize that you have brains where a given brain area carries the disease mutation and another brain area doesn't.

2:37:50And even though it all came through dad on the Y chromosome, it should be everywhere, but it's not because there you have some structures that are essentially purely XX. These little territories, domains. They correspond to entire brain structures that drive of all things, hypothalamic fat function. There's a condition of hyperphagia of like very obese kids. They can't stop eating. This kind of comes through, I forget if it's mom or dad. So these things show up in the human genetics. I mean, human genetics is often more complicated than we think about in terms of Mendelian genetics. You can get hypomorphs where you have a kind of reduced gene expression as opposed to just lacking a gene completely.

2:38:28This exists and we could talk about this for hours. But so when people say, see an attribute and they say, oh, that you clearly got that from your mom or from your dad, that's actually could be true, right? That they're much more like their dad in certain ways and much like more like their mom in certain ways based because we're never going to know but their brain is entirely actually separate it out yeah it very well could be it's gonna be fun when your kids play with my kids and we can you know lex that's you that's you well lex and i have this but well we're not going to have kids together i don't want to give people the wrong impression what i was referring to is the fact that lex and i always have this discussion about timing uh the the delivery of our independently generated kids um so that they can grow up to Well, he wants his kids to beat up my kids in jujitsu.

2:39:13Okay. I have more a theory about enrichment of sort of the engineering offspring versus the neuroscience. You're much more pro-social than him. He's very competitive in this regard. Yeah. I mean, I'm competitive in certain things, but mostly - You're trying to compensate for Lex. My interests are so, I don't really find many people looking at my collection of interests in an overlapping way. I'm going to beat him at octopus training or whatever it is. Well, the octopus raising community is a little, people are a little guarded. So it's a whole thing, man. It's a whole different podcast, a whole thing.

2:39:54But I did want to ask you something. Hit me. I want to make sure. So you put out this video about your health journey. or I guess it's your sickness journey and seek in search of it. You seem really good. Can I wager a hypothesis? Cause I've experienced this myself at one point. Do you think that at some point, it sounds like I'm leading the witness, but that it's possible to like that in pursuit of recovering one's health that along the way, cause I've done this, you do something or take something that layers in another health thing that makes the direction increasingly confusing. Like I took this on the suggestion of some conventional doc recently.

2:40:36I decided to try and knock down my ApoB a bit. It's a little high. And it created a whole set of gallbladder issues for a couple of days. I stopped taking it. I feel fine again. And I probably don't need to take it in the first place. So I believe medications work. I think they can be very useful. I also think that some of them work so well that they can drive the system in directions we don't want to go. And so when I hear about these blood cleansing methods, or I hear, you know, I worry as your friend, I worry a little bit that, listen, I don't want you to struggle with the symptoms of Lyme's, but I do worry a little bit because these things are really extreme.

2:41:15Yeah. Okay. So the health documentary that we out, which is, you know, episode one. The reason that I did that was I'd assumed at the start of last year, the day that I got the diagnosis, I knew that something was up. I knew that I was tired all the time. I knew that I wasn't recovered no matter how long I slept. I knew that I had brain fog and I knew that my mood was low. And I'm like, you know, maybe this is just getting older. Maybe it's something, whatever. And the day that I started filming with my videographer was the day that I got a, hey, we've done an EKO test on your stool. And it turns out that there's line.

2:41:47We don't know if it's IgG or IgN. We don't know how prevalent it is when you got it. Don't know if it's Borrella, Babesia. Because it could have been way back when. Correct. It almost certainly was vestigial. All of the stuff, all of the basic shit that wasn't exciting, I did. Right? I did - Doxycycline. Yeah, doxycycline, minocycline, like all of the usual treatments. This was not me jumping straight to going to Tijuana to have an intrajugular line put in and me live in a hospital. It wasn't me going straight to Vienna to get a fucking hypothermia treatment, like teaser about what the next episode is.

2:42:24It wasn't me going straight to those. I'd gone through all of the standard. It's Gabrielle Lyon that's looking after me. It's her team. And she is as like Western by the book as you're going to get. She's just a bit more like integrative than most people would be. So we're trying to make changes to diet and we're trying to make changes. So, well, my training had to get backed off from like 10 out of 10 to six out of 10 for a while. And oh, well, maybe we need to do. and then i had a fucking um a migraine with aura that i thought was a stroke i thought it was having a stroke so have you ever had a migraine with aura no okay you know what they are it's like a ring so some people get it visually but other people get it olfactory and i get it olfactory so i'm on an assault bike doing norwegian four by four it's fucking rhonda patrick and uh my heart rate's coming back down it's been 165 165 something like that and it's coming back down and like it was as if someone shoved a piece of burning toast under my nose like that was all i could smell that worries me because normally when somebody gets the sort of phantom smell of burning toast we worry about temporal lobe seizures and and so immediately i go immediately strokes that's why i thought i'm like this is how i die i die on an assault bike in on it gym austin texas this is how i fucking got yeah but i was doing normal i mean it's not super badass but it's it's it's in the right is that how i get i get taken out you weren't just like on social media that's true so anyway i immediately go and get a ct scan no it's not i go into get a what is it a transient ischemic attack tia yeah i'm like we go and do another one with contrast so now i've got fucking gadolinium in me and i'm gonna have to like detox the gadolinium people creatine after tia's now it doesn't surprise me it's neuroprotective anyway so like the amount of shit that wasn't included in that vlog that i went through like hundreds of sauna sessions with cholestyramine or charcoal body wash as a binder to try and get the mold out of me.

2:44:13So what, you had mold and lime? Oh, the litany of things. Mold. I mean, I saw that in the video, but the mold was confirmed. Mold was through the roof. I've done a, who does Total Tox? Can't remember who does the test. Anybody that's got it, Total Tox is kind of the gold standard test. We're going to need to chelate our metals after being in this garage. That's true. Smells like bumper in here. Heavy metals were in there. BPAs were in there. I kind of like this. But I mean, the problem is, and I said this in the doc, if you do a huge battery of tests, loads of shit's going to come back and be out of whack.

2:44:43But if you don't feel bad, it doesn't matter. Yeah, if you have antibodies to chocolate or strawberries, you probably developed those as a kid. And I love dark chocolate and strawberries, but I'm sure I make antibodies to them. That doesn't mean I have a food allergy. Yeah. So if you do a lot of tests, stuff's going to come back. And what you're doing is you're basically like a guess who Sherlock Holmes in your way through a list of potential suspects for why you don't feel good. And one of the problems that I found and have found since the doc came out, even though lots of people, especially people from like the MECFS community, chronic fatigue syndrome stuff, I had tinnitus for a long while.

2:45:19Like that community was like, fuck, like somebody is talking about this and they're saying it's kind of a silent like suffering that nobody really appreciates. and this was met at least in large part by people going chris looks fine this is all psychosomatic it's in his head it's because he's pushing himself too hard it's because of blah blah blah that makes it worse right and and i'm certainly not suggesting that i mean i think you're doing an important public health service by talking about these things um you know i think i'm hearing more and more lately from people young men who took drugs for to avoid hair loss post finasteride syndrome you know the medical community the standard medical community thinks it's it's nonsense but you talk to these guys that are having serious and at least till now permanent hopefully some of this stuff can be reversed sexual sexual health issues psychological issues i mean it's cratered the lives of a lot of young guys and there's actually a scientist out at a scientist physician out in florida who i may end up posting on the podcast there needs to be more discussion about these things i always thought that you could kill lyme with high dose or just long last long duration doxycycline treatment and you found it it helped or didn't help yeah it's it helped but there's just when you start to get deep into these things called fish tests you do a fish test for it um and i'm working with like doctors like fluorescent in situ hybridization yeah there's this uh dr carsten who is german guy who's like the number one on the planet matt cook out of San Francisco, San Jose, is the guy that's leading this, like, more forward-thinking.

2:46:55He does, like, he does a lot of stuff, forward-thinking, sports medicine doc who's now doing peptide stuff. And just not quite right and not quite fixed. All of that is to be said, I got inverse pretty privilege, which is you look fine on the outside, you're in good condition, you're a young dude that seems to still be performing at an okay level, but it's kind of the same as saying to Usain Bolt, oh, you ran a sub-10. you must be great it's like yeah but i should be running like nine nine five fours or nine fives and i know where i'm supposed to be at and i know where i want to be at and i don't want to like surrender to entropy in this way and just accept a lower standard of living for myself and that was the the main thing i wanted to people to people to take away was like there are so many people who don't have the inclination the time or the resources like i do to be able to text you or a here or fucking ronda or whoever i want or or matt kirk or fly to take time off to go to mexico do all of this bullshit that are just like this is life now this is my life now yeah i'm just a bit more forgetful i don't think i used to be that forgetful yeah i fall asleep at 8 p.m i don't think i used to fall asleep at 8 p.m yeah like my mood's a little bit low but maybe it's just because of and it's explained away and explained away and explained away by lifestyle environment psychological disposition aging something and you're like oh no you there are chronic underlying infections that you've got and to treat them is so fucking complex and so expensive but the mold was the covid and mold were the two things that really fucking pushed me over the edge and then when you get into autoimmune all you need for autoimmune is genetic predisposition permeable gut lining and environmental stressor and if you live in a house with mold for two years Like I challenge anybody that's got those two to do the third and not get fucked.

2:48:41Is it true that mold is a prominent issue in Austin? I hear this. It's one of the highest, Texas is one of the highest states in the country. Is it the, you know, hot, humid days? Subtropical. And for some reason, this country decides, your country, decides that it's going to build houses out of wood. It's an organic material. But while it's being built out of wood, it's exposed to the elements. So it gets wet and hot and wet and hot and wet and hot. And now the skeleton of the thing that you live in has been wet and hot. And now it gets covered in cladding while it's been wet and hot. And sometimes it's wet as it gets covered in cladding.

2:49:16I mean, home design is something I think a lot about from the lighting perspective. We didn't get into it. But like, you know, we hear so much about the benefits of red light. But, you know, long wavelength light can really offset some of the toxicity of blue light. It's not just about sleep. But going back to what you were just describing, do me a favor. I'd love for you to talk to David Fagenbaum, who cured his own Castleman's through an intelligent approach of taking these already approved drugs to treat Castleman's. I mean, he cured himself. He's alive 11 years now. He's married with kids.

2:49:47He was going to die, like dead. But he has this not-for-profit every cure where they use AI and hardcore scientific methods, basically. I mean, not to sound loose about what exactly they do, but he's a serious scientist and physician to try and decode different diseases and try different existing drugs to cure them. So I think it'd be worth talking to him. He's very open-minded and he understands the medical profession and he understands that if the solution hasn't been handed to you yet, it's because people aren't aware of it, but it's very likely that it does exist. So I think it'd be a good conversation for you.

2:50:26I like it. I mean, look, if I was to track my journey, we were here in this location, although we're at a different angle, about 14 months ago or so, I think. And just after that, September of last year and sort of spring of this year were the two worst times for health. Brain was so slippery. I was so forgetful. It was insane. It was like trying to think through mud. I love the agility of my own thoughts. And the fact that that was taken from me through, you know no fault of my own i fucking hell oh god you you were too hard charging i focus on sleep i'm in bed for like at least you're a vigorous guy i i don't buy the like you're just pushing too hard i mean there are there are ways in which people push too hard but you're you're like you said you're you have a you know 12 cylinder engine that's you you built yourself that to that and you came into the world presumably with some forward center of mass i feel i feel like you were born started nursing finished nursing and got into the world and started doing stuff yeah so So, but that period, the last time that we were here, you can even go back and watch the vlog from after we've recorded.

2:51:30And I think I finish up with Eric and I'm outside and I'm like half asleep, falling asleep on this couch. And it was, if I, two and a half years ago, we're a 10, if that was Chris, where he's supposed to be. 14 months ago, I was at a four or a five. and then the start of this year and for much of the start of this year it was like a three or a four. I would say I'm up to now, I swing between a seven and an eight. And the fact that I was able to do the live shows in New York and Toronto last week and I've got LA coming up and then Boston, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Nashville. It feels like there's color back in the world because it felt very grayscale for a long time.

2:52:15I mean, I say it in the dark, but there was a day when I forgot how to tie my shoes. like I looked down at my feet and there were laces that were undone and I didn't know the combination to tie my laces in to be able to get them to be in a bow anymore and I'm like I've gone from that which was like a three out of ten to now I feel okay and there's some color in the world and I can have fun with my friends and I can fucking send it like and I can stay out after 11 o 'clock without fearing that the next day is going to be ruined we're not drinking I'm 37 37 should i be should i be treating myself with that much fucking fragility no i don't think so i mean it's it's i mean it's almost like you're describing a kind of having a sort of dementia for a while it felt like have you ever taken an anti-cholinergic no so i took one this is funny during i like to stimulate the cholinergic system well you should do but if i'm not a big nicotine guy but every once in a while if you have overactive bladder syndrome um which i and a lot of men developed during covid because we were right next to our bathroom and we had nothing else to do.

2:53:18So we were drinking fluid and going to the bathroom and drinking fluid and going to the bathroom. And I was like, I found myself urinating more frequently when I didn't need to. And I'm like, prostate problem. Like this is going to the doctor. I tell him and he laughs in the UK in like 2020 and laughs. I was like, is this funny to you or what? And he was like, you would not believe how many men I've seen over the last couple of months that have come in with this problem. My business partner at the time in the nightclub stuff, Darren comes around, we have a meeting it's the first meeting we've had in ages after i ruptured my achilles so my foot's up on this thing and while we're having this meeting he drinks half a glass of water and it's still in the back of my mind right because i've just gone to see my doctor that week during the meeting an hour and a half he goes to the bathroom three times i'm like mate are you uh are you finding yourself urinating more frequently that's not just from sitting too much because certainly during the pandemic there was a lot of sitting at a standing desk.

2:54:12Uh, anyway, you've detrained the little muscle in between the bladder and the urethra to be like the sensitivity that you're supposed to be at, which is a fucking podcaster, right? It's one of the primary things you need to develop beyond your working memory is your bladder. If you're going to be a podcaster or a touring musician, you got to learn how to, you got to, you learn how to hold your piss. Uh, so one of the things that they give you is an anticholinergic, which gets that a little sense of thing. You probably feel like you're floating. It's horrible. That's what they used to give. I mean, this was the whole thing of witches, you know, like to give them the, they would take it to give themselves the sensation of flying.

2:54:49This taps into the muscarinic cholinergic system, different than the nicotine cholinergic system. So nicotine cholinergic system, it's the stuff of muscle movement and contraction and focus and all the reason people take nicotine. The muscarinic stuff is what you took. Muscarinic agonists are going to give you a sensation that you're floating. It's going to make your pupils about this big, but you're relaxed. Normally, if your pupils are big, you're more alert. You're going to feel dissociated. This was actually recreational witch drug use. Dude, it fucking sucks. You can't remember shit. Anyway, it felt like that.

2:55:22I remember I was talking to Michaela Peterson at the time and I was like, I'm being forgetful and I've got this thing. And obviously she was experienced from dealing with her dad. And she was like, taking any new medications recently? And I was like, yeah, like I've taken 10 milligrams a day of this anticholinerant she was like rings me immediately she's like stop taking that stuff right now prescription drugs work very well to to hit the mechanisms they're supposed to hit which is why they often blast radius they often listen some of them are great some of them create real problems i mean i'm yeah oh man anyway so it sounds like things were just getting layered in and layered in and you're fighting through this stuff and yeah you're right as you try to treat one thing maybe something else comes up like if there was h pylori candida placebo, uh, leaky.

2:56:01You did the H. pylori treatment? Yeah. That's like four different antibiotics. Correct. Ruthless, all timed with different sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence, and you're a hard driving guy. So the thing about autoimmune stuff is like a lot of men, women too, but a lot of men who tell me like, Oh, I'm like got this weird skin thing. Are these like, you know, and they freak out. It's because if you're the kind of person who can push and not get sick too often, oftentimes it means that your immune system can really ramp up in parallel with your kind of levels of drive and activity. I don't get sick people who always end up getting sick sooner or later, but just push, push, push, push, push.

2:56:36You get high levels of interleukins and things that you end up, you know, essentially deploying so much cortisol, but also anti-inflammatory molecules, right? It's not just cortisol that you can start, you know, getting skin conditions because your immune system's attacked. People get eczema from that. People get lichen planus. You really want to get scared. Look up lichen planus. It's some scary photos. Sounds like a moss well they're like um you're right but it's it's an autoimmune condition where the immune system because of stress in it excessively long days etc excessive caffeine push push push people will get um it's almost like looks like bruising um on the wrists they can get them on their genitals on the tops of their feet people get very very scared and it's actually just they're pushing themselves too hard some relaxation look i think humans can tolerate a ton of stress provide they get enough sleep at night and sleep well let me give you this but but what you're telling me is you you're looking down at your shoelaces you don't recognize them as shoelaces even this is how i know i'm too sleep deprived when i used to pull all-nighters and i'd work on grants and papers really late i'd look at the word the and i go that's misspelled that has to be misspelled i'm like it's time to go to sleep that was my i mean just to show you how unhealthy perhaps i was is that was my redlining when i when the word the looked like i'm not sure if that's spelled correctly i'm like i'm sleep deprived i think i think i'm going too far But yeah, dude, I have come to believe that there is basically no such thing as being overworked under rested.

2:58:03And I was resting. I was going to bed. I mean, I can even show you my fucking whoop data. And Andy's got it. All the team have got it. Oh, man, I believe you. Dude, I was in bed. I'm not kidding you. I was in bed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. for like weeks, months at a time. I'm like, I'm dedicating. And I'd wake up having been asleep for all this time. And I'm like, I'm so drained. and it's not, anyway, I'm now moving between, like if it's a really fucking bad one, like a six up to a seven and sometimes up to an eight. And dude, when it's an eight, like today's probably a seven and a half. I woke up this morning, I'm at the W in West Hollywood.

2:58:38I'm like surrounded by, I saw a homeless guy literally pissing into a wine bottle this morning and I'm like, hey, what's going on? The sun's shining, fucking shit. The sun's always shining. Go to a Dunkin' Donuts. We have a serious homeless slash mental health slash addicted people. The world just felt like color. I'm like, fuck, this is so good. It's back in Technicolor. It honestly feels a little bit like I kind of got a second. It feels like I died a bit. It feels like me, who I am, kind of died. And now I've been so gentle with myself this year. I've gone to bed early and I've restricted my diet and I haven't had any fun and I haven't really adventure and I've worked and I haven't got to do new stuff.

2:59:18I've just tried to hold on. You know, I used to have this, I still do, this really long end of year review. I had two goals for this year. Usually it'd be a light, I mean, meditation, practice, training, muscle, getting, we'd be straight, all this stuff. Two goals for this year. Fix my health, don't let the show drop. That was it. If I got to the end of the year and I hadn't fucked the show and my health was fixed, I'm like, that would be, and as I come into land, you know, we've got a few months left in the year. I'm like, I think we might just sort of bring this into land there. So it's been a real, it's been a real sort of fucking adventure that I wouldn't wish on anybody especially the hopelessness having hope expectation that being dashed that really uh that really sucks like that's the hardest part um that you think that things are going to change or be improved and then they don't and then you have to deal with the expectation and then the the disappointment and the disappointment was the worst thing but uh if nothing else in kind of Brian Johnson's on the show later this week.

3:00:16Brian, very few people want to be Brian, but appreciate some of the things that he's learned by the stuff that he's done. I'm like, dude, if I can tell you 20 different modalities that I think didn't move the needle and two that did. at least there's a bit of silver lining on the fact and now obviously i'm hopefully on the trajectory we have been back to being better. So it seems like, sounds like it. I'm being hopeful. It feels like that to me. And, you know, I did, to sort of round it out, I did Piers Morgan show a couple of weeks ago and Michaela came on and was talking about dad and Jordan's having a really fucking rough time.

3:00:49I was going to ask how he's doing. Super rough. Like, just not good. The answer is not good. And she finished up with like, so we think it's because of mold and we think it's maybe because of this, not immune. But then we also think that it might be because of demons. And like, that was what she left the conversation with. And then Piers turns to me and is like, Chris, you're ill. I think it's the work of the devil. And I'm like, why do I have to clean up this? Like, this is her claim. She just said yes. Well, look, my point is I understand why because it feels so fucking cosmically unfair after a while that you're like, this has to be a fucking curse.

3:01:27Like this feels so much bigger and greater and more painful than it should be. uh i can only attribute this to like some karmic retribution that is owed to me for some past slight some something and that's when you start to ask yourself excessively hard i mean whatever the reasons let me let me ask you a question um i mean we're on a podcast but in all sincerity how can i and your other friends support you and since we're doing this as a podcast i'll also say how can the people who listen support you? I mean, like, but really, I mean, do you want them? I mean, I'll be praying for you. I'd decide that.

3:02:08Do you want people to pray for you? Do you want, they will be, but do you want people to send you suggestions? Do you want people to not send you? You know, oftentimes when somebody's struggling, like my, or anyone's impulses, be like, I'm like, talk to Fagan while I'm doing this. Let me fix it. You know, we all want to do that. But I hear you. It's clear this is like, you know, what started as lime has it's opening up all sorts of doors and cupboards and stuff in there and um i mean i as your friend i caution you against exploring whether or not you did something in a past life or did i think you're um my understanding of you is that you're sufficiently in touch with your mistakes and your uh good choices overly in touch with the human no no i don't think overly i think you you're a you're a introspective person and and flagellating yourself is certainly not going to help.

3:02:58But yeah, how can I support you? You do already, man. You know, I had a close run-in over this weekend, which we'll see whether or not that ends up surfacing, perhaps relevant to our conversation about what's going on with mainstream media and how they are garnering momentum by attaching themselves to industries and platforms that have momentum. Very interesting that it never happens before there's any status associated with trying to unearth something. You are, dude. I really cherish our friendship. The fact that you're one text away from giving me a fucking essay. You even sent me, this is to break the fourth wall, how good of a friend you are.

3:03:41You knew that I was sad and worried this weekend. So not only did you give me a ton of different bits of advice, you then decided to peel off to give me a miniature novel about a black ferret who repopulated an entire like female colony of ferrets and this entire he saved the species saved this and i'm like you're like scarface you're gonna save the species i appreciate you i appreciate all of the stuff that you do for me that that that's it um i really do i really cherish our friendship uh likewise when does the book come out people want to know september 2026 let's fucking go dude 12 months later we're going to be back here i can't wait would love to um yeah i delayed it to add some things, change some things and do some illustrations.

3:04:23And, um, I apologize in a real way for the delay, but I I'll make it worth people's while. And, um, thanks for the kind words. I you're an amazing friend, you know, I mean, I've been so fortunate to be part of this colleague set that we called, uh, you know, podcasters and the more or less same vintage of podcasters, although you got into it before me. Um, I will be praying for you and I also will do everything I can in terms of my connections and resources in the medical and scientific community to try and figure out what's going on. I do think you're on the, on the recovery slope now. And, um, and I'll be praying that that continues and do anything to support you.

3:05:05You're equally, if not more amazing friend, how did you quantify these things? Right. And, um, it's such a pleasure to be in the same field, to call you a friend and you're going to beat this fucking thing. No doubt. Thank you, man. Until next time.

3:05:46books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.