#836 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The New Science Of Longevity, Resilience & Breaking Bad Habits

26:11So if you do some jumping jacks, you skip some rope or you even just take a walk while facing the sun, now you're starting to stack different zeitgabres. And I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment. If you then also add caffeine, now this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes ago, but if you were to add caffeine, you can in train as it's called the circadian clock to be alert at that time a bit more. And I'll be honest, if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning, I need caffeine. I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes. If I need to jump right into exercise, I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking, three hours after waking or 11 hours after waking.

26:48And a lot of people find that the same. But of course, exercise when you can because it's that important. But if you want to, quote, unquote, optimize your energy levels for exercise. Typically people will notice that has to do with your temperature rhythm. Okay, so we've got sunlight, we've got exercise or movement of any kind, it could be jumping jacks, it could be walking, you don't have to do a full workout. And then caffeine and in some cases food, I'm not big on eating first thing in the morning, I don't like to eat until 11 a .m. or noon, that's when my first meal arrives for me and just naturally that's when I get hungry, it's all caffeine and hydration prior to that.

27:21But if you were to eat something first thing in the morning, that's part of the way you entrainer circadian clock, to wake up, to essentially wake you up earlier. And then the fourth one is a social rhythm. If you're interacting with other people, you are going to entraining your clock to that as well. So, yes. So there's a social component to circadian entraining. Now, the pathways for these are from the eye, in the case of viewing light to the circadian clock, the superchiasmatic nucleus. In the case of caffeine, it's more general. In the case of exercise, there's literally a brainstem to circadian clock connection, a big, it's super highway of neuronal connections, that then so -called in trains your circadian clock.

28:02Remember your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24 hour rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light, you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap. It just is what we call free run. It would drift a little later each day. This is what happens when you go to Vegas. This is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the sunlight rising and setting cycle. Mm -hmm. Sunlight, exercise, caffeine and eating and social interactions, bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeitgabers.

28:38So when I said it takes three days, if tomorrow you wanna start beginning the process of becoming an early riser, you'd set your alarm for 5 a .m. No matter what time you want to sleep the night before, you're gonna get up and you're gonna do the four things that I describe, maybe leave out food if you don't wanna eat. maybe leave out caffeine if you want to delay by 90 minutes. It's going to hurt. And then by the early afternoon, you'll be dragging a bit and you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine, which will then cause you to fall asleep later. Then you want to go to sleep at your now naturally, slightly earlier sleep time.

29:10The next day, you'll notice you'll, it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine. I just described. And by the third day, you ought to be waking up with or before the alarm by a few minutes or moments. because your circadian clock has phase shifted. Okay. It's phase advanced, as we say. Your circadian clock intrinsic to you generates a 24 .2 or a 24 .3 hour rhythm. It's not perfectly 24 hours. And that we believe, we don't know, but the just so story is that it's that it's such that that you're able to then shift that clock in one or the other direction. You can phase advance, you wake up early and go to sleep earlier, you can phase delay.

29:52How do you phase delay? Well, you're probably doing this already. Everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not -so -strict criteria of shift work, which is Are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after 9 p .m.? Are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 9 .30 p .m.? Most people would say yes. So the diabolical thing about the circadian timing system is that it requires a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, But a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person. But it requires just a little bit of bright light, even from an artificial source, after the hours of about 9 .30 p .m.

30:28till 4 a .m. to quash your melatonin and make it difficult to sleep, or if you sleep to make that sleep not as effective. There's a simple remedy, however, which is, and this is a beautiful study published in Science Reports in 2022. If you view sunlight in the afternoon, even for five minutes or so, could be late afternoon, could be sunset, take off your sunglasses, look in the direction of the sun, so now looking west, you adjust the sensitivity of your retina, the neurons in the back of your eye, such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to suppress melatonin. and reduces the melatonin -suppressive effects by about 50 % or offsets those.

31:11So I think of this afternoon viewing, as well, first of all, it's nice to look at a sunset. If you're indoors in an environment like this, even if there are bright lights on, get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets. This is especially important in winter. Even if you can't see the sun as an object, get some sunlight in your eyes, and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night, partially, and I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation. So that that night you can be on your phone or watch an Netflix and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much But it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat but let's you know unless like Rick Rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses I've started doing that as well But if you don't do that Well, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening.

31:55He's very attached for good scientific reasons to the sunlight thing But these are little things that take just moments, right? they're essentially zero cost that can really improve your sleep. But that's how you become a morning person. If you want to become a night person, you do the opposite. You view bright light between the hours of 4 p .m. and 10 p .m. and then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way your circadian clock, making you want to wake up later the next morning. I wonder if dogs count as social interaction. Absolutely. And they have all of the same mechanisms we just described.

32:34So I just think how can we stack that everything first thing in the morning, morning walk? Yeah. If you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high, North, dog, social interaction, moving around and then caffeine if you do or if you don't, if you don't want it. But if you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run. You're going to have to shake it. If you have an English bulldog like I did, you'd be lucky if you get out of it. Yeah, you're in. Yeah, Blizzard, Juru B. And they don't like to move. But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun.

33:11And people always ask, you know, do dogs have the same mechanisms? Absolutely. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, the one that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian and training into sunlight. Or present as far as we know, in every extant mammalian species, every mammalian species that's alive today. And, you know, this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opsyns, the light of absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye. It's a very primordial system that's organized very differently anatomically in the red. And to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in all of us.

33:48In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat, you're never going to biohack away is circadian biology. This, you know, fluctuation, 24 -hour fluctuation and energy and focus. You know, some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms. And, you know, it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest, nor plasticity occurs during sleep, they push down a denocene, you know, it takes us through these natural ebbs and cycles of cognition. I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep, you know, the conscious mind obviously is not in control. The unconscious mind can guys are up thoughts.

34:22The brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols, time and space are very organized, very differently in dreams. And there's a lot of information to be gleaned from dreams. It's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean, the kind of classic Freudian Jungian interpretations are certainly not going to be complete. But I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep. And I think thanks to the great Matt Walker, we now understand that the whole thing of all sleep, when I'm dead, is a really dumb mindset. And my team at the Hubertman Lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping.

34:54You know, when we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to like get rest, you know, get rest. Like we really prioritize sleep. It's so essential. One of the best little cliches there, which is too much of a generalization, but I think works is there's no such thing as being overworked only underrested. I like that. I like that a lot. I also think that, you know, we know a lot about the different stages of sleep. We know less about the different stages of wakefulness. I've recently started and embracing my natural cognitive and physical cycles. And I've come to realize, and I think Edmaylet says he does this, but he thinks of his day as consisting of three days, which is awesome from the productivity standpoint.

35:36I noticed that also, because he mentioned these time blocks, so I just want to, you've got a new daily routine. Yeah, what's your routine? Yeah, so I came to realize by observation, right? I didn't force this, so this is something I observed in myself, which is that from 6am until noon, my brain is very capable. My body is very capable of doing certain things far more easily than at other times of the 24 -hour cycle. So I consider that sort of the first phase of my day. Sometimes I'm up by six, sometimes it's seven, sometimes it's eight, usually it's about six, six, thirty. So I consider that one opportunity block.

36:12The second opportunity block is between noon or because I eat lunch typically around noon, between, you know, one and six PM, or noon and six PM. So second opportunity block. And then the third is between six PM and bedtime, which for me typically is 10 .30, but sometimes late, I'm half Argentine. Sometimes I go to bed at midnight, and I just go all take a nap the next day. I mean, you have to live. I mean, come on. So what I started to realize is that I can do really focused work in two, but not three of those blocks, consistently. I also noticed that if I exercise early in the first block, like between 6am and before 9am, I have more energy all day long.

36:52This is what I observed experimentally on myself. But if I exercise starting at 9 or starting at 10 or halfway through that block, the second opportunity block is diminished. I'm kind of dragging. Maybe it's related to when I eat, but that wasn't changing when I eat or what I eat. So I do think that people could benefit tremendously, not necessarily by following the schedule that I follow, but by paying attention to their natural, cognitive, and physical rhythms. And so as a consequence, what I now do is I take a look at the day, like for instance, this is afternoon, we sat down together here at one, I think we're probably somewhere around 2 p .m., I don't know, somewhere around there, but I realized, okay, I could work before I got here in this early day block, or this evening.

37:32What I chose to do this morning was kind of more procedural things, took care of some posting for our Monday episode, took care of some phone calls, I took a walk, made, took care of some email, I made sure I ate some food before I came here. On the way here, I did a brief 10 minute NSDR because I didn't sleep quite as much last night as I would have liked, but I walked in feeling great and I don't get paid to endorse, but I noted, we have any kind of arrangement to say this, but this new tonic energy drink, I'm loving. It's really nice. It's got an eye on it, so I'm hyped. Love it, really tasty, it tastes so good.

38:06So I can work two or three of these three blocks And then the third one ends up being kind of a mishmash of procedural stuff. So today, the early part of the day, the 6am to noon block was kind of like handle doing none. It's work, but it's not like focused work stuff. And I didn't train today because I trained yesterday. And today was a day off in any case. Hopefully we'll do some son of cold tonight. So now we're working. I'm focused. And I imagine that, you know, two, three, four hours of this and my brain will have, you know, who expended some pretty serious cognitive effort. And then I'll take a little bit of, I'll expect a sort of dip in energy.

38:44I won't force it. And then this evening, I'll get some work done and then hopefully we'll do some sauna cold. So I'm very aware of the fact that I get, so two opportunities from these three blocks. Now, my ideal schedule would be to work in the first two blocks, really, really hard. Still eat, still train, train early. So it would be train early work in the first block. So get the training done by 8 a .m. no later. work, super focused work. Then eat something, super focused work in the second block. Maybe do an NSDR to recover my mental and physical vigor. And then in the evening, social time, social time relax.

39:18I've been watching a lot of documentary. What have you been watching? I watched Anthony Bourdain documentary yesterday. I'm not, I obviously knew who he was. We have friends in common. He, you know, he's a few, well, the sadly passed away, but took his own life, which is tragic. But I was aware that, you know, because Joe's talked about him a lot. David Cho, the artist, has talked about him a lot and is in that documentary. He also was part of the New York City, you know, 70s, 80s punk rock scene. So the Ramones, I mean, he's a Ramones fan, Joe Stromer, like kind of of that ilk. And the documentary is called Roadrunner, and it's very, very good.

40:02And it's also very interesting to see how he was such a sensation seeker. You could almost feel him veering toward something and then, you know, and I've never watched any of his documentaries. Yes, very, very good and very, very good. Have you seen just to interject if you've seen a World War II from the front lines? No. So this is Netflix Netflix have done at least two or three colorized World War II documentaries. In fact, there's one that's World War I. I saw that one. Yes. So at least three, World War II in color, World War II, the Great War in color, and something else, all of these will be available on Netflix.

40:45Watching archive footage, there's something distancing about seeing it in black and white. It sort of reminds you that it's not now, and they've used a combination of AI and manual recolourers to be able to sharpen the image, everything's 4K. The facial appearance of everyone, the emotions that you can see on their face, the smiles, the teeth, and now in color as well, to me just drives home that story in a manner that I've never watched a documentary about something from that era and felt so emotionally connected to it, which is interesting. So I've really been enjoying that. Shangelis from the front lines.

41:23Yes. Okay, because the World War one doc I really liked, I read all squad on the Western front of course, when I was in school, I fascinated by World War One. Yeah, documentary, it's kind of an obsession. I love the Oliver Sacks documentary. I've seen some others recently. About true crime. You're a true crime guy. I used to watch that stuff when I was living alone and then it was like then you kind of like you, you're checking the hausets and stuff. I don't know if it's going to for me to watch that stuff. It can be interesting. The one that they did about Richard Ramirez, the night stalker fucking brilliant terrifying terrifying, especially given that it's in Los Angeles and just the brazen nature of his of his new one just watched called American nightmare.

42:03Yeah, I don't want to see this man. Oh, yeah, it's I don't really. Yeah, really interesting and harrowing. But I shame -gillis warns that watching World War Two documentaries is early on set Republican. That's what he refers to having an obsession with World War II documentaries as early on set Republican. Okay. You need to track that in your mind if you start shouting, nagging in your sleep and your sleep cycle picks it up. Yeah, unlikely. But I'll look at it in an unbiased way. How's that? For the last three years now, I have started my morning every single day with element. It is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you on each grab and go stick pack contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium in no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk.

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43:23Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors of your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. We're an intellectual at the moment, I think, as much as you might want to fall asleep for the next three months. No, I was just sort of joking. I mean, the political process is critical. It's just been a lot, as I said. I don't think that it's unfair to say that. I think a lot of people hold this sort of cognitive superposition, which is I understand the future of the country is very important.

44:02And I, as a person with a vote, need to be an active participant. That's the whole reason for doing it. And also, this is exhausting and it's sapping an awful lot of my will to live and I feel kind of overloaded. Have you looked at any strategies spoken to anybody that has any psychological tools to be able to deal with a rapid media cycle, sort of very activating stories. Basically, how can people psychologically manage this upcoming period? What would you suggest? Yeah, I actually hosted a guest who is expert on the psychology of politics. It was super interesting. And we looked at all of this through the lens, a completely nonpartisan lens, because we have listeners on both sides of the aisle and probably some who are undecided.

44:51First of all, the fervor around this upcoming election, the intensity of everything certainly convinced me that I'm never gonna run for office. Despite some speculation out there from friends and family and some occasional calls from reporters, no. It's not my arena, but it's obviously a very important one. And one of my concerns is that if the intensity around all of this continues to increase as much as it has - Yeah, that young people who would consider running for office out of a genuine desire to serve might be dissuaded. Because you hear these things like, oh, it's impossible to get anything done or in order to be effective, you have to be the other kind of person.

45:43And that's a terrible message. It might be true, but it's a terrible message because I think ultimately what you want in any field, right? Whether or not you're talking about music or sport, I mean, we're seeing this at the recent Olympics or podcasting, you want a big pool of people funneling into it so that you can discover the incredible talents and virtuoso's. That's what you need is a bigger, bigger, applicant pool to reveal talent and for a field to progress. Okay. Enough editorializing. I think the best thing that one can do to navigate this whole cycle is to pay careful attention to what draws attention.

46:23And what I learned from this expert is a political science professor is that what you're listening for and what people are orient toward, orienting towards is a dominance language. But the dominance language over others is far less effective, believe it or not, in shifting people's minds, then the dominant language associated with expressing one's true beliefs. So their argument was, if you look historically at presidential and other forms of election, and by the way, I'm paraphrasing now, so that you could predict who was going to win based on who told you what they really think and believe as opposed to telling people what they want to hear.

47:11Like I think that we have a sensor for when we're being told what people think we want us to hear versus what somebody really believes. Even if we disagree with them. And you know, this probably gets to our origins as an old world primate species, but we tend to put leaders into office who can communicate either through their words or through the, you know, tamber of their voice or through their gestures or a combination of things. Maybe it's redundancy and how often they hammer on a message, what they really believe as opposed to flip -flopping, You know, according to what the polls say, we're blowing with the wind.

47:44Right. So I think we hear the words dominance language and we default to, oh, it's about one person kind of dominating the other person. Now ultimately it's a, it's a, it's a competition between mostly two people. We have a third party in this country, but it seems to be boiling down to two at this moment. And so this thing about dominance language is often couched as dominance over the other in a given scenario over a given topic, in separate venues, you know, at one gathering versus another. But what this, I consider brilliant political science professor was explaining is that it's real, the dominance has really exerted and impacts voting at the level of one or the other candidate, perhaps both expressing what they really believe about something in clear terms with conviction with conviction and it and it being true.

48:38I think this is the sort of thing that they can't fake ultimately. And that where people lose faith in a candidate is when that candidate, you know, says, well, at one point, you know, I said this, but now I'm saying this and they don't give a reason that feels legitimate to their actual beliefs or they don't address it, right? Or they don't address it or they simply focus on the beliefs of the other candidate. So my strategy in this current election is to put, as I do for many not all things in life, much to the dismay of people in my life, a neuroscience lens, a psychology lens, science -based lens on what's happening around me.

49:11And I'm listening for, does that sound true in the sense, does it really sound like that candidate really believes that? Or does it sound like they're trying to tell me this? Or are they spending more time talking about what the other candidate believes or doesn't believe in an effort to sway me? Because ultimately, yes, there does seem to be some, and this guest pointed it out as well, that there is a tendency to orient towards people that we recognize that feel similar to people what we grew up around, but that's not actually the thing that impacts voting in the end, that ultimately the people who are undecided, because there is always gonna be a group of people who are voting against the other party, period, like they're just literally voting against one party, but I do think that there's this group in the middle, what, you know, and I didn't coin this term, but Dr.

49:59Paul Conti, who was on my podcast, and he's a psychiatrist and yours, talks about the League of Reasonable People, which is, which has nothing to do with politics per se, but this is a group of people who are really evaluating evidence on the basis of what they see and what they feel and what they hear and try to move away the silence middle the silence middle that you know and so people that are trying to evaluate evidence and are really paying attention to does this person feel genuine do they really believe this do they or they tell me this because it's what I want to hear how I think that's I think that's the way I plan to navigate this time and how will that help with psychological health using that, you know, you're still going to be peppered with the story and the worry and the concern and oh, here's a new, and I've got to forget the last thing, but it's still in my mind and there's a new thing and I've got to spin all of these different news stories.

50:44Yeah, great question. In a very Paul Conti and way, it gives you agency. It gives you a sense of control over the firehose of information that's coming at you. You can say, okay, I'm going to, there's nothing, there's nothing I do about the firehose. It's nothing I can do about getting just blasted back with all this information, but I'm going to apply a very specific filter to try and hear what people are saying about specific issues that matter and paying attention to whether or not they're telling me what they really believe. You can disagree with them and vote against them or you can vote for them.

51:15But ultimately, the data show, as I understand, that people ultimately are voting for the candidate that they believe has the greatest conviction. What I think has been lacking, frankly, in the political discussion, I say this as a citizen not as a political scientist, but as a citizen who votes has been a clear picture of what the future could look like if a given candidate wins. I want a vivid picture of the world they imagine. I don't want this like surface level stuff like imagine a day when this and that like, it's like they start each sentence correctly and then it just kind of goes to like, Vuh, it just kind of, and you know, as a scientist and somebody who's a public health public science communicator, you know, I'm constantly under the scrutiny of like, wait, what exactly is the protocol?

52:03What exactly justifies the protocol? Okay, delay caffeine 90 minutes after waking. If you crash in the afternoon, well, what's the randomized control trial? I'll be the first to tell you, there isn't one. I'll also tell you the mechanisms that support my statement. Now, if you talk to Dr. Lane Norton, someone who I respect tremendously, he's been on my podcast twice, I've true menace respect for him, He'll tell you, unless it's an Aranomized Control Trial, that doesn't meet his threshold. And I'll tell you, well, you know, I don't eat seed oils. I avoid them most of the time because I like olive oil and butter.

52:30I'm not afraid of them. But you know, it's not based on a randomized control trial. I just feel better when I don't. So I'll tell you my reasons for believing strongly why I suggest A or B or what I do. Does it meet the same standard that Lane requires? No. But I'll tell you exactly what I'm grounding my statements on. And what I want as a scientist, what I want as a citizen is for the candidates. Presidential candidates, all candidates, just tell me what you believe. Tell me the rationale. The rationale could be, listen, they're telling me to say this, but just tell me what you believe and why.

53:07And when you do that for somebody, certainly when that's done for me, I just feel an immense relief and an immense trust that the person actually understands their own process. They're letting us look at the underlying mechanics. And I also want to know what they envision for the future. Right now I'm hearing very little about that. I'm hearing a lot of aspirational things on the one side that are very vague and I'm hearing a lot of kind of like dogmatic language on the other side. Also pretty vague. And so I want to know, I want to list, like send me the one page PDF. I want to know like, what are your protocols for making this a better country?

53:40I think it's so that's my threshold and I do get worked up about this, but not enough to run for office. I found this really interesting study that's been done recently. Stories don't care about your statistics. In controlled experiments, research has documented a pronounced story statistic gap in memory. The average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73 % over the course of a day. The impact of a story fades by only 32%. So 73 % average impact of statistics on beliefs, 32 % on a story. So in short, people's beliefs are more durably impacted by stories than statistics. huge implications for how voters beliefs can be more easily swayed during the upcoming elections.

54:19Yeah, I have a part of the reason I love you. I really mean that. Like you are, you have an unbelievable ability to find studies that are relevant that I would never find. Here's why I believe stories are more impactful than just citing statistics. The reason is that the brain Organizes memories of all kinds in beginning, middle, and end. And a graph has a structure, but it doesn't really have a beginning, middle, and end. Now, at time course plot, it can be a time course plot. There are all sorts of caveats to this, right? And the scientists in me always has to mention all the caveats. But we, from the time that we are a little children, we organize things in terms of beginning, middle, and end.

55:00The best example of this is the ABCs. When you learn the ABCs, you don't do ABCD, EFGH, HHKL, and on PQR, STV, WXYC. For a moment, they're all so worried I wouldn't remember. But I'm so far so good. And I've been drinking my newtonics. So it's so flying. But how do children learn the ABC? A -B -C -D -E. So the brain is learning the inflections. It's learning what's prosody, right? The inflections, the lilton fall of voice. And we know that this is one of the ways that we organize information. My friends who are like world class musicians who sing, I always say like, I remember lyrics really well and I would say, oh, what about that lyric?

55:41They go, oh, I can't remember. And then they'll start with the first line. And then all of a sudden they remember the whole song sequence. That's right. That's the way memories are organized. They sort of peel back. You know, like some people are very good at memorizing lists where acronyms can help us. But in general, we sequence our life on the basis of a beginning, middle, and type structure. So, you know, I think when people... Now, the exception to this would be flash bulb memories. Like, for instance, about a month ago, right? One of the presidential candidates. There was an assassination attempt on his life.

56:15I think that was the first time since 9 -11 that I recall everyone in the country being tuned into the same event online. wild. I mean, there may have been intervening things, but wild. You know, there was an earthquake this morning, Los Angeles. Did you feel it? I was busy preparing and I had my app pods in. All right. Everybody else went, I was a little one, but I grew up in California. This one was, it was kind of a, it was a ripple, not a rumble. So usually if it's a bigger one, you'll hear it, like a train coming through the environment. In any case, not a flash bulb memory, right? Obviously, but not, but you remember what you were doing.

56:46But you know, a few weeks ago, we had, or about a a month ago during that assassination attempt, we had a flashball memory. I can recall, it was a Saturday, I was sitting on the couch, my girlfriend and I were talking, and then all of a sudden I was like, oh my goodness, she's like, no, oh my goodness, and all of a sudden we were on a different phone. Right, exactly. So flashball memories are an exception to what we're talking about, and they grab all the context around now. I remember when my mum picked me up on 9 .11 from school, I remember listening to it in the radio. My memory, I know yours, I really want to get into this later on about you have a very self identified very good memory of life experiences going quite a Way back into your use for better or worse.

57:26Yeah, I'm for better or worse. I'm the opposite But I remember that one light bulb memory like in a big important event. Yeah, but yeah, the story thing's so interesting and I think By the way, sorry, I mean to interrupt but you know that the origin of flash bulb memory is adrenaline It's adrenaline released from the adrenals and in the Locust Cerulia said sort of a quote unquote alertness center, although my neuroscience colleagues don't be like there he goes calling brain structures by the function. But it releases epinephrine into the brain in kind of a sprinkler -ing fashion. You know that there's we know and there's a beautiful review by James McGaw, one of the leading researchers in memory about this, that dating back to medieval times, if they wanted kids to remember something, I'm not making this up.

58:10they would, like, it's an annual review of neuroscience starts off by describing they would take kids, they give them a tutorial, typically it was a religious tutorial back then and they throw them in the cold water. So you get a spike in adrenaline and then you remember what you had heard prior. So it's, you know, when you have a spike in adrenaline, the brain, the nervous system knows something's different, it cues the memory system. So just to think about why that might be adaptive, ancestrally, any dump of adrenaline of that kind of size would probably be indicative of such a important strategic learning moment opportunity.

58:46Do not go near that cave that happened to have that bear in it again. Right. We'll make sure that you actually hold. Is that the... Right. So much so yeah, so much so that there's what's called condition place aversion. So, in fact, if you see a drawing of that cave or you go back to that cave, you start to experience some of the same somatic stuff. What is the same somatic stuff? Well, the nervous system is fairly nuanced, but it's also crude. You're releasing some adrenaline as the increase in heart rate, the increase in breathing. It's like, oh, that cave. Now, the issue becomes it's not nuanced enough that such that some people then they see any cave and then they think that could represent danger.

59:22So, you know, the adrenaline system is a way to obviously cue alertness, very fast, milliseconds fast, but also to change the chemical milieu of the brain so that whatever memories These were experiences were being charted in the brain, now are locked into your memory. So for instance, let's say we were to walk out of here, we walk out to the car, and we're not thinking about something bad that could happen and all of a sudden, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, and so on. Get shot right in front of us. Whoa, okay. Now, you know, all sorts of things are going to happen. Okay, like hopefully no one's heard of it.

59:54Let's say it's a bad tragic incident. Now the adrenaline released into your system grabbed and consolidated the memories of this house, of the lawn, of walking out there. This is why people who experience trauma oftentimes have kind of odd, like seemingly odd or unrelated recollections about the things leading up to an event. Okay, so because ultimately what did you need to learn not to avoid streets Not to avoid this street necessarily, but like what were you doing? You're right. You're right. You're right. You're trying to grab something. What brought you to that location? What things brought you to that incident?

1:00:27Oh, interesting. And of course some people dump these experiences more readily than others You know, part of the logic behind a lot of not all but a lot of trauma therapies is to literally bring the brain and body back into a state of high intensity and then to rescript the story. Others are designed to bring you back into the story but keep you calm. So there's sort of two general approaches just as there are approaches to treating depression that involve, you know, bringing a lot of salience and emotion to the surface, the cathartic approach. These are tested and some work very well as well as the use of drugs like ketamine, you know FDA approved drug for dissociating your emotions while in the presence of the MDA, right or MDA, which just recently Day before yesterday did failed to pass approval by the FDA for the treatment of PTSD.

1:01:15I didn't know about that Yeah, big deal in the in the community the psychiatric community This could be summarized as very impressive clinical trials showing up to 67 % even remission of PTSD or significant reduction in PTSD from people that did two sessions of MDMA with a qualified therapist in a clinical setting. But the FDA had a number of different stated reasons including lack of control group. It's very hard to have a control in the sense that people can take no MDMA, excuse me, methylene dioxy, methamphetamine. or but then they knew that they were in the control group, right? This whole business of how do you blind people to the to the drug?

1:01:58You know if you've taken MDMA, you know it. Yeah, and then there were some other issues sadly that seemed at least by my read, not unique to MDMA therapies, but that unfortunately it happened during the course of the trials, which made the results not satisfactory enough for the FDA. So I think that the effort needs to continue. Did I get another crack at this? Well, they get another one hope. Yeah, one hope. but there are a lot of people out there with PTSD and intractable types of stress disorders that now are tractable with treatments like MDMate provided you have the right therapeutic support.

1:02:31And that's the issue is these drugs without the proper therapeutic support can send people down bad trajectories. And so this is the big thing. And you can tell I'm kind of agonizing over this because we need to support, like the way these things move forward is we need to be very objective and say, okay, Why did the FDA say no? Why? We can kick and scream about it, but that's not going to do any good. Why did they say no? And then address those issues like a scientist. If you get a paper back, you think it's the greatest paper in the world, you get the reviews and they have issues with certain things, you go, well wait, but you have to go systematically until those issues are dealt with.

1:03:10You're going to get the same results. You're going to get the same results. So we need to be very objective about this. And I look forward to a day when the FDA is satisfied, based on the best criteria. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not being political there. I just like, I think these drugs can really help people in the right circumstances, but it's been a slog for the community of people trying to get these drugs through. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that their top quality but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet.

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1:04:46Yeah, one of my friends, her husband is suffered with PTSD, with alcoholism. Oh, yeah, get the switching app labours wild citrus. Well, you know what's weird is I study the visual system. I have an appointment in ophthalmology after all. And I can see great at a distance. I can read small text ideas, but I'm actually running into trouble, seeing things up close recently out. Like if I put it here, I'm blind to it. Well, I told you last time about my LASIC, right? and I can see absolutely everything. Ancestral trauma at 500 yards, I'm like Tim Kennedy. I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at it. I'm not laughing at it at Tim Kennedy.

1:05:21Lord knows I'm not laughing at Tim Kennedy. Tim, don't hurt me, I'm a fan. I'm just the fact that you could see trauma at 500 yards is that's a high acuity. I'm like Tim, like. He will come and find you. I've got a story. I'll tell you a story that he told me about him and Brian Callan and I'm going to get to good happy days. So Brian went over to the UK with them. He was going to go surfing. They were doing some sort of adventure in the UK and Brian arrived late and Tim said we're gonna go swimming in the morning. He's like no, it's him. I'm you know, I just got in like my flight you've been here for a little bit longer and he said we know grabbed him by the arm like that and said, no, no.

1:06:08We're going swimming in the morning, lucked him in the eyes. And Brian was like, I don't want to. I'm going to be tired. I'm going to be whatever. Anyway, Tim made the threat sufficiently plain that he wasn't joking. So six in the morning, Brian hears this little knock on his door six in the morning. Brian. So Brian pretends to be asleep. Brian's an actor. Brian's been in Hollywood movies. Big Hollywood movies. Comedian too, right? Comedian and actor. And he said he channeled every single ounce of acting ability that he had. So he's laid on one side and he even so give a little snort here and there and he heard the door open.

1:06:48And then he felt the bed move one side to the other like that. It sort of rocked from left to right. And then Tim's face came down to his ear and he said, Brian, do you know how many terrorists I've stood over? when they pretended to be asleep. I know. Next thing you know, he's in the water, so I'm like, correct, sure enough that, you know you're talking about the cortisol spike. Yeah. That is a reliable way to give. That would be, that's the ultimate alarm, the Tim Kennedy alarm. Forget using sleep cycle, forget everything that I said, just pay Tim Kennedy to come and pretend that you're a terrorist.

1:07:23Yeah, it actually raises an interesting and relevant biological point, which is that, you know, if you wake up at five in the morning and you glance at your phone, something I don't recommend doing, and you see a troubling text message, you'll be wide awake. Well, in a moment. And that's adrenaline, epinephrine. In the brain, we call it epinephrine. In the body, we call it adrenaline for uninteresting reasons. But that structure of neurons, that cluster in the brain, it's called the back of the brain area. Let's just stay with broad nomenclature. The locus cerulius has, there's cluster of neurons that do many different things there.

1:07:57But some of them provide these wire -like axonal inputs what's as we call them in a kind of sprinkler fashion to the brain. And when there's something that alerts us that we need, you know, it's triggering to us, if you will, it just, it's sprinklers the brain. Yeah, as sprinklers the brain with, with up and after adrenaline and boom, the brain wakes up. And then in parallel, your dreamals release adrenaline and within, you know, couple hundred milliseconds, you're up. You're able to move and you're not thinking about fatigue and the denocene doesn't mean anything. And sometimes I think that the earlier we were only half -half joking about jaco willingness in the sort of 4 .30 a .m.

1:08:38thing and waking up, you know, you can train these systems. Earlier we were talking about entraining the circadian clock to different stimuli to become an early riser or a late shifted person as it were. All of these neural circuits are subject to kind of conditional plasticity, right? So like the alarm, boom, like you can be wide awake or in my case, you're like hit the snooze, right? nothing is like the sleep that you get during a snooze. It's so good. It's so good. But, you know, you can be conditioned to, you can condition these locuserliest systems, the adrenaline system. In fact, we were talking about a minute ago in the context of PTSD, in the context of fear, in the context of non -newanced alertness on the basis of a broad stimulus.

1:09:21Like, you know, something terrible happened to you in a garage, we're in this beautiful garage with all these vintage cars around, but if something bad happened you in a garage, it doesn't have to be that garage. It can just be garages, the smell of metal, different sensory cues get embedded in those memories and then can feed into these alertness systems. This is why it's such a challenge to undue, to unpeel a trauma or a chronic anxieties. You have to sort of get to the combination of things that is the combination lock that lets you undo it. That was one of the most interesting things I learned from Paul Conti.

1:09:58I told him a story. When I was 20, I was in a head -on collision with a snow plow at 60 miles an hour on the main artery motorway of the UK going up to Scotland. So they were driving the snow plow? And they sort of listed gently across into our lane. Only clept to driving a little MG or something? It was a Ford Focus with my business partner in. And they only clipped maybe about a foot or so into the car. But for him, what we think happened was he was probably looking at something, not looking like, bink, and what was that? And just kept on going. Didn't even notice for us all hell broke loose.

1:10:33And I said to Paul, you know, I had a little bit of travel anxiety for a short while after that and it dissipated about six weeks or so. I was uncomfortable with a contra -flow traffic. So I didn't like being on that lane. I would always be on the, or on the other side of the road in the UK. Right. So I would want to be on the outside lane, not the inside lane. And he said, one of the interesting things about the way that trauma can repat and memories, old memories, is that you could have convinced yourself, well, I've never liked driving. I've always been uncomfortable of this. You can forget that there was ever a time before the incident.

1:11:08Interesting. When you felt differently. And this is where I think, first off, our brains aren't always necessarily our best friends. and secondly, the story, what's the story that you're telling yourself? What's the story that your brain is telling yourself about these memories? Paul was adamant. He said, you absolutely could have begun telling yourself. Because I like, I love driving. I miss not having a car in the US. I finally did get a car at the start of this year and I really enjoy being back on the road at the time where I get to listen to podcasts and I can't use my phone. And I really like it.

1:11:37But he said, you know, how did it have been a more significant issue? Or had you dealt with it in a different way? or you could have convinced yourself, I know I've always been an nervous driver. I've never enjoyed driving. And then what, you know, how sort of infectious and panicious is that kind of a memory? You know, these individual instances, which I think are why it is so important to connect with those emotions to look at the things that are driving you. What are your, what are your unspoken assumptions about the world? What a man. And so I'm just wrapped with attention is here time. So I have this notebook.

1:12:10I like these bound notebooks. and I started writing kind of journal format, but then recently I started just jotting things down. Sometimes it's podcasts and notes, but the other day I had this thought, it's gonna seem very, oh, this is a funny one. You wanna hear a funny one? I do. So I a long time ago I used to make a joke, but I just decided to just script it out. It's this is only three word entry. It said, my goal in life has been to go from like, boy to boy to just piece. So I have, boy, no I have, boy, and then I have, no I have, boy, and then I have, boy, and then I have just like peace.

1:12:43Like that, like basically aside from sleep, like these are the three states that I can be in, right? So in any case, idiots aggression chill. Yeah, so assumptions about the world. So the one that I woke up the other day, well I spent a lot of time the other day explaining to a friend that because they were going through something that was really unfair and we were parsed, I'll get back to this, but we were parsing the difference between mistakes, misunderstandings and betrayals, and how some people respond to mistakes and misunderstandings as if they were betrayals. And some people mix these up.

1:13:21You know, so that was an interesting one, but to me anyway, but the thing that you said, assumptions about the world, I know it's in here someplace, I wrote it down, and it felt so true. This is it. This was the other morning I woke up, and I was like, I don't feel right. Like I don't feel right. like I got all this stuff to do. Like something just, and I was like, I can't remember a time. This is why what you just said queued me. I can't remember a time when I woke up just feeling like there was nothing bearing down on me that day, ever. But now based on what you're telling me, perhaps there was a time and I just don't remember.

1:13:55But then I was lying in bed as I do, keeping my eyes closed. Rick Rubin taught me this trick, not in the same bed, but he taught me this trick. He said, if you wake up and you're having a dream, right before you wake up and you want to remember the dream or you want to stay in a mental state keep your eyes closed and stay completely still However, if you have you're having a nightmare or you don't like the way that you feel move your body It was something about the movement that dispels it absolutely and if you think about rapid eye movement sleep Which is the most dream rich sleep your body is paralyzed and the mind is active So I've started doing this and it's made it very easy for me to remember my dream so Rick who's not formally trained in science, but is Rick gave me that tool and it works exceptionally well in my experience.

1:14:40But I woke up and I said, you know, maybe the illusion is the pain. Maybe the illusion is the pain. Maybe the mental anguish I feel, maybe the challenge of life, like maybe that's the illusion, right? Because we hear so much about how, you know, the pleasures are the illusions. Now dopamine is a real thing and chasing dopamine is a real thing. At its extremes, it can be addiction at its less extremes. It can be compulsions and it can also be a joyful life. But I was thinking myself, maybe pain is the illusion, right? Maybe the idea that there's all this like challenge and just maybe that's the thing that we're supposed to remove.

1:15:25And then I thought back to something that a friend who's a very, very talented trauma therapist, his name is Ryan Swav. He's out in Florida, runs at trauma treatment center out there once told me he said, yeah, you know, in some of the Buddhist traditions, they talk about your work in this life is in part, not completely, is to burn down. I think they call them, I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong, but someone will tell us in the comments, the scum sorrows, like burning down to the roots, like the weeds of life, like your misperceptions about what things are. And I started thinking about this, especially after Martha Beck was on my podcast, who I really love.

1:16:00She said, you know, you're not here to suffer. And I thought, I'm not. And she was like, you know, you're not here to suffer. You know, I've endured a lot of suffering in my life more than some less than others. But I think we all endure a lot of suffering largely. It's a consequence of what happens between our ears. Unfortunately, some of us also because of things that actually happened to our bodies, but we're self -induced or otherwise, but maybe we're not here to suffer. Maybe a lot of the suffering that we experience is this illusion that we create. And so I started real, I wrote it down, maybe the illusion is the pain.

1:16:35And so maybe we need to challenge this. Like maybe it's okay to be joyful, a little more joyful. Dude, I have so much. Is that, I mean, it's great. And I have, I wish you washing. No, not at all. I have so much to tell you. So overthinking creates more problems than it solves. Definitely. Unless you're solving a really hard problem. Correct. But on average, as everything is, Joe Hudson, do you know who he is? I don't. Art of accomplishment, phenomenal guy, really, really interesting dude, came on the pod. And he has this very unique definition of efficiency. And he thinks of joy as efficiency.

1:17:12So efficiency is how much get out for how much you put in, right? What is the return? What is the out put that you get for the input that you've had to expend? And if you do something which is joyful, you have to expend less and on the other side, you get out more. That's like, what a lovely redefinition, so joy, enjoyment for him is the ultimate version of efficiency, that if you're using your passion, if you're doing something which you find in liveening, you are by definition helping to make your system more efficient. So his question while we were doing this podcast, it was a virtual one, and he said, this is one of his favorite little cues that he asked, because he says, what would this be like if it was 10 % more enjoyable?

1:17:58I love that. What's the guy's name again? Joe Hudson. And I wrote down joy as efficiency. Joe Hudson. Joe Hudson, yeah. Not that it matters, but what's his training? Is he a psychologist? I would, it's very lengthy. Okay. So what would this be like if it was 10 % more enjoyable? And that is a cue, 10 % achievable. And what he said there, so I'll notice when I said that, just now I sort of shifted in my seat a little bit. It's my back, my t -shirt was a little creases under my lower back, so I'd move that and maybe I'll get a little drink. I'll look after myself, I'll look after my body, or maybe I'll allow the peripheries of my gaze to just sort of open out a bit.

1:18:32I'll maybe, I'll take a little slightly deeper breath and I'll oxygenate a little bit more. I'm having fun right now, We're gonna have 10 % 100 % just what 10 % more enjoyable what we said loosen the bolts 10 % so that's one thing the other thing An insight that I've been thinking about a lot recently things are not what they are Things are what we think they are For instance doing a hard workout gives you a signature feeling you're laid on the floor Panting heart rate at 180 sweating from everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth. This is oddly enjoyable But if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while you were sat in traffic, you'd call the ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack.

1:19:12Framing is everything. And this is a quote from Rory Sutherland. Do you know who that is? One of the greatest living advertisers on the planet, Vice Chairman of Olga V. Advertising. This is the only man I've ever heard swear in a TED talk. And this is a direct quote from his TED talk. He says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. The problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window, you're an anti -social friendless idiot. If you stand in stare out of the window with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher. The power of reframing things cannot be overstated.

1:19:43It's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them, rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy. That's like alchemy, it's kind of alchemy. I like that. I'm both taking notes and listening very carefully. Yeah, I think people exist on a continuum of bias toward more joy or bias toward more pain. And I agree that we have a lot of cognitive control over the middle range, right? Because of course there are experiences that are awful traumatic. Unacquivically. Yeah. Excellent or terrible. There's no question about that.

1:20:25We'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Marik Health. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to a thousand and six last year, and that was done without TRT and under the guidance of Marik Health. Marik Health have the best, most sophisticated and comprehensive service of anyone. In fact, I've loved this process so much that I reached out to the owner so that I could partner with them on the show. Dr Andrew Humein is always talking about how important it is to keep on top of your blood work. And if you've always thought, oh, yeah, I really should work out what's going on inside of my body.

1:20:55Marick Health is the place to go. With Marick's complete package, you're able to get extensive lab work on over 100 carefully selected biomarkers giving you insights into your home on profile, your cardiovascular health, organ function, and much more. Stop guessing when it comes to your health and get the exact same panel and medical oversight I got plus a 10 % discount by clicking the link in the description below or heading to marichealth .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout, that's mairekhealth .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. I turn 49 next month, trying to think about like what I've learned where I'm headed and I have unfortunately at times, but also fortunately my memory is very good.

1:21:41My memory is very, very good. How good? What's good? I mean, I can close my eyes and hear conversations that I had with people in with a fair degree of accuracy, I believe. How far does that go back? Oh, I can remember walks I took with my dad when I was five or six years old. I can remember the layout of my room and to like fine detail when I was a kid. I have a strong recollection of faces and facial recognition. I don't track time well. You know, as a professor, we get some leeway, but I, you know, I perpetually run late. I don't track time. And until recently, I didn't really have a sense of death.

1:22:23I mean, I knew it existed. I've had people close to me die. All three of my academic advisors died, suicide cancer cancer. Yeah, the joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you. I was gonna say, if I didn't come to the computer. I'm gonna call my mom and air. Yeah, and, you know, for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city or military, I've had, you know, quite a few friends die. Drug overdoses, suicides, you know, and it's kind of hard to know if it's on average more or less, you know, I was a teen in the, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s and there weren't a lot of people doing therapy.

1:22:53There were no psychological meds for the treatment of different conditions. Maybe that's it. Who knows? In any case, if I spend any amount of time thinking about anything over the past, I can easily drift into it. In fact, until very recently, very, very recently, much of my cognition each day was a battle between trying to anchor in the present and thinking forward and being pulled into memories of the past, kind of orienting toward the past. Such a rich opportunity to ruminate. Yeah. And we're seeing, you know, even music from the past acting as a cue to the past, something happened in like the last eight, nine months where I feel hyper focused on the present.

1:23:36very, very little focus on the past, very little. I have exquisite memory of the past, but very little. In fact, one of my journal entries was, I was trying to think of, and this is somewhat embarrassing because it's not the way I would have scripted it, but I was thinking about from the time, as early back as I could remember, the different animals that I felt like I sort of related to or embodied it. You know, when I was a kid, I had the same voice I have now, and they called me froggy, you know, because I was like the kid from the little rascals as a show that most people will now don't know, you'd like the kid talk like this.

1:24:07And I had, you know, my Adam's Apple was out when I was a little kid. I had heroin, my Adam's Apple. It's like, there's a, I have a, I'm a heterozygot for a certain genetic mutation. I overproduce Androgen from my Adrenals. If you have two copies, it can make you infertile. Fortunately, I don't. I have one copy and it doesn't result in any other, like bodily differences or anything like that. I'm very fortunate in that way. And I'm, I'm, I'm aware I can reproduce. Let's just leave it at that. Okay, so but then you know there were different animals that different stages of my life as I grew and matured and experienced different things I was like at one stage of my life.

1:24:43I felt very oriented towards the mustolids and then at other times towards like a certain species of of cat and like I just I identified with them in a number of ways and then recently I was on this long run I do these long Sunday rucks and runs and and I was thinking myself like where am I at right now and all of a sudden I just went oh shit, this is about the least just exciting animal I could think about. And I realize like right now at this stage of my life, I don't know how long this will last, I'm, and this is very personal, but whatever. Effort. Like lately, I'm just kind of opening up on podcasts, my own and others.

1:25:19I realized and know it has nothing to do with butterflies. I realize I'm in total caterpillar mode and it has nothing to do with becoming a butterfly. I don't know if that would be a bad thing. It's that I'm able to orient towards the tasks of the day, the day divided into three parts. I can basically, I basically have vision about this far in front of me, despite when I said a few minutes ago, I can think about what I need to do. I know where I'm headed, I can move forward, not backward, but I can't seem to bring my thinking any further than that. And it's such a new place for me. I can't think I have to consciously try and think into the past.

1:25:58I'm like, that was yesterday. It was yesterday. I can't do it. Now, not in denial. I can do it if I need to. But for me, this is a very functional way to be at this point in my life because of the enormous number of tasks in my life. Fortunately, the enormous number of people that I love and that I want to spend time with and make time for. But somehow, I have just, like, so I drew it out. I was like, I'm getting catabiller. You know, and we'll see what happens. And, you know, and where this goes. but the other animals in here, there was a rhinoceros phase that was interesting, moving very slowly, but with a lot of force, you know, on anything that was in my way at one stage.

1:26:35You know, it's, there's been times when I've orient felt like a raptor, where I was just kind of like placed and really observant. I spent an entire year speaking very little, believe it or not, people in my life will be like, what year was that? I didn't talk to you that year exactly. You didn't talk to me that year, and I didn't talk to you. So, if you're wondering where I was, so right now by sort of like identifying with this kind of mode of caterpillar vision and movement, everything is in small increments. You know, I even feel in the way that I talk and the way I parse ideas. I'm writing the bonus chapters from my book, which comes out in April next year.

1:27:08Everything is line by line. Everything is iterative, and I am not oriented toward the past. It's there. If I need it, it's like a book on a shelf. I can go grab and look things up. But until now have existed very much in like sort of thinking about the losses of past, the wins of past identifying with that. And I don't know what caused this. I can't point to one single psychedelic journey. Not that I've been doing a lot of psychedelics. We could talk about that. I was involved in some psychedelic trials. But I don't think that's it. I think it's that I've matured. I think the brain matures your whole life.

1:27:41I don't think we have childhood and adulthood and then death. I think we have a developmental arc that starts when we're born. probably before we're born. I mean, after all, you know, we were embryos with who knows if we have consciousness, but we were alive, right? Born and then we have a developmental arc. And the great psychologist, Ericsson, talked about at every stage of life from birth until death, until one to 80s and 90s, you're working out some core conflicts of agency versus, you know, autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do. And I forget the stages off the top on my head because it's not my area of expertise.

1:28:16But look at my dad who's turning 81 in November, who fortunately, you know, God willing is gonna live another 20, 25 years with immense vigor and he's still cognitively super sharp. And he's working out whatever it is you work out when you're 80. I'm working out whatever it is now, but right now it's like caterpillar vision. And as a consequence, the past, while important, and informs a lot of who I am and what I do, it's like, it's not like, it's not in my consciousness at all. And I must say it's a great place to be because throughout my 30s, I felt very stricken, very like pulled in different directions based on past, present, and efforts toward the future.

1:28:54So if anyone's, I say this in part because if you're struggling, like kind of feeling stuck in your life story, there's great advantage to just letting some time pass. Getting older. Just getting older is the best. As long as you train with weights three times a run three times a week, long medium and short, it runs, and you take a cold shower and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods and you try and get sleep and you limit your alcohol and you deal with any addictions you might have and you work on your traumas, like you're going to have a great fucking life. You know, you're going to be healthier than 90 % of people in the world, right?

1:29:31Are you going to take gold at the Olympics or you're going to be coal hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final 100 meters of the 1500? No, unless you're Cole Hawker, but like you can still have an amazing life. And so I think there've been so many years where I've just been like, God, like this just feels like a battle. This just feels like, you know, and I can't complain. I've been given so many opportunities and gifts and like trying to make the best of those and share, but like I just feel like, listen, that's freaking caterpillar. It's a caterpillar. And then I got back from that run and I was thinking I said, I don't know.

1:30:05Now I got to think about the butterfly thing and like this is turning out pretty soft. And then I thought, hey, well that's pretty cool. So I started researching caterpillars because this is me. So I started reading about caterpillars. They are amazing. Like some of them have adapted different poisons so that the birds that eat them don't die, but literally survive and transmit the discomfort by feeding their young and then the young are like, ugh, and they actually know they form a permanent memory not to eat those caterpillars. So I now look at caterpillars completely differently. I smell on time drawing caterpillars.

1:30:38I haven't yet watched a documentary about caterpillars Sure, you'll find one anyway. I'll avoid going down this hole any more than I already have but I think there's great wisdom in Trying to think about different animals and how we orient toward them as people I certainly look at other people and think you know like what dog are they? Or a and in part because I think that other animals in the absence of their kind of self -awareness are showing their displaying to us how different, the biases of different components of the nervous system. So like dogs that move their tails a lot and have a lot of spontaneous movement, right?

1:31:13Like the pit bull breeds versus a bulldog, which doesn't move unless it has to. They have different spontaneous temperaments. And then you look at people, have a colleague, he's Hungarian, he has a lab in Switzerland, and the guy is all staccato movements. And he's like this thin and has like 5 % body fat naturally, right? And then I have other colleagues who like more resemble melted candles. They don't move so much You know and they need to exercise more because I love them and you don't see many overweight 80 year olds So it'd be nice to have you around longer. So three times a week resistance training and cardio Thinking about the last few months for you probably One of the most difficult periods that you've gone through I I will say not not to undercut where I think we're going definitely a challenging time based on what I perceive as a lot of misunderstanding.

1:32:06But fortunately or unfortunately for me, I've been through a lot of hard times, more than some less than others, but hey, it's all in reference to our own nervous system. And, but definitely hard, but not the hardest time, certainly not the hardest time. My hardest time was probably years earlier when I had so much less agency and my community wasn't as established. But definitely not a joyful time. Talk to me about what you learned about yourself and your own psychology and the motivations inside of dynamics of public scrutiny and pressure like that. Yeah, so if I may, I'll lay into this from a bunch of perspectives.

1:32:57And this is usually the point in a discussion like this where like audiences are like, oh, this is where he prepares the diplomatic talk. Like, look, I've done a number of sessions talking about this kind of stuff publicly and privately since then. So like, I'm just just showing up to this how it feels and my read with the understanding that language is sometimes deficient, like conveying what's really going on, but I'll do my best. So I learned a couple things. At a kind of basic factual level, I learned that while there are wonderful aspects to media, there are also a lot of lies in the media.

1:33:44I just didn't, I actually didn't know that or believe that before. Or you hear about it, but I didn't really understand that stories, literally fiction can be woven from lack of context or from outright lies. And that for me was an eye opener. It was like, whoa, like, no, that's not true. That actually didn't happen that way. Or well, yeah, but you left off the second half of that sentence, which would put it all in context and make this scene completely different. I mean, for a scientist, it was extremely jarring because it was like, I could see what they were doing. But if you tried to do that in a scientific paper or in a talk, you wouldn't be giving that scientific paper or talk.

1:34:26You wouldn't make it 10 feet into the business because that's called cherry picking. It's data selection. It's not what we do. It doesn't mean people don't have biases of conclusion, biases of interpretation, but you reveal those biases. Again, as we talked about earlier, you reveal the origins of your thinking and decisions. You state your motivations. So it woke me up to that. And that was a bit of a, man, like really? Like, that sucks. Like, I wanted to believe that all media was wholesome in its intentions. I also learned that if you have a, you know, this is hard to say with, you know, you know, I say this with humility, but if your face and name clicks, then you're a target.

1:35:11What's that mean? It just means that if the bigger your platform, the more attention your name or face draws and therefore your name and face is leveraged for clicks, people are making money off of you. It's a profit driven business. Okay. I also learned that many people are very reasonable and they can see through BS. They can see the like, tautary efforts or the, the, you know, the attempt to spin an narrative that just isn't right, isn't true. And what I'm saying there is, you know, whereas I definitely had to face stuff where I felt I was being badly misconstrued or misunderstood, our audience, the podcast audience, and people outside that audience, reached out in droves and supporters at all levels reached out in droves to say, listen, we see what this is.

1:36:11Like, we love what you're doing. We get it. Not a problem, you know. And that was great. It also brought forward my friends and people in the community, both podcasters and academics, family and friends. You know, I mean, basically the essence of it was when my dad and I, who in the past, we've had some challenges in our relationship, but now are really good when he called me and said they tried to pit us against each other. And I'm like, yeah, and he was like, I can't believe it. I mean, he at 80, he couldn't believe it. And he's a very smart guy, okay? He's a theoretical physicist by training.

1:36:46He's a first generation immigrant. He's not here on accident. He had to work his ass off to get here. And he worked very, very hard to provide for us as kids. So he was like, he was like, I can't believe that they would do that. I was like, well, this is apparently what they do. And, you know, and he said, I'll never forget what he said. He said, well, he's very logical. His physicists, after all, he said, one trial learning, one trial learning, meaning we're not going to make that mistake again, right? So, so that was the sort of the media side of it. And then I also want to acknowledge that there are people in media and they're both journalists and news platforms that I think really are well intentioned.

1:37:22It also provided this amazing contrast for me. And then I'll get into the more personal aspect I promise, but it mainly realized why podcasting and podcasters like you and Joe and Lex and Whitney and David Senra and Tim Ferris and ritual and on and on are so amazing. Rick Rubin, it's real. Like we're not pretending to be somebody else. We're not doing this to get, click sure you want the success of your platform, but you're being you. I'm being me. Lexus being Lex, Joe is being Joe, and that's why it works. And it's been so interesting to compare that and contrast that to traditional media, which has its merits certainly, but for which like it's become this kind of senator of a thing where you're not sure what the motivations are.

1:38:11And like, why would they go after you? You said this in a clip. Like, why would they go after you? Well, you generate clicks. But they're going after you because you You actually have you have two, three, four, five, tenets there reach. Why? Because people know when something is real, if somebody is being genuine, even if they disagree with that person. And we like realness. We like authenticity. We love that. As humans, we want that. It's the artistic expression. And it made me realize that like the obvious, which is that we're in the golden age of podcasting right now. And never before in my life have I sort of been in the golden age of something.

1:38:52I came up early, I want to be involved in skateboarding, friends made his professional skimmers. I didn't. Okay. I wasn't talented enough. Fine. Got into neuroscience, caught the wave in neuroscience, meaning at a time when you could, you know, I always funded my lab with grants. I even still have some grant money, you know, and even though I still teach teaching in the next spring, you know, I've definitely shrunk my lab down. You know, the media said, oh, you know, he doesn't have a lab. Yeah, I shrunk my lab down. Like what's that mean? It just means I got my students in postdocs jobs. We published two papers including a clinical trial in 2023 But I've shrunk my lab down like so I teach and I'm still tenured at Stanford.

1:39:25Still operate your lab still going Well, I have grant funds in a new department where we're doing some human clinical trials Okay, but I no longer run experiments on animals That was a very personal choice for me and also when you have students in postdocs You need to be able to give them a certain amount of time in order to nourish their development and then they all, all of them. Everyone of my students in post -docs has gone on to jobs or positions they wanted. So I took care of my academic children. I think they would say that if they don't, I'll hear from them, you know, but they're doing phenomenally well and I'm very proud of them.

1:39:56They deserve the credit. So it made me realize that, okay, I'm still a neuroscientist, I still read papers, I'm still on editorial boards. It's, and yet right now we're in the golden age of podcasting this new form of media of people being themselves. It's not like radio. It's like radio, but different. It's not like television. It's like television, but different. In fact, this this arc might be of interest to you I watched this documentary about game shows recently Hosted by Alex Trebek the documentary frankly as far too long But it goes like this during the world series when Demagia was making Effort towards the home run record was the first commercial Okay, to sell a product and it was designed to grab the housewives and people that purchased things for the home Okay, back then, then came eventually game shows.

1:40:45And game shows were just an excuse to sell products. But they eventually found that the human narrative in the game shows, the prices right host, kissing the contestants, something that would never happen nowadays. Okay, things have changed, matured. Eventually it was the human story. Then it became reality TV shows, right? And then now I see social media as the reality TV show that we're all casting ourselves in on a daily basis. And then podcasts are sort of the umbrella around and within social media, right? I mean, I think Elon's sitting down with Trump today, right? We didn't mention that just to really track back just in case you thought that things were going to calm down, Trump's back on Twitter.

1:41:34Right. I know they released his account. Has he tweeted anything? Yeah, today for the first time since his look shot. What did he tweet? A couple of videos, one mocking Kamala, one begging himself up and two announcements saying I'm going live at 8 p .m. tonight with Elon on X. Okay. I wonder if they'll correct the rogue in narrative because over the weekend there was this narrative that Rogan had endorsed. Yeah, and then I think it turned out not to be true. No, he just said that he liked him, which he said a million times before. I'll see. And then Trump post socials, I don't know what you call it, post it on truth social.

1:42:12I wonder how much Joe Rogan's going to get booed the next time that he goes to the UFC. That may be fact check false. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that that's that, but I mean, that's a tone death. Rogan is the hero of the UFC. It's Dana White. It's like small Dana White and big Dana White. Happy birthday Joe. His birthday was over the weekend. So I guess the point is this, that the fans, the listeners of a podcast are part of the podcast in a way that no medium has existed before because they can comment and give feedback in a way that has not been available before. Now that's the media side.

1:42:50So they made tremendous appreciation for all of that. The personal side. How do you personally deal with a few or like the one that you want? And also I'm particularly interested in the lessons that you've learned longer term, but what does it feel like to wake up that day? You understand the neurochemicals, you understand the hormonal response, but you've got this just flood of phenomena going through you. So, I think one of the hardest things is being misunderstood and then understanding, the motivations of the media, the motivations of the people that gave stories to the media, the blatant lies, although there was a portion of what was said that was absolutely true, and that's the part that I was overly doding on my bulldog.

1:43:37That is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. But well, what I decided to do is what I've done at numerous times in my life when things felt potentially overwhelming, which was to get a committee of people around me that I really trust and rely on their optics when I couldn't rely on my own. So that meant my podcast producer, Rob Moore. That meant other people, including my family, were amazing. People from my high school, you know, it was interesting because they interviewed many people from my high school, but discarded with those narratives because they were positive. They interviewed many former girlfriends of mine who I was in touch with regularly and still am who are very positive and they discarded with those narratives.

1:44:22And you're not looking for yes people, but you're looking for people that can really help steer you through something and help you see where like maybe you need to pay attention to this aspect of your life a bit more or that a little bit more, but you know what? No, there's a thick black line here and that's simply false. Lex Friedman literally showed up in my home. Showed up. I just looked up. There's Lex. Jack and Ty. Hey, it's up brother. He's there. So my home during that week and the week's following, the week's following consisted of many people coming to stay. I recall very clearly, when they were walking out in the yard, I'd take a little nap and must have been 15 or 20 people there, including my good friend Tim Armstrong, other people there supporting me, just being there, right?

1:45:09We also continue to work in that time. We release solo episodes, we release posts, we release podcasts, we were not gonna stop working. How are you able to get yourself into the right mode of mind? Are you not, have you not got a split brain problem there? You, half of you, so be here. The other half is trying to be professional. I learned in that time, but I took some tools from prior to prior experiences to take five to ten minutes, take the first couple of minutes and meditate, concentrate on one's breath, try and get as present as possible. your mind is always flitting to these other things that are trying to distract it.

1:45:48Realizing every time you can hold on to your present cognition, bringing things present for a millisecond longer, you're doing that much better, ratcheting back, and then getting into action, doing generative work, teaching science and health information, because that's why the people to listen to the Hebrew and Laugh podcasts. I don't think they listen to it to hear anything about my personal life or attempts to malign my past story I will also say there were some things that infused a focus and energy into me that I didn't anticipate that we're very beautiful for instance You know one of the narratives that was getting spun out there is that my backstory about growing up and the skateboarding thing getting into fights that maybe that had been constructed Which is categorically false those are true stories in other words and Steve Rougie the guy who is my team manager at Thunder and Spitfire skateboard companies back then wrote to me and he said, yeah, you know, I got this outreach from reporters and they kept kind of trying to pull and get me to change my account of you calling me from being locked up and saying, hey, Steve, like I'm in this place and me saying, you're the most normal person I know and, you know, that whole thing.

1:46:54And he's like, and I don't understand why they're doing that. And I was like, I don't know either. And he's like, well, I told them the truth. I told them exactly what happened. You called me. I remember where I was at the Deluxe office. He's, okay, fine. And then he goes, and I told them that I'd put you on Thunder and Spitfire and I was like, do you realize what you just did for me? From the time I was 14 years old, I was still uncertain whether or not you would put me on the team and I was too embarrassed to ask. And he was like, of course you are on the team. And I was like, oh man, I waited my whole life to hear that 30 years.

1:47:23I saw the lining. So there was, is like, you know, these things that it kind of vexed me for years. Like was I really part of that or was I not part of that team? Like, so what ended up happening is people from my past showed up, not just my family. Jim Thiebo from the World's Gabor, Steve Ruggie, people from my past, people from my present, and then I just got outreach from men and women in droves. Some very high -profile people, very, very high -profile people, some lesser profile, some no -profile, reaching out by email, by phone, by text, showing up at my home and encouraging me to continue on the mission.

1:48:00And at that point, I was buoyed by the fact that I'm like, okay, you know, people can see, they can see the truth. They understand context being warped. They understand lies versus truth. And they understand that a single -sided story is never, ever, ever the right way to resolve all of issues. And so it was amazing to see. And then what happened was we started growing. And I was like, oh my goodness, you hear about this. You're going to grow from this. I always thought that just meant psychologically and internally. But then it was like, we grew. Then the next thing I know, I'm on Jimmy Fallon.

1:48:40Okay. Some people might have thought that came came about before. Uh -uh. Next thing you know, we're a jeopardy question. Like all of a sudden, like things started growing. And then I started realizing, let's just get back to work. Was that the fastest period in the show's growth history? Among. I don't know because I don't track the numbers that closely. I decided early on to remove my dopamine circuits from the numbers. I do my own Instagram, I do my own Twitter, and I manage, I don't have someone manage my comments, I manage all of that myself. So yes, if I say thank you in the DMs, that's me.

1:49:13But it was definitely among the sharpest inflections I've ever experienced. I think Joe said something similar about the CNN then horse -paced, D -Wormert scenario that although, you know, might feel back, so he had sort of a one -two punch. He had his infamous N -word video and the CNN thing within six months of each other, but he said the quickest period that they've ever had was the CNN thing. So if you were one of the sensations, I imagine you must have his indignation, well, it isn't true. And now I want to correct the record. As you said, one of the worst things is being misunderstood. Was it a strategic decision to not issue a statement?

1:49:55Here we go. Here's the four -hour long breakdown. You know, you've got the tools. You've got the platform. You've got the followers. Why not? Yeah. Get it out there. Yeah. Well, I certainly was tempted at times, but the consultation I got and what I eventually arrived at was that no matter what I would say, that, well, first of all, there were elements to some of that that needed to remain private to protect other people. So in that sense, there were a few things I had to take on the chin to protect other people's lives, not their actual lives, but their well -being. The other piece was that it was made very clear to me and I wholeheartedly agree that the media will cherry pick statements and clooch together things, they're still doing it, in order to spin a narrative, right?

1:50:52That makes it such that no matter what you say, it won't be understood the way you want it to be understood. And that was extremely frustrating to me. extremely frustrating to me. In fact, last night, late at night, I had a conversation with a male friend and colleague with whom we had a misunderstanding. This gets to something I mentioned a little bit earlier. Not a betrayal, not a mistake of misunderstanding. And we actually didn't speak to one another for about a month and a half. And it was very frustrating for me and for them. And then he and I, I wouldn't even say hashed it out last night.

1:51:26We just brought to the table. I said, listen, I think there was a misunderstanding, not a mistake, not a betrayal, I own my part and I'm sorry. And I've learned, you say you're sorry. That's it. You say you're sorry. And he said the same thing. He was, you know, I think I overreacted and I said, I didn't say no, you didn't or anything, even though I have my feelings about it. And he said, I'm sorry. And I said, we're good. We're good. We had done the work internally, right? Now, unfortunately, when things are done at scale, you don't get that opportunity. You don't get, I think also, personally, obviously, I'm human.

1:52:07There was the need for reflection on the things that passed and present that I wish I had done differently. And that you make the change and you move forward. I'll also say, and people can roll their eyes if they want, or they can come up with any theories they want. But prayer was extremely grounding for me in that time, Just to not meditation, not seeking approval validation and support of others, although, you know, support from others was critical, as was constructive critique, but prayer to just spend time in prayer, listening to any messages that I needed to hear about what needed changing in me, in my personal life, in my family life, in my work life, in my public facing life.

1:53:01And that was honestly the cornerstone. That was the center of it all. That was the piece that allowed me to go, okay, you know what? This sucks. There's silver linings.

1:53:22There's all that. I see the changes that need to be made. I see where I also draw a thick black line and say, no, that's not that. And we're not going to pretend it is. And prayer was the thing that helped me calibrate my compass 10 times a day. And it wasn't just praying, like, oh, please make this stop or anything like that. You know, please, people, it was more helped me see with clarity. This is the way I would do it. And again, people can decide what they want. I'm not telling anyone what to believe. It was like, you know, literally, on my knees, God, please help me see and feel and think with the kind of clarity that's going to allow me to make the best decisions now and going forward.

1:54:05Let me get through this morning, making the best possible decisions given what's happening. I'm turning over all control and agency over the things I can't control to you. And I'm going to put every ounce of effort I can into trying to continue teaching people about science and health and becoming a better person as I go. And that's still my prayer, among other things, before I go to sleep at night. I'm on my knees at the side of the bread prayer kind of guys, since the New Year, since just before the New Year, before that it was kind of in my head, a little bit kind of here or there. And before every podcast, I just went in the bathroom now and prayed before this.

1:54:44I go there for privacy, not because it's the bathroom. But and I know for people thinking like, okay, this is a scientist or now he's he's kind of claiming the God thing, I'm not claiming anything like for me, this has been the most powerful thing that I've ever experienced because it's it's just given me peace and a compass and a rudder forward, even if I have to be at caterpillar levels of, of horizon view, like this far out in front of me inching forward, I'm just grateful to God, I'm grateful to God for the chance to keep going forward. What would be your advice to somebody who's going through an emotionally intense period?

1:55:33It seems to me like if I was to try and deconstruct the not to make protocols out of a nightmare scenario, but social cohesion groups around you, not being on your own too much. Yeah, and if you, you know, I'm blessed to have a huge network, but I'll say this, I have that network because I put work into that network. Yeah, some of these people I work with, but you know, Jim Thibaud didn't show up at my house because I'm a podcaster. He showed up there the same way he did two years before when I got slammed to the concrete in life. If he showed up when I was 14 and I was a depressed kid sitting at the embarkadero with a busted foot because I couldn't skateboard and he just sat with me and gave me a book to read and encouraged me to write.

1:56:20You know, I took what Jim did for me and did it for other people. So I like to think perhaps it was God kind of returning the energy, returning the favor. You know, people, you build your support system in good times. And when they're down, you support them. And you don't do it because you might hit bad times. You will hit bad times, and that's one reason to do it. You just do it. And so there's that. So if you're up, build your support network doesn't have to be huge, but make it strong. Make it strong by doing the right thing, setting examples. and if it's medium fine, if it's huge fine. Definitely, I definitely use tools, right?

1:57:06The physiological side works to limit stress, get sleep. I didn't rely on pharmacology to get sleep. I know some people need to. I just didn't wanna go that route once. Months earlier, it was prescribed to me. I took a half Xanax to try and sleep in the sleep. I got felt like crap. I woke up and I was like, I'm not doing that again. I use breathing tools. I use NSTR. I use some supplementation to sleep. But sleep is key. You win by sleeping. That was one of our motto's during that time in all times. When we're out on the road doing lives, it's like we're going from one city to the next. We're podcasting and we're doing AMAs and we're busy and we're talking all day and go, go, go.

1:57:51Like we were like we're sleeping and we don't drink. and we're serious, we're like professional athletes, right? So there's that. Training, hot cold? Definitely did some hot cold. In really stressful times, I'll pair back on training a bit. I train as preparation. So for me, lifting three times a week, I love training. Yeah, I do my legs, I do my torso, I do my arms and calves and neck. Okay, sure. I do my long run, I do my medium run, I do my sprint day, I do the cold and heat, But I do that, not as a means, I do that in part as a means to an end, so that when it's time to sprint for the airplane, when it's time to take a week and just lean all your physical and mental energy into a crisis, you can do that.

1:58:34And then I go back to training. I would have been, I think I would have struggled to regulate without training each day. Listen, taking a walk, getting a good shower, getting your hair cut, you know, these things make a difference. The other thing is I learned to be able to call on people to pick up the phone, you know, and say, hey, listen, like I'm spinning here, I can't make sense of this strategy or that strategy. What do you think? And then writing down what that person said, taking a few things and then just going inward, right? There is this tendency, especially with text to constantly be, you know, increasing the size of your committee.

1:59:11I'll say this was interesting. Some people came to me immediately and said, you should do blank. and I was like, really? And they're like, absolutely, do blank. And then I didn't do blank. And then a week later, they're like, oh, you absolutely did the right thing. You should do exactly the opposite of blank. And then I realized I was like, oh goodness. You know, like, nothing, I'm never gonna listen to advice from that person again, but they were just saying stuff. So you need to be a selective filter. And it can be very hard. And I will say, anyone going through a crisis of any kind, any kind, you need a committee, however big or small.

1:59:45And if you don't have people, you need people in books, you need people in podcasts. And, um, you know, I'm not a recruiter, but, um, you might give prayer or try. Because there's real peace at the center there. And from that peace, you can see the right decision. And from that right decision, you can make the right decision for that circumstance. And there are just too many circumstances to say you should always say this or you should never say anything and this kind of thing. What I do know is that God forbid if they come for you, Chris, or anyone like we got you. Like I don't know what the best advice will be in those circumstances, but we got you.

2:00:31Like and we got you because you're a truly good person with your heart out there being you right up until now you've just been being you and that's why you're successful. And yeah, I mean I got calls from you know people can guess the names and there were some names also I couldn't believe it. I was like these are people with enormous stature that like I thought were probably would fall on the opposite end of the spectrum would be calling me to yell at me and in fact we're like you're doing all the right things don't let it get to you, keep going. Think about X, Y, and Z, but and I was like, whoa, so what you will find in hard times like those, God willing, they won't happen to you is that you'll find your inner resolve.

2:01:17The world will come to you and show you who your real friends are, who your real supporters are. And I wasn't counting off who stuck their neck out for me and who wasn't. It was beautiful to see people who did. And the ones who didn't, I get it, like they have their own incentives. They needed to do whatever it is they needed to do. I think I regretted not messaging me that day and the reason that I didn't was it's kind of like when somebody's birthday and you think, fuck does he really need an additional thing? I said, text it Rob instead. Rob can be the filter for this. Yeah, and he passed it to me.

2:01:49And thank you. And listen, it's also a felt thing and you raise a very important point that goes, and I hope people hearing this can understand that the reason to have this discussion is not about me. It's that we all are going to go through these sorts of things at different scales and in different contexts. Is that, you know, it's like when somebody dies, everyone's like, my condolences, so sorry, so sorry. The time to reach out to them is also afterwards. And you know, again, call me non -scientific. Fine. I have enough science under my belt and to be totally confident in what I'm about to say, which is like last night in my prayers, I prayed for somebody who had posted something about losing their mom.

2:02:27I actually didn't know his mom, but I just like it came to me. I was like, you know, like We all flooded in and there condolences thoughts and prayers, but like he's probably hurting like crazy Right now and so you pray for that person now you say well, how does that prayer impact them? I don't know But I believe in that and you reach out to somebody by text they just checking in and this is the beauty of what you do and it's the beauty of what podcasters do in general, which is you're creating things in perpetuity. The AI is gonna be trained on these conversations. You know, your great grandchildren will be able to glean knowledge from things that you've shared.

2:03:08And I think that putting that out into the world in a way that other people can benefit from is nothing short of spectacular. You know, when I was a junior professor, I'd listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast. At that time, it was just that. And like, I remember thinking like, this podcast is like my friend in a city where I don't know anyone, now I'm fortunate to call Tim a friend, right? I could actually call on Tim, but I think that the loneliness and isolation that people feel, especially people that are striving and don't have a big network can sometimes feel so overwhelming. But I was that guy.

2:03:43I was that kid who didn't have anyone to call or I was confused about something that was happening and I didn't have the network of people to call. You build that over time, but podcasts and what people being themselves out there in the world, mainly podcasts. It's like I really care. I hope that if bullet bus or cancer takes me out tomorrow that some of the things that I've shared, hopefully many of the things that I've shared could help people now and going forward. That's a real thing. It's not about selling us advertisement or a supplement like that's incidental. It's about the material. So So, I'm kind of spooling it now, but like within me, I feel immense gratitude.

2:04:25I wouldn't change the experience of the last year for anything. I don't wanna experience it for its own sake, but what it brought me was huge gifts, and yeah, it grew us like crazy, but shit, I mean, if I could have done it a different way, I would, but God served up this meal just the way he did, Have I ever told you my idea of the Lonely Chapter? I've told you about this. No, but I feel like I've had a few of those. Yeah, so I learned this with Alex Homozi last year. And the Lonely Chapter describes a time in which you're growing, you're changing as a person, and you're now so different that you can no longer resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not sufficiently developed that you've got the new set of friends that you're going to grow into.

2:05:15And this is the lonely chapter. And the problem with it is that you're always the desire to sort of regress back to where you were is always going to be there. And you're going to have uncertainty. There's not even the promise of glory or success or triumph when you get through the other side. What am I pushing towards? You know, you're telling me that I'm not going to go out on this night out with my friends, which I've done for the last five years or ten years in the town that I grew up in or went to university and or whatever. You tell me I'm not going to do that because I'm going to get up and I'm going to meditate or read who even knows if meditation works right like all of these questions in your mind and all of your friends and all of the dynamics and the Temptations pull you back toward that it pulls you back toward the old version of life So this lonely chapter is a period Through which I think everybody needs to squeeze anybody that decides to go from a place they are to a place that they want to be, is going to have to let go of people who can't go there with them.

2:06:14And this isn't a value judgment about the people that are doing the personal growth thing, about it than the people that are already fine as they are in a happy leading a different sort of life. It's that if you know that there is something that you're meant to do, if you know that there's something that you're meant to change, you will have to let certain groups, friends, routines, places, activities, recreations that you do, you're going to have to let those go. And there is this, you know, the Rocky Cut scene lasts for 90 seconds in the movie, but it can last for five years in your life. And you have no idea whether or not it's even going to work.

2:06:50And that's the bit that always got to me. The bit that always got to me was I didn't even know if it was there was going to be any glory on the other side. It's like ordering an Uber and never knowing if it's going to arrive or not. You think, well, I'm just stood here doing the thing, But I don't know if it's going to come out on the other side and I can promise you anybody that has done anything Move from any place they were to any place that they want to be has gone through this lonely chapter and I think about Personal growth like the velocity of a rocket that's taking off so you've got people moving in as you start to take off You can begin to move a little bit more quickly and as you start to pull away from people there's attention between the two of you because is sometimes your behavior, especially if it's positive and you're moving yourself in a more developed direction, can throw into harsh contrast the behavior of the people who maybe aren't doing that.

2:07:37And then you start to sort of become friends with someone that said, booby, and then the worst or one of the really difficult sensations is if you then do that. And you've got past somebody who previously you were within this sort of sense, well, I'm on the journey too, but maybe I'm not moving in the same kind of way that you are. And I came up with this idea of personal growth guilt, like survivor guilt. You know, somebody comes back from war and they were sat in the back of the Humvee and the piece of Shrapnel that was supposed to kill them and killed all of their buddies hit the engine block and they come back and they feel like they should still be back there.

2:08:08But they're not and it's almost the same with the personal growth stuff that I feel like I'm almost sort of betraying this older version of me this past version of my life that I should be there. And there's this scene in the matrix that Alex talks about where Nia doesn't know if he wants to move forward. He doesn't know if he wants to take the journey that he's called to. And he opens the door and Trinity says, you've already been down that road Nia, you know where it takes you and you know that's not where you want to go back to. And I think about that, I think about that a lot, that lonely chapter.

2:08:43And for me it lasted for a good amount of time, transitioning from being a guy in his 20s that does the reality TV thing, does the party boy thing, and then goes, okay, I need to decide to stop drinking, which 10 years ago was revolutionary, especially as a club promoter. It's now very common to do low and no, but pretty different back then. And all of the incentives were for me to go back to partying. Well, why are you doing that? You're going to be boring on a night out. I realize that. If you need to drink to be around your friends you don't have friends you have drinking partners and the most, if the only way that you can bear to be around your friends is to drink then you really need to find yourself about a social network.

2:09:24All of the things I used to leave the front door of a nightclub and I would sit and I would wedge my phone into the top of the steering wheel. So I have a party with 1 ,500 people there. It's my party, my company, right? And I would leave to go watch a lander boton school of life philosophy videos. And it was evident that I just had this odd sort of discordance in my mind. I was being ripped away from where I was to where I am. And yeah, I think, you know, the lonely chapter is one of the most important insights that has come out of the show over the last 18 months because it's reassuring to, I think, a huge portion of podcast listeners.

2:10:00Why is it that people resonate and have this parasocial relationship with some bloke that's on the other side of the planet? And I think it's because while they're struggling to resonate with any of the blocs that or girls that are around them, where they live, and you end up finding solace in this person that speaks to you because you struggle to find solace sort of personally. So yeah, the overarching lesson is just keep going. The lonely chapter is a feature, not a bug of personal growth. It is a, it's the cost of doing business if you want to develop yourself. Yeah, I love that. You know, I recall in high school when getting hurt, skateboarding, realizing I didn't have a future there, which fortunately was a good thing for me.

2:10:46I mean, it was God again intervening saying, nope, you're going to get broke off again. You're not going to, this is not going to be your path. Following a high school girlfriend to college and then realizing after the first year that, you know, drinking, getting in fights was not a good path and get my life in order and studying a lot at a school where at that time people weren't terribly studious and it was incredibly isolating. I even lived alone, lived in my girlfriend or I lived alone and being very isolated. And then in graduate school felt more social connection, but then as a junior professor, you know, there are boundaries between you and the people you work with and those are important boundaries.

2:11:21And so not having many male friends and you know, my fortunately at the time, my romantic partner, who I'm still good friends with, was a great source of family and support, but feeling cut off from friends of other types. And then again, you know, in this more recent iteration of entering the podcast world, but then you find your community. I also think while I totally agree, you can look to podcasters to books, also to people who are no longer alive, that mentors like the great Oliver Sacks, who I've never met, but I've reached out to people that knew him and they've given me information about him that's given me You know, it got me through many hard times based on his life experiences biography as autobiography This is why I like biography and autobiography so much you can Feel a kinship with Pete.

2:12:12Why David Senra shows so great That's one of the reasons founders podcasts is so great. I just got to meet Senra himself recently Is it just amazing amazing podcast? He's amazing Highly recommend that podcast. You know Rick Rubin's been a great source of support Tim Armstrong has been in enormous source of support. Jim Thibos has been in enormous source of support. Joe Rogan's been in enormous source of support. Lex Friedman's been in big source of support. You've been a great source of support. Whitney Cummings, and on and on, and people showing up and people from entirely other industries, investors, people in, let's just, I want to, because it's only fair to protect their identities, people in media that are not of the podcasting ilk, For instance, people who I never thought I would meet, you know, explaining the commonalities of their experience You know, and if you're wondering, okay, well then, you know, those are all these people But who's gonna come for me?

2:13:04Well, I'm going to and Chris is going to You know when you're coming up and you're in your thing like reach out, right? I mean it's It's kind of incredible the way that humans will move into support one another when they need it good humans Good humans and it's kind of incredible how how good humans help lift each other up even when we don't know each other. Right? And I don't want to get into it here because it's not appropriate for here, but where I look at people that have really disappeared, not always, but a lot of times, it's like their motivations weren't right in the first place, something happened to them and they're gone.

2:13:42And you go, what happened to them? And it's like, you know, again, there are exceptions to this, but I don't know, their heart probably wasn't in it. their heart probably wasn't in it or you know, there was enough of a terrible circumstance there that it had to go that way. But you know, I think it's just a, you know, I heard from a former postdoc of mine recently and another one, both of whom are professors now. And through the philanthropy arm of my podcast and some donors, I'm able to support scientific research. We do this. We don't do it for public recognition. We do it because I want to support the best science and we're able to do that.

2:14:14And I can't tell you the joy, just pure joy that it brings me to hear about them and their students that they're mentoring. Like there's a passage of this stuff over time. And look, none of us live forever except Brian Johnson, just kidding. And by the way, if people want to know my take on Brian, I've known Brian for a long time. We go way back. And I think it's wonderful that he's doing what he's doing. And I think he's, you know, I don't know him well enough to say like, people always want to know like what's he, you know, I think he's, you know, I don't know him well enough to I think it's great that somebody's exploring the field of longevity from the perspective he is and other perspectives.

2:14:49So for that, for that. Just, I gotta give you my take on Brian. So I was at a, I've seen Brian in person, maybe two or three times. I was at Roatan, an island off Honduras with him at the start of this year. And then I did a Jeffersonian dinner breakfast with him. Very Bay Area to do a Jeffersonian dinner. Yeah, well, he brought some of the Bay Area Rover and I had some of his nutty pudding. And I had his sit down with him. And the way that I think of Brian is kind of like a scout in an army. So it wouldn't do to have an entire army filled with scouts. It would be a pretty shitty army. But I'm more than happy to have that one guy who apparently is built to be a scout.

2:15:29Go up that really dangerous hill over there that maybe the view is beautiful or maybe slip and catastrophe occurs or something. And come back and tell us what he found. I love that. Yeah, thank you. It's a bit of an astronaut. Correct. Yeah. You expend time and effort and resources and all of that. Finding out stuff. I'm, you know, I'm all for him doing that. And I'll take the, you know, top 20 % or whatever that gives the 80 % of the insights from him. Yeah. Yeah, he's part of this incredible tapestry that's being built a public facing health and science information. You know, never before in human history has health and science information been dispersed first in the way that it is now through podcasts, through traditional media, from physicians, from scientists, from ancient wisdom stuff.

2:16:16I mean, I can sit back from all of it, see Brian, see my position in the field, see the lane noran, see the people that attack us, see the FDA, see the NIH. And I can look out and, you know, I mean, listen, I was on a grants review panel until, you know, little over 12 months ago, it was a regular member on there, I've reviewed grants, written grants, fortunately got many grants, funded, planning grants didn't get funded too. I understand the process and I understand people's different orientation and realize that we're all after the same thing We're all we all want to live longer healthier lives with more vitality like we're all after the same thing And what I'm interested in is the overlap in the Venn diagrams So if you call it yoga ninja or NSDR if you're talking about REM sleep in the dynamics of spindle waves in the brain Or you're talking just about your dreams and you're doing a dream journal ultimately I'm interested in the practices that are true now that have always been true and that can evolve through technology that are going to allow us all to be healthier, mentally, physically, etc.

2:17:09That's the mission. So you nailed it. You want a Brian Johnson on the mission. You want a Lane Norton on the mission. I like to think you want an Andrew Huberman on the mission. You want Chris on the mission. You want all these people on the mission and the FDA and the NIH and you want the arguments. What you don't want and what I see is incredibly counterproductive is people taking the stance that only their view is the appropriate one. As long as people voice their motivations and their logic for proposing what they propose, it's mostly all good, except the stuff that's dangerously bad. Okay, that's not good.

2:17:46But listen, I chuckle at the idea that any one of these perspectives is going to be the perspective. And in fact, I throw my head back and laugh because if you look historically, all you have to do, if you really are having trouble sleeping or if you really want a dense book, the The Prince of Medicine is a beautiful book that talks about Galen and how our understanding of the human body and medicine really evolved from really people being allowed to do more and more in terms of human dissection and analyzing the human body, something that wasn't allowed prior because of rules about dissecting human bodies.

2:18:20The understanding that government bodies, plus funding, plus curiosity have all been these competing forces. And that the acceleration of science and medicine is now taking place at a rate that is unprecedented. CRISPR, brain machine, interface. And yes, I'll say it, psychedelics and supplementation, they're just compounds. People go supplements. None of that's regulated. Yeah. And you could also have a conversation about SSRIs, which have huge value, but can also do huge damage. So any qualified psychiatrists will tell you that. So right now we are on an accelerated path. And I think the challenge for most people is they're drinking from the fire hose and they don't know which filters to put up.

2:19:00And so all I can say is it's super exciting, right? It's super super exciting, but you want to argue about these different orientations about as much as you want to argue about what genre of music is best. There's just no answer, right? Most people love Taylor Swift and there are people that also love other forms of music, and you're always going to find out at the extremes. So unless something is dangerous, right? I think that most of the ideas I see out there weren't further exploration and some are just really darn good. So I'm glad that Brian came up because I think he represents one spoke on the wheel and it's an important one.

2:19:39In his absence, I think the field will progress less quickly. You know, I just wish that people would look at things through these lenses. I also think for the generation coming up that were weaned on social media, it's very important that they realize something that David Goggins has said. I just feel like it's appropriate to say this right now. Right now because most of what's happening online is a consumer -based environment. I think he said it's easier than ever to become extraordinary now. That it's hard to overstate the power of putting away the phone and doing some writing or putting away the phone and doing some musical training or putting away the...

2:20:20Like, it's... And then using social media as a place to put your efforts out into the world as opposed to place your efforts while standing there obliviously in the real world. Like the people that realize that the direction of flow needs to be from real world into electronic world and out, as opposed to the other way, are going to be the ones that are gonna succeed in life. If barring some accident or injury, you're almost guaranteed success relative to your peers. It's that simple. I remember, and we've spoken about this before, but I remember when NMN, rapper Micein, NAD, sublingual, mix it in the yogurt, do all of this stuff.

2:20:59I remember when that was, you know, going to make us all live to 150 and what is the state of the world of longevity, drug supplements now? What's happening with that? Yeah. I just did an episode with Peter T. So here's the deal as I understand it. Peter is pretty bullish on rapamycin. Remember that emitor, which is expressed at very high levels in essentially all cells of the brain and body during development declines across the lifespan, emitor, mammalian target of rapamycin, that's named after the drug that targets that receptor. Rapamycin targets the emtore. And in some sense, mimics fasting.

2:21:50Okay, this is broadly speaking. Keep in mind that the study showing extension of life in different species, including mice, show that being fairly dramatically sub -maintenance caloric extends lifespan. But you're also potentially sub -happiness when you're that sub -caloric. Potentially pretty weak immunologically too, potentially, potentially physically weak. Okay, so yes, starving yourself within reason can extend your lifespan, but you also starve yourself of joy and vigor, right? I mean, at some point you are sub -caloric enough that testosterone levels plummet in men and women, libido plummets, fertility plummets in men and women.

2:22:33So, you know, it's a trade -off. I don't take rapamysin, I don't take metformin. I don't even take burberine, which is poor men's metformin. It makes me very hypoglycemic for reasons that make total sense based on the mechanisms of metformin and burberine. I do take sublingual NMN, but it's very important. But I don't take it to extend my lifespan. I take sublingual NMN and by the way, I have no affiliation to any supplement company that sells NMN. I take it because it has for me in my experience. Again, this is not a randomized control trial. This would not meet Nortean criteria, lane Nortean criteria.

2:23:13It causes my hair to grow very, very fast, which is odd, but other people I know who've taken it report the same effect. Nail's very we thick and gives me a lot of morning energy. Yeah, me too. Yeah. So that's the reason I take it. But I don't expect it to make me live longer. Now the history around NMN is worth paying attention to. It was David Sinclair that popularized NMN. Remember NMN is a precursor to NAD. And R is the precursor to NMN. So there's a phosphate group that gets removed. people that are not David Sinclair are fairly bullish about NR being preferable to NNN, but the people who are proponents of NR, true, nitrogen, associated folks, etc, tend to focus more on the anti -inflammation effects of NR and point to the fact that NR has been shown to convert to NAD in cells more readily than NNN.

2:24:11Now, all I know is that when I take sublingual NMN, my hair grows faster, my nails growth thicker and faster, the two effects that I wasn't seeking, but that I'm okay with. And I have more morning energy. I've also taken NR and I didn't notice any tangible effect. I don't take it because it's very expensive relative to NMN and even though I probably could afford it, I didn't subjectively feel much, which is not to say it isn't worthwhile. people might be interested in taking it. The NMN was popularized because David Sinclair started talking about it on various podcasts and then he started a company that is evaluating it as a drug in a clinical trial.

2:24:52Therefore, the FDA said the NMN could not be sold as a supplement. That's the way the laws work. But then supplement manufacturer has continued to do so and it does not seem like the FDA is clamping down on it. At least not hard because you can go on Amazon or or you can go to any one of these different companies and buy NMN if you wish. So that's the story there. In terms of other things to, oh, and why don't I take a wrap of mysin? Not enough human data. And honestly, my goal is to live to be 100 or 110 with vigor. And I'm not so interested in living to be 150 years. Mentholman. No, not interested in plummeting my blood sugar, burberry, not interested in plummeting my blood sugar, gives me headaches, unless I'm eating a lot of carbohydrates with it.

2:25:38The only time I've taken burbrine and I might take it again as I used to do cheat days, I don't any longer, but I could eat a dozen donuts if I take 500 milligrams of burbrine first. I feel fine. Otherwise, I feel like my eyes get blurry and I want to pass out. It's kind of fun to do every once in a while, but if I don't eat a lot of carbohydrates or sugar with burbrine, then I get a massive hypoglycemic headache. And I feel like it almost feels like my head is made of stone. It's very strange feeling. I don't like it. Other things for longevity, Take good care, don't get hit in the head, avoid excessive stress, all the basic kind of things that we all know.

2:26:15So the longevity field is a peculiar one. I mean, it could be that Brian is on to something with the exosomes. And with the, again, I don't want to throw out things that I'm not aware that he's doing. I think it's some PRP exosomes. I do red light. I think there's enough data for red light therapy, whole body red light. You know, yep, naked in front of the panel, 10 minutes, five minutes facing, five minutes from behind, or facing away, as it were. For sake of eye health, the data from Glen Jeffries lab showing that red light therapy, especially in the early part of the day may offset some age -related vision decline.

2:26:50This is my colleague Glen Jeffries at University College, London, beautiful studies. He might be a fun person for you to talk to. He's been in the game a long, long time. I'm red light therapy for mitochondrial health, these sorts of things, and then dosing with stress appropriately, but not overdoing stress, making sure to get enough sleep. Having a joyful life, I love this joy as efficiency and longevity, perhaps as well. I'm bolstered by observing my dad, who might have a glass of wine every once in a while, but never drink very much, who exercises but never overdid it, who always worked nine to five and then would put down the pen and he's a theoretical physicist after all and would focus on walks and getting sunlight and thinking he would often take walks and think about science he would tell me but didn't overwork himself but was very very consistent and he just filed like more it's he's in excess of 70 patents and he's going strong you know he was also somebody that in the move to the United States in the era of the 1960s and told stories about people you know, passing joints and he was like, no, like I worked my butt off to get out of a, you know, a country where they didn't support science.

2:28:03He had this opportunity from the Navy to come here and study on scholarship and decided, you know, he's sort of like all drugs bad kind of guy. Whereas I think nowadays I and others have a kind of a more adapted new onto view of things like cannabis. Probably okay for some, probably good for others and probably terrible for others. So I think that moderation goes a long way, including in exercise. I mean, if you look at people who marathon and ultra, they don't age as well as in my opinion as people, certainly better than people that are sedentary, but when you look at, for instance, people are very heavily muscled, they don't age very well.

2:28:43You look at people who do a ton of ultra endurance, they don't age terribly well. You look at some of the older sprinters out there, older gymnasts. I'll pass you a clip of this guy. He's 98 years old. I sent this to Rick Rubin the other day and we were just blown away The guy doing a two two fingers of each hand doing a pull up I think the guy is Chinese and then doing a skin the cat so rolling his feet in you know Shoulder extension skin the cat then back out and then a chin up and then walking away from it now He looks 98 at the level have his skin sag in his face in his and his gate but holy moly does he have grip strength and flexibility and I want to be that guy at 98 I don't know what he's doing in the other domains of his life, but I'm pretty sure it's impressive What is the reason for the concern on ultra Athletes is that free radicals?

2:29:32I've heard that I don't even know what they are just stress I mean and I think at some and you know I went up to the Olympic track and field trials in Oregon and it was amazing and I met some of the the best marathoners in the world. And I know Cam Haynes well as you do and he, you know, and Cam pushes himself hard. I think that, again, better than that than to be sedentary. I think for Cam, I can't speak for him, but I don't think he has a choice but to push himself that way. But and he's pretty, I don't think he's pushing. He's being pulled. He's being pulled. Yeah. Well, and he's got it up.

2:30:01I don't, I think he's, it's all coming through him. I know, I don't, probably some people were like, oh, I got here. We go again with that whole thing, but there's something about when you access these sources of guidance and energy that are outside you that feel bigger than you and are bigger than you. If nothing else, we can agree on that. Cam carries a fair amount of muscle as well, which I think is protective against some of the muscle wasting that occurs when people are running really far, really long, you know, over and over and over, it's stress. You see that guy that ran the entire length of Africa?

2:30:39No, but that's super impressive. World first, world first guy. But the Cape town, you know, the absolute bottom to Turkey. And it can't be a strong, because there's a lot of people who run for a year. Run for a year. This is some forest kind of stuff. Correct. And Ross Edgley, do you remember Rossi swam around the UK? was the first man to ever swim around the UK. So he's just completed. He would be great. I'm going to try and twiddle the dials on Rob to see if you guys want to speak. He's just completed the world's longest single distance non -stop swim. How far? 300 miles without touching land, without stopping, without sleeping.

2:31:21It was 50 over 50 hours. Eating in the water, pooping in the water, the first time you had to go to the... First time you had to go to the bathroom. He's got like a butt flap on his thing. He missed the butt flap, so then just churned his poop for the, you know, next 50 hours as he did this swim. Apparently they cut him out of it. And he was, there was like this sort of gray dust inside of him, which is what if you churn your own feces for long enough, apparently that happens. But Russ, it was first month swim around the UK. Amazing. So he did six hours on six hours off for six months. And he six hours on six hours off for six months.

2:31:56The human, you know, the human spirit is like one of these things I just marvel in. I'm curious Chris, what do you see as your long arc? Have you thought, are you, like I'm in caterpillar mode, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about the microplastics episode that I'm preparing, like what, well now I'm focused on where we are right now, but you know, in a book and some other things in the not too distant future, but like do you hold you? 36. Man, you're young. I mean, you look young, but so do you do you have aspirations for politics? Are you great? No, no, no, no. Very flatteringly, Rogan and Kamhain said that they would vote for me if I run for president, but they can't because he's British.

2:32:42No, none of that. You could run in the UK. Yeah, I'm sure that I mean, the UK is a whole other challenge at the moment that I don't intend on stepping foot into. One of the interesting things that I've learned, I think, over the last two and a half years since moving to America is, if there's ever a period of rapid growth or development, optionality in life opens up so rapidly and the potential universe is branched so quickly, that any real long -term plan is kind of pointless. This is maybe a cope because I struggle with long -term planning. I know that the way that you're supposed to live the most fulfilling life for my productivity grow background is to write your obituary and then you're in 25 year eons and then you're in seven year phases and then you're in one year sprints and you're in 90 day blocks and you've got your daily actions which contribute to you and so on and so forth.

2:33:38I've never been able to really think more than about six months ahead. and the last two years, I would have never thought to, and a half years ago, that I would have been living in America, that I would have been doing this sort of a thing that the show would have been where it was, that would have had the opportunities I would. And especially if the things that you want to have happen, start to happen to you, the pace is so unimaginable, that you need to learn to develop the skill to say no, to things that you would have only dreamt to have had the opportunity to have been in the room, to have pitched, to have said yes to six months ago.

2:34:16And it's like reverse hedonic adaptation, you're permanently having to reset your baseline of what you should expect from yourself, from your life, from the way that you show up and the challenges completely change. So I know that I wanna have a family, I know that I want to be a dad, I'm very excited about that. I know that I love learning and having these sorts of conversations. I know that it's incredibly gratifying to be seen as a peer by people that you also admire and that you aspire to emulate. That's unbelievably cool. I think that especially I grew up in a town in the UK famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England.

2:35:01and then it lost that, so I didn't really even have that. The name of the town. Stocked in on Tees. And it's just, you know, classic, northern, working town, nothing spectacular. Apart from the railway was actually invented there. But when I was growing up, I didn't have a massive number of role models like the person I wanted to be like. But I had a lot of people like the person I didn't want to be like. So I came up with this idea of the reverse role model, which is if you are in a kind of a role model desert, we hear about food deserts, if you're in a role model desert, that's not great, but I think more people's lives are side -swiped by making errors than by expediting success.

2:35:45And it meant that I was able to grow up and say, well, I don't want his relationship with his family and I don't want the way that he uses alcohol to cope with his problems and I don't want his issue that he's got with gambling. and it creates these sort of way markers in the ground, not ones that you go to, but ones that you avoid, sort of helps you to map out the mind, sweep, or territory. And Kit, can I just... one thing that's extraordinary about what you're saying is deserving of a neuroscience analogy. I started off as a developmental neurobiologist. So I teach embryology and brain development to medical students and graduate students among other things in neuroscience.

2:36:25And one of the things that we learned over the last 20, 30 years is that the brain, the nervous system, the brain and spinal cord, without question the most complex and incredible object in the entire universe. Without question, right? I mean, just think about what human brains have created in terms of other technologies. Those are all the the product of the brain, right? Elon's rockets, X, This podcast, everything here, these cars are the product of this object, this two and a half pounds or whatever, depending on the size of someone's head and brain. The nervous system starts off from, you have sperm -meat egg, what happens before that is it varies but it has certain required elements.

2:37:08spurming to egg and then there's duplications of the cells and some of those cells become limbs and some of the cells become fingernails, etc. But a certain number of those cells become designated as nervous system. And then you have literally trillions of neurons, nerve cells, that are independent of one another, little spheres that need to connect to one another in immensely precise ways in order for you to be able to see the world around you, to smell the world around you, to make sense of when milk is coming, and when food is coming to form traumas and to have dopamine -related reward experience.

2:37:44A big mystery in the field of brain development for over a century was how is it that the neurons find the right connections, given the exquisite precision that allows for all these incredible abilities of the brain, the most magnificent object in the universe. And for a long time, it was thought that, Oh, there would be what are called chemo attractants. There would be things that would lead the neurons to steer in the right direction and wire up. And indeed those chemo attractants exist. They go by the names of things like netrin, which means to guide or effrin or etc. But far and away, by I would say by an order of magnitude.

2:38:24Most wiring in the nervous system occurs by selective repulsion. In other words, by neurons ones growing out, looking for something to connect to. And chemical labels saying, ah, not here, ah, not here, nope, not here. And neurons trying so hard to form connections wherever they can. And these, as they're called repellent, not repulsive, because repulsive seems like, you know, but repellent forces, coridoring them into progressively more precise and more precise and more precise connections so that by time a baby is born after nine months or so, the wiring of the brain and spinal cord is such that they're ready for life.

2:39:11And then more wiring occurs. And most of the wiring that occurs after we're born, the so -called neuroplasticity, is a selective removal of connections as opposed to the formation of new connection. And so as you're describing your experience of growing up in this town whose name I can't remember right now, Stockton, the origin of the train. Yes. You describe all these repellent forces. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like that. And it highlights such a key principle, which is that, you know, we think of a really good life as being the consequence of selective decisions for, you know, running toward not away from type decisions.

2:39:48But I think what you raise is incredibly important and is not discussed enough, which is that so much of a good life, a right life, an incredibly successful life involves the no. Definitely not that, definitely not that. And a selective pruning and a selective repellent mechanism away from the wrong territory. And so forgive me for waxing poetic on brain development in relevance to your life experience because your life experience is far more rich in terms of what it means. But I I think that if ever there was an analogy for how you've emerged and the trajectory that you've taken, it's the wiring of the central nervous system.

2:40:34Yeah, I think avoiding catastrophe is significantly more profitable than trying to expedite success. This is meant to that. There's this idea from mathematics, which is never multiplied by zero. So if you take 20 multiplied by three multiplied by 400 ,000 multiplied by 1 .3 multiplied by zero, you get zero. So you can do all of the good work in the world. You can avoid eating seed oils and you don't put any fucking sun lotion on your testicles and you get all of your light in the morning. Some sunscreens are safe. Despite what the internet says, I believe in some sunscreens. I lost friends for saying that, but it's true.

2:41:19What was your thing about people will lose so much sleep and friends over debating seed oils? Oh goodness, seed oils are the sunscreen thing. Look, mineral based sunscreens, everyone agrees they're safe except the few people that don't like sunscreen at all. But I'm not one of those people. I believe in sunscreen. I wear zinc oxide sunscreen, but according to the internet, you find all sorts of lies about the opposite of anyway. Yeah, so you and you multiply by zero. You've done all of this stuff. You've been resistance training three times a week. Listen to the Cuban lab part even subscribed on whatever your thing is podcast thing and got the additional AMA.

2:41:56And then you decide one day to just drive without seatbelt on or what happened to me two weeks ago. Head into the podcast. I've got to get my run in. I love running. I'm going to take a quick run. I run down my street. I'm live on a hill. I run into the park nearby. I run into a podcast fan, we hang out for a little bit, jog together, I split off and head home, and I'm head home, and I'm thinking, how am I gonna get home, do my five minutes meditation, shower, and get ready, and make it to the podcast studio and ton. I'll just do my meditation now. Brilliant idea, Professor Hubertman, so I close my eyes.

2:42:29While you're running. Yeah, and I'm striding up the hill, and it's a big wide street. And I'm thinking, and all of a sudden, and I go right into a box truck and I'm thinking, ah, now I've been hit before, I boxed a little bit, skateboarded, I've hit my head, I'm not tough, but I've hit my head, you know, I reach up, I'm like, oh good, and there's enough blood on my hand, I'm like, oh boy. It's a big one. It's a big one. And then I feel like Gabe, I'm like, oh boy. So it turned out it was like, ocular bone exposed, not good, no bueno, ran right into a parked box truck, okay? I'm the absent -minded professor at times.

2:43:08Managing when you get home folks. Fortunately, I have a friend who I know through training and friend, common friends, his name is Jason Diamond and he's one of the world's best facial plastic surgeons. I didn't care so much about a scar, but he assured me, we can do this without a scar. He said, you have to get in and get it stitched up within six hours. You're kidding. So I go to his clinic, fortunately, they flushed it out. He wasn't there that day. I mean, while Rob's waiting at the studio with the guest from Stanford, amazing, amazing professor named Jamil Zaki, who's brilliant. And they put a couple of injections in Novajain, suit, jamie up and, you know, I'm a week there.

2:43:47I'm pretty good. That was a little bit of week ago. Yeah. Jason and his clinic are absolute phenomes. Yeah. Did he explain to you the importance of the six hours to avoid infection? To avoid infection. It's the infection that gets in there. I they flushed it, put some local antibiotic. All I put on it was a little bit of Neospor and Polysporne after it was stitched. Got the stitch out. It's been a week and four days. Yeah. I got like Wolverine. Yeah. Normally, I don't heal that well. Now, I will say this for the record. I've been experimenting with BPC157 for which there are basically zero human data, tons of animal data and anyone that's taking BBC 157, by the way, you don't want to take it continuously.

2:44:33And if you're going to take it, get it from a compounding pharmacy and get it prescribed by a doctor because there's a lot of contaminated versions out there. I would never take an oral version. It can cause it. It does cause angiogenesis growth of blood vessels. So if you have a tumor, you could cause angiogenesis of the tumor. So, but I do take, I was taking it subcue. Yep. And I do heal noticeably faster when taking BPC 157. But where I not to have had that injury and I had a little bit of a calf thing I was trying to repair, I would not take BPC 157 continuously just to take it. And nowadays I hear about a lot of young guys just taking it the same way they just take testosterone sipine which is just foolish.

2:45:12Yeah. Two stories. I ruptured my kele's three, four years ago, I took TB 500 and BPC 157 for the six weeks after that. So you tore your Achilles. Complete detachment. Yeah. Full rupture. I mean, you can even see if you lean over there, you can just. Oh, he's not lying. That thing looks like a zipper. No, I've got the scott, I've got the, like it looks like a zipper. Got the scott to show it. Um, so yeah, playing cricket the most British way. Oh, yeah. That's a confusing sport. Yeah. Um, so I did that TB 500's at BPC 157 six weeks. and the recovery was very good. It was also during a pandemic. I had nothing else to do and I was beyond mille, a psychotic, like probably 95 to 98 percent compliance with sets reps recover everything everything.

2:45:58Did you curious because there's no clinical studies on this. So when I talk to Peter O 'Tea about PBC 157, he's like, no clinical data, but then you talk to, Let's just say X -game athletes or let's say you're me and you talk to Olympic athletes. BPCs still. People out. Right? It's not really gastrointestinal. I don't think it's allowed in the Olympics. I will tell you that many, many athletes used and used BPC 157 to recover from injury more quickly. CB 500 is very restricted, but BPC 157 seems to be less restricted. Yeah. I worry about any conversation about this only if people think, oh, I'm just going and take this so I can like grow.

2:46:37So let me recover bigger by steps. Like don't, like just, cancer's nothing you want. So that's the second, this is the second thing I want to tell you about. So Chase, who isn't here today, leads strategist for us. He had started to hear about some of the great effects that you get from BPC 157. I think that he took an oral version of it. Yeah, those are out there. Have you heard about this an thymia response once where it just creates a persistent feeling of hopelessness that is inescapable. No, but that sounds horrible. Don't do it, folks. Taking BPC157 or injecting testosterone sipinect because you just want more gains and recovering the gym is absolutely foolish.

2:47:18You know, I've talked about these things before. You know, I was 45 before I touched anything and you need to bank sperm if you want kids. You need to take HCG if you want to maintain sperm production. You need to keep dosages low. I also did an experiment where I went on and then went off. I would not take these things continuously unless you're working with a physician and they say you need it. I'm living proof that you don't need to do it continuously. And I would also say that when it comes to BPC157, the angiogenic effects are really the most concerning. Again, you could get vascularization of tumors.

2:47:54The one peptide that - Is that mediated? Whether you take it orally or sub -Q? Nobody knows. So I was gonna ask did you inject it locally into the because I wasn't injecting my eye No, so I was shooting your typical sort of love handle spots TB 500 just Because I was trying to get it as close so it was sort of the fat on the inside of your calf I was shooting it in there just in case it would maybe some sort of side probably some local effect Here's what we know about the PC 157 it's from the animal studies It seems able to detect injury in some very interesting way and lead to fibroblast there's a certain kind of cell type, a relevant attendin, etc.

2:48:34It's actually Achilles tendon ruptures in the mice or the rats that they're using. That's right. I thought, well, God, if it's ever going to work for anything. And sciatic nerve as well. And what's also interesting is there are a couple peptides that I think are going to be discussed more and more, you know, BPC157 and OZM pick are the ones you hear the most about. those are after all both peptides as is insulin by the way. For sleep, pinealin, which is related to regeneration and support of the pineal gland, very interesting. Maybe we talk about this in a year or so when there's more data. Cordogen, things that are relevant to the trek one pathway and can accelerate nerve growth.

2:49:13Not track, track receptors BDNF, not that pathway, but Trek one. There's a lot of interest now, Brian Johnson, very interested and others interested in cerebral lice, which is sold in Europe, but not the US. Taking cerebral lice in at the moment. Are you? Yeah. How does it? How do you feel? I've only shot it once. So that's I am. So you're taking cerebral lice? Yeah. Okay. I've taken once. I've never tried it. No, so I've used it once. I need to shoot again. I have to say I just get nervous with I am injections generally to fucking big old needle to be shooting in and it's a why why use a big needle?

2:49:45Uh, because it's a pretty hefty, um, dose. It's five mill five mills five mill. Oh my goodness. You're not going to put that through an insulin pen. Oh, you know, unless you're going to draw it up each time, you know, five individual injection. That reminds me it takes it. We didn't close the hatch on NAD. Have you ever done an NAD infusion? Yes. Number of times. Yes. And it feels like an elephant is stepping on your legs. I mean, and you're getting kicked in the groin. Have you tried that with, uh, what's the stuff that stopped you from one, Zulfran? Yeah, I don't like taking medication if I can avoid it.

2:50:15So I just you did without the Zulfron. I did I do it But I don't I didn't infuse it that fast now. I will say this I've done any infusions You feel horrible while it's going in you feel better afterwards But it's always hard to dissociate from the you know saline that you're bringing into your system because the saline is Very good could be we don't know so I we there's a place in Austin, Kooja, which I go to which is really great You get a great sauna. It's called Plotation. The salt baths are great too. The flotation tanks. So they do the NAD infusions and they'll do it with Zulfron. So I'm there with James, a newtonic guy in my house, my Zach, and she says, you want the thing to stop you feeling so I was like, yeah, of course.

2:50:54And classic three guys in a row, we just start opening up the taps on this thing to the point where it's just pouring in. Yeah, the idea here that Chris is referring to is that when you do an NAD infusion, they'll offer to give it to you over the course of three hours, two hours, one hour. I heard, and this is just lower, that Rogan does it in like 30 minutes. I think it does it less. The faster you put it in, the faster you infuse the more painful it is. And if you don't take the Zoltranets call, something like the Antinagia medication, you feel like you want a vomit, you feel irritable. But then when it's done, the moment it's done, you definitely feel better.

2:51:32I just don't know what the source of the effect is. But the rationale there is that unlike NRNRNN, which need to be converted, which need to be converted, excuse me, to NAD, the direct infusion of NAD, either by some lingual, a litroferetic patch, or by IV infusion, is supposed to get into your cells more readily. But again, and it tends to be pretty expensive. It's not, it's a couple hundred bucks or more. I'm reading it. I haven't been doing NAD infusions consistently. You know, these days I'm back to real basics. I may still do the basics. I will give you my review on what I'm doing at the moment.

2:52:11But right now, BPC157, Thymus and Alpha, are you injured? Thymus and Beta. What's the rationale? I'm doing this mold detox, very aggressive mold detox. So mold detox, yeah. I've heard this like that people who are like a number of people that I know from Austin claim. Particularly a bad thing in Austin. I haven't spoken about this. It's the damp, damp night's hot. Correct. Yeah, I haven't spoken about this on the show yet. We're kind of tracking everything, and I'll bring it up at some point. But that cerebral isin, MOTC. So I've got a peptide. It's a very important part. I'm also doing ozone therapy.

2:52:48Have you ever tried that? No. So half a pint of blood is taken out. If you put into a bag with an anti -coagulant and then an antimicrobial gas is pushed into the bag so it almost looks like it's carbonating your blood. And then the sci -fi. Oh, this is, I've got everything. I'm doing 25 gram IV. You don't even live in Los Angeles. No, no. But there's places alive and well in Austin. It's phenomenal for this. Glutathione IV, phosphatetal coline, red light therapy, lymph massage, everything to try and fix. I've got my brain fogging on. You look healthy. Thank you. I'm very sharp. I don't feel it.

2:53:26But it's working along. One thing that I did want to loop back to that you mentioned earlier on, you're teaching an undergraduate course. How? How is that not going to be the most oversubscribed? Cues out of the... I mean, people go to see you do talks in Australia. How are you able to organize a course at a university? Surely that's just going to be everybody in the sister who's going to come along? Yeah, we'll see what happens. You know, I've talked consistently. I've never taken a sabbatical, a formal sabbatical. I have sabbatical time accrued where I could not teach. But during the pandemic, we were mostly remote teaching.

2:54:10I was directing our course in neuroanatomy for medical students and teaching. I did some in -person lectures. Last year I did a remote lecture. Because my main appointment is in the medical school, you either have to teach or do research in order to fulfill your obligation. So, you know, at Stanford, we have the option to teach undergraduate courses. And I spoke to my chair, my new chair, I'm in three different departments now, but the chair I'm currently under. And we decide I would teach an undergraduate course in neuroscience and health in particular. It's also gonna have some guest lectures, and we're gonna make it a big course.

2:54:52So anywhere from 400 to 600 students, I've taught lectures that big before when I was Threates of that size. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're you know, they're not really amphitheater But yeah, certainly big enough when I was before I was at Stanford my lab I trained at Stanford as a postdoc But then when I was a junior professor meaning before I got tenure was at UC San Diego and I taught a course that called neural circuits and health and disease Evening course started as 50 students and very quickly grew to 400 students So I'm familiar with this kind of format. We read papers, we evaluate papers, we have guest lectures.

2:55:28I'm also getting some help from the students. This is gonna say, how many TAs are you gonna have for that? Probably gonna need somewhere between six and eight TAs. And what's interesting is that, it's a fucking cartoon, it's like SEAL team six. Yeah, and the TAs are amazing. I mean, they handle so much of the work related to kind of the mechanics, but obviously as an instructor, you need to coordinate that. And when I directed the neuroanatomy course, I had a TAs in there. There was a laboratory component as well where they dissect brains and things of that sort. Again, all made more difficult by the pandemic situation.

2:56:01It was really complicated, but they're phenomenal. So it worked out. I've reached out to some of the students who are helping me devise the curriculum, which is going to be a lot of fun. You know, learning from the students, like what are the things that you really want to understand? and they are phenomenal. I mean, obviously Stanford students, as our students elsewhere, just like fun on. What age will these be? So undergraduates, I suppose, when I went to college, I'm a fall baby. So I was born late September. So when I went off to college, I was still 17. I turned 18 my first month in school because we're on the quarter system as a Stanford.

2:56:36So they're gonna be somewhere between 18 and 22. It's gonna be a lot of fun. We're gonna get people in from computer science and AI. We're gonna get people in from obviously neuroscience by engineering, chemistry, psychology, you should come up for a lecture. It's gonna be a little bit of a challenge. We are definitely going to be checking IDs at the door. I was gonna say it's like a fucking capacity problem. People are gonna be sneaking in. You're gonna have to have a turn style. We, well, I don't wanna give away too much about this, but we will have a format by which enrolled students will be like, it'll be clear who those are.

2:57:12And, you know, but we're not gonna announce the location of the course like each day or anything. So yeah, wow, but yeah, it's a lot of fun and people often want to know like you know Can I come to Stanford and see your your space and this and you know? Unfortunately that can't happen. I heard a rumor, but these are gonna be filmed I should say that that very likely Stanford media is gonna put these out there separate from the podcast I mean if they ever wanted to get some free plays on YouTube That's a pretty easy way to do it. Bob Sapolsky's lectures at Stanford or some of the most popular The number of times that you see introduction to evolutionary biology.

2:57:43That one famous photo of him in front of the board. Yeah, how compatible have you found the life of a influencer, very well known podcaster, with being a sort of responsible and in -depth researcher? Is that challenging to navigate those two things? Yeah, so keep in mind, just to give people an orientation of how this went, you know, in 2019, I started posting clips to Instagram just because in 2020, I started going on podcasts. I think I went on close to 30 podcasts in 2020, including Rogue and Rich Roll and Lex Friedman's podcast, Whitney Cummings podcast. And then we launched the podcast, the human lab podcast in January of 2021.

2:58:28From the time I've been 19 years old, I've been a student and working in a laboratory. I started my laboratory as an assistant professor when I was 35. I got tenure when I was 40 and I've been at Stanford Since I was 40 I'm 49 and tenured there and I ran my laboratory to pretty big capacity I had at one point I had a lot of students and postdocs and technicians and things of that sort During the pandemic, I definitely shrunk the size of my research laboratory in part that was related to the pandemic In part, it was related to the fact that I was doing more and more public -facing work The Huberman lab as a research lab still exists, but we do human clinical trials.

2:59:05And we published a paper in 2023 with my collaborator David Spiegel, who's in the Department of Psychiatry, where we started doing those experiments remotely, people wearing boot bands and other devices to monitor their sleep and HRV, etc. while they were doing specific practices to mitigate stress. Yes, currently I'm involved in the generation of experiments in humans to evaluate non -sleep deep rest as it relates to patterns of activity in the human brain. Those are experiments that are spinning up with Matt Walker, that we've done at Berkeley, as well as studies at Stanford through the Department of Ophthalmology and some other departments looking at visual repair.

2:59:45So there's a longstanding interest in mind trying to understand and cure glaucoma. the second leading cause of blindness in the world second only to cataract. So, I still have research funds and so the Huberman Lab exists now in that realm working with clinicians. So, gone are the days we now only recently. So, we might read that. So, we might read, but gone are the days now where you can walk into my laboratory and see mice that express green fluorescent protein and glow that was not long ago where that was true or we had brain bone mice that glowed 12 different colors, not developed by me but developed by others.

3:00:18But we use those tools where people were recording from neurons using extracellular electrodes. We've recorded from human brain in collaboration with Dr. Eddie Chang at UCSF, recording from the human insula while people are in VR looking at great white sharks that I filmed while doing the... So I've been involved in a number of different styles of research and I still am very much interested in research, I'm still on advisory, excuse me editorial committees and so forth. These days, because of the demands of the podcast and the fact that we're soon launching in addition to the standard podcast, 30 minute, what we call essentials, 30 minute versions of the podcast, in addition to the long form, okay?

3:00:54Because I'm also writing the bonus chapters on my book, which is out next April, because I am going on podcast and still very much involved in science philanthropy through psychom, my company, and through a bunch of other venues. And I'm very much interested in lobbying for advancing treatments for the PTSD and other psychiatric challenges. because I've been spread over a lot of things. I'm basically restricted to doing one or two studies per year or two. And I'm fortunate to have excellent collaborators and clinicians and postdocs that can carry that work, but we still have to look at data and analyze data and write papers.

3:01:33So, you know, I think one of the people who has been very important as an example, but also a mentor, I've never said this out loud was from an early stage, the Dr. Robert Sapolsky. It's been very generous with advice about how to navigate these sorts of things about being public facing and transitions from laboratory and teaching, etc. And I must say that Stanford has been wonderful in their support of the podcast. They've been wonderful in support of me evolving this new course curriculum. They've been wonderful in terms of embracing these new types of philanthropy to bring laboratories other than mine, the kind of financial support that allows them to do really cutting edge science.

3:02:13So, one of my missions, and this wasn't discussed much, publicly, but it should have been, is that during the Obama administration, there was the Brain Initiative. It infused over $100 million in the Brain Research. During the Trump administration that followed, that funding was maintained, although it changed names. Just this last year, or so, the brain initiative was cut, the budget was cut by approximately 40%. And as a consequence, a lot of neuroscience laboratories were not able and are not able to do the important work that they need to do to develop treatments for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for eating disorders, for addiction and on and on, autism, etc.

3:02:52So a big part of my effort these days is to raise awareness and money from donors, but also from SICOM, my company, the parent company, the HLP, to bring money to researchers so they can do that work. And I'm very passionate about this because as somebody who wrote grants for years, as somebody who ran a laboratory for years and still does, although in a more minor extent, the academic has to work two jobs. They have to work like a demon to raise the money to begin to do the work. And oftentimes the best work takes years to evolve and many granting agencies sadly will not fund work until it's already basically done, believe it or not.

3:03:39So I've become very, very passionate about raising more money for the best science. And one of the things I love about doing science philanthropy is that I can direct money to laboratories very quickly. In fact, I have one rule for giving funds to a laboratory. First of all, right now we're only funding human work, not animal work. Second, of course the work has to be of excellent value and quality. But the grant application has to be one sentence and no more. You write me two sentences, you're not getting the money. I don't want to budget. I trust the best researchers to do excellent work. And then we give them the funds and they are unrestricted, meaning they have to spend them on research, but they can do the great work they want to do.

3:04:19What's the coolest sentence that you've received? Oh, we've given money to Joanna Steinglas' laboratory at Columbia University School of Medicine, and her stated goal is to find a cure for anorexia nervosa, the most deadly of all psychiatric illnesses. Period. Now, that's a grant application, and it's one that I was happy to fund, and that we're going to be happy to continue to fund. And it's been marvelous to see these billionaire donors, and hundreds of million dollars in worth donors, put their money into the pot. They've now forexed our initial contributions to from SICOM, and it's continuing to grow, and it's just all the ecosystems perfect.

3:05:02Where can people go if they want to throw some money at the? Yeah, so we fund it in part through our premium channel, which I do these AMAs. If people want to give to SICOM philanthropy directly, they can, if people have money that they want to put towards science and they want to bypass all of that, they can do that by contacting, let me give the proper name. It would be Ian at psychom with 2mscicommedia .com. This is not money that I'm seeking for my own laboratory. This is me acting as a hub to distribute money to excellent laboratories. This is a very important mission in my life because I can tell you as a researcher who wrote grants for years, that the amount of time and energy that talented researchers put into raising money to be able to do their work is extraordinary.

3:05:53And it's not that with money, you can do successful science necessarily, but you can afford a lot more risk -taking, healthy risk -taking in science. And you just get more time to develop and analyze data. And we have a dearth of funding. In this country, there's more funding for research than anywhere else in the world. the UK is pretty good as well. Germany's pretty good as well. Switzerland is well there, other countries. But the more money that goes into research, the faster cures are found. We know this. We know this from every disease that's ever been looked at, where there's time, energy, a healthy dose of emotion, and money, you get cures for the most challenging diseases.

3:06:35This is absolute fact. I've been thinking about this sort of, a little bit of a juxtaposition that I see happening with you. Maybe recently or maybe it's always been never bubbling below the surface, which is between cerebral horsepower, sort of cognition, rational, material, science and intuition, something which is a little bit more sort of a fameral, it's kind of embodied, it's good. There's no language for it. Good instinct in a way. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about thinking, thinking about science and how it works. What is your advice for people on how to follow intuition more, how to blend the cognitive with the intuitive?

3:07:20Yeah. Yeah, I can feel ideas in my body. And it's like, I can remember driving as a graduate student to visit friends in San Francisco because I was in graduate school north of San Francisco. And and feeling in my left arm. So weird. Feeling in my left arm that I was gonna do something new and I ended up doing some writing for a music right about music for a skateboarding magazine that led and led to set of ideas that eventually led to this, that it is a podcast, philanthropy, it so on. The nervous system because it includes the brain embody, I think has a more ancient form of response months and acts as more of a rudder in our, sort of, somatic awareness in our body are thinking obviously can be very structured and I indeed try and train up both.

3:08:16Here's the exercise that I think is very useful and it's going to seem really squishy and new AG but it was given to me by the great Martha back who's triple degree from Harvard who who then developed a bunch of self -help personal development tools to figure out right path, right life for whoever you are listening to this. The exercise that I did based on one of her books years ago was you sit quietly and you imagine something terrible, something really terrible, and you observe and feel how your body responds to that. the feeling of contraction that precedes the movement of your limbs or covering up.

3:08:58Then you relax it a bit, you shake that off and maybe at a different time, maybe a few minutes later, so you do that several times, maybe for five, ten minutes, set a timer. Then you do the opposite. You start imagining things that are absolutely the word that comes to mind is very Martha Beckian, delicious to you, things that just feel so good, right? And don't limit yourself. And you experience in a way preceding any bodily movement, how your body, your face, your nervous system responds to that. And what you're doing is you're tapping into the more, in some sense, crude, more broad, but in other ways, more sensitive aspects of your nervous system to detect, yes versus no.

3:09:44You know, so many of the circuits of the brain work in a yum -yuk kind of fashion, where you either want to move towards things yum away from things, what we call a version, yuck or meh, kind of mutual, right, ambivalence. The body has the option to move toward to remain where it's at or to move away. And paying attention to the signals that precede those intuitive decisions and practicing them through these, you know, she has this perfect A exercise, which has been very, very useful to me. I've started doing it again and where you take 10 minutes and you just know limits. You just go perfect A.

3:10:19What is your perfect A? and you just allow that to come up, what is the bed you wake up in, where you look around the room, what's there, allowing surprise and unanticipated things to enter the room. You know, maybe you wake up alone, maybe with one person, maybe with two people, maybe you have a dog, maybe you have a cat, maybe you have a fish, but you let some of that guys are up from your unconscious mind. The, as Paul Conti would say, the unconscious mind carries a wisdom based on your prior experience, maybe even the experience of people before you, that your conscious mind can work with, but you need to be able to access it sometimes through dreams, but this perfect day exercise that Martha talks about allows this emergence of what's inside you in the directions that are really right for you.

3:11:03Okay, there's no limits on this. Now, what you're watching for in these different exercises is again, how your nervous system responds before the action that you would take. So you're withholding action. So you're not going, oh, that feels terrible and you're not going, oh, that feels great. You're paying attention to the neural signals that precede the impulse to do that. And you're playing with it. And I would say this is a great way to build your intuition and to learn to respond to it when you're conscious and moving through space. The other day I was on a phone call and I was just all of a sudden I realized like, I don't want to be on this phone call.

3:11:39I don't know what's happening. I don't want to be on it. I thought, yeah, Andrew, like quit being such a worse, like, like, great, don't be so emotional. And I realized I was like, this is very energy draining to me. And I got off the phone call. Other things moving toward. I think that intuition in science, my dad talks a lot about this when we talked, Einstein talked a lot about this, not to put us in the same bin at all. But, you know, there was one, there's a story about Einstein. I know because my dad talks about him all the time, where someone gave him a picture to sign an autograph, a picture of Einstein.

3:12:09And Einstein put an arrow to his nose and said the source of all my ideas, like his, you know, he could sense like where things were. But you need to develop a set, everyone needs to develop a sense for themselves of what steers them in a particular direction. What are the somatic signals? Again, the somatic signals, the signals of the body are more crude in the sense that they are more divorced from language, but they are more sensitive. It reminds me of the neural retina. We have two systems of vision in the retina as humans. One that is the rod system, which is very sensitive. It's the one you use at dusk and at night to sense if there's anything in your environment.

3:12:48It's very sensitive. It can detect one photon, one photon, but it has very poor acuity. It's not very nuanced at the level of seen boundaries or edges, but it will tell you if something is moving from behind a tree to get you. The cone system, as we call it, is far less sensitive. The cone system, in contrast, is far less sensitive. Okay, it can't detect such subtle differences in luminosity, but it is exquisitely good at deciphering boundaries and color. In fact, it's the system that allows for trichromacy, which is what allows us to see this as yellow. And dogs see this probably as kind of a blunted orange or a burnt orange because they are dichromats, not trichromats.

3:13:35So I think I know that within the body, we have a sense of intuition that we can learn to listen to the signals are very, very sensitive. You're like a tuning fork to your environment. Most people learn to suppress this and we override it with thinking and cognition. People that can combine thinking and cognition with this more coarse language of the body are able to parse their life experience in the direction they're going to go in with exquisite sensitivity. And when you read, shit, you don't even need to read. You can just listen to do something Rick Rubin says, or you could do better and read his book.

3:14:12What you realize is that Rick is somebody who he's like a sensor for music. When he talks about his taste, he's able, I mean, he has this incredible ability to get, really let things waft over him and experience them and go, yes, more of that and less of that. He's like a, he's a conductor and he can say more of that, do more of that. But what's so unbelievable about Rick, so spectacular is that when he steps away from that experience, he's boundary, he's still himself. So it's kind of like empathy, but he can engage in disengage it in a very adaptive way, which is why he can create a little cool J, Beastie boys, Slayer, their Rick, I mentioned Slayer because he gives me a hard time about not listening to Slayer.

3:14:57Slayer, right? You know, Adele and on and on. He's able to sense what is good, what is extra good, And that's what taste is in the same way that, you know, somebody who is expert in wines, how are you pronounce? Sommelier or what are you pronounce? Sommelier. Sommelier, the Sommelier or the chef or the food taster or the neurosurgeon. They know the precise movements. They know the chemistry and the ingredients. That's part of their training. But ultimately it's the gestalt. It's the whole picture that's taken in. You sip the wine, right? You have to understand how the cut that you make in a neural circuit leads to changes is a network wide, brain wide, body wide.

3:15:40And so being able to straddle those two levels of analysis is really the essence of being a virtuoso, right? And I'm not calling myself that, I'm referring to these other people that way, right? A virtuoso is somebody that can embrace all the levels of granularity in an exploration, all the details, but also the macroscopic picture. And then combine those in a way that's really unique. And I think that, you know, the basic training of anything is a layering up of formal training. I do believe that. That most people need a formal training. And then at some point you get to a level of expertise where your intuition is guiding you because it's grounded in all that knowledge.

3:16:20It just, it comes forward in what look like very simple blocks. But those simple blocks are built on incredible depth of knowledge and understanding. And for myself, you know, I spent a lifetime exploring biology in the nervous system. and that's where my depth of expertise exists. But why are we now soon going to do in addition to long episodes, shorter episodes? Well, some people only have 30 minutes and they wanna know how to sleep better and they don't wanna have to listen to four episodes at four hours long. So I want them to know the basic things to do. So I think having the offering and the understanding of different levels of granularity is key.

3:16:54And you do this, Chris. Listen, three years ago, I said to Rob, I go, in addition to all the podcasters that are already doing phenomenally well. I said, David Centra, Founder's podcast and Chris. They're the ones that are going to be next, next level in a year. And I'm not saying I have a crystal ball, but boom, you guys are killing it. And I know that you're pointed at the sun and you're just going to continue along this trajectory. It's like, it's a felt thing because I can tell by the number of different topics, the number of on production, how you treat your team, the nuance that you put, the way that you articulate, the emphasis that you put on the details of, like, you know what's in your energy during down to the milligrams of this is like when you meet someone who runs a laboratory, they know at the beginning where everything is placed.

3:17:47At some point, they don't even know where the antibodies are because it's not their job to know. It's the student's job to know. But they knew how to know that when they needed to. And so I don't care if you're talking about yo -yo -ma, Rick Rubin, you, Rogan, Lex, it's all the same thing. And what you need to, what people need to understand is that you have to get the formal rigorous training. Or if there's no degree in what you do, it's just hour upon hour upon hour upon hour. And then eventually it starts to look like a kind of shorthand and just natural, but that's built on deep, deep, deep expertise.

3:18:20If you never learn the rules of the game, there's no such thing as breaking the rules. You're just playing the wrong sport. That's right. So you have to have that ground. Yeah, I mean, you know, my background in nightlife, we always wanted our guys to come up from being a guest -lister. That's what we did. We gave out wristbands in the rain, in the cold, asking people where are you going to night -dalling. And after six months, then you get to stand on the front door. And then after you stand on the front door, you get to work out how the tells work. And then after you've done that, and you work all the way up.

3:18:49And I think that there's something very reassuring about hearing somebody. Maybe they don't know as much as the audio engineer or as the director of photography or as the producer or as the whatever, but they can hold the conversation. I was there when it was at a lower resolution and now you're beyond my skill set, but I can hold the conversation all the way up. And there's a kind of respect that that commands, and I really like that. I've always wanted to sort of embody that and develop that in myself. and I guess there's some disadvantage, many disadvantages to kind of being obsessive and very attentive and very vigilant, but there's a ton of advantages as well.

3:19:25Sure, advantages. I mean, my friend Eddie Chang is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's one of, if not the best neurosurgeon in the world at least in the top three, he's constantly evolving his craft as his show. And this might seem as if it's some sort of promotional thing, but I just want to point out because it's relevant to the conversation we're in, and some of the things that have surfaced. Like in terms of sponsors that I'll work with, no, I didn't say you can go from a two to a seven. That was AI, I didn't promote that company. There's a lot of AI and bullshit out there using our face name and likeness.

3:20:02But the sponsors that I work with, whether or not it's AG1, Aitsleep, Element, these sponsors, the reason I work with those sponsors is, yes, I use those products, AG since 2012. But in addition, in particular with AG1 and H sleep, they are constantly improving the product they're making. You know, it's very interesting to see how the companies that are doing best are the ones that come under the most scrutiny, and are also the companies that are doing the most innovative iteration year after year after year after year. Why? Because they've been in the game a long time, and they continue to iterate on more or less the same thing over and over and over.

3:20:43Now some people would say, okay, Crete Monohydrate, right? I'm not involved in any company that promotes Crete Monohydrate. I take Crete Monohydrate. I have since I was 17 years old. At that time, everyone said it was going to blow out your kidneys or whatever, but anyway, I read about it in a MM2000 issue for those of you that remember. I was like, well, this stuff really works. Turns out, it doesn't destroy your kidneys. Okay, it's also good for cognition. It turns out. But, you know, does Crete Monohydrate need to be evolved? No, it's a single ingredient type of formulation that some people might find benefit from no requirement to take it I'm not selling it anyway But when it comes to things that are blends of things where it comes to a sleep technology So like a G1 like it sleep and again people might think oh this is just a you know an ad in disguise No, I will only work with companies that are telling me yes We're constantly working to make the purity better and better and better 99 .9 % isn't good enough.

3:21:37We're constantly trying to make a cooling bed better It's now going to help you offset snoring. Amazing. The sleep tracker on a sleep is exquisitely good. It's laboratory grade sleep tracking. The companies that succeed over time, like Apple, I mean, I'm from the Bay Area after all, like Apple, or we see YouTube. I mean, they're constantly updating things, constantly updating the algorithms, Instagram, constantly meta, you know, and X is evolving. And so I am an absolute fanatic about anything that mimics the scientific process, which is you come up with hypothesis, you develop something or you develop a technology and you're constantly trying to improve on that technology over and over and over, which is why I use these things.

3:22:22Why I know they're gonna continue to get better and why I already believe in their value now. And this is I think something that's often lost in the discussion about Oh, does this really work? Does it? Yes. And the point is that you want to surround yourself with colleagues, with sponsors, if you need them, or use them with people in your life that are really, you know, we hear the word optimization, but that are optimizing for the now that also includes a balanced life, right? And it's reasonable about, you know, what you can do in a given day. And that are constantly trying to do better. These are the things and products and people that evolve health, that evolve science, that evolve creative activities.

3:23:01And, you know, I can even look to Rick as somebody, or my friend Tim Armstrong, Tim writes a song every day. He had platinum records back when he doesn't need to do that, but he, people who are just obsessive about their craft and lead balanced lives, end our healthy. These are the people that we need to look to. Joe too. I mean, four, three or four, three hour podcasts per week, okay? Plus UFC, plus stand up. Plus he has a family, plus he's a healthy guy, and he just did the special. The special was super entertaining. I could feel the catharsis in some of that. And you can be sure he works like a demon.

3:23:44Yes, he does the co -plunge. Yes, he does his training. All it like, I know you do, I know Rick does, I know I do, I know Whitney does, I know Sandra does, I know, you know, there are many other examples. And so forgive me for not naming it. Jay Shetty works extremely hard to make their craft better and better and better. And so for people coming up, it doesn't mean you have to devote 12 hours a day to it or 100 hours a week, but you got to put in, you got to, you know, chop wood carry water. I think everybody needs to pay the entry price at some point. Yeah. Chop wood carry water. Everyone's got to do it.

3:24:16Yeah. And there are no, there are very few shortcuts to the top. Is that not what it says on the steps of the mothership going up to the main stage? Have you ever been backstage? I have been there yet. Oh, okay. I think it says it's a long way to the top if you're gonna do something. But I think it's from the ACDs. It's a lot of way to... Maybe it probably. I mean, it's on, it's on -brand with everything else. Andrew Cuban, ladies and gentlemen, dudes, I really appreciate you. I love getting to catch up. It's so interesting sort of seeing where all of this is going. What you're doing with Andy Galpin's show, what you're doing with Mahwarka, what you're doing with Rob, with the book.

3:24:53my prediction is that you're gonna do something. I know that your mom does kids. There's definitely, yeah, good intuition. There's definitely some kids content and ideas I've had a longstanding interest in animation and puppets. And that's about all I can say about that right now because it's poorly formed. I'm not being cryptic. It still needs iterating, but I've had outreach from some amazing puppeteers and some amazing animators and I'm super excited. I also just want to say, you know, I'm both extremely grateful to you and I kid you not. I am extremely in awe of what you've done and what you continue to do.

3:25:36You showed up like a force and you are doing it. I feel a little bit, I've said this before, you know how in an Indiana Jones movie, the big sort of ceiling is coming down and it's, he's going to get crushed in anything. to be sprinting sprinting sprinting. So if there's a little slide underneath, I feel like grabs his hat. Yeah, and then gets the hat. I feel like me and that hat are kind of just sneaking in at the last thing and then now we're moving under our own steam. Well, whatever you're doing, it's awesome. And I really appreciate you having me here today. Every time you pop up on my screen, I'm like, yes.

3:26:09Like I'm gonna learn something. From you, I'm gonna learn something. It's your openness and also the fact that you have this razor -like mind to be able to pull things out. I wish I was as succinct, I can't even say the word, I wish I was as succinct as you. And I agree with those other guys, I wish you could run for president, but since you can't, you're just going to have to keep podcasting for us. So thank you so much for doing it. I appreciate you, man.