“This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman #1150

26:54That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I suppose one of the advantages, at least with regards to driving practically, is that people are re-triggering that on a multiple times per day basis. Yeah.

27:08Dr. Andrew Huberman:Or you get a ticket or you get into an accident. I feel like I'm quoting my dad a lot lately. That's a good sign. As my dad always says, the thing about speeding tickets is they're expensive and money hurts. Speeding tickets were$20. For most people, that's - Formative experience. It's not trivial, but it's not enough money to really dent your heavy foot on the pedal. But if you give someone a$300 ticket, plus your insurance goes up, people speed less. You're going to remember that. People speed less. I'm not saying it, you know, I mean, we could argue about speeding laws, but money hurts, right?

27:44So that's how you learn.

27:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation. I wish I had learned that in the third grade. I wish they had told me that. Now, many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things. They're getting their sets in reps and they're pushed past failure. They love their video games. They love perhaps mathematics, but not literature. The things that we are not facile in that don't come easy to us, there are two reasons to do some of that learning at every stage of life. One is it enriches us. We often find that the things that are hardest to learn that we then learn are the most satisfying.

28:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:This is the effort that precedes dopamine is far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in. You could say, well, you know, scrolling, there's no, you know, there's no effort involved and that seems very reinforcing. That's more of a compulsive behavior after a certain point, and it gets passed into reflex. But talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, oh yeah, everything was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame that big thing, and that was really the thing that taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things. right?

28:54Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, we don't really like success stories. We like underdog often to success story, pitfall come out of that. The hero's journey is something that we resonate with in part because it's so true, but in part because for so many people, it's not true. We know it's there, but most people don't embark on those things. And I think it's because we set too lofty an idea of what the hero's journey is. I mean, for a lot of people, it's about learning to do less. I know a lot of hard driving people. It's about learning how to achieve more peace. It's about exploring ideas around spirituality or fiction if they only read nonfiction.

29:32Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, we all have to ask ourselves how much should we push ourselves to do things that we're not just naturally inclined to do. I think a mixture of what we love to do and some of the things that we've just avoided because they just seem too hard. I think there's real value in doing those things. And all the data on maintaining cognitive ability say, will exercise make you smarter? No, it's necessary, but not sufficient to make you smarter. You still have to go learn. And without completely joking, I mean, this is evidenced by many guys that spend hours upon hours in the gym and they're not brilliant people.

30:05Dr. Andrew Huberman:So they're exercising plenty. Their brain is clearly not getting bigger. They're not necessarily getting stupider, but they're not doing anything to make themselves smarter. You need to learn information. So there's that, but then there's also people say, is it crossword puzzles. If you love doing crossword puzzles, guess what, my friend? They're not going to help keep your brain young. You got to do the hard puzzles. You know, if they're easy for you, then it's not going to help. You like chess, play go. You like checkers, learn chess. So this is where I think people really lose out on the understanding that people who are striving, maintain brain and bodily function for a long period of time, their internal state is not necessarily one of like, oh yeah, I just love learning.

30:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so I just keep learning. I bet you Andy Stumpf, as calm and cool and collected as he is, even though so many of his tier one operator peers tell me it's really frustrating because Andy's really good at everything. I bet you if we looked at his internal state, his narrative is probably by now says, you know, you can do this, but is I doubt it's one of complete calm all the time. I'm sure there's he's just managing the external rep. Like he's not showing it. Yeah. Talking about that, it seems like one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of people's lives is stress. What are your best protocols for managing stress?

31:23Dr. Andrew Huberman:And I realized some people may have heard this from me like 35 ,000 times, morning sunlight, yes. But that physio, just do a long exhale. When you're stressed, do a long, deliberate exhale. It slows your heart rate down through a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad. People hear arrhythmia, it sounds bad, but we've all heard of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve collects sensory information from our viscera, which is nerd speak for your internal organs. So your stomach, your spleen, your liver, sending that information up to your brain. Unconsciously, your brain is responding to that all the time.

31:59Dr. Andrew Huberman:The vagus nerve also has a portion of it that goes from the brain to the heart and other organs. And there's one particular pathway that contacts and communicates with the sinoatrial node of your heart and it slows your heart rate down when you exhale. And the reason is as you inhale and exhale, the space available for your heart changes. So when you, at some point, your heart is a little bit smaller, right? During your breathing and the volume of blood that's in there moves more quickly. So your brain sends a signal through this vagus nerve pathway to slow your heart rate down. So when you exhale deliberately, this is the key deliberately.

32:38Dr. Andrew Huberman:I don't think I've ever described it this way. You slow your heart rate down significantly. You offload carbon dioxide and your level of autonomic arousal, meaning sympathetic alert versus parasympathetic calm, balances, it tips more towards parasympathetic calm. And immediately, it's the fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. Better if you can do two big inhales first and then exhale all the way to lungs empty. That's the so-called physiological sigh. discovered in the 1930s, not by shamans, not by breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set of neurons in the paraphacial nucleus of your brainstem that capture the activity of this vagal pathway and slow your heart rate down.

33:25Dr. Andrew Huberman:But the beauty of this mechanism is it also increases what's called HRV. Most people know I want higher HRV. How do I do that? Well, I train VO2 max. I do some high-intensity interval training. Great. I do some long distance endurance training, lower intensity. Great. You have higher VO2 max. What is higher HRV? Heart rate variability reflects the number of times throughout the day and night that this pathway, this pathway in the Vegas signals your sinoatrial node to slow your heart rate down. In fact, you can increase your HRV pretty significantly if you just do 10 deliberate exhales throughout your day.

34:02Dr. Andrew Huberman:And then at night, look at your HRV. It will be significantly elevated. This is why I spoke about this last time. And this is why I need to get you one of those ohm.health lamp things for resonance breathing. We talked about this previously. Oh, yeah. So it's an algorithm. It's a stone on the top of this lamp. I think they're about to launch this month, this ohm.health. Stone on the top of the lamp. It vibrates. You breathe in time with the stone. It's got a 100 hertz sensor in it, so it's detecting your HIV all the time. And as it vibrates up and down, you breathe in time with it, and it modulates to maximize that arrhythmia.

34:33and if you were to see it you would be swinging from 61 to 72 to 62 to 70 so like 60 to 62 to 72 and it is so fucking cool and the the sensation of doing that if no one's ever done resonant breathing before it is like after about three minutes it almost feels like you've had a drink it almost feels like you're a little bit drunk it's very very when you get it and the guy jay Wiles, who's the main science dude behind it, he talks about precision with this because you can get a resonance breathing that's not doing biofeedback. The problem with that is everyone's resonance pattern is a little bit different.

35:12Everyone's resonance pattern. You might be 4.9 in and like 8 out, and I might be 4.1 in and 7 out. And that difference to him, he says makes a big difference. One final thing on that, he said to go from state change to trait change with regards to resonance breathing, you need to do over 12 minutes. He says over 20, it doesn't start to - Slot like meditation sounds like. Very similar. Very, very similar. And what's cool about this, what I love about this particular thing is you can grab it and you can hold it while watching a movie. It's like if you're just doing something else, it's silent. Even if you're with someone, you've got the lamp next to the couch or you've got the lamp next to the bed, you can't sleep at night.

35:53You grab it, it vibrates. It's pretty much silent and you can just breathe in time. You can be doing, watching something else. I haven't been able to read whilst doing it. That's a bit too cognitively demanding. But you can breathe whilst watching the TV. And that I've racked up hundreds of hours in the last year doing resonance breathing because I've grabbed that.

36:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:All right, I'm going to go buy one of these. Don't give me one. And I don't want Om to gift me one. It's funny. I still love finding new technologies, trying new things. Dude, new interventions are the best. They're just harder and harder to find new ones that people don't know about, which is why when I find one, I like chirp on about it for ages because I think that it's cool. I do the same. I mean, it's funny, throughout the book, several times I mentioned, because I talk about behavioral tools, I would say 80 % of behavioral tools. And then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements about the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on.

36:46Dr. Andrew Huberman:But multiple times I mentioned some of the devices that Saunaspace, a company I'm not affiliated with at all, Saunaspace makes these indoor red light saunas that are incandescent. They heat up right away. But I also, I travel with one of their red lights. It fills the whole room. I love those things. Raw Optics has these incredible non-flicker shortwave length eliminated. Well, they're actually same bulbs go from daylight to you can get candlelight at night with no flicker and it's LED because incandescents aren't very energy efficient. And I have no relationship to Raw Optics or to sauna space.

37:21Dr. Andrew Huberman:Like I know the people there now because I've mentioned them enough times they've reached out, but I just enjoy sharing things that I find useful. Cool shit's cool, dude. Physiological size or, you know, these particular lights. I just like sharing what I think might be useful to people. And some people have more disposable income than others. I think that, you know, nowadays it seems like the, are we over-optimizing becomes a big question. Like, are we over-optimizing? I did a huge essay about it not long ago. No, I listened and I think it's an important question. I mean, to me, optimization is just taking the, like, what do you got today?

37:52Dr. Andrew Huberman:what's on your plate today and how do you feel best and do best in that context and this brings me back to something that i failed to say earlier which is that top down versus bottom up dynamic tension pretty much everything that's in the book morning cortisol high nighttime cortisol low physiological size etc they're all of those things put you in the best position put these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive less reactive it's not meant to rhyme more adaptive, less reactive life, right? To be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS that you have no control over, this kind of thing.

38:30Dr. Andrew Huberman:To be less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you, the people that you love and doing the right things in accordance with that. You know, we all know that a bad night's sleep cripples this circuit such that the bottom-up influences take over. We know this, right? People sleep less, they're more prone to, they have less impulse control across the board and they become slightly psychotic also, especially if they don't sleep well for three or four nights in a row. But when you have these top-down mechanisms really reinforced by high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, great sleep, you're buffering stress well, you do a learning bout or two, and I do refer to them as bouts because it should feel like a bout.

39:14Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's when your life is actually headed in the direction you want. It doesn't matter where you're starting from. That's when your life starts really heading in the direction that you want consistently. And these things don't take a lot of time. In fact, they save time because they position you to be at your best, show up as your best. That's not a marketing ploy, it's just true. And some people, now I'm skipping around a bit, but I wanna make sure I close a few hatches. Some people might say, how alert and focused do you need to be to learn? We rarely talk about this. Like one thing I really emphasize in the book is like people talk about be present.

39:44Dr. Andrew Huberman:I give a tool that explains exactly how to be present. Okay, so we'll talk about that. But how alert do you need to be in order to focus and learn? What's the state of mind? Alert and calm. What is that? Because that might mean something different to you than it means to me. How do you stay there? Okay. Have you ever played that game, Hot Hands? Where, you know, I put my hands on top of yours. Wouldn't that be nice? I put my hands on top of yours. That's what we did all morning. That's literally, we didn't go to the gym. I put my hands on top of yours. And we play a game where you're going to flip your hands over and you try and smack my hands.

40:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay. And I'm going to try and pull them out of your way. And you're younger than I am. so you think you have faster reflexes, but you don't. No, I'm just kidding. You probably do. You're the person whose hands are on top. So let's say my hands are on top and you're ready to flip your hands over and tag me. You're the person with hands on top and you're in that ready anticipation of what's going to happen next. That's the state of mind for optimal learning. That's the state of mind you want to be in. So when you sit down to read something and you're like, I read that whole page and I didn't learn anything.

40:42Dr. Andrew Huberman:Of course you didn't because your brain was, you're running four or five different circuits at once In order to really turn on focus, you need to turn off a bunch of other circuits that are, or you need to lower the activity in those other circuits. You can't be thinking about at the same time, okay, what's the, how do my feet feel? How's, what's my heartbeat? What's going on online? What's my girlfriend thinking? What does she, you know, you need to be focused. What is focus? Focus is obviously in a tunnel, but then how much alertness? I don't think anyone's ever described it before, but when you look at levels of arousal in a game like Hot Hands, and believe it or not, there's some equivalent data on this or data on the equivalent sort of thing.

41:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:When you're waiting for a timed trial and you're waiting for something to happen, you have to react quickly. That's the state of mind you want to be in to learn something that's hard for you, but beneficial for you. Period. End of story. So hopefully that'll help people kind of find that mental groove. And then as you learn, if you find you're getting too stressed, that brings down reaction time. It actually, you start making false positive. You start moving your hands away before the person even does anything. Okay, so hopefully that will help people understand the level of attention and why it's so tiring after about 90 minutes.

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42:57That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What about presence? How can people be more present?

43:04Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay, so this one really surprised me. So the final chapter of the book is about personal development, okay? I was gonna do a chapter about relationships, but for various reasons, I felt like that wasn't appropriate. Then I thought about relationship to self. I thought, well, that's kind of weird because what is relationship to self? It's too squishy, a theme. But like personal development, step back and start asking questions about, first acknowledge step back and acknowledge there's a lot out there about how to get through trauma but what are the unifying themes and can i put a structure on those themes that helps people navigate all of that what's the business of having a great life so we talk about that we hear be present there's this massive study out of harvard a few years ago that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind i'm sure you're familiar with the data you ping people throughout the day You ask them what they're doing and how present they are to it.

43:55Dr. Andrew Huberman:Turns out happiness is really about being present. Having your attention, what's called present tethered awareness. You're focused on what's happening now, even if it's unpleasant. People report that as being much happier on average than if their mind is someplace else. Daydreaming has its place, but daydreaming is usually mind wandering to bad things, things of past, things of future. We're just not present. Distraction is literally unhappiness. Yes, yes. and the converse is also true that focusing on what you're doing is a great way to build up your mental health. So then I started asking, because I'm a biologist, not a psychologist, what the hell is presence?

44:34Dr. Andrew Huberman:Does it mean anchoring my visual attention? How do I be present? Because otherwise it's just a bumper sticker. And otherwise, look, I love psychologists say these beautiful studies that discover phenomena, but then it's like, if you're going to say like fall asleep, what is falling asleep? And we can talk about that. What is being present? Okay, so be here now. I think Ram Dass said that. Great, be here now. How? Turns out that if we step back and we just say, okay, what does the brain do? Don't worry, this won't turn into a whole lecture. What does the brain do? The brain takes physical phenomenon in our environment.

45:06Dr. Andrew Huberman:Photons of light, sound waves, mechanical pressure, chemicals through the nose and mouth, translates those from sensation to perception. Cool. Then we also can remember things, predict things. It's basically what the brain does, and it can change itself. So that's neuroscience in a nutshell. How do we move our brain from thinking about the future and the past to what's happening now? Okay, so that means perceptions about what's only in our immediate physical environment. It means not thinking, not doing, not planning, but asking questions about the immediate physical environment. So we can do this just right now, and you can do this anytime you want to be more present.

45:45And I want to just preface this by saying, what I'm about to describe is not the end

45:49Dr. Andrew Huberman:point. It's the way to get into the present. But what you do next is critically important too. So first you ask trivial questions about your immediate environment that can only be answered accurately by focusing on the present. So for instance, what does it smell like in here right now? Like, I'm not getting much for me, but okay. What is, like how many cans are on this table? One, two, three. there's a couple other vessels four cans okay all right answering two or three trivial questions seemingly trivial questions about your present environment how many people are in line in front of me how loud are the kids screaming in the back seat is it louder or softer than last time things like that bring our mind toward obviously perception of the present duh there's nothing you know, profound about that, but it's what they take our mind away from.

46:50Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's critically important. The brain, there's a whole section on thinking. What is thinking? The brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states, which is nerd speak for if I take a ball bearing and I put it on a, on a plate, it essentially can move in any direction. There's some details related to the smoothness of the bearing and the plate, et cetera. But if I put a little groove on that plate and I tilt the plate slightly, it obviously will go toward the groove. It'll get into the groove And then if I turn that groove into a, I make it more concave and eventually a trench, the ball bearing stays there.

47:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's how your brain works. The more that you see the thought, the more that you see the perception, the more that brain circuits are devoted to things related to that thought or perception. So when you want to be present, something that we know from excellent data, I have this large study at Harvard, but subsequent studies as well is so critical for happiness. the way to practice that is to learn from taking your mind from thinking and doing and remembering about things of past and future to just anchoring your perception to the present it doesn't require meditating meditation is one form of that what what are we doing when we meditate we close our eyes we focus on our breathing that's here now and we focus on the quote-unquote third eye center or whatever but that's actually interoception it's focusing on our internal bodily state which is not that great, frankly, if you look at the data for being present in a happy way.

48:16Dr. Andrew Huberman:Most people who are overly focused on their internal state in the present are like, my heart rate is increasing. My heart rate's too low. I'm sweating. I'm uncomfortable. You start thinking about the fact that like your, you know, your boxers are like pulled up on one leg. You know, that's not the way to get present and calm and aware. The way to get present, calm, and aware and be able to move forward from that in the best way is to ask questions about your immediate physical environment. Once you do that, remember, that's just the first step. The second step is to use that heightened level of awareness to ask yourself, what do I want to, what do I actually want to do next?

48:54Dr. Andrew Huberman:What do I want to say next? What do I want to think about next? This is the way that you take control of your thoughts. And I won't go into all the detail now, but thoughts have this way they seed each other. So I think we've done this thing about the cat, right? I think we did that previously. We say like, you know, I think of a cat. Okay. You know, tell me about it. People say, well, it has soft, it's this color, it's this, that you're starting to recruit more and more neural machinery toward the thought about this trivial thing that we call a seed idea, which is the cat. But if you just let your brain run like through the tributaries of its like own choices, you end up in a pretty unhappy place.

49:34Dr. Andrew Huberman:So the key to being a high agency, happy person, it turns out, is being able to control your thinking and bring it back to the present. But then you don't just stay there thinking about your breathing. That's like kind of sociopathic, right? It's weird. It's like, it's just weird. You ask questions about your immediate environment, and then you pivot into the person that you want to be in terms of action and thinking and speaking, or maybe silence is called for. And so none of this is psychology. This is all 100 % neuroscience. I get into the underlying mechanisms and it fully supports everything that I just described.

50:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:I should say is fully supported by the work that shows that people who have heightened levels of activity in the so-called default mode network. This is the network of activity that just takes place when you're doing essentially nothing are more depressed Too much activity in the default mode network. Yes, some is associated with creativity, but usually elevated levels of activity in the default mode network are what you find in depressed people because their brain is just kind of all over the place and they feel discombobulated. Unless we're in sleep, we need to organize our internal landscape.

50:41Dr. Andrew Huberman:The problem is most people here, you need to organize your internal landscape and they think, oh, you have to get up in the morning, do 10 breaths of meditation, get your light. And they think about it as rigidity. I'm talking about now And throughout the book, it's all about the things that set you up to lean into life so that you're reflexively more effective. You're reflexively happy. You're reflexively more adaptive. You're reflexively more present. And I think this is where the over-optimization conversation is relevant. None of these practices are an end in and of themselves, right? I mean, I think nowadays because people go to the gym and they get like the aesthetic effect they want, they think like, oh, you go to the gym to do that.

51:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:I go to the gym so that I can sprint for the plane, open the pickle jar, move all the boxes on moving day up and down the stairs and feel great tired, but great at the end of the day. And I like being strong for life. I like having endurance so I can go hiking in Yosemite. If we go, let's go tomorrow, we're going and carrying 80 pound packs. We do it tomorrow. And yeah, it hurts a little bit, but like in a good way. And you can sprint for the plane and not cough up a lung. You can, you know, there's a section on mobility, which is, you know, four trivial mobility exercises. You know, get your knee behind your glutes once a day, squat down, do kind of bend and look up at the ceiling, like to a right angle, be able to look up on both sides, identify any, you know, kind of mismatches on either side and work through those.

52:03Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so I can like lean down and grab things and move so I can reach and grab things. Like you threw me the protein drink out there. I just, for the record, I caught it. You did catch it. I'm not so proud of that. I'm just pissed that your camera guy will probably wait until I drop it and then film that one. So for the record, they're running a diabolical scheme here at, uh, and modern wisdom where they wait for you to F up and then they film it. But when you get it right, no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Actually, I don't care about, I'm not, obviously my hand eye coordination is not something I I'm like really concerned about, but, um, nor do I boast about, but the point being that it's all about being able to move through life with confidence and agency and awareness and sensitivity to what you need to be sensitive to and being and saying pfft to the things that you need to say pfft to you, that's a really good life.

52:51Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's not about the tools. It's about what the tools open up for you. Yeah, I think a lot of people have an issue with the over-optimization thing because it feels like more homework. They're already overwhelmed. They're already working hard. The sort of people that read your book and listen to your podcast and are fans of modern wisdom, they're already contorting themselves into a pretzel trying to get more out of their day. They've already got standards that are so impossibly high that they can't meet them. And now when they sometimes hear people saying, you need to do this and do this and do this and this, they feel like they're overwhelmed.

53:18And the difference being, you can make yourself fragile if your entire performance and your whole life is predicated on this kind of rain dance ritual that you are only able to do the stuff if you have had this like weird two hours of foreplay beforehand. I understand why that's the case. Two hours of foreplay.

53:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, that's a lot. I knew that that would be. I mean, what's that? So nothing. I mean, some people might argue it's not enough. Yeah, that's true. I guess it depends on how much time you got. That's true. It could be a Sunday. But I think, at least from my experience, periodizing your life is one of the best ways to think about this. And a lot of people, especially toward the end of their 20s, especially a lot of guys go through this manopause. They go through this period where they realize that all of the strategies, tools, habits, routines, modes of getting recognition and success from the people around them, they've stopped working and they want to become something better it's kind of like a second adolescence it's actually a more important adolescence i think than the one from you know 13 to kind of like 17 and they're okay what sort of person what sort of man do i want to become in this world i don't know maybe women go through it too but but i i know that i see it in a lot of guys especially dudes that are a little bit more deep thinkers and maybe they played the game in their 20s they were successful perhaps maybe at playing the game which game are you referring Like the social norms game.

54:37I'm going to like, you know, contort myself or like chameleon a little bit. I'm not going to bring up quite what I think or what I mean or my unique interests.

54:44Dr. Andrew Huberman:Well, that can be adaptive too. I mean, especially in the age of camera phones. I mean, when I grew up, you say something outrageous at a party, just like, you know, not offensive, but just outrageous. And it may land, it might not land, but you don't worry that it's going to land everywhere. It's not concretized on the internet for the rest of time. Yeah. I mean, I, I, and this is not just for public facing people. I mean, I feel like, um, you're probably a great dancer, but you know, I think like a lot of people are, are not right. A lot of men in particular are not. Um, and you know, you'd like to be able to like go to a wedding and dance and have fun and not think about how that's going to show up.

55:17Yeah. Is someone going to mock me for this video? So anyway, you know, guys get, get to this period and they think what sort of a person am I going to be? And that to me and for me, and for a lot of my friends as well, I needed to basically bundle together quite a lot of locking. I needed to lock the fuck in. I needed to lock in for an extended period of time. And from the outside, that might look like an over-reliance on protocols and self-experimentation and optimizing and doing things like that. But what they don't see when they look at somebody that's going through that period is I was basically paying a debt that I had slowly accumulated over a decade and a half of running nightclubs.

55:52I will go toe to toe with pretty much anyone for degenerate behavior in my 20s, right? I ran more parties, did more of the things that you're not supposed to do in my 20s than almost anyone else. I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs. I attended a thousand parties. A thousand parties. A thousand parties. That's how many we ran. You and my 20s were very different. We had a million lifetime entries. I had a great time, but very different venues. So I'm like, I've served my time. And then I needed to, I wanted to become somebody that was a little bit more well-rounded, that understood himself, that had a great connection, all of those things.

56:25And I was like, okay. So if you look at me from 28 to 32, 33 in isolation, it actually looks like probably quite a fragile, highly strung life where I've got this elaborate morning routine that's going on for a couple of hours. And I'm like, getting up and getting sunlight in my eyes before it's cool and doing the lateral flow eye movement as you're ambulating through the thing. Like you're putting Redmond salt in water that I had to import from America because I once read in some random blog post that it might work. Like all of this shit before it was kind of popularized and then journaling and breathwork and meditation and reading a book and doing space repetition with Anki flashcards and all of this shit.

57:02Why? Well, because I wanted to like discover what worked for me and I wanted to like rip myself out of this hole that I dug myself into. And my thing around the optimization, like guilt that a lot of people feel or fear that they have or this kind of pushback against the fragility that definitely comes along with it. Like there is such a thing as like the fear of, or the worry that you have of trying to be optimal, killing you more quickly than your suboptimal behaviors. Like you're so stressed about this, but there is also a period I think that you can really use it to like get the momentum moving.

57:37Okay, I've got a training practice. I understand how to meditate. I've stopped going to bed late. I've started getting up on time. I've started, you know, those are things that then carry you forward and you can either try and slowly ingrain them over a long period of time, or you can Navy Seal Hell Week it and bundle it together. And that's what I did. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger.

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58:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:I came on this podcast because I was excited to talk to you. And yes, I'm out on the book thing, but I like learning from you. So can I just like take in what you said for a sec? but I'm happy to share what I know, but I want to think about this because I always learn with you. So one thing that you're so excellent at, and then I'm trying to do more of by way of example from you, is you are very good at spotting contradictions. And as I said earlier, trying to like clashes and contradictions and trying to export something of value, like a new direction from that. So, you know, I will say, and I acknowledge you in the book for many reasons, by the way, just, you know, we get these conflicting messages inside of any space.

59:38Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay. So you have so much within you. If you do the right things, you can access these things. Okay. If you do all these things, you're actually a weaker version of yourself, because if you don't do those, not doing the hard thing now becomes the hard thing. Okay. I mean, hell week is a week for a reason. It's not hell year. although talking to people who are instructors and seal training and this guy i mean it i do think they are um identifying people that are that have something different in them as opposed to building that up i think they build it up in those people but i think that filter is really unique i think for the rest of us um you know i don't you'd probably make it through but for the rest of us.

1:00:16Dr. Andrew Huberman:Um... So the real question, I think, is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions that are out there and put a structure on them? Forgive me for going slow here, but for once I'm speaking slow enough. Okay. So years ago when I was a graduate student, a guy who is really a luminary in the field of neuroendocrinology said to me, he said, you know, it's rarely the people who make like the key discoveries that go on to be associated with the great findings of a field. I go, how can that possibly be? And he said, it's almost always people that are in that field or educate themselves on that field that put a structure on it.

1:00:59Dr. Andrew Huberman:And he said, this is why it's important to publish research papers, but also regularly publish reviews. And I always made a point for about every three research papers I published to publish one high quality review, not some like, you know, like yellow ribbon journal, you know, review, because you can publish a review anywhere, but like real compendiums of where the knowledge is now. Like I took those very, very seriously, like annual reviews and so forth, very seriously. And why? Why? Because they help you organize your mind around what's happening and they help other people do that too, because most people aren't going to take the time to do it.

1:01:33Dr. Andrew Huberman:In the health and optimization space now, there's so many tools, right? So what we need and what I try and highlight in the book are principles. High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol, means high nighttime melatonin, means great sleep, means better days, and so on and so forth. You're essentially got the gears of the system linking together with that. Understand that. And then, yes, it's true. Bright light is the best way to spike your morning cortisol, but exercise is pretty effective too. Sometimes you don't have access to either. Sometimes you have access to both. Sometimes you're on a plane, but you can start doing other things to nudge the system or keep the system online when you have 30 seconds.

1:02:11Dr. Andrew Huberman:You also understand that if you miss a day or two, you're okay. Because you've set up the system through good behaviors going into it. So you don't have to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears because you're on a plane and they don't have any caffeinated coffee and you can't do your air squats and like, I mean, come on. No one wants to be that guy. Exactly. So once you understand a bit of the principles that organize the mechanisms, you're in a great position to be truly strong of mind and body because you can organize information. And the same thing is true. And like in chapter seven, the book on personal development, I took a step back and I said, what are the unifying features of all the trauma therapies?

1:02:50Dr. Andrew Huberman:What are the unifying features of how to have a great life? Let's just start with how to have a great life. James Hollis came on my podcast, 84 years old, surprised the shit out of me when he said, here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are shut up. That's the first one. I go, shut up. And he goes, yeah, someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you got something to be grateful for. I didn't really expect that from him. He's like this 85-year-old Jungian analyst. He talks about the unconscious mind.

1:03:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:He goes, shut up. Your day should start with Huberman, shut up. Whatever's got you bothered, shut up. You got it better than somebody. It's interesting. I wish someone had said that to you earlier, but that's okay. Thank you. Second, you can keep this in. Next, he said, Chris Williamson, go fuck yourself. Yeah, that's true.

1:03:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:First is shut up. Second is suit up. What is suit up? Suit up is you have a role to fulfill each day for other people and for yourself and for the world. Suit up is get prepared. Shower, organize your room. We've heard this stuff from Jordan and from other people, but get your act together so that you can then do the third thing effectively, which is show up. Go find a role in life and fulfill it. It might not be the role you fulfill your entire life, but if it's a summer camp counselor, if it's a babysitter, if it's a nanny, if it's a firefighter, if it's whatever you are doing at some point in life, in order to have confidence and be a healthy, happy person, you need to fulfill roles for society, meaning for people in your life, not just for you.

1:04:31Dr. Andrew Huberman:You have to be in service. Now, some people might think, well, I want to make as much money in the world as possible. So that's not me, but a lot of people feel that way. Great. To do what? Go fulfill that role. So get dressed properly, do those things. It sounds so basic, right? So shut up is about gratitude. Suit up is about prepare and practice. Don't show up. For me, I delayed the publication of the book three times. Why? Because I want the book to be something I'm truly proud of and that people will feel that they were honored as smart people who deserve quality information period end of story and i was willing to tell the publisher and everyone else look i'm so so sorry but i'm going back in again and again and again eat the shame because ultimately i had a higher value which was that the book be of good to extreme value to anyone that that that read it or even just looked at a chapter for instance and then that last one of show up is actually go do the work like chop wood carry water like no one gives of shit that you don't want to do it today just do it great confidence comes from those but then he said the fourth thing the pitfall is that when we get too much into role playing these roles and doing these things we we don't often enough or excuse me many people end up down a road that they don't really want to be on and everyone fears that so he said that solution to this is very simple.

1:05:53Dr. Andrew Huberman:Once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus response. You either meditate or just breathe. You draw, you listen to music. You don't look at your phone. You don't think about your role in the world. And all you do is you try and listen to, and it sounds real squishy, but when it's next to shut up, suit up, show up, I feel comfortable saying it, which is you ask yourself, like, what is my deeper wish, my heart's desire? What do I need to be focusing on now? Maybe I have enough career, enough money, enough, enough, uh, whatever, you know, colleague respect, et cetera. Maybe now it's time to, uh, focus more on relationships.

1:06:31Dr. Andrew Huberman:Maybe it's time to focus less on one's role as a mother or father, not completely, but focus more on an artistic, creative side that if you don't satisfy, you're not going to feel like you had a good life. So personal development, if you look at those bins, it's not about shut up, suit up, show up and do this internal practice of getting out of stimulus response. That's just one example. You look out across the landscape of personal development and almost everything slots into one or two, but usually just one of those. Entire books are about the first one or just the last one or two of the four.

1:07:06Dr. Andrew Huberman:And I go, that's very satisfying to me because as my colleague said, putting a structure on things is very helpful because it helps us navigate without feeling like there's all this information. wait, I'm supposed to journal and I'm supposed to do therapy and maybe psychedelics, maybe not. And I'm supposed to have social connection. And I'm like, pretty soon you're like, when am I supposed to do the morning sunlight thing? So the idea is that you understand the framework. And then when it comes to the trauma piece for unlearning, right? Like there's a tremendous amount of information in the book on how to focus and learn better.

1:07:36Dr. Andrew Huberman:But then also, what about unlearning? All of getting over bad stuff is four steps. The process is four steps. The first thing, you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore. You can't suppress it. What are you suppressing? You need to acknowledge this happened, this sucks. Two, the second step is you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this. There are entire books and workshops written around, breathing into, psychedelic-ing into, talking into, hugging into, shaking into, feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened or things. but that's not where it stops people often just end there the next piece is feeling calmer even slightly and more peaceful around the accurate detailed memory of the thing you're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing you can't just live in the feel your feelings we have an entire generation of people and collection of people online who are only there and they wonder why they're still there at the mercy of their feelings at they're at the mercy of their feelings, but also they're not effective in the world.

1:08:45Dr. Andrew Huberman:They're not affecting change. They think they are, but they're not affecting change. This is actually why I think they hate one of the many reasons why successful people are often hated because they're moving along. They're like, I feel like sometimes online, I look and I'm like, you remind me of those kids when I would go home because I left, I went to college, then came back and that scared the shit out of me because I was like, oh my God, you guys could write a textbook on how to become like a world-class loser. and some of them weren't like drugging out or anything. I was just like, you guys are still talking about stuff that, well, today I talked about stuff that happened in high school that was helpful for me, but you guys are like stuck.

1:09:23Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's like these people that hang out in the parking lot of bars for years and years talking about this thing. I mean, it's the saddest thing in the world and men do it one way, women do it another way. It's this fixation on the things that happened that we feel wronged about and we all have them, right? And granted, some people were genuinely wrong. That's not the point here. It's not whether they were wrong. It's that they're stuck there. And the third piece is about the uncoupling. And then the fourth piece is what we kind of think of as the magic of life, where people take the hard thing and the experience and their journey of moving through it, and they transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world.

1:10:03Dr. Andrew Huberman:These are the people that go and talk at bereavement workshops, talk to people who've lost a child, talk to people who have experienced horrible things, talk to maybe they even just plant a flower and put it in the windowsill. And every morning they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience and the beauty that they're representing. A small detail, right? A small detail in their life. They've transmuted the pain. But you can't just go, oh, you know what? You had this horrible thing happen. You know, plant a flower. Put it in the windowsill and think about how beautiful it is.

1:10:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:You can't take somebody who's struggling in number one or two or three and put them there. So for me. Go back through those four for me. What's that? Go back through those four. So acknowledge the thing. Yep. Straight on exactly what happened or how many things, you know, what is the thing that sucks, that hurts so much? Two, you have to, in a safe environment, this is why there's an interest in clinical trials on MDMA because it's this empathogen makes people feel, you know, love and safe, but you need, that's not the only way. I mean, there's therapy, there's journaling. I talk about this and talk about all the different approaches to each of these steps.

1:11:13Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's the second step. You have to feel the feelings completely of the horrible thing that happened. The third thing is once you've done that enough, and we talk about what enough is, you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing that happened with less emotional load. The emotional load starts to peel back. And it's a hard step to get to, but once you get there, it's a process. It's not like you go in and you go, okay, today I'm gonna remember everything, but it's not gonna bother me at all. Little by little, you start to uncouple. It's like memory exposure therapy.

1:11:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:Some people do EMDR. That's one way. Some people do hypnosis. Some people do talk therapy. Pennebaker has people journal four times for 15 minutes each about the horrible thing that happened. This takes them through steps two and three. 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, no more, no less. And by the fourth day, tens of thousands of data points now, not just individuals, but many, many papers, even if, you know, manuscripts, scientific manuscripts, But even if you tear up the writing afterward, even if you delete the file, you find that people move through steps two and three to a significant degree.

1:12:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:And then the fourth step is not just letting it hover there as this thing that you got through, but finding some way or ways, it can be many, of transmuting that entire experience, the thing that happened and the way you moved through it into some point of beauty or contribution to your own well-being. to others' well-being. Could be, you're a dog, and the dog represents every bit of your ability to love unconditionally and their ability to love unconditionally that represents the unconditional love you didn't get. Maybe it's someone who has suffered a horrible trauma, is helping people who've suffered similar traumas, or maybe it's some just symbol, right?

1:13:06Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, you know, in a very Jungian way, it can just be a symbol of like, maybe you have this paperweight And that symbol is the weight of your certainty that you made it through. And you just, you know, the human mind can assign symbols to experiences very easily, good or bad. So those are the four steps. And for me, in thinking about personal development, it was like, how do I look out on the entire landscape of all these books and all these podcasts and science and think, what's the best way to move through? You acknowledge that process. neuroplasticity is alert focus agitation through genuine errors to get things right reinforce through sleep and self-testing those are the steps there's not a fifth step or a sixth step there's not jump to step three and avoid steps one and two so these days a lot of my role in in my public life is to educate about processes and when and this all comes from my training in neuroscience you don't teach people neurons fire action potentials that's the first thing you teach them.

1:14:05Dr. Andrew Huberman:Then you tell them how that happens. And once they understand how that happens and you get the action potential, they have embedded in their mind an understanding of when a neuron fires, you have neuron fires, they're not thinking about all the steps, but it's all there. That's what we call true understanding. You have a nuanced multi-level understanding of something. And I think that all too often in the optimization space, we say, hey, this red light's going to give you better skin. It's going to improve your mitochondria. And people, of course, just want those effects. But if people are feeling overwhelmed, they should think, well, what's better, red light or GHK copper?

1:14:42Dr. Andrew Huberman:I would say, well, what's the best source of red light? It's the sun minus UV. When does that happen? When the sun is low in the sky, boom, you got the best red light therapy that you could ever get minus UV for zero cost. Congratulations. You want a red light too? Cool. Be my guest. I own one. You might want one too. But just we're talking about long wavelength light minus uv end of story so it's not complicated and i think the same is true in resistance training andy galpin talks about this or exercise they're only like five or six different adaptations better speed better power better you know i mean you've added a seventh of like like you know forearms but for the rest of us they're only six and you can get that through crossfit you can get that through sets to failure you can get more volume with near failure like once you understand something, you're in a position to make much better choices around it.

1:15:33Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so I'm actually wondering when to retire right now. I'm kind of thinking, what's next? And I have some ideas about where that's going. But I think we, in 2026, right heading into 2027, I think we pretty well understand the principles of great mental health, physical health, and performance. There'll be more peptides, there'll be more devices. I think devices and pharmacology are really going to change the game. AI is going to change the game, but I think we're there. The fundamental, the physics of the system. Pranayama breathing or Wim Hof breathing? How do you want to feel? More alert, inhale, emphasized breathing, passive exhales.

1:16:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:You want to feel calm? How should you do that? Exhale, emphasized breathing, passive inhales. Longer exhale relative to inhale, more calm. why we know all the mechanisms. So the naming, and this probably scares some of my health colleagues, hopefully not, because no longer can people name things after themselves or give something a name that cloaks what you're trying to achieve. The reason I went yoga nidra, non-sleep deep rest, and I have great respect for the yoga culture that developed this thousands of years ago is non-sleep deep rest is the goal. What does it involve? Exhale, emphasize breathing, and slow the heart rate down, shifting the mind from thinking, doing, and planning to pure sensation.

1:16:55Dr. Andrew Huberman:Great, how do you do that? Present tethered awareness, long exhales, eyes closed. That gets you into a pseudo sleep that recovers some of your lost sleep, makes you better at sleeping at night, lowers cortisol, puts the brain into microstates of sleep, enhances learning. That's non-sleep deep rest in a nutshell. Now, why the book has to be so long, given I can just kind of cut it down to a nutshell. That's a different story. But principles are what allow a field to say, you know what, we got it. Doesn't mean the stuff isn't important. It means we got it, we're moving on. We understand the action potential.

1:17:30Dr. Andrew Huberman:We understand plasticity. We understand getting over trauma. The tools still need work, but we understand how to get to sleep. We understand how to be focused. And so people, I think, I'm hoping will appreciate that we are here now. I didn't podcast and do all this for the last six, seven years so that I could be in the exact same place and regurgitate the same things. I'm like, here you go. This is my thesis. This is my thesis. This is my graduate thesis. My graduate thesis, like, you know, some people say there's a little bit of like pigeon chesting, but I didn't publish like two papers in some, you know, red, red ribbon journal.

1:18:06Dr. Andrew Huberman:We publish close to eight first author papers in awesome journals, some in apex journals. I could have graduated way earlier. I did it because I wanted to close a story in a field. We didn't get everything, but I wanted to get to the point where that field didn't make sense to work on anymore. It was like, we're done. We did it. Like, what are we doing? Like, I don't want to stay in high school. I want to graduate. So it's now time. This is my thesis. I'm done. I think it's, I believe it's of real value. you, I'm on to the next thing. And if people want to quibble about the details, I'm all ears.

1:18:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:I'm happy to talk about it or even the big things, but it's not like I'm done. It's not important. It's like, we got it. Let's move to the next level. And I want you to do this too. I talked to Lex the other day on the phone. You know, everyone's like, where's Lex having her, Lex is building up the next big move. I can't talk about it, but it's awesome. And I'm like, he's so brave. And I'm like, yes, you're always on the next thing. You know, Rick's always on the next thing. And it's so cool. It's like, we got to keep going. We can't stay back there. Can't stay back there. That's what happened in the 1960s and 70s.

1:19:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:People went down the rabbit holes. They took too many psychedelics, thinking psychedelics were the answer, and a lot of them lost their minds. or they did too much somatic therapy and they forgot that the mind, that actually you don't store emotions in the body. I'm sorry, folks. You store them in your brain and the body represents them. Turns out we've now moved on. Body and brain are important. So I think it's time we move to the next step. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body.

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1:20:23And right now you can get$25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save$25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Is there a good test for microplastics and what is the best detox protocol that you're aware of at the moment for microplastics?

1:20:45Dr. Andrew Huberman:Detox as opposed to limiting the ones coming in. Because we know where they are, right? They're pretty much everywhere. But glass better than plastic and so on. The data on sweating are decent, right? They're not going to purge them completely, but they're pretty decent. So sauna, living in Texas, running outside. I mean, heat is heat, right? So, you know, I was kind of joking this morning on a press call, you know, if you're standing outside in Texas in the middle of the day, like you're getting some deliberate heat exposure or non-deliberate heat exposure. It's the same heat as heat. Um, so that definitely helps.

1:21:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:You know, there's this idea that a sulforaphane, which is in cruciferous vegetables might be able to bind some of it and you can purge some of it. That, uh, arterisol, is that what it's called? I think it's sulforaphane. Um, you can take concentrated sulforaphane, you know, Rhonda Patrick's - Broccoli. Yeah. Rhonda is very bullish on this. I, um, I don't take sulforaphane. Um, I do try and sauna. because it has other benefits a few times a week. And I just think more and more companies that can their beverages are going to start looking. A lot of canned beverages do and a lot of canned beverages don't.

1:21:54Rhonda put me in touch with a company from Nutonic who have a different wrapper on the inside because all of these cans, it's not tin. It's the plastic lining. But there's an organic biodegradable liner that you can get. So we're looking into that. It's going to take forever. Yeah.

1:22:10Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, the stuff is everywhere. There's the particulate from tires. There's the clothing thing. In Europe, actually - Your dryer, whether your dryer's venting inside. You can buy a better trap for some of the microfibers. I'll be honest, I don't do those things. I'm conscious of trying to not put heated food in plastic. Whenever I order - Well, this is limiting input though, right? That's limiting input. To the extent that it's getting things out, we don't know. I mean, I think also like anything, some people are going to be more susceptible to this. I mean, if people are doing a bunch of other things to disrupt their endocrine environment, right, they're not sleeping well, they're not doing all the right things, or they're doing some things badly wrong, especially if you're getting a lot of environmental exposure to toxins because a lot of people work jobs where they work with paints and solvents.

1:22:57Dr. Andrew Huberman:you know laboratories it's kind of wild you know laboratories you find all sorts of things that can what we call intercalate into dna that's how you you run gels and things of dna and i mean without getting into the details of looking at proteins and different types of blots or rna or dna in order to break up proteins or break up dna in order to you know basically run them out on these gels you have to put chemicals in them that break the bonds right that's not good right you don't want that happening to you it's good for the experiment it's not good people are dermally disrupting their own DNA.

1:23:27Dr. Andrew Huberman:People who work in laboratories are exposed to, you know, parformaldehyde constantly. And, um, if you, if you have a neuroscience lab that we're perfusing brains, you're fixing brains to cut them up. You're working with parformaldehyde and other fixatives all the time. You're working with, um, things that are mutagens, uh, sometimes radioactivity, I mean, viruses, I mean, my lab for years, I mean, I'm not running a lab anymore. Last, I think last paper came out in 2023, 24, um, now just teaching, but the, the, the lab had, adenoviruses, synbis viruses, modified rabies viruses. I mean, we - Some stuff you don't want.

1:24:01Dr. Andrew Huberman:We worked with, yeah, we had sedatives that are, you know, federally controlled. You had to keep them in a locker, account for every microliter. I mean, laboratories are full of dangerous things, unless it's a computational laboratory, in which case we call those carpet labs, where they have carpeting computers. That's real science. It's just different science. When it comes to the microplastics thing, I learned some interesting insights around the fact that the micron size of microplastics and the size of your sweat glands can get some out, but not all, because microplastics range in size. This is a conversation that Ben Greenfield was bringing up.

1:24:37Another interesting one, we're talking on 9-11, a friend told me a story about this particular firefighter who had gone into the towers and had been out of the towers and then was exposed to all of the most particulates probably in history, apart from volcanic eruptions. and he developed like a Parkinsonian tremor and he did niacin flush with charcoal and had a towel wrapped around him when you do that. So you get your heart rate up doing exercise, you get into the sauna, you take the niacin, then you take the charcoal, niacin to flush everything out and then charcoal to bind it so it doesn't get reabsorbed again.

1:25:11And apparently the towel that this guy had wrapped around him was like verdigris.

1:25:16Dr. Andrew Huberman:It was all colors of blue and pink and green. Those firefighters, I mean, they absorbed so much mental and physical damage in those days. I mean, one thing we should say before, I want to talk about 9-11 and that particular thing I do. But before we do that, I just want to mention one thing that I think is important because the message got out based on one publication that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in us. Already been there. Okay. So it turns out there was a second publication that went to the same data and basically found that the tool they used in that first study to measure the number of particles was not a very good tool.

1:25:56Dr. Andrew Huberman:And it turns out we have far less than that in us. You saw the stuff about the gloves, right? uh not about the gloves but that oh but but what's interesting about this study is i think that some people say you have a marble sized uh amount of plastic in your brain at this moment maybe distributed maybe but the i looked at both the the data analyzed two different ways in those papers and unfortunately the more um the more catchy thing you have a credit card and it was worth of plastic in you or your brain that's right you know it kind of did the telephone game of the internet. The second paper didn't get as much airtime.

1:26:31Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yep. The retraction versus the accusation. Right. It was a separate group. It wasn't a total retraction, but having spent a lot of years in my lab where you try and count cells and you're trying to decide on a computer screen what's a cell, it seems trivial to you. I mean, that's a cell, that's a cell. Sometimes it's very easy. Sometimes you see two clumps like this. Is that one cell or two cells? So where you set your threshold for what you define as a cell is very important. And in this study - So this was, sorry for interrupting. No, no, no, no. I think the message is at a moment. This was what I saw.

1:26:57So basically, when people were using nitrile and latex gloves to do the microplastic thing, the way that nitrile gloves actually bend is because tiny fragments of plastic peel off. Basically, people measuring microplastics wore gloves that got plastic on the plastic detector. That's what happened. So this is like one of the biggest. Look, I mean, if you talk to. There it is, a wild microplastics goose chase based on the glove.

1:27:29Dr. Andrew Huberman:So we might be overestimating the amount of these things, which would be great. To be more worried and actually be safer is better than to be less worried and actually in danger. Think about this, though. If it's the case that microplastics are less prevalent by a factor of a lot. Some of the studies I've seen around this, it's like a hundred less, a hundred times less, or maybe even a thousand times less than we've got. If that's the case, what that suggests is the X factor, which is disrupting endocrine, impacting testosterone, stuff like that, is even greater because people have been able to lay at the feet of microplastics.

1:28:01It's kind of the microplastics of the gaps of what's going on with endocrines, why is sperm count going down, et cetera, et cetera. If we say, oh, actually, we've been overmeasuring that, the X factor begins to need to fill more of the hole.

1:28:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, we don't know how to match, you know, number of particles to biological relevance. I mean, you know, one parallel example would be for many years, you know, there were new antibodies coming on, becoming available for the study of the brain. And you could label up like, where is the richest concentration of serotonergic neurons in the brain? And a group identified this massive serotonin input to the brain circadian clock. Massive. I mean, it counts for, you know, basically half of the input to the clock. You know what happens if you disrupt that input to the clock? Nothing. Functionally, it means nothing.

1:28:48Dr. Andrew Huberman:Does that mean it's doing nothing? Excuse me. Functionally, it means far less than the anatomy would suggest. In the brain, big, strong synapses mean a lot more than number of synapses. Number matters, but big and strong matters way more. And so we don't really know how to correlate X number of particles with this much dysfunction. Also, this is not a study that I think about very often, but my colleague, Mike Eisenberg, quote you've had on a podcast, right? I mean, it does seem that sperm counts are going down generation to generation. But they have data that, do you know about this, that penis size is going up, right?

1:29:23Dr. Andrew Huberman:And no pun intended. But then you start asking, how is this measured? And it's either self-report, and then you get into these details that I really don't want to discuss. It's too early in the day. Like, are they measuring from the top or the bottom? Is it flaccid or is it erect, like all these different things. And you'll talk to Mike and he'll say, you know, they try and standardize these studies, but it's one of these things where the headline is so catchy, right? One or the other headline, but then you get to, no pun intended, but then you get to, you get to the nuance of how these studies are done.

1:29:57Dr. Andrew Huberman:And the answer almost always is, well, let's just stick to microplastics. We need more data. I think that the other - We need more penises. Some people on the planet would argue we need fewer, but that's a different podcast. but um 9-11 um i'd been on the east coast so i'm 51 years old so um i remember this very clearly i'd been on the east coast at an amazing place on the north shore long island called cold spring harbor laboratories this is sort of summer camp for scientists where they go to learn molecular biology you take courses and it actually operates all year long as it one of the premier laboratories in the world are you telling me there's something on my face no no no i'm just great i'm just I'm complaining about this fucking summer camp for nerds.

1:30:38It's all right.

1:30:38Dr. Andrew Huberman:Oh, it was a great time. So I was a student there at Cold Spring Harbor. I was a TA. I was an educator and I was a course director for many years. And then I passed the course off onto people who are better equipped to do that at that time. But we had gone to this course and then flown back, right? A number of us had flown back and some people were still in the process of going back. So I remember that day very well. I also remember two years later, because the course was every other year, going back to this course in Long Island. And there's this day off where half of the students would just recover from their hangovers.

1:31:13Dr. Andrew Huberman:There was a lot of drinking back then. Not so much of these courses anymore. And took the Long Island Railroad into the city and went to the 9-11 site. So it was a memorial slash site because they were still excavating the site. What date was this? What day? Date. Oh, this would have been a summer of, okay, so two years after 9-11, so it'd be 2003. And they still hadn't finished? Oh, no, no. I mean, this was a giant, I mean, I think it's hard for people to conceive. Like you see the towers in the photos and they're so huge, but the footprint of these towers was just enormous. You know, multiple city blocks long in it, you know, and there was just, all there was, was like a, you know, a wooden gate.

1:31:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:You could walk around the site. There were pictures everywhere, obviously, and a lot of inscribing and some photos and things of that sort. And there were people working the site, construction workers working. Many of them, no masks. And then you've got all these tourists. We were essentially tourists. Reading the stuff on the wall, walking around. No doubt, everyone was inhaling tons of whatever was in their jet fuel particulate, et cetera. But the people that got there first, I mean, I can't even imagine what the firefighters and others were exposed to. I did hear an interesting story that one of the companies that was housed in those buildings was led by somebody who had some former military training.

1:32:41Dr. Andrew Huberman:Do you know about this? who had been there for the first bomb bombing of the world trade center and had run drills for his entire company insisted on drills going into it and all but i think 11 of the of the people in that company got out so they were they would run these drills about how to you know single or double file out of the stairways i don't know the particular the particulars of this um but it turns out there were people who were very concerned about this going in for a number of years and that increased survival. Now you don't, I don't know where they were, you know, which, which level, et cetera.

1:33:17Dr. Andrew Huberman:But I mean, that was a, that was a huge game changer. And yes, there were videos online at that time. Um, so different cause there wasn't social media of people, some places in the world, you know, quote unquote celebrating, but I would say the vast majority of media that you saw, the vast majority of what was online was just people either in shock or in anger and just surprise. A lot of people in the United States at that time didn't know where Afghanistan was. They didn't know what Afghanistan was. They didn't know where Pakistan was. They didn't understand that. I mean, they knew these places in the world exist.

1:33:56Dr. Andrew Huberman:They probably heard the names before, but there wasn't a lot of awareness of that side of the world. It was like, oh yeah, like a bombing in Yemen. People would hear these things. But that and the Challenger explosion where in my lifetime were the two where you just went, oh shit, this is a line in the sand. Things are very, very different now. You mentioned nicotine earlier on. I'm seeing pouches everywhere. What's your opinion on nicotine in pouches? Same. Look, I consume caffeine every day. I love caffeine. Nicotine is sort of similar, although caffeine is safer, obviously, can even improve health nicotine will definitely make you feel alert and calm unlike other stimulants which is a very unique state that's great for learning right sets you up for learning doesn't let you learn but it so excuse me doesn't make you learn but it lets you learn raises blood pressure highly addictive and and here's the thing people don't realize if you take three to six milligram pouches multiple times per day it's not going to have a cognitive enhancing effect.

1:35:00Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's just rescuing the deficit from nicotine withdrawal. Like if you don't drink caffeine for two days, you're not going to feel good. You drink caffeine, you'll feel good. It's bringing you back to baseline. Okay. So if you want nicotine to be a performance aid, you use it occasionally, meaning, you know, three to six milligrams once or twice total, twice per week maximum. But how many people do you know that are taking - Develop a dependency. Or just not do it very often. And then it does something. I mean, this is how I feel about a lot of energy drinks. I love them, but I'll take them when I really want to dial in, really want to.

1:35:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:Like I slept last night, but not quite as much as I would have liked. I'm like time shifted and so on. So this morning I drank one of yours and one of Derek's. And that's a lot. The old twin turbo. Yeah, very good. The twin turbo. And that's a lot. But, you know, I thought we had a pretty good workout. Yeah, you performed well. The previous mode of delivery was smoking, and then we moved on to vaping pretty quickly, and vaping became massive. Let's talk about the history of this. Humans have found a way to get their nicotine. Smoking causes cancer. Okay. Not good. Dipping, snuffing, not good. Cancers.

1:36:12Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay. Oral nicotine. Oh, vaping. It turns out it's not good for us. Really not good. The chemicals associated with it, probably a bit safer than smoking, but this is really wild. The behavioral data say because you can do it anywhere, pretty much, people are doing far more of it. They're taking in far more nicotine and they're now having issues, lung issues and issues related to nicotine. So smoking was less healthy and maybe more dangerous per puff. But because the number of puffs that you're consuming from vaping, because you can do it in more places and it's more tasty and there's less fatigue from it, means that maybe the healthier delivery mechanism of vaping versus smoking is more than offset to the point where it's more dangerous.

1:36:52Right. Wow. In the same way that, you know, cannabis, you don't say is good or bad.

1:36:56Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yes, it nukes REM sleep, but that's very, very bad. It can cause psychosis in certain males, ever predisposition of psychosis. But you'd say smoking cannabis, people are able to put themselves into a plane of high that is not freaking them out. they can take one toke i did bong you know when i was in college everyone just like did bong rips i was like you know and then but you knew if you could do half a one or one or you you wouldn't go like four and then wait and see what happens um some people did that that didn't work out so well but with an edible the problem is people can ingest you know 100 150 milligrams of thc like that and then they're freaking out in some cases it can trigger a psychotic episode that lasts a long timer doesn't reverse.

1:37:40Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so it's the ease of ingestion. So that's the vaping thing. The oral nicotines, they're here to stay. Humans have, since the discovery of nicotine, have found a way to get their nicotine. Same with caffeine. They've just found a way to, they're not going to quit. But a lot of young people using nicotine, they should just be aware of how addictive it is and the fact that it raises blood pressure. And I think that, you know, usually you can scare guys out of it a little bit by just saying, oh, it's vasoconstriction and, you know, that can have some sexual side effects, but nowadays people are using pharmacology to combat pharmacology, you know, and thanks to Mike Eisenberg and other people, you know, like I've said, you know, the, the low dose Tadalafil for, um, for prostate health, but then people go, well, if you take a little bit more than it, then it's a, you know, it's like a sex drug and like that kind of thing.

1:38:25Dr. Andrew Huberman:You know, anyway, that it was developed as a prostate drug, but it's a vasodilator. Does it, does that combat the vasoconstriction of nicotine? Yeah. In theory. Uh, but you, now you're, you're doing like sort of a push pull, bad language. You're now doing a push pull between, you know, one, one set of effects and another set of effects. And, you know, I would say, this is just by observation, um, you know, people in their teens, twenties, thirties, even early forties, you really want to get away with it using as little pharmacology as necessary. This is why for, you know, during my manopause monk mode era, I did a thousand.

1:39:03You're what? Manopause. I went monk mode. You were in manopause? Yeah. You're too young for manopause. No, manopause is end of 20s. Listen, I told you.

1:39:13Dr. Andrew Huberman:We got to return to that. Manopause is end of 20s. Manopause. Your androgens dropped at the end of your 20s? It's a colloquial bro science term that I use to describe when guys stop behaving the way that they did in their adult infant 20s. I have so many thoughts about that hat and none of them good. Please take that off. um so uh a lot of the time like when i when i was doing my period of personal development becoming a proper human i did a thousand days without alcohol and 500 days without caffeine because i wanted to prove to myself i don't need to use any of these things i don't need to buttress my life with this i wanted to have that in the back of my mind if there was ever a period because i knew for the rest of my life that was going to be like around parties i was going to be around like caffeine that's like my thing right and now i have a company that does it something that's kind of interesting.

1:39:59So we've been doing these, which are these pouches. And those, I think by the end of next year, we could do more volume in pouches, more revenue in pouches than in cans because of how many people want to dial back their nicotine. So many people feel like I'm not in control of my nicotine usage and the delivery mechanism has been locked in.

1:40:19Dr. Andrew Huberman:And it's easy to take. And we'll talk about the canister. By the way, if you write a 600 page book, what happens is you stare at things up close, your eyeball lengthens and you become myopic. You've worsened your eyesight because you wrote the book. You literally damaged your own. But at the end of this year, right after this book promotion tour is done, I'm going to spend a lot of time staring at horizons and hiking in the mountains. And I might even go hunting this year. So yeah, that's why I'm wearing these. I mean, look at it. This is crazy, this prescription. You tried to, you made me put them on.

1:40:50Yeah. You're blind. They're like cool bottle glasses.

1:40:52Dr. Andrew Huberman:So yeah, when you stare at things too close, you become nearsighted. So kids, adults, get some long view vision each day. My vision at distance is great, but up close is lousy. So the other thing about this and these canisters is, it's interesting, I'm not trying to diverge topics here, but we'll get to peptides, I'm sure, but the pens that the GLPs use, that pen with needle, has basically gotten people over their needle phobia. It turns out it was the plunger people were afraid of. I don't like needles. Do I have to inject myself? Turns out if you put the needle at the end of something, it looks like a pen everyone's pinning themselves men women people are just pinning themselves um these canisters are interesting because they have like a tactile feel it's a little bit like like chips at the casino but when i was a kid um there was a uh jerky do you remember this there was a beef jerky that came in a canister that looked like tobacco and kids oh this stuff was was horrible you would take a pinch of beef jerky and you'd put it in your lip we were like nine years old 10 years old and then you'd eat the beef jerky eventually just cosplaying as your dad kids uh my dad didn't chew he did occasionally smoke a cigar pipe my grandfather smoked a pipe yeah so it was like you would so we were like little kids we were little kids walking around lipping beef jerky beef not licking lipping beef jerky yeah and so and it was they clearly figured out that like candy cigarettes and you know and and so there is something about the pout the there it is jerky stuff no no it's called jerky stuff that looks so gross oh my god it looks like uh the fluff that you find in your pocket it's called jerky stuff look at this ready there you go jerky stuff and you would you stuff your cheek or you'd stuff your your lip wow yeah this was a thing yeah so it was it was kind of like jerky flavored sawdust it was and also barely any it It was probably like four grams of protein per day.

1:42:50Dr. Andrew Huberman:In the entire can. And you would pay more for it. And it was because it was, you know, a good way to take in something. So these canisters are also very reinforcing. Yeah, it's really tactile. It's nice. And also like, you know, it's your back pocket. Guys love carrying something in their back pocket. Nobody wants to carry the man purse. You know, I might've brought like a small zip thing to the gym today. I did see that. I did see that. Yeah, you didn't ask what was in it, but I'm not going to tell you. What are the spiciest protocols that you weren't able to put in the book? what was the stuff that you wish that you could have got clearance on right so the book is everything i'm certain about that we understand the mechanisms for and that i know work not just because i experienced that but because many many people have and we have great data to support it like everything's substantiated there's only one protocol that's a little bit out there and i said this is kind of out there we have a little bit of data not a not a ton but here's here's why i'm including it and i think you might want to try this because it can really help you fall asleep when you talk about this, but we know why it ought to work.

1:43:50Dr. Andrew Huberman:I don't talk about psychedelics, although I do fit them into a framework along plasticity and learning. And so they make sense of when they might, might be the appropriate tool. I don't talk about hormone therapies and I don't talk about peptides in part because the data are still coming. And also because they'll likely be a second book. Although, you know, if you write a book like this long with, you know, thousands of references and, you know, it can damage relationships in your life. People have been super understanding. This book basically acted as a filter in my, in my own life for like, who really loves me?

1:44:24Right.

1:44:25Dr. Andrew Huberman:So, um, but look, it's big, but it also operates as a doorstop, a weapon. Yeah. I was going to say, if you're feeling not quite tall enough at the table, you can sit on it at Thanksgiving. And, um, and as I joke, if nothing else, it'll cure insomnia. Very nice. Okay. What are some protocols that you fully believe in, but you can't scientifically prove? Ooh, that's really good. Um, okay. Yeah. Let's just be blunt here. Um, but these would be things that aren't in the, in the book, right? Okay. Cause everything there is substantiated by mechanism and description. So I've had some wild experiences with a couple of peptides that most people, some people have heard about.

1:45:14Dr. Andrew Huberman:You know, I don't have shoulder pain. I've never had shoulder pain, but about three, four months ago, I made the decision. I was like, you know, I should start doing some heavy pressing again. I do my dips. I do my overhead press. I just start doing some like, I don't like flat benching. So I do some low incline pressing. And after about three months to three months i started getting some shoulder pains i started doing some external rotation work doing i'm like this thing isn't going away like what is this maybe i need to back off and it's like you know what like it's pretty bad i'm gonna just put two injections of bpc in there so two injections of maybe 100 or 200 micrograms tiny amounts right um gone history can't find the pain it's gone now is it placebo i don't know maybe it is i mean i knew what i was injecting a better experiment would have been somebody you know traded out uh saline and i go oh my you know that didn't happen um that's pretty incredible the animal data are really impressive and i know a number of people with pets dogs in particular who've been injecting their animals with bpc because their dogs are getting older i don't want to name names here because it's i haven't cleared it with them, but, um, they have dogs that either had spinal strokes or just aged and were limping and not doing well.

1:46:31Dr. Andrew Huberman:And they asked, you know, does this stuff work in animals? I'm like, all the data are animals, you know? Um, so mouse and rat owners, like your, your mice and rats will live. If you rupture the antenna, they kill each other. Exactly. Cause there are a lot of data on that. Um, but I know a lot of people now, um, injecting their dogs, aged dogs and and saying, oh my goodness, this is crazy. Like they're more mobile, et cetera. And it's hard to give the placebo argument there. I mean, you could say that the owners are doing other things, like they're also massaging, more care, they didn't do the saline control, but kind of hard to explain it away.

1:47:06Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay. So the other one is pinealon. Pinealon is ironically is a peptide that doesn't come from the pineal, comes from brain tissue. epithalin comes from the pineal who names this stuff is like it's insane but um i've experimented with pineal on every third or fourth night taking about about a you know uh tenth of an iu and um in those nights those nights i get anywhere from two and a half to three hours of REM sleep that's a lot of REM sleep inside of six to seven hours inside of six hours you're kind of cheating the system because like, wow, I like normally I'd have to get into my last third of sleep, which for me is seven or eight hours in order to, um, total in order to get that REM enriched phase, which always comes at the end of the night.

1:47:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:But what's, what's so wild is that on the subsequent nights, I also experienced this massive REM increase. So it's, I've cut that back to doing it once a week or at once every 10 days and still getting the same effect. The only downside for me is that the next day I can feel not foggy, but I feel like it's harder to become fully alert. I can still focus, but a little bit of sleep in usher maybe. And I know people who are taking it in the daytime because they like being in this kind of shallow plane of sleep, wake for cognitive work. That's not me, but, um, you know, there's talk about, I don't, you know, I mean, rumors, whatever.

1:48:33Dr. Andrew Huberman:There's talk about people at tech companies who are like, oh yeah, if you're going to do something for 12 hours, that's like really laborious, maybe this is good. I don't know. So that's been interesting. I think there's a lot of excitement nowadays about growth hormone secretagogues, things like tessamorellin, ipamorellin, CJC. I'm not a fan. They've always nuked my REM sleep. They've always spiked my PSA. For me, they don't tend to work. I am curious about, but I don't think I'm old enough yet to really embark on a somatotrope growth hormone experiment. But the clinical trial by exploring low-dose growth hormone for people - That would be exogenous, right?

1:49:16That would be exogenous, yeah.

1:49:18Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's intriguing to me. But there there are data, right? There are data. But I feel like at 51, I'm like still in this place where I feel good. So there's no real science there. The other, sorry, aside from the growth hormone thing, the other stuff is there's animal data, not human data, but my experience has been pretty impressive. Now, of course, maybe I gave myself a tumor by injecting the BDC. I have to acknowledge that. But a whole body MRI tells me no. So, you know, the things that, well, I've talked about this openly. So I'm happy to talk about it. you'll find clinical trials on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.

1:50:01Dr. Andrew Huberman:You'll find clinical trial, beautiful clinical trial data, in my opinion, on psilocybin for depression and PTSD. You won't find a lot of data combining them. I've experimented in a clinical setting with combining them, right? This is done in a legal clinical setting. So that means therapy going in, therapy during therapy coming out. You have to be very thoughtful about where you do this and who you do it with. They have to, all the adequate supports have to be there. But for me, that was incredible. I have to say that psilocybin alone was helpful, but didn't really feel like it resolved certain things for me.

1:50:41Dr. Andrew Huberman:MDMA was helpful and being, feeling feelings, et cetera. That first, that kind of first and second been acknowledging the thing and really feeling the feelings. But the moving through part was really, for me, was uncoupling the negative feelings from the negative thing, but also replacing the negative feelings with positive feelings. That really came about through that combination therapy, and you won't find a lot of data on that. I mean, unfortunately, the data on polypharmacology of different psychedelics isn't there yet. But then again, the FDA approval for the first single ingredient approaches aren't there yet.

1:51:24Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so that's why people have to go out of country to do this or else it's illegal. So I think that the data on Ibogaine are really intriguing. We've had conversations with people that are very open about the fact that they did it and it's helped them. I know a number of people are trying to get us to go down to Mexico. Are we going to go? On a daily basis, I feel like I'm being peppered by somebody else to go, hey, man, just come down and turn your life upside down for a week in fucking Mexico. I have a friend that's there right now, and I told him not to go, honestly. I'm sorry, but I just was like, he doesn't have a substance abuse issue.

1:51:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:So maybe he has PTSD, but I think there's this idea also with peptides that we can just up-level ourselves. People say, should I use peptides? Like, what effect are you looking for? Better. Yeah. You know, it's sort of like, you know, it's sort of like, should I invest in blank? It's like, well, what effect are you looking for? And they're like, more. They want more money. So it's understandable. People want to feel better. If like you feel seven out of 10, could you feel 10 out of 10? If you feel 10 out of 10, could you change what 10 means and be eight out of a new 10 that's way better than your current 10 out of 10?

1:52:31Like that's an intriguing idea, but I'm not so afraid of the Ibogaine, to be honest, done

1:52:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:in the proper clinic with heart rate monitoring. The thing I'm afraid of is the DMT. Yeah, because they have to hit you with that the day after and then pretty much straight after as well. I also know a number of people who have done DMT and they're – I mean, I know plenty that have done DMT and they're okay. I know a lot who have done DMT and they're genuinely weird now. Not all of them, but some of them are like legit weird. Yeah. And they were not that weird before. Some are perfectly fine. The other thing is a guy like DJ, he's talked about this, right? I love that podcast that you guys did, by the way.

1:53:07Dr. Andrew Huberman:Thank you. Like, DJ is a solid mind, you know, so. Well, also, he was starting from a very low baseline. If you're sat watching the sunset with a gun in your mouth, you're already, what's going to be worse, you know? Like, you've already considered taking your own life. Okay, wait, wait. You go smoke the thing, take the drugs, see how you feel. Yeah, I mean, it seems to have really helped him and Marcus and some of these other guys. helped him enough that he's trying to be a uh like maitre d for me and you but a maitre d that sits down at the table what if what if what if we go to sleep one night not near each other of course um and uh although actually oh yeah we live actually so funny so i i i got a a place that turned out to be really close to chris spitting just it's gonna be like the podcaster neighborhood if we're not careful um it's cool man we ended up being neighbors well good taste good taste in neighborhoods um but what if uh you go to sleep in your house and i go to sleep in my house and then we we wake up in in mexico in this clinic i guess dj's done because somebody did someone i got fucking maduro by dj shipley yeah exactly uh i've had similar things happen in totally different contexts years ago uh where i was supposed to get dropped off after working with this some friends have this awesome band um and they were supposed to drop me off uh back at my lab in my car and i i woke up in utah they drove to utah in the middle of the night i woke up i was like where are we he's like utah he's like you're one of us now this is my good friend elvis cortez he's actually the one that found me costello and i love elvis he's great but yeah they uh technically they kidnapped me but it was it was a lot of fun that was that was many years ago um i don't know I don't know.

1:54:57We'll see.

1:54:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:There are other things that are perhaps a little less of the Mount Everest of that stuff. Yeah, lower risk. But you seem to be in a really good place now. That's true. But still, there's always the sort of ability to show up versus how much of the four steps have you done in terms of being able to get over some. how do you respond when people say um they go oh my goodness like here you are looking for this next thing or the thing you can do and they and they just say chris what you really need to do is just get married and have a couple kids i agree that will be the psychedelic experience i agree i say yes plus plus two golden retrievers i agree and i say yes and they're not preaching to the choir two girls and retrievers golden retrievers golden retrievers i mean i that's a freudian slip from you no it's a freudian slip from you i said fucking golden retreat people can rewind the tape uh i i completely agree i completely i completely agree on that and um i i've said this before like i'm the most ardent guy without kids supporter and ambassador for guys just starting a fucking family and it's not for me to say hey i want you to stop your ambition and the same for women too like you stop your socioeconomic climb and doing all this stuff just like so many of the things that i see people doing you know young people and people that are getting into more middle age, like surrogate families.

1:56:18It's like the business that you're building, the fervor with which you're going after this political party or this new sort of social campaign or this like obsessive hobby that you've got or, you know, trying to become wealthy or whatever. A lot of that to me looks and feels like this is the energy that you would be putting into a family, especially the existential energy that you've got. And I'm like, I think a lot of your, I don't really know what my purpose is. I don't feel like I'm contributing more largely to the world. All of these questions that people have, like, why am I here? It's like, well, a lot of this I think has kind of been solved throughout time, which is like you do the golden retriever thing and the family thing.

1:57:01Like golden retrievers do come first. That is an important caveat for me. Interesting choice of breed. Ah, dude, I just want an animal that can't, there is no danger of it competing with me cognitively. So I want something that's both cuddly and stupid.

1:57:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:Golden Retrievers are not all stupid. I'm going to try and find a breed of Golden Retriever, which is particularly fluffy and stupid. Just find a dog with a really flat head. Single digit IQ Golden Retriever. And if you think about the Mastiff breeds, they're all very sweet and they have flat heads and they look at you like, you know? So the Mastiffs, the Bulldogs, the boxers, that they're smart about certain things, but they're kind of like dog with a flat head. Okay. You know. Are you doing phrenology for dogs? I mean, I went to the - This is fucking phrenology for dogs. I went to the Meet the Breeds in New York and met hundreds of breeds.

1:57:48Dr. Andrew Huberman:Second time I've done this, right? And walked through and met all the different breeds. And I can tell you a couple of things. First of all, people look like their dogs. Okay, so the otter hounds - You do look a lot like strummer. You know, thank you. The otter hounds, like these otter hounds, the owners look like otter hounds. It's crazy. The bulldogs are kind of like the demeanor of the people and you just, and it's wild. You have to go. It's so much fun. It's at the Javits Center each year. It's awesome. You meet all the breeds. I walked out of there and I was like, you know, I turned to my girlfriend, I go, getting a bulldog breed.

1:58:21Dr. Andrew Huberman:I'm getting a mutt. Because I've been around enough dogs. I've experienced them all. And the mudded bullies, not the pure bullies, but the mudded bullies, they're kind, they're vigorous. they're got a little bit of goofiness they're very emotional in a good way but then they also like get over their shit they're just like a little hedonist sometimes and and they'll back you like they will they will fight to the death for you but if your life's not on the line like they're not doing shit at all they're not reactive i'm reactive i mean are you kidding me um so yeah well listen i hope you get a dog then the dogs can hang out in the neighborhood um and i do think No, I mean, family is awesome.

1:58:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, family is amazing. So what's the delay? It's very difficult. First off, I need to get the dog thing. I always felt guilty because my mom and dad had been so good with dogs. Like they walked them all the time. They gave them a great life. And I would feel, I've seen what a good life for a dog looks like. And I would feel incredibly guilty not being able to, and I can pay someone, I'm sure, or somebody, I can bring them to the office, bring them on the trip or whatever. But I'm like, I don't want to have a dog that's flying once a week. Do you travel that much? I did, what, like 100 ,000 miles and maybe 80 flights last year.

1:59:34I've done like a new 80 ,000 miles. I don't want to do that.

1:59:38Dr. Andrew Huberman:Also for kids, you want to be present for your kids. Of course. But that is another thing that I think is, it's kind of beautiful if you frame it this way. And at least maybe this is just cope for me. that if you take the, oh my God, maybe I have just been surrogate family building with this business or with this hobby or with this body or with whatever, this finance, this investing, whatever it is that you've been doing with your time, skill building. But on the flip side of that, I think if you've really closed a lot of the different loops of like, I really feel like I've put it all out there on the table.

2:00:12I do get the sense that there is an additional level of presence that's afforded to you because materially, hopefully you're pretty well set.

2:00:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:I can tell you, I mean, I don't want to get into details of my personal life, but 100%. I'll also tell you as a hard driving, like in pursuit of knowledge, skills and resources person, which you are, which I am, and which our teams are also, I mean, very, very few things feel as good as being able to resource the people around you that you love. Of course. Like there's like, yes, your presence, obviously. it's not just about earning money and giving them things, but being able to relieve suffering, however minor or major, being able to resource people to be in their full expression of what they want to do.

2:00:57Dr. Andrew Huberman:Like I, I, I think very few things will feel as satisfying as, as that, especially if you, and I say that based on knowing you, but also your prior statement, the fact that you don't want a dog yet because you want the dog to be thoroughly resourced by the love that you're going to provide. It tells you everything you need to know. David Perel, who does how I write and write a passage, it was when I first moved to Austin, and he's about a similar age to me. And he said, we're having coffee. He turned to me one day and he said, you know what, man, I realized that most of my 20s and 30s were just spent becoming the dad that I want my future kids to have.

2:01:36And I wasn't even bothered about having kids. And all of the accumulation of skills, of habits, of, you know, closing the loops of desires that he wanted to pursue. It's an adventure and all of this stuff. He'd got rid of that. And he said, oh, you know, I sort of, I feel like I'm here is a way that you could say it. It's like, I actually feel like I'm fucking here. And I think a lot of guys, and you see this with a lot of dads and moms too. I've got these unrequited dreams and children sort of imposed on them. And there's this, you know, low key, perhaps resentment of, oh, you know, I'm doing this thing, but you don't know what I sacrificed for you.

2:02:08And then there's the shame or, oh my God, what sort of a monster am I to blame my kids that I chose to have because I didn't fulfill my dreams beforehand? Yeah. It becomes really messy.

2:02:18Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah. I mean, I want to be thoughtful with my words here because again, I do like to maintain some sense of privacy in my life, but I will say that, um, it does check off a sort of a, a deep, um, must, what must be a primitive circuit of like, of, of satisfaction. like having kids is a really good feeling like it just feels like like you fulfilled something of duty you know um that feels really really good and at the same time it comes with all sorts of challenges and complications you know um but yeah i think that um you know it's become this uh kind of ongoing debate you know between me and lex or like you know is you know like a like you know but i think that look it sounds like there are gonna be a lot of kids to wrestle and play I can't wait.

2:03:04It is a competition between me, you and him for who will have kids last, but we'll, we'll, we'll see who's, who's the holdout. I think I, well, I'm going to keep my mouth shut. There we go.

2:03:13Dr. Andrew Huberman:I'm going to keep my mouth shut. But in, because we all, nevermind. Wait, I take this back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's turning you crazy. So I've been asking you questions. This feels good. I didn't tell you that the last page of the book is where I do therapy on you. No, I'm just kidding. No, but can I, can I read my acknowledgement to you absolutely because i i didn't even i didn't even get to that bit oh i'm gonna do this i acknowledge you uh here um

2:03:46Dr. Andrew Huberman:Here we go. So it's brief because the acknowledgements are five pages long. I think there's eight pages long, but I figure if you're going to do something, you just do it. So I just put a bunch of names. I put you Chris Williamson for your friendship and for breathing so much life into the podcast. And what I refer to as the everyone sphere, because I don't think you're about the manosphere. I think you're about the human sphere, but human sphere. sounded weird so i said everyone's fear so i i mean it you breathe so much life into this thing like i remember first seeing you online and then you on rogan and i was you know and i'm not a skeptic i always want the best i thought well who is this guy with this british accent and like so you know and why are the women in my life asking me if he's single um and um and i go this guy is really smart.

2:04:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:He's really nuanced and he seems like a really cool guy. And you totally exceeded expectations on all those things. And it's awesome to just see what you're doing. And also day or night, you're available for an emergency or an adventure call. You'll get to the gym early on jet lag. And you've been super honest and vulnerable in your online and in that career and relationship with your audience, but also just one-on-one. For anyone that wonders, Chris is who he appears to be on the internet, which is really - For better off or worse. No, for better, man. For better. For better. Like it's an honor to have you as a friend.

2:05:16Dr. Andrew Huberman:You're a great friend and I feel very blessed. It is really cool. You know, I think one of the almost inarguable great parts of life is becoming respected and admired by people that you respect and admire. Like it's one of the coolest things that you can do. My back is also hurting, so I'm trying to self-massage at the same time. We did neck training this morning. We did a few face pulls. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, this is sounding terrible. Jeff Cavalier has an exercise called face balls. We did some neck training because, as we both know, having the wrong head place, like if a neck is too narrow with wide shoulders, it looks, what do you call the coat hanger?

2:05:51Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, you look like a coat hanger. Yeah, that's not good. You don't look like a coat hanger. Thank you. Yeah, becoming admired and respected by people that you admire and respect is just one of the fucking coolest things. It really is. Like, I like that person. I think they've got good taste. I think they're noble. I don't think that they're spiritually chinless. Spiritually chinless. I love that. If ever there was a Chris Williamson-ism, spiritually chinless. Spiritually chinless. I'm going to borrow that, but I'll give you attributes. It's Adam Mastroianni originally, originally, originally.

2:06:22So, looking around. Wait, you didn't make that up? No. Spiritually chinless is from Adam Mastroianni.

2:06:28Dr. Andrew Huberman:Oh. Well, you know that song? Breaking rocks in the hot sun. I fought the law in the... that's a cover of a cover of a cover okay but everyone assumes the clash did it it's fine you're at the end of the human centipede of spiritually churnalists now you're the guy at the very very end i'm gonna just give it to you they gave that song to to the client i'll take it spiritually churnalists so um you know you see these people and you go wow they're they're cool i respect them in a way that i think is really really sort of noble and aligned and then if you manage to do something in that industry or a different industry and they turn to you and they say hey like i like what you do, you think, holy fuck, that's really cool.

2:07:05And can people take it to an extreme? Yeah, of course. You can basically construct your entire life trying to reverse engineer being liked by people that you like. And that's the charlatan social climber that doesn't have anything below them. But assuming the people that you respect are discerning, and one of the reasons that you respect them is that they are discerning, you shouldn't be able to finesse or fugazi them, famoose them into believing something they don't believe or you being a person that you aren't. so yeah man like i really hope that everybody that's listening to this gets to experience what it's like to sit opposite someone that they were a fan of and then became a friend of like it's the fucking coolest thing in the world it's really really cool well that statement includes my

2:07:43Dr. Andrew Huberman:experience of you you know fan of and then became friends of i you've got an awesome life energy i mean we don't want to spiral into a whole other conversation but maybe for a future time but i think a lot about energy these days not just mitochondria but like some people genuinely have I'm going to offend some people with this. Some people just have more life energy in them. And I think, I like to think that if you're thoughtful, which you are, and I try to be, that you want to allocate their life energy toward career and pursuits and health and resolve and then pivots that energy, but doesn't decide, you know, I'm going to shift all my chips to this.

2:08:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:And then all my chips to that, you have a lot of energy to go around. You know, Rob on my team, my producer of the podcast is such an engine of productivity and running and he's got a family now. And it's like, you always hear these things like people have kids and then they like slow it like he's picked up speed. We're just like, Whoa. And you know, I think some people just have that extra gear. Some people don't, and they need to take their, whatever they've been allocated and do maximize with that. And some people just have a tremendous amount of life energy. And I think the goal is to not die at 27 if you have a lot of that energy right you think about the 27 club it's almost like took all the energy of a life and crammed it into this early existence usually it's drugs and alcohol isn't it yeah you know so but you also don't want a like a low slow arc in life that you never figure out what your peaks are put your fucking foot on the gas yeah i'm in the third quarter now so i figure i'm you know so speaking of engine i texted you about this last week what is happening with the vo2 max versus zone 2 debate because when i was thinking more deeply about like i'm getting a little bit older i should pay attention to my cardio respiratory fitness and stuff like that low and slow was like everything yeah you sent me that jeffrey dolmer video yeah you it wasn't a fucking jeffrey he sent me a video of a guy talking about this it was very good video my first thought was the guy looks like jeffrey dolmer which is making it a little hard to listen to watch so i could have just listened and said that would have been good But what's happening with VO2 max versus zone 2 debate at the moment, in your opinion?

2:09:55Because for a long time, it was focused exclusively on low and slow. Now it seems like the VO2 more high intensity Norwegian 4x4 is increasingly important.

2:10:03Dr. Andrew Huberman:I think the word to delete there is exclusively. I think my read of the data is you need some volume of cardio training to get that, quote unquote, aerobic base that can be very beneficial. I mean, the sorts of adaptations that come from doing 45 to 60 minutes of long and slow, we're not talking walking, but zone two, three-ish. I don't ever think of about zone two. I think about upper zone two, zone three around there where you just barely can continue without, you know, you could, if you tried to speak, you would, you would have to pause a few times as opposed to just super easy. I mean, you are getting buildup of more capillary networks, you know, which has a lot of positive downstream consequences.

2:10:43Dr. Andrew Huberman:You're getting all sorts of enrichment of the mitochondrial system and genuine enrichment of the cardiovascular system. But I think doing that once a week, so I make it a point to do a long, slow jog, so 45 to 60 minutes or so once a week, or a ruck for, usually if I hike, I'm going for longer than an hour with some weight or something like that. It's often social with somebody. And then once a week, I'll do the, I feel like I'm going to die, hit workout. which for me is the Airdyne bike, 20 on, 10 off, eight rounds. And by the seventh round, you're just like cursing everybody and yourself. And you get off that thing, you feel so good.

2:11:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:You probably cough a few times because you're just like breathing that hard. And I actually just, I do the crude measurement of heart rate, like 220 minus my age, and then figure out like what my heart rate is, a percentage of that max heart rate, right? So we get max, so I hit like 85, 90 % of - Are you wearing a chest strap for something? I don't. So I talk about this in the book. You're not fucking fingering your heart rate, are you? to your choice of language man um you with your your your Britishisms look I get it you want two wives and a golden retriever you said that and you're fingering your heart rate I just put my fingers on my neck and record my pulse or I just and I'm looking at a stopwatch so absurdly low and I do that for 30 seconds and then I double it and I'm probably off by you know plus or minus you know five beats but I'm you know in the ballpark and you're like fucking schrodinger's podcaster you're someone who is both very forward thinking like technologically prepared excited about ai and also using like a fucking sundial in your fingers to work out what so funny i i my girlfriend had birthday recently and she we we i got this like compass sundial which is so cool i love primitive and very advanced tools and i look at you i do think yeah primitive and thank you i book it thank you and not a lot in the middle you're the barbell You are the barbell of a human.

2:12:42Dr. Andrew Huberman:Thank you. Actually, I'll take that. There's a great song called Streetwise Professor that I love. It was referring to somebody else. But yeah, sort of like a barbarian intellectual. Slightly elevated. Something like that. Refined. So once a week, get your heart rate up near maximum for six to 10 minutes. maybe do a mild mile trial or you know for most people that'll be somewhere between six and ten unless you're really really fast in which case it'll be less or slow in which case it'll be longer um so jog two laps i talk about this in the book and then do a mile time once every two or three weeks two or three months um you do norwegian four by four you do the air the nice thing about the airdyne bike like 20 on 10 off you can stop immediately it's like yeah and after six to eight rounds of that you're smoked you hop in the shower and you go but you It takes so little time.

2:13:40Dr. Andrew Huberman:It takes so little time. But you're also using, the reason the Airdyne is so great, or an assault bike, you know, Echo bike, pick your like handles and feet bike of choice. The reason that that for me is a superior form for what we're trying to do, which is get heart rate as high as possible, is that you're getting to use your arms as well. If you try and do that on a bike erg, which is a fucking awesome piece of equipment, if you could give me any piece of cardio equipment, I'd choose a bike erg. It's super comfy. You can speed up and slow down. Then your calves won't fit in the room. That's true.

2:14:08Dr. Andrew Huberman:Your calves, not mine. But you're only using your legs, which means that your legs are going to be burning like hell. Okay, if I can get a little bit more. I mean, if I was a better rower or a ski ergo, I imagine you can probably get to an even higher, higher heart rate. Yes and no. I mean, the rower, I mean, it's not a super skill. It's not brain surgery. But getting the row form proper is not as easy. The airdyne, as long as you set the seat height, right, you can't really screw it up. So go as hard as you can to get your heart rate elevated for six to eight rounds, but do it in a way that you're not going to hurt yourself.

2:14:44Dr. Andrew Huberman:Like the skier thing, like, you know, it's not, you're going to hurt yourself, but like you said, it's hard to get the heart rate way, way up. So that once a week, the longer thing once a week. And then in the middle of the week, I just do a 30 minute run that's somewhere in between or a 30 minute swim that's somewhere in between. So five minutes of warmup, perhaps, you know, just like jogging. And then you do a 25 to 30 minute run where you're in your zone four, right? You're, you're breathing hard and you know, you could go faster, but you don't. Yeah. Because then you got that HIIT workout later and, you know, two days later or a day later.

2:15:18Dr. Andrew Huberman:And I talk, and then I'm just interspersing three days of working out with weights and one day legs somewhere in the week, one day torso. Today we did a push. So it's chest, shoulders, neck. um and then another day of the week you're doing you know biceps triceps calves maybe neck again definitely i i'm big on abdominal work these days core work not just abdominals what are your favorite exercises pikes pikes what the fuck is that you hang from a bar okay you're working on you do knee ups to 90 degrees slow without swinging back and forth you do five of those drop down then you see if you can do knee up legs out so l sit can you go back do five of those if you can do five and you just build this up.

2:16:00Dr. Andrew Huberman:If you can't do the L-sit, you just do, what I'll do five sets of five of the knee ups next time I come back and try and do at least one or two L-sits. So then you're doing, if you can do five L-sits, so you just bring your knees up, then straightening your legs, you're still holding, right? So you're also getting the grip strength work. Then you lower slowly. If you can do five of those, then you start, you could do the one knee at a time, kick out, kick out, kick out, drop one, bring down one leg at a time. And then over time, what you're trying to do is bring your feet up to your hands on the bar without just swinging back and forth.

2:16:32Dr. Andrew Huberman:Controlled, non-crossfit. Using your lower abs. Five sets of five or even three sets of five on the pikes. And especially if you're hanging from a thick bar, so you're really working your grip. That's a great ab work. And I do back hyperextensions. And so it keeps your core really, really strong. Why are you bothered about torso work so much? You want strong abs. You want strong midsection. And you want strong lower back muscles. I mean, I noticed that basically all injuries for me, little nagging injuries completely disappear. Even if I'm sitting a lot, I don't have any pain. If I'm doing, I make sure I get a hundred reps of hyperextensions per week.

2:17:11Dr. Andrew Huberman:Just so I don't care when I put them in. Sometimes I'll put always at the end of a workout, but I'll put them at the end of arm day or leg day or back day or I'll just mix them. I just, I have a commitment to a hundred reps and I started getting strong enough that I can do them with one leg. So on the 45 degree, you just, you sort of like kick up one leg, like you're a horse getting your shoe cleaned or something. The GHD, that would have been insane. No, not on the GHD. I don't do those on the GHD. And then I just go slow and controlled. You don't want to be tilting from one side to the next.

2:17:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:So you really discover any imbalances that are there. You're bracing yourself and you just, I'll do five, five reps, switch to the other leg, back and forth, back and forth. And now I'm at the place where I can hold some weight or use a band. And I'll tell you that having those strong spinal erector muscles Like my default posture has suffered in writing this book, even with a standing desk, because you're just looking down so much. Eyesight and posture. Exactly. But yeah, there's some recovery that needs happening. But I did buy an inversion table. Those are fun. I love hanging upside down. I've tried those as well.

2:18:07Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah. You have to be careful if you have eye pressure issues like glaucoma, you can blow a gasket. You can make glaucoma worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eye pressure upside down. Not good. I don't have glaucoma, so I'm not going to wood. but having a strong lower back i notice leg days are so much stronger pressing pulling everything just gets stronger and you don't want any weak links in the chain and i think jeff cavalier really nails it when he says you want to do the small things like face pulls back hyper extensions the glute medius work to stabilize the pelvis those little things allow you to do the big things for much longer people say all that stuff is like namby pamby stuff you need to do just your squats and deadlifts and split squats.

2:18:48Dr. Andrew Huberman:And yeah, the way you do those things into your 50s, like me, with, yeah, I had this little shoulder thing, but no biggie, is, and continue to get stronger, is by doing the little things. And if you do the little things, you stay strong and healthy. If you don't, you are the person who's complaining about your back, who can't deadlift, or you're using a deadlift bar with like elevated handles from plates. You know, it's not good. It's just you're becoming weaker through negligence, which is, it's excusable, but it takes three minutes to do some hyperextensions. For most educated people as well that are into their training, they know that what they're doing is trading short-term gain for long-term fragility because they've got five minutes left at the end of their session and they're going to go and do another set of bicep curls instead of going to go and do some hyperextensions or whatever, right?

2:19:48Like it's always a trade-off and there's a level of ignorance where you're allowed to not do the thing that you didn't know you were supposed to do. Totally. But for most people that listen to you and listen to me, like my brother, you know that you should be doing lower back work. You know that you should be doing some mobility work. You know that you should be getting your heart rate above 170. You know that you should be going low and slow. You know you need to be walking after meals, the 10-minute walk, postprandial thing. You know these things. Ignorance is no longer an excuse for you.

2:20:17Dr. Andrew Huberman:Oh, it's all out there. I mean, especially since, and I talk about mobility in the book, it's basically get each knee behind your glutes at least once per day. Like a couch stretch? Well, yeah, like a couch stretch, like Kelly Starrett talks about, or just a lunge where you're stretching your hip flexors out. Because sitting, walking, almost everything is like knee in front of the glutes, right? You could skip like Stu McMillan, but then you have to have the confidence to be a skipper. Are you sitting and holding? Is this more like a yin yoga type position? Yeah, you could do it. I talk about just getting your knee behind your glutes or your foot up on a chair or a stool and stretching that out if you're at the airport or something.

2:20:49Dr. Andrew Huberman:I'll do 10 seconds per side, three times per side. Yep. You want to try and squat down once per day, as I talked about, like sumo squat, put elbow on inside one knee and then looking up, being able to look up from the squatted position, point directly overhead. Most people can't do this right away. They have to, you know, start here and gradually, you know, over a week or so get to the point where they can look straight up at their finger. And then you want to be able to do it to the other side too, right? What are you doing here? You're getting stretching through neck, thoracic, spine, shoulder.

2:21:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:there it's not look they're great mobility programs so most people don't make the time or have the time these are the minimum right you do the the squatting things you do a couple of those then i talk about doing reverse what gymnasts would call like kids would call like the crab pose where you you're in a reverse tabletop you're you know you put can push up for shoulder extension i don't have like excessively good shoulder extension but i can get my shoulders behind me no problem you know you have horrible shoulder extension okay so working on that a little bit gradually and then there's something in there that i didn't develop which is called which i um uh which is really cool called the founder's pose and i describe it there it's from um it looks a little bit like a chair sit in yoga but it's actually for the posterior chain and i talk about that um and that's described there it's someone else's creation i want to be clear and i credit him um it's really really cool and those four things take you know five minutes to do maximum you can do them anywhere you can do them watching netflix you can do them at your desk you and do them spread throughout the day to maintain some level of mobility.

2:22:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:The other thing is use a full range of motion in your resistance training sets. Strength is gained through the range it's trained. Oh, that's good. I like that. Full range of motion and holding tension on the stretched position. Not, you know, indefinitely, right? Don't turn it into an isometric, but, you know, really like on your hamstring curls, making sure that you're setting the machine such that on your seated or lying leg curls, you're really holding tension in the stretch, not passively stretching. and I find like my range of emotions pretty darn good. It's not amazing. You know, I was real stiff for a bit in my mid back and I did some work to get over that.

2:22:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:You just move better, you'll feel better, you'll be more comfortable. So yes, I think that what you're pointing out that there's really no excuse for people once they have the knowledge gets to a deeper psychology. I don't wanna parse this, you know, infinitum, but there are two things that I think are worth stating out loud. One is that if you're somebody who's in pursuit of taking care of yourself and doing well, there are going to be people that say like, you're doing all this stuff all the time. You're doing all this stuff all the time. Like, what is this? These are the people that when I would go to scientific meetings would give me shit for not drinking on the first night.

2:23:33Dr. Andrew Huberman:I had a rule. I don't go out the first night. But you find me on night three of a five-day meeting and all day I'm rocking and like I'm engaged. I'm learning. I'm not at a meeting to socialize, but I do some of it. But I'm learning. I'm getting techniques. I'm there to work, okay? And they're talking about their hangover, they look like garbage. And over the years that accumulates for them and it accumulates for me in a positive way. So people will give you a hard time for exercise and they'll give you a hard time for taking good care of yourself. And I do think that the other thing is there is a certain loneliness that comes with being the person who's really diligent.

2:24:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's a different community of people that I can call at 7 a.m. and go, you wanna work out? And it's like, you might say, hey, listen, I was up way too late. You might say, yeah, let's go. Your friend group changes. I mean, I have a friend who used to work with people from really troubled backgrounds. And he would say, somebody would occasionally make it out of that world and just leave completely. But many times they would get themselves into all sorts of financial and social messes because they would continue to revert to this world they grew up in. You've heard me talk about this lonely chapter thing, right?

2:24:43Like this is the whole idea behind that, that there is a period where you are so developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed that you built your new one and you keep looking back and you're tempted.

2:24:54Dr. Andrew Huberman:I think Martha Beck calls this the empty elevator. Oh, interesting. You're just, you know. Between floors. Between floors. That's beautiful. Yeah, the empty elevator. And then you get there and you realize, well, there are other people who've also felt lonely, who are now in this place, who are doing cool things. And And it takes a strength of character to say, no, I'm not going to do that. And yes, I'm going to do this. And to also not be defiant and also still be able to go to Thanksgiving and still, yeah, you don't - I'm better than you. Exactly. It's not about better or worse. It's just different.

2:25:25Dr. Andrew Huberman:And that I think that people fear being lonely. And I understand, like, I get it. You know, you're drinking buddies or you're eating lousy food buddies. The first night we land in a city, my team always likes to go out to dinner. I'm always in the hotel taking care of myself because I want to have the full week of vigor. And they do great, but they're younger than I am. We'll see. We'll see that because we're going to be in New York together next week. Last time that we spoke, you were telling me that you were teaching an octopus to use an iPad. Yeah. How's that going? But she died because - She electrocuted?

2:26:04Dr. Andrew Huberman:No, she died because she laid eggs and they die after they lay eggs. So they live about two years. You bought a pregnant octopus. Yeah. Well, they lay eggs and then the eggs get fertilized by a male and then they die. This is the life cycle of the octopus. So I didn't know how old she was when I got her. They don't tell you. It's hard to know. And you have some sense, but yeah, she was in her second year. So she was really cool yeah yeah um i thought it was a male but that was pure projection right um and then i named him van gogh because he was a starry night octopus okay yeah um didn't you replace with a new one that one died too um maybe you shouldn't have kids no no fucking strumming's like looking around all the time, like just waiting.

2:26:55Dr. Andrew Huberman:Both of these octopuses were old. They were old. Okay. Yeah, they were in the - Have you given up on the octopus thing for now? No, heck no. Okay. I have a new tropical tank. I got the dog. I got the other freshwater tank. Hell no. But I need to get a younger octopus. Okay. Like a purebred newborn on a puppy octopus. I just need, I need either a male octopus or I need a younger octopus. I can't believe that you weren't able to discern whether or not you bought a male or a female. Who the fuck were you getting this from? Some bloke on Venice Beach. I swear. No, I get them legally, but let's just put it this way.

2:27:32Dr. Andrew Huberman:Their fate would have been far worse if they hadn't come to me. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Salvage an octopus. So I have not done that yet, but I will say that Van Gogh was spectacularly smart and would sit down in front of the coral and mimic the coral. It was awesome. It was so cool. Um, they're a little bit sadistic, which is a little bit troubling. I think we should probably talk about this so I can get over it. Um, we're in that like second phase of the trauma thing. Um, in all seriousness, like the weird thing about octopuses, they're a little bit of like drama queens, um, because they're, they play with you.

2:28:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:So like I would hand feed Van Gogh and she would take the fish and sometimes she would just eat the fish, you know, and give it to her on a forceps. And other times she would take it and she'd stuff it against the glass of the aquarium and slowly eat the fish, then take a nap halfway through. And I was like, oh my God, these octopuses are pretty brutal. Kind of ruthless. Yeah. And then sometimes she would just like play with it. And that's rough. A dog is a benevolent creature. They're going to eat their food. That's it. A cat will play with its prey. Cephalopods are motherfuckers. I like cephalopods.

2:28:44Dr. Andrew Huberman:I like cuttlefish. I had those for years. Kept those alive for a long time, by the way. Congratulations. Thank you. So it was a little disturbing to see the octopus sadistically play with and partially eat its food. That's funny. Yeah, we don't like to think about the animal kingdom that way. But if you look at nature is metal, that account. Yeah, that'll teach you some stuff pretty quick. You got to get on a plane, my brother. I love you to bits. Do you get on a plane? Yeah, you've got to get on the plane. No, I'm seeing you on Monday. Sorry, on Tuesday, I'm going to be in New York. You'll be there.

2:29:18Great. We'll try and get Rick and a couple of other people.

2:29:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:So we could do a wrap up. So, well, I should just properly say, I should say thank you for hosting me. Grateful for your friendship. Thanks for supporting me through this book, for taking my calls at odd hours. My sanity. Thanks for supporting my, restoring my sanity. And I'm so glad we're neighbors. Me too. And fun to work out with you this morning. Yeah, you're the best. Where should people go to get the book? Protocolsbook.com will put links to all the places you can buy books and books in different languages. The audio book is read by me in my voice. It's 19 hours long. But you can hop to a particular section, learn what you want to learn, and then put it away, come back to it anytime.

2:30:01Dr. Andrew Huberman:Question that I like to ask authors. What is an insight from the book, either an intervention or an area or something that you think most people are going to skip over, but you wish that they didn't. The wacky eye movement thing to fall back asleep. Oh, we talked about that last time that we were together. Yeah, yeah. I think people would think it's too crazy, but it costs nothing and it works and it will get you back to sleep because it confuses your body awareness system. You need to forget where your limbs are. It is really fucking like dizzying when you do it. You need to forget about your body position in order to fall asleep.

2:30:36Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's a prerequisite to falling asleep. So that will help. I think the one that people will skip over, frankly, is the personal development thing around how to finally let go of the difficult things that you're still carrying forward. You know, I can say 15 minutes of journaling on the hard thing one day and then subsequently on three more days. The data from Pennebaker and others show conclusively it's a super powerful technique. but people just don't do it and we should ask ourselves why don't they do it and i think because the thing is hard and also nowadays getting people to write for 15 minutes is tough i learned a lot about focus overcoming procrastination and scruffing oneself into doing hard things and writing this book and i thought i was pretty good at doing when i when i have to write someone a card like if it's someone's birthday or whatever i realize i haven't done this in so physically writing a thing i haven't done this in so long i've basically forgotten how to do it but uh peterson before he did 12 rules and then 12 more there's 24 there the original um answer the original place that that was born out of was a list of 44 rules on quora you remember that place it was a website where people get answer questions yeah and somebody asked jordan uh what are your rules for a good life or something like that and he just listed 40 that include like pet a cat when you see it on the street don't bother children when they're skateboarding don't let your children do anything that like that means that you don't like them etc etc and one of his that i remember from that was, if memory still upset you, comma, write them down, full stop.

2:32:09And it's like so much of this stuff is pointing in the same direction. Dude, you're awesome. Book's fantastic. I'm glad that you're not insane, but you are a little bit short-sighted now. I'll see you in New York next week.

2:32:18Dr. Andrew Huberman:Thanks so much, Chris. You're a gentleman, a scholar, and a beast. Big love. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude. Thank you. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Green's Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels, and crave-worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon Brussels side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to Sweetgreen, featuring fall's best dressed. Make your move. Order on the Sweetgreen app.