#700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain
03:03:53 Share

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is doctor Andrew huberman is a neuroscientist, associate professor of the stanford university school of medicine and a podcasts. m. IT has never been so easy and also so difficult to remain healthy and perform at your best the right tools and insights that we all need to avoid pitfalls. And max mize, our outcomes, thankfully, at our fingertips.

And today we get to go through some of doctor he berman's favorites, expect to learn how breathing can literally change the shape of your face, what Andrew thinks of the huberman husbandman's kink, just how bad vpc actually is for you, how to increase your willpower using science, what everyone misunderstands about stress, his opinion on tom sugar ous transformation, how to be more productive and much more. This episode is so good, I absolutely love doctor human man's work. The guy is the biggest health and fitness podcast on the planet.

And with good reason, he's made every bro biohacking ck very silly. Over the last couple of years by using science and evidence to work out exactly what we actually need to do to improve our outcomes, our longevity, our health, literally everything. I really appreciate all of the work that he puts in, and there is so much to take away from today.

Don't forget that if you are new here or a long time listener, you might be listening, but not subscribed. And that is tress bad because that means you will miss episode when they go up the next two months. Has got a stack lineup of huge guests that you don't want to miss.

So navigate to apple podcast or spotify or wherever you are listening and press the subscribe. But IT does support the show. IT makes me very happy indeed.

And IT ensures you will not miss episodes when they go up to go impress IT. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentleman, please welcome doctor Andrew huberman.

What will you just teaching me about mouth freeing and how IT changes the shape of the face?

So I arrived Carrying a copy of the book, jaws, a hidden epidemic. This is not jaws, the shark. This book was written by my colleagues at stanford, sunder kon and paul eric and IT has an introduced by Jerry diamond, who won a polter for guns, germs and steel in a forward by the great Robert polsky, also a colleague, and stanford. So four heavy hitters on this book, just a credential at first.

This book centers around a couple of core concepts, but the first being that people in in particular, children who overuse mouth breathing as opposed in nasal breathing, have changes in the structure of the face that will, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were too mouth breath IT also discusses the chewing of foods as essential to mouth and face development. Sandakan is an expert in queeny official function and structure. Um and the fact that if your parents and you did things right, you should be able to place your your entire tongue on the room of your mouth with your mouth clothes.

Now I can do that. Okay so when you were teeth closed, the roof, your mouth, I can but I still feel the back of my teeth of IT um so yeah OK but the so that's the second point that we want a true heart. Chewing food is essential to tooth and mouth and face development um these days many children slip their food.

Many adults slip their friends. Many adults are eating like babies and of course babies before they developed their mature teeth and even when they before they get all over with their teeth and need, I will, sly breast milk um you know putting like foods okay, but so that's the second point. So native breathing good, mouth breathing bad for any official development, chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth grade for cranium, official development or al development, tooth development and youth health, which, by the way, corlaer ed, with a number of other things like cardiovascular health and metaphorical health, very interesting links there.

And then the third point is that the the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia, things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers, are the by product of poor breathing and let's just say over consumption of soft foods in place of hard foods behavior. And so there's this guy who's from your side of the pond, new and a new method um of restoring Normal cranial official development. The book is chock a block full of impressive photos of before and afters.

Impressive because in some cases you will see kids that were um mouth breathers or we're eating a lot of soft foods and then they recovered their behavior. So this speaking and became nose breathers, of course we have to melt breathe one more exercising really hard or when we're eating or speaking we're gona mouth breathe, but at rest we should nail breathe as the argument and that greatly improves cleaning official um aesthetics and the good news is this stuff is modifiable across the lifespan and and so the book isn't arguing for anyone to purchase anything. You don't need a drawer sizer.

I'm saying that explicit because they took clips of me talking about this product dizzy and had nothing to do with that. So hopefully will keep this in the episode and they even admitted they were breaking the law. He said we don't care.

We're going to continue to do IT.

So sales sales man yeah but now those to the credit of of products for um exercising the job. Sure there are muscles of the jaw that static.

but using yeah IT tough food is if you don't have a sufficiently tough diet, I guess you could replace IT. But explain to me the mechanics of how the difference in whether you break through your nose or break your mouth changes the shape of your face and head .

and goes to be on that. If you breath through your mouth as opposed to your nose, the first one you bring in less oxygen, then you would, if so you you're limiting, effectively putting yourself into a state of apa, right, which is bad during sleeping. Guess what? It's bad during waking states.

Also, if you get less oxygen, your brain bad. The sinuses, you know, here are, my sinuses are closed, and my side, the sinuses, wish I had brought a skull with with me. Because one of the most impressive things about a scholl human goal being no exception, is that the sciences are literally, these little tubes are channels through which fluid and iron move and the sinses, even though they are essentially the created by the Fisher res between different bones.

So like the two, two or three different bones that are interdicted and create these tunnels, they're actually fairly plastic in the sense that they can be modified in terms of their shape. And so people say, well, I have a deviated step. M, guess what? You should try and emphasize breathing through both nostrils, as in order to a undeviating your section now someone has a broken nose or something is really structure abNormal.

They may correct tive surgery, but purely through deliberate nasal breathing, so could be melt taping at night, but also just deliberately nasal breathing during most of your cardiff asar training unless you need to really hit the gas, in which case the mouth breathe is going to help dilate the sinuses and lead to Better air flow, which makes nasal breath easier. The other thing is that nazzal breathing we know um well, first, while there's a nasal microbial, there's also an oral microbiome, but the nasal microbiome particularly well suited to um scrub or capture and destroy virus bacteria and even some function infections. So in other words, when you're breathing through your mouth, you're more susceptible to infections.

This is important heading into winter as well. Um so there a number of I mean, we could talk about this for hours, but the point is nasal breathe when you can um kids especially but adults as well chewing foods that require you know eating foods that require some chewing and really working at IT and chewing away. They have some impressive images in this book of kids that were twins that were raised separately, won by a group that needs a lot of, let's just take tougher foods that require chewing versus one that slip ing their food.

And I mean, one kid is literally incredibly attractive, perfect dentist with no worth of donor det or you know regular dentistry. And the other kid is teeth is like snag. They have the horse like the horse smile.

even though they're got the same genetic predisposed.

right, right? It's not a perfect experiment because there are other factors as well. And you know none of this is um the for Better worse, none of this is really amenable to come in laboratory type stuff.

Um so as these are naturally occurring experiments, as we say, um there are also some very impressive images in the book. Or we just take deep pressing of kids that were pretty attractive as kids. And then there's an example of a kid who got a pet hamster.

He was allergic to the hamster. He switch as a consequences, becomes a month breather. And then the characteristic changing in the face when one over does mouth breathing is that the chin .

starter move the .

recessions or tower the neck and the rest of the face was out, but also the eyes become gruppe. Um and but you say why would the eyes be affected? It's not just muscular later.

What's happening is there's um less use of literally the the sciences in the upper the uh tower, the upper mandible and up towards the eyes because they ever had a science infection. It's painful up here in your forehead around the ice. So again, it's pretty straight forward.

No products required. Chew you chew your food well, chew on both sides of your mouth, especially if you're Young person, but even if you're not um be an naseer breather, really chew at your food. Try and probably also has benefits in terms of limiting um unessential or loan nutrient density. Calories was slipped your food all the time.

I mean drink calories yeah .

I love a good greek yog you but but drinking and excessive calories is probably not good and and eat like an adult I would say no one of things is I don't know like to me growing up snacks, food with something that kids um indulge you know once you hit eighteen or so you eat like .

an adult and mentioned I had want to show recently yeah what do you think most people misunderstand about stress? Obviously he's contributed and over a lot this and you ve thought about this too yeah what do you think people don't understand fully about stress?

Yes, the finding that I think are overlooked tremenhere sly, the following experiment, there's experiment in the animals where a rat is given the opportunity, run on a tread mill and ratten and roads of all kinds love kinds, love running on trade meals. There are these interesting um we will see who catches this fly first.

I'm ready.

The I think you know there's even a study from hoppy hofstra lab at harvard that shows if you put a wheels running wheel in fields, that rodents will run there in the midst and I and run on them. That's how insanely obsessed with running I just go.

There's something .

rewarding about IT for them, but in any event, IT lower their blood pressure. That leads to improvements in a number of metrics that you expect. And you see the same thing in humans, right? We run on a trade.

Miller run outdoors as women. Cardigan lar exercise okay well um suppose key um and I love to talk about an experiment where they took two different cages with animals. One is running voluntarily, but then that running wheel is tethered to a running wheel in another cage that encloses an animal forces IT to run every time the other one runs.

So four exercise versus voluntary exercise and the takeaway very straight for voluntary exercises, at least all sorts of improvements in health metrics, resting heart rate, blood pressure, blood cog um resting blug lucas that are awaking lug lue cos um the animal that's force exercise, you see the opposite, right? So it's not exercise persue, it's something about being forced to exercise is causes decrements in a number of health metrics, and you see the same thing in humans. So what's wild is my colleague, doctor ali, crime department of psychology at stanford, on these beautiful experiments on mindset and belief.

These are not pleasure effects. And what she's shown, and just absolutely spectacular way, is that if people watch a short video about all the ways in which stress can really diminish your health, well then indeed stressed diminishes their health. Whether if a separate group watches in a factual, also five minute, also factual, tutorial on all the ways that dressing enhances performance by harney, your ability to focus memory formation, it's under all, which is true. That's indeed what you see.

Can I give me my favorite one that I lend about over the last year? yes. So the boston marathon bombing. Two thousand twelve， about ten years ago, two thousand and sixty, maybe anyway, boston marathon omber. The study was done comparing people who had been at the actual marathon while the bomb had gone off, and people who had watched twenty minutes or more of news coverage about IT in the people who watched ninety minutes or more of news coverage about IT showed a greater stress response than the people who literally lived through IT.

Interesting interesting. Yeah the. The the mindset and belief effects are are absolutely extraordinary and and very real right? I mean I think you know recently been reading and researching a lot about to the pocket on tenacity and willows. Um there was this idea early on from balmy stern colleagues that willows ers .

are limited resource. Some of go to um IT .

was controversial um they showed that you know replenishing glucose in between heart tasks could restore willows.

They showed the uh I was at juries or judges that were low in blood glue cover more likely to give harsh a sentence stuff like .

this yeah IT IT is worked out to a number of naturalist situations and IT made good sense. And then my colleague carduel, also in the psychology department at stanford, um most famously known for her work on mine growth mindset, did an experiment in which they um essentially asked whether not tenacity and willpower are limited in terms of being some sort of resource and also whether not IT was somehow linked to glucose availability fuel in the brain and body and found that if people fought or were told that mind that, excuse me, willows was a limited resource, that's indeed what they observed experimentally but that if they were taught or were told that willows is unlimited and and divorced ed from glue cose levels, well then that's exactly what you the .

thing that learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower ers are limited resources and information hazard that is self .

for fAiling potentially. Now bow minister, you know he showed um himself to be you know pretty determined when encountered the the duck counter by showing that if indeed if there is a hard task followed by a hard task, then your beliefs about willpower can impact your performance on the second task so the A K do what is right but that if you have hard task, hard task and then another hard task, back to back to back task or more, which is a lot of what life is like, well then IT seems that the that the wheel powers is a limited resource and blue coast supporting will willpower theory holds up a bit Better.

What have you come to believe about the difference between willows and motivation and discipline? How to kind of all of these fit together .

in your mind yeah so Willy wer in tenacity um are related to motivation with are not quite the same. I think we should think of a motivation as a um as the verb state that moves us from um let's just say apathy to tenacity OK. So it's it's it's the verb function that moves us along that continuum.

Apathy at one and tenacity and willpower, a strong exertion of willow wer the other end. One of the most interesting structures in the entire nerve system is one that gets very little coverage. Unfortunately, in fact, most neuroscientists aren't aware what its function is, and it's called the AMC c, which is the anti middle t cortex.

You have won on each side of the brain. The name isn't really important, but we want, you know to to the credit of the of the structure we should name at the A M C C. The mcc receives inputs from a lot of interesting brain areas related to reward, relate to automatic functions.

So how alert, sleepy we are to prediction, to prediction error is a hub for many, many inputs and outputs a hormone on systems. That said, beautiful experiments done by my college joe, part of busy at stanford, have shown that if you stimulate this brain near a tiny little brain area in a human, they immediately feel as if some chAllenge is impending, and they're going to meet. That chAllenge is a forward center of mass against chAllenge response.

This has been seen an independent subjects. I do controls where they then tell them they're stimulating but are not actually stimulating. And then like I don't feel anything you can turn on and off.

Tenacity and willows. So there's literally a hub for this. Now here's where IT gets really interesting. I'm going a list of a bunch of peer reviewed publish results in rapid sequence, and i'm happy to point out the substantiation for the other references.

Okay, individuals that are dieting or resisting some sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that, the size and activity in their mcc goes up over time, and the structure gets bigger, dies who fail flat or downward trajectory. The size and activation the cc. This can be taken too far.

Individuals with international, international of the most deadly of all, psychiatric disorders, where a dep self deprivation of food activates excessive reward. There's this kind of loop of reward. Their mcc es are significantly greater sized than others. So there's this can be taken too far, super ages, which is a bit of a moma, because these individuals are people who maintain healthy cognitive unction, similar to people in their choices. And thirties into their seventies, eighties and nineties, their mcc maintains the increases in size into their later years, typical ages, the size of we always here that you lose brain mass across your life spin.

Well, most of IT is from the mcc and beautifully, and this is two my favor results that really bring this around to a protocol or take away if people are given an easy task, the mcc is into activated. If they're given a hard task in particularly a hard task, physical or cognitive, that they really don't want to do, the M, C, C levels of activity go through the roof. And here's what's really coal they gave aging is, you know people age sixty to seventy nine, the task of three hours extra per week of cardiovascular exercise.

Now that's a lot, right. Three, one hour they call them a robot classes, but getting their heart rate up to about sixty five, seventy percent of maximum, it's getting til like three year. They have people can look up on three, but you nail IT.

So three the size of their arms, he see, increased across that six months protocol and offset the Normal age related decline in this in the spread ain area. In terms of its size, the theory that starting to emerge is that the C, C, is not just about tenacity in willows to push through hard things that IT may actually be related to one's will to live, one's will to continue living. And I think this is these are some of the most important results.

By the way, I didn't participate any of the researchers that I just described. I spell lot time with that literature, but I think it's so important we hear about the immigrant of hip camp s as the prove onto cortical all of very important brain structures. But um if nothing else, this the one with the M C C on the map.

the one that literally could create you will to live, is the one that's being of a look .

a little bit and and IT can be in what's interesting about the structures that is involved in generating tenacity and whether wer for all things, not just for one situation. And what's really wonderful, I think about the the research literal, this is is so clear what we need to do, we need to do that. Lisa, like me, you you a person who enjoys weight lifting and you love running, I love those two activities.

Guess what? Those activities, even if they're hard, like a hard run that i'm really enjoying or some hard sets in the gym, not going to increase the size or activity of the mcc. People love to over um romanticize the utility of those final two p sure OK.

Pushing to failure great. Running hard till you're lungs burn great. But if you enjoy that, you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willows, at least according to the research data. What's going to do is, is doing something what I call microsofts or microsofts, you know. And so microscopes could be all the little things you don't want to do during the day. Micro socks could be the larger things but of course you don't want to do things that are going to damage you psychologically or physically of course of course but everyone I believe would benefit from um picking a few microstructure some of your .

micros cks or microsofts that you could sprinkle throughout the day.

okay. So on a household maintenance level, you know, I I maintained a very clean home. I I constantly throwing things away as well. But there are a few things like once I exceed a certain number of dishes in the sink, IT becomes this okay, although the dish washers later type thing like a microscope, me will be, especially if someone has been in there for a violent kind of grow something like work through, of course, I trying to put each dish away as as I, you know, dirty them up. But so little things, the things like that, the I really want deal with that right now. That's the kind of thing, those harder tasks where you have to break some barrier, some resistances to put IT into, even press for your language or our friend David organs, right? You know that this idea that one has to calls the mind, I mean, David said that you .

probably got an hypothetic a mcc that's bigger than most people.

people probably. And and the the beauty of having a uh a mcc that's highly a you know available for activation is that you know through the micro and the micro socks of the day you have this thing is like an engine that you can devote to other things. So then you can devote the mcc to other endeavors.

I have this thing I called email anxiety, and it's when my und inbox reaches three figures on more and that's when it's just a kind of follows me around like a palter guys throughout of the day. And that absolutely that's probably a macro o suck to get through that probably three to four hours, a lot of its scheduling. Once this guys coming on, you need to speak to this partner, we got blab a um so I I feel that what is .

subjective, right? I mean what sox so my .

yeah someone might and I think .

that um you know you've talked a lot of in your show with the various guess about when we're in too much comfort, uh, are we're not meeting our goals. I love deadlines for that reason. Um I I love deadlines. I of pressure I I think .

parkinson's lawyers is close to a thoma dynamic of productivity as we can get. Do you know I mean, like when you have a deadline, you will meet IT, right? If you do not have a deadline, you will manion a manion a until forever.

That's right in some people. I think in preload the deadline by procrastinating, then that's what you know gets their activation energy to, uh a level where they can they can engage. So i've started thinking about this a lot.

You know I love running, but IT is interesting. I I like to finish my driveway and I live on a hill and um I see this morning I was out for a run in the gate at the end of the color sac is my. So stop point.

So I actually sucked to do the last year twenty meters um this morning. So there I probably got a little bit a mcc activation because everything was the number negotiations I went through when I turned up my street at the end of this run. Whether I was going to run this extra twenty meters was ridiculous.

I mean, in the human brain that was struggling to not do this extra twenty meters was so silly. So it's got to hurt a little bit. Again, you don't want to damage yourself.

But I think in the context of um for instance, cognitive learning, getting to the point where you finish something and then forcing yourself to do one little extra bit there, i'm not looking for any credit for but I want to be very clear that the scientific nature doesn't call these things micros cks. I call them microsofts. And I put that out there .

just to make IT clear as what we're really going to do.

You know nick, back in aten .

is of power lifting also runs to be clear.

I know that large guys are run fast, but um typically they don't run fast for twenty mile.

correct. And he um he his little h catch phrase is go one more. And it's interesting what you're saying here is it's not just about the completion of the thing that are doing because a lot of the time the thing that you choose to do, even the thing that difficult, is done into your own volition.

Don't get me wrong if you do a difficult cross, the workout friend, whatever, twenty one, fifty nine of thrust and palliative IT is of its hell, right? IT is literally a name for what your throat feels like you finish called francop. The people get from having taken their .

heart rate .

as high um that taste of metal in the back of your throat. But what what people are doing that although they're doing something that's difficult, it's like validate ally difficult and it's within the domain of enjoyment. And what you're saying here is that we're looking to just push ourselves a little bit past that is I can unnecessary amount of chAllenge and I think that go on more makes quite a nice uh, reminder for us with the micros cca micrococcus push ourselves just a little bit beyond where we would got a sense of satisfaction because presumably you get the dopa have completed the task. Fuck here and then it's like and then I do just that tiny little bit more to to bring one person that I thinks been really interesting from this side you're good friends with thoma gira.

Yeah and where we're related, we're cousins. You're kidding me. No, no, no.

We're cousins. I can see that. Yeah and his commitment to fitness has been pretty fascinating for me to see. And he's kind of treating his body like an athlete to facilitate his show in pursuit of comedy, I think even, but is trying to sought his set of health and fitness out one number of time.

Two birds, the control experiment. There's if the experiments about willow wer tenacity and discipline, tom, is the, is the, is the, is the active condition, and where is the control?

But I am seeing more and more people now, especially performers, the on using the aunt within the realm of physical fitness, really starting to understand if I want to perform outside of this, I need to think like an athlete. I need to be looking at my hydration. I mean, tom, how is trying to travel with him on .

the road for months? Yeah, yeah. Tom's really serious about his craft as his bird. They just have different approaches.

And when he comes to fitness, I by the way, I know bert is training. He's working out. I've been trying to get bird to quit drinking and alcohol for a while.

Um not because i'm the um Albert of of of who should do what. I I never tell people what to do, by the way, provide information. People can do what they want.

I'm a live and let live. I want to be very clear about that. Um but it's out of care and affection for for bird that um you know excessive alcohol consumption over long pars of time bad. I think we can keep that on pretty brief. So but bird is working out. But tom, I know um because we talk and I ve spent some time with them that um he drains, he dragged hard and he sees IT as interrogated his with his writing with his ability shot for his family and business at Sarah.

I mean, I think we're finally approaching a time in human history where a we accept at the level of you on the scientific community all way through to wellness and just generally that the brain embodies are intimately linked at the level what you you know if you want to improve your body, um do something for your mind. If you want to improve your mind, do something for your body. And and it's so clear now what we all need to do, I mean, we can get into the details.

But at a macro level, it's clear that we should all be getting that hundred, fifty, two hundred years of zone two per week or walking a lot. If you live in a big city, you're probably getting that. But then also getting your heart rate up to two, you know max heart rate once a week, doing some sprint type stuff on and whatever format is safe for your body.

Some people swiming. Some people, what's rowing? Some people, it's running come, it's running. But you know, not everyone enjoys running or can do IT. And then everyone should be doing at least six sets of resistance training per muscle group per week minimum hard set to failure. Okay maybe maybe not close to failure. Yeah probably and it's especially the groups that have been um less to say a verse to weight training relatively women, older folks, although now more women weight train because they understand that in the absence of a lot of injected or prescription animal at cormon's are not gna get enormous.

That's the funniest thing for me.

That's why we died. I think right that that concept that if you won lift weights that they're .

going to be belk. Do you realize to all of the women who are out there that are concerned about lifting weights because I going to get to bulky. Do you know how hard i've worked to try and desperately become bulky for fifteen years? Like I ve worked really, really difficult, hoping that one day i'll become bulky. And there is, I think it's dissipating a lot now, but that was, for a long time, this fear that would do a couple of bysset calls, and you gonna look like the incredible hok mean, my friends have really, really prayed for that to happen forever are you do not need to be concerned it's not going to creep up on you on one day. You're going to wake up and be the sort of vascular beast, right?

Um a couple of things about that. I mean, from a lunch vd standpoint, we know that maintaining healthy nerve to muscle function nor muscular junctions is one of the things that resistance exercise does and it's highly quarter with cognitive function into older age. And for those people, I guess going to match our earlier conversation will provide this a few times in the course of of this episode.

But um the thing you want to do the least that's actually the thing that where you stand to build up your mcc the most. So for me that would be language learning or learning a musical instruments. Two things that I love music and um but I I just it's just so hard for me.

So IT sits there on the shelf as a possible way to activate the mcc. But in terms of actual a resistance training, resistance training has an interesting property that haven't heard disgust before um that pertains to men and women who do IT um which is unlike cardio accused training during a resistance training bought because of the blood flow to the muscle so called pump. You get a little window into what the potential progress would look like that pump dissipate tes post work out and then if if you allow sufficient rest and nutrition and said you get a hypercritical response.

But it's so unlike other forms of exercise, like if I go to a yoga class and I stretch her, am doing some movement, I get to that limit where i'm quaking and I fall over. It's very different than getting a picture of just how flexible I will be the next time yeah and then losing that until I adapt with running your lungs, sometimes your throat burns, as you pointed out, and that's showing you you're limited, of course. Then there's an adaptation response that then allows you to perform at that level without the burning in the next time, right, if you allow efficient recovery.

But with way training is kind of interesting. The whole pump thing was never something that I really drew me to wait training very much. But it's interesting because you get a glimpse into what that the progress might look like.

And so for I would say, for anyone who is worried about getting too big, unless your pump is bigger than you want to be, you're not going to get that right. And so you actually get a window into um how much potential size increase you're going to create. But it's so different in other forms of exercise in that way.

It's like what other thing in life if you took a language class and you are going to learn japanese and you go and during the class, you actually become fluent for a moment, then it's taken away and then you to become fluent. So it's it's a very special form of exercise that that offers some unique um gifts to us as incentives for going back. But look, as I say this, I realized some people hate resistance training, the love running.

Some people hate running um they love resistance strain. Some people I realize hate exercise, but if you hate exercise, you should do IT anyway. AMC c and you're getting the A M cc.

So going back to what you think might be happening to someone like tom, who is a like a cognitive athlete, right? But largely the physical round comedians apart from, I guess, until joe, which is part of the beginning of like the comedian bro bro left a revolution before him IT IT wasn't exactly like, I wasn't looking to comedians as being the vanguard of health and fitness. Like bu.

I can look at belushi, right? I mean, he was. He was. The epidemic, lack health and sadly died.

Talk to me about what would be happening to the brain of somebody like tom, who pivots from being maybe forty pounds overweight, but I don't know how big he got IT is. IT is biggest, but lost a good bit of weight. And IT wasn't just losing weight.

IT was then gaining muscle. So doctor, online world of like muscle scanted medicine is going to benefit from that. The insulin sensitivity, they'll be like some physico logical changes. But talk to me, for the people who are cognitive athletes, what's gna happen in someone like tom's mind when he changes his body? yeah.

So improve blood flow to the brain. And in the brain is. Most metal ability, demanding organ in the entire body IT consumes a ton of glue.

Cose, if you eat carbon hydrates, yes, I can run on key tones. But blood flow through arteries, veins in capitalists to the neurons. So the brain is, is, is inseparable from cognitive unctions.

So when you improve blood flood brain, you improve cognitive function period. When you restrict blood flow to the brain, even at a, at a micro level, you impair cogent function. H in addition to that, um we know that several forms of age related coding on decline and dementia are considered nowaday.

Some people even call a type three diabetes, although that's a controversial term diabetes of the brain. This is why a number of people who have alzheimer go on key to generic guide and get some degree of relief. It's not that, by the way, it's not a cure for alzheimer's.

Some people do Better when they switch the major fuel source for the brain. But in the case of tom, as an example, but someone who gets into exercising regularly, both resistance training and cardio ashlar training, you're getting improve blood flow. You're getting far less inflation tion of the brain inflates.

Tion is cognitive depleting a reducing inflation tion. Cognition hanckel. All that absolutely true across the board, right in animal studies in humans.

In addition to that, there are a lot of blood borne factors, two of which all just highlight now, just for safe time, only two. First of all, when we do cargo, that IT possibly impact brain health and memory in particular. So when we do load bearing, cardiff asked lar exercise.

So running as opposed to swimming, um anything where where the skeletal system is, is under some load. There's a hormone that's literally secreted from bone I know don't Normally think a bone's is underground organs called osteosarcoma steal callin is from the bones. Under these low bearing conditions, IT can cross the blistering barrier.

And we know that IT plays an active role in promoting not just new cell production but because that a more minor component of neuroplasticity but um enhancement of nerve health and function in the hypercar pus which is an area that's instrumental for the formation of new memories so there's something about movement of the body that signals to the brain. Oh, you know, we're moving you. You actually need to maintain or perhaps even enhances your ability to remember things.

And this problem is an evolutionary conserved circuit that we not exist my as well. So that's one one example. The others that my college, stanford ony wise corry um is best known for these um Young blood experiments where theyll take the blood or plaster from a Young road in and put him into an aged or demented road and and see improvements in cognitive unction.

And outside the united states there are some clinics, by the way, i'm not recommending people do this, that have shown improvements in cognitive unction or even offsetting of of alzheimer in agra, a cognitive decline. This is LED to the idea of like vampire and baby blood and which is all crazy and conspiracy. Go on record saying that.

But there's a recent paper that also from tony's lab showing that in animals that exercise regularly, if you take their blood plasma a and you supply that blood plasma to aged or cognitively deficient animals, they their cognition or their cognitive abilities improve. So there's something about blood of the exercised body that enriches the brain that could be many different growth factors that could be B D F N neurotic factor IT could be the like I G F one in some like growth factor rs probably give me A A cocktail of different things um as well as osorio calls. And so what we want to think about is that when we exercise, and that's a broad statement exercise or word rather cardiff asia resistance training IT creates A A cocktail that then crosses into the blood brain berry that then creates a of general growth health, or at least madness of of cognitive sh.

That's there. So tom's incredibly sharp course comedy requires not just memory, but also writing of new jokes, right? He's he's got to do network specials for a long time.

And I actually went, saw him and ask in a small venue, I flow out there to see, because I want to see in a small venue, because in small venues as work, comics often work out their new material. And I, just to me, I was just astonishing, like to see the number of different thought threads. And one thing that makes tomes comedy so wonderful, and other people like Richard, prior to this exception, well too, is that he can switch personas very fast.

So he's doing his voice, and he switched to his son s voice and switches back. And the speed and precision with which he does that very makes us seem we forget that they're very and he created a panel of characters and then wipe SAT board away, right? He's the only guy up.

There's wipe that board away and then creates a panel of new characters. And so I think that requires a lot of like cognitive dexterity. So exercises absolutely one of the best ways to improve brain function over time.

And in addition to that, you there's been so much interest in you. Should we do crossed word puzzles? Should we you know, why is that that some people maintain cognitive function?

I think what's very clear to me, based on all that literature, is that it's not one specific thing, crossword puzzles or social engagement or exercises, all of those things. But let's not forget the superagent, the people who are constantly trying things that are difficult, that are pressuring themselves a bit to do things that are difficult. Those people are offsetting, as far as we know, all of the major shinkin of these brain structures that Normally would shrink as people age.

So we have a lot of control. But he does require effort and not tell you there's never going to be a pillar injection IT whether not oepa or something like that. But for the brain, there's just there's no way there's no way that you're ever going to recapitulate learning and effort um and yes, IT requires time but IT is so clear.

I mean, don't know how many more papers in preclinical models and in humans, one needs to see before they finally just see unite the bullet and live weight and run or endo car diva cup training IT can't be one or the other. You know, the stereotype of like the big, let's just say, big guy who's down, you know I don't think it's entirely I mean, to meet some big, big folks that are smart, right? But there is something in the kind of broad correlations of people who you know what people who tend to only do.

Cardiff asked lar training. You know, maybe it's it's a selection bias like the the people who are already avid readers are more kind of intellectual learnings, maybe get more involved in tennis, swimming, running type sports growing because of the schools they went to or whatever. But people who just live weight IT does seem as if, over time, I don't know, maybe dead quay's.

Their ck is getting too big. They have sleep up, they don't see my sharp and they're often mouth breathers. Look at the daily big guys in the gym. They're often and not just between sets, not after, just after hard sets there that I think they're also there are fixed ating themselves and sleep. We know this and then you look at runners and the people have the kind of like the really spells and and they um and sure they might maintain cognitive function, but their bodies are very vulnerable to injury and they all seem to be complaining about what hurts you know like my friends who do a lot of extended training unless it's David gorgons who doesn't seem to have the circuit for complaining um at least certainly not online um yeah always seem to be complaining about about injuries. So I think a combination of resistance training, cardio asco training is a little just face is like you can't do one and not the other if you want to be healthy all around healthy of hard, healthy of body, healthy of mind cognition um improved or or at least maintained as we age gotto do both.

Coming back to the discussion about alcohol, which is one that you try to interject with burton, I think your episode that you really last year yeah back end of last summer yeah I think that really opened a lot of people's eyes to some of the risks of alcohol have been kind of flying the flag of IT as a tool for productivity quite a while yeah that I .

think when early do you drink at all?

I've brought IT back into my life now, but I did six months but three times and then a thousand days without alcohol to um but yeah i'm seeing right now a huge push back against unseen unintentional drinking and I think that ah your episode last year opened a lot of people's eyes to IT.

thanks. I mean again, I I don't tell people what to do. I give them the facts and so they can make the best decisions for them. I mean very clear that unless you're an alcoholic and provided you an adult that you know two drinks per week maximum um is about the upper threshold beyond which you're going to start getting some health that's .

called that's called the warm map to a warm up in england.

Yeah so you know i've never been a big drink. I don't drink. Um I am lucky that it's not something that's that's a strong draw for me. I think friends that are recovered alcoholic and you know their lives there are so much Better as a function of being silver.

But for non alcoholics, I mean, I think everyone should just know the the health risks is precise women, where the risks for breast cancer and other types of cancers are are elevated. So very much. And IT was interesting to me about the response to that episode, is that I think many people took IT. My the impression I got was that many people took IT as permission to finally stop drinking or drinking less because I didn't enjoy drinking and as you so you know beautifully put out on social media, you know drinking is one of the few activities that if you don't partake, people assume more, accuse you of having a problem and it's just wild.

I mean, like why would that be and I think that I think IT also make once actually I was out to dinner with a colleague years ago and I declined a drinking that you I was just talking to the the visiting speaker and um SHE said how that so boring and well, first, while I don't never promise ying what's on my mind without alcohol, right? I don't I don't have a excessive gave gic innovation so i'll say what I want to say um you know as best I can. But I think drinkers don't like people who don't drink because IT takes the fun out of IT for them because there is this idea that seem prolific on college campus is like if everyone is drunk that somehow, like the entire like vibe, the party is gonna on a new. New flavor and and Frankly I remember I want to college you see in a barber wear at the time people drink out taun tony discovered alcohol lix here right um and I used to go to party sometimes I look around and you like everyone here is just blasts IT like, if anything happen, drinking do you think?

Yeah, I drinking calls.

but not that often. I I had a habit and I don't recommend this. I had a IT going out about once a month and I would tie on on absolutely infrequent .

but bench .

yeah I never even at my talent. Alcohol was always such that I would get drunk quickly and then sober up really fast. So I was drinking late into the night um but then I sober up really fast. Now of course we know the sleep you get after even one drink is vastly diminished.

Every single person that's got a or a woop stack of something is feeling you right now.

Um and I think that alcohol to me um never felt good. I never liked IT and he was a recipe for know there was a lot of five, eight. There was a lot of, you know, there are a lot of bad stuff happens when people are drinking too much, driving to say nothing up or decision making. I, to me, IT just feels like there's so there are so many Better ways to have a good time that that that alcohol isn't necessary. But I do understand it's a big part of many cultures, and I do understand that for many people it's so part and parcel with relaxing and with festivities and with feeling comfortable and withdrawing a boundary between the Normal day and the rest of the day.

That's interest a rich alister aspect to IT.

Yeah, there's a story divides the day and interesting way. So i'm not judgmental. I love IT. I for me party where people are drinking and just hanging out and .

perfectly tly good. Did i've stood on the door of a thousand club nights in my career write as a clump mota? And I can promise you, for the people that are thinking, I like the sound of this just fiction, this excuse that I don't need to drink anymore.

Doctor, human man has said that, you know, maybe it's not for you. Maybe it's not as enjoyable. Nothing good happens in nightclubs after one in the morning.

I am patient zero. I have the, I am the doctor of late night parties. Okay, like that, one of my expertise. Nothing good happens in the nightclub. It's this sort of messy, sloppy fights and kiss in people you shouldn't and and and stumbling all over the place and stuff.

If you go out and you don't drink and you go home at one in the morning, I think you probably get to capture about eighty percent of the enjoyment of the event that you went have done, had you have drank pre drinks, gone out in the whole thing. And I got a bit push, I got quite a bit push back from the separate community a few years ago. I did this thousand days sober as a club promoter, which was, I guess, I A kind of a big deal in in summer gards for like pushing the suborning community forward.

But I was not never doing IT because I had a problem. I was doing IT because he gave me more consistency and more time and more money to spend on things that I care about. So I was a productivity tool like like the poma doro technique, right? Or going to bed on time or something.

And um they had a little bit of problem. They had a big problem with the fact that I said there is something to the enjoyment of drinking on a night out. I think anybody that says alcohol has no role in improving the quality of a night out ever just hasn't been on enough good nights out, right? There are ways that they can improve kind of illusions.

People up IT can reduce their inhibitions. If you want to go and dance, you know you dancing at a rival or a festival, which I think there's one going on quite close to here. Um if you are, there is really great. But if alcohol wasn't so widely distributed, I think people would ask a lot more questions. It's like you can see the wood for the trees, right? You you don't question is such a is backed into the the fabric of of just human life every single time that I take a like a macro dose, but low of sliced and one where I can still .

function is .

point seven five, point seven five to one gram.

So that's about it's a little less than half of the macro therapeutic. C, those for for intractable al depression, which is something like two point two grams or so.

you can still hold a conversation depending on what strain you ve got. But every single time that I do IT, without fail, I thought, comes into my mind, which is, why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does anybody do IT? Because i'll go to bed.

My H. R, V, my recovery is fine. The next day, maybe i'm a little bit tired.

I have had a lot of like activation of, been super energetic, very little high over on the evening. I don't do stupid things. IT makes me want to say nice things to all of my friends.

My thoughts are sharper than they were before. Sometimes they are silly, but that sharper. And then you compare IT with alcohol and it's this kind of sloppy, muddy, very una.

It's just I I totally get what you mean when you've taken a little bit of time away from you. Look at IT in the harsh light of day, the effect that alcohol gives you just aren't that enjoyable. And it's been folded into people's lives through tradition and through just angering bias and continuation. And in marketing.

you know the idea that like someone can quote, hold their liquor is such like it's been made synonymous with you know masculine ideal. It's like, I mean it's kind of crazy because if we know IT also crushes to astro n levels, what's interesting is that um you know I forget who said this but you know there's a very different picture of a Young drunk verses and old drunk someone has been just drinking for too many years.

It's not a pretty picture. They become infantile. They become really infantile. And you know again, i'm i'm not the enter alcohol creator. Did I did that episode? Not expecting much of a swell and um that shows just how out of out of touch sometimes I can be.

I think it's just reiterated mand. I think he gave people the excuse what did you gave people the justification you legitimized? Then it's like the best box tell you something you think you already know.

I was like that everyone always, a lot of people always had an idea. I probably shouldn't be drinking. Maybe I don't enjoy that much.

Maybe these aren't my friends, are just my drinking partners. Maybe I don't like the way that I feel the next day. Maybe my life could be Better if I stop drinking. That's the justification.

Well, i'm happy to hear that for those folks. You know now the information is out there and I was accused several times on twitter slashing of um taking all the finale parties in the at least in the bay area but i'll say I grew up in the bay area.

The good parties end a long time ago but there still exists you know and I think there are you and when I say other ways to have fun, I don't mean I know everyone should just sit around, do math, read neuroscience, although for me that's fun. Um you know I think I think in a broader sense, I think there's a shift now is that people really think about you know how to engage socially in ways that are interesting. I mean, perhaps it's again a samp bias because of the topics that I cover and who talks to me.

But in the bay area there are these russian bonier in new york, their spite eight, by the way, they don't pay me to say this. I'd like to go this, uh, russian bonier down the wall street. You go there and, you know, get hot sonus and cold plunge.

And people are Young, Young people are there and enjoying themselves and that they actually serve alcohol. So they'll have sometimes. So do you like giants of oca something there? And so people, that part of the the most russian .

that I can think of, shot of vodka whilst hot.

right? So you know, if they ve got series, how that can help in list? I think some of those traditions can really be wonderful. But you know, people are starting to combine socializing with health promoting protocols and you know going out and eating good food together like keeking a really wonderful food um with the social component you I going into the grave talking about getting morning sunlight, something that maybe we should talk a little bit more about and his people like were all their eyes just say there's this incredible study now just out in nature.

Mental health published about eighty that has eighty five thousand eighty five thousand subjects showing that the ratio of getting a lot of sunlight during the day to getting minimal artificial light exposure at night IT really sets the tone of your overall system is and is associated with brain and body that is, and is associated with Better mental health. Alt comes across the board, and the inverse, right? If you're getting too much artificial at night, worn on the sunlight or both is associated everything bad, elevate, depression, anxiety, tes, that are now, I do believe people should get out and have a good time.

Don't avoid the bright lights of a city or a club, have a great time like dancing, socializing. Those are great reasons to stay up too late, get minimal sleep, sleep in the next day, great reasons. So everyone in know 是 twenty percent of your life， you're gona do that.

You probably some percentage of time is also give me raising kids, see you up because they have to to keep keep them alive, which is important, our species. So thank you. But I think people you forget that, yes, you can go outside and get morning sunlight in, which are highly recommend people do that as as most people know, but mean so many benefits on mood and mental health and improve sleep that just and it's completely zero cost.

But I often get accused of, okay, well, but what if you have kids? Like how do you do this? Well, you take the kids with you because guess what? They need IT to. You take them outside. You eat breakfast outside or at least facing a window indoors, if not, can be as good as having the window open or being outdoors.

But even if the suns on the other side of your apartment building and in these things have an outsize positive effect on health and i'll later both upper limbs anyway, uh that many, many, many of the mental health issues that we see nowadays in Young people and in adults is the consequences disrupt its ratan rythm because of. A lot of time in a two dimensional screen space, which i'm not condemning, I spend time on and put almost my content on social media and youtube, apple, spotify, right? And in addition to that, the lights are too bright at night and are not king in enough sunlight during the day.

And an important thing understand about our circuit and slash health circuit system and health is that throughout in the morning and throughout today, your eyes are less sensitive to light, and you need more of IT in order to get what you need, okay, broadly speaking. And at night, your eyes are far more sensitive to artificial lighting, and you need far less of IT in order to disrupt your cacti system in bad ways, disruption, mental health. Now, does that mean you have to walk around with sunglasses is at night and you dim all the lights in your housework? No, but you could afford to dim them a little bit. Um you could afford to switch to the red light function on your phone. There's actually a triple click red light function on every phone that um maybe i'll pass the the the through put of of what to do your phone which allows you to accessibility .

functions on on iphone you think goes to my goes to Grace go when I do that yeah you .

yeah so you can have a switch a gray scale to purely red you know, eliminate the blues. A trick at my friend rick rubin. Tommy S, I go.

This is great. You know, you don't you don't necessary have to purchase blue blokker glasses or anything like that. So there are bunch of little things that we can do that make a vast improvement in the way that are biology and psychology function.

And it's amazing when you start to think about how most people exist out. It's too dim, not enough light for them during the day, especially not enough sunlight, and there's too bright for them at night. And they're also living most in the two dimensional world of screens.

What what's the problem with the two dimensional thing?

Well, you, we have an epidemic of my opp o of near sighted this. And it's been shown in a bunch of different clinical trials now. The first couple of them that were attacked like most studies, something comes out then he gets attacked, then there's a retaliation study.

It's um that kids that spend two hours or more out of doors per day have a far lower incident of my opium near sightings. And even if their own ipads in books, in computers, they're about far viewing about viewing things further than three or four feet away from us on a frequent for a significant portion of our day doesn't mean have to be staring off into the horizon. But as opposed in near viewing where you're looking at something within about four feet of oneself, this distance that we're sitting across from one is about probably four a half.

Five feet is it's not quite far viewing. But you you think about watch people's behavior, look at how they go through the day. They're spending most of their time looking at things about a foot to foot and half away, and as a consequence that I ball gets longer.

This is a well establish fact in animal models and humans. And then the visual image isn't focused on to the retina. The light sensing portion at the back of the eye, the image falls in front of the red, so called near sightedness, right? It's flowing to near to the lens.

Okay, there. Rather some people claim that your sadness has to do with the actual perception changes. But in any event, so fortunately, that the eyeball actually can change in lane.

So viewing things further away and actually especially early in life, allow the eyeball adjust its shape. amazing. Just like the science.

There's places of a lot of different organs. And so the point is that we need to get out of view things at a distance. You're walking on the street looking at your phone or degrading the functioning of your visual system.

But I told you, I think I text to do you before I did IT.

I got laser right surgery. You got the right. Yes, that so the last, you know, was to actually change the shape of the eyeball somewhat um in order to make IT more perfect optically um in a way that for many people lose them to not have to work corrective lens .

is of any yeah I can see everything. I can see your ancestor trauma and full works now .

at one hundred yards twenty fifteen .

what was was .

the surgery painful? It's very interesting.

So um I actually video I hadn't put IT up because it's kind of is probably pretty for people to watch.

Um don't .

never stop before. That's true. That's true. So they know both of your eyes using nummi drops OK. And then they come over the top with a kind of a large box on an ARM.

They rest the value of the front of this box on the eyeball itself and then suck the eyeball onto the actual view so that they can't move. They then use one laser to create a flap in iconia, which is at the precise distance based on all of the test in the days prior to that. They then take IT off you.

You're still lying back. You have to keep looking at a Green light that's above you. The a surgeon will lift the flap, the front flap of the cornea up, yeah, using kind of a software of twins.

The laser will then come in behind. Now the open part, the corner do the corrective surgery. The flag will then get replaced. A and and IT needs to be very, very, very precise, so that any slight nudge I actually had to go and get, I had to get my flapper y lifted a couple of days later on my left eye, because a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of oil from the top of my island had been caught underneath the flag, and IT was causing a flaring of bright lights.

And I had to go back and actually get the flappy lifted, get this, the flap that they make can still be relisted up to three years later. amazing. It's fascinating.

And yeah, had he done in both eyes, couple of one day of recovery. IT feels very gritty for the people that are concerned about whether or not it's it's gonna like hurt them. My recovery period was one day, and I was able to. I recorded a podcast forty eight hours in bright lights.

eight hours after is an expensive procedures.

Grand G, B P of five grand. Uh, U S, A. Not a trial, but also given that it's literally how you navigate the world.

And I was squint a lot. I was squint at screens to have read the text. I was using really large text.

The only reason I found out about this is because I went in for a, and they got me to do my eyes test. And the lady turned and said, yeah, you you legally can't drive without glasses. I know that.

Were you talking about my visions? My visions, great. Like, my visions always been like this. But he got me to do the thing, and I thought, yeah, IT shouldn't be. I shall be able to read those huge letters that are only twenty feet away from me, shouldn't I?

Uh sure enough, after this corrective surgery, twenty fifty vision, everything raise a sharp the only considerations that I would say a night time viewing of bright likes specifically h streets, ets cars coming towards you. You get a little bit of flaring around them um and that's because it's now passing through not just one piece of material, but there is a second cut that supposedly dissipate a little bit over time. But I am fly in the flag for laser right treatment.

Montes, it's been a complete game, changed. My pick ball games improved, which is obviously what was most important. Um everything is really, really good and I am very, very impressed. And thank you to .

my surgeon for doing IT. Yes, so they all flap. Did they tell you how big the flap is?

I can just show you the video. I can show you the .

video once we finish up. Interesting thanks for sharing that. Yeah I think it's an interesting procedure.

And we did an episode, our chair of author logy, jeff alberan. He was a proponent of IT. For people that .

you know that have I take to you to make sure that the optimal gist guy with all of the that that I are right to do.

actually, we trained in the same lab. He was going to know the post sock, then handed up in miami, and we conversion Sandy ago. Then when he moved to stanford, I moved to stanford as IT we serve.

He'll argue I was tracking him. I'll argue he was tracking me, but he's my chairman. I'll just say I was tracking, but a very, very smart guy and and I think getting keeping your eyes healthy as key, this actually comes back to light. So there's some really beautiful data of gland Jeffery's laboratory, university college london unknown blend for more than twenty years these of spectacular vision scientists um showing that exposure to artificial red light.

There's a lot of the like the jew and these other red light set are out there cozy and these other red light systems, which, by the way, on any financial relationship to, you know, the idea that red light could somehow enhances different functions of our tissues or preserve different functions of our tissues, people think is really bio hacky. Like, oh, this is know people into red lights, but there was noble prize given for the use of long wave wave light for the treatment of lupus almost one hundred years ago. So the idea of photo therapy is not a new concept but people love to to kind of push IT into the realm of of um biohacking flash bro science.

But it's not um the red light therapy has been shown to have some positive outcomes for a treatment of agony for scar healing and wound healing. Red light is a long wave light light which can ensure further through tissues and short way back lights. That sort of the argument there is that when you look at red light, or red light is placed on, is shown on the skin, some of IT is actually getting into the deeper layers of the how deep is questionable.

Some people argue that they can even get into the the blood supply, if you know, it's like on the raisers. In any event, glen's lab is shown to really important findings. And the first one, they have shown twice in separate studies. And this is all in humans. The first result is that if people look at red light for two or three minutes, once or twice a week, in particular early in the day, you can offset some age related vision loss.

How well the photo sectors of the back of the eye, some of the most uh the consumer tables active and um legally energy consuming cells of the entire nervous system was saying a lot because the error system is the most metals ics consuming metabolite, excuse me, active organ. And so as a consequences, really active cells create a lot of so called reactive oxygen species. And that impacts the negative ly, impacts the functions of medical rio. So viewing red light seems to restore some of the medical dro function by limiting reactive oxygen species in the photos settings and offsetting. And they have shown this some, not all, but some age related vision lost.

Presume mably. You're not talking about looking at one of these red light panels because these .

things are like a fucking like flat. You want to do IT a distance that's .

comfortable. So several feet, right? Those panels for the people that don't know these things inside even provide you with the suber goes with them yeah so you don't .

want to do this for more than a couple minutes and you do want to blink and you do. And probably through elites closed. If your elites are thin enough and it's bright enough, you can probably get in. But let me very, very clear, well, to tell you the other result, then i'll tell you why you don't necessarily need a red light. The other result, which is more recent and is still under review.

So I want to be very clear, but the data look interesting, to say the least, is that there is old theory, like old theory, that the french have really expounded that eating food outdoors as meta lizer differently than eating food indoors, which sounds crazy, right? Mean at some level. And yet this study shows that if people do this red light viewing while eating, or in the minutes just after eating for just a few minutes, that the post meal blood glucose level severe is significantly dampened, which is a good right? You don't want big elevations in blood glucose or excessive elevations in black glue cos.

Now that all sounds a little bit at the edge of what we consider you know valid uh or reasonable. And yet if you think about sunlight, sunlight is full spectrum light. So this isn't saying you need to run out and buy a red light.

This is if you get outside and get your morning sunlight, yes, it's gonna your circuit rhythm for elevated mood, focus on alertness during the day, improve sleep at night. But in addition that you're getting red light to your is early in the day, you absolutely are getting red light eyes now on very densely overcast days. So in the U K. Or elsewhere, it's not you're going to a really filter out the the clouds are going.

everything, the joy, the will to live and and .

as a consequence, some people choose to supplement their light with these red light devices. Um but this idea that the french and others have have argued and i'm sure as I say the french said IT you the french will not in everyone else so say no.

It's like IT was asked first for us also it's probably multiple people throughout history, groups throughout history but he does seem that there's something different about the way that food is metabolic if under different lighting conditions, which sounds crazy. And I I can only hear lane norton stompin with this. Basically the lanes lanes brain sort of has like pub md ideas. I think it's great, by the way, the lane we love you and I love his his um his um sort of um adherents to pump ideas but you know these are yes, i'll send along. You can tell me what you think like.

But the point being that there are still needs to be more work on this, right? But it's always a nice when some nicely controlled studies done by well established laboratories that people in a field trust like glen slab start seeing things once or twice over and multiple studies um that really work well with what we know from kind of naturalistic conditions. For instance, the hunters, people that are adventures that are whose job depends on them being able to see into the distance.

Sometimes, sometimes these people maintain vision well into their older age. Nerds like me who spent too much time in front of a book or or a screen, who spent most of their time and half for many years, looking at things down. I think for years I looked at things down, a microscope that was where most of my life was down, looking down the microscope, but also reading things at close distance.

Well, you know, IT makes sense that the ibo would length and you end up with near signings. I do where corrective lenses at night, for if I am driving at night, I really worked hard to try to not succumb the need for correct tive lenses. I'm trying to keep my vision health good.

I reliant I don't want .

to become reliant on IT, but I have to work corrective.

Talking about the red light stuff. Have you heard of huberman husbands? Do you know what this is?

Ah um unfortunate. Well I I should say that the most unfortunate thing about the human and husband's post is that IT was about is that IT was taken by certain media outlets to amplify the idea that the audience of my podcast is just a male, when in fact, it's fifty percent male. Female, at least in the listenership youtube excuse male but we knew that anyway um but the listenership is a recent mail for a few and the huberman and a husband's thing um was really about how a woman was saying that SHE think she's the huberman and husband because he does all these different .

things that but they got taken from that for the people that don't that the meter mee around huberman husbands, which you can surge on tiktok right now, is that the hot new thing that all of the wives want out there as a husband who's into red light therapy and he just call plunges and he just show the treatment and stuff. So I I wondered .

how I wonder how .

you feel of a bunch of guys potentially calls playing as Andrew huberman in the bedroom, like the Price of long sleep black shirt has gone through the roof. You now have people fully lapping as you maybe they are telling telling the wife that they didn't get enough. Sunlight in the rise is dirty talk in the bedroom. I'm not sure I wondered how IT feels to have this army of Andrew humans from wish now existing on on the internet.

So so we covered the mcc. IT means enterie d singulair cortex. But I confess, even though I know that I don't know what cosplay is and I don't know what living is.

cosplay is dressing up. IT happens that a lot of conventions, someone will go as I can, skyWalker or 皮卡丘 or whatever。 And lopping is life actual to and sometimes, but not always.

So this is serving like this is is like the action hero um variation on furies kind of .

yeah but but .

this is more relaxes domain precisely.

We know well and then we .

know that we don't know IT well.

fortunately, live action, role playing, lopping. So that again, is this kind of i'm saying there are potentially there is potentially a market out there. If a guy is struggling in the dating world to take the esthetic, get fully huber man piled. And then there is a huge potential demand among st the wipes out there.

okay. So um this is news to me. Um one thing that's come up recently in discussions to with some traditional media outlets but but also just generally right is you know to what extent is all this focus on health um you know does that change something about masculine dynamic like like that?

The traditional stereotype of men was that they're tough enough to not need to engage in any self care, right? They don't need sleep. They can drink a lot of liquor.

They will eat when there's food they all need, whatever they don't like. Going to the doctor, right, is like runs very counter current to the kinds of things I talk about. My park is, hey, get up in the morning at some sunlight, right? Lift weights, run. And I should point out that none of what i've talked about with exercise ever, of course, is an esthetic component right limiting body fat to some extent, right not having excessive body um you know resistance training, as we know, is an incredible way to adjust this one synthetics if they feel like their proportions aren't where they want. By the way, guys train your neck clearly Chris does mean nothing looks more .

ridiculous than like White with .

a little neck pencil that I mean it's well, it's just it's crazy because this is a proportionally you see something .

like this is the male equivalent of the B B L. If you have like teaching you, i'm so happy that I get .

to teach like class for me.

good. Make sure you ve got your note. So this is the brazilian butt left. It's kind of like the bomb equivalent of a bob job and they have an implant for the glutes. I think that they actually take fat from elsewhere in the body uh and then put IT into about it's the a risk, the uh .

surgery risk. This is really quite just do like he trusters or ah he's very groups on people but they actually put them on themselves because the other one's doing that.

I think the doctor technically puts IT on them. But yeah and IT kind of looks because there's no associated leg development with the group development. It's kind of like if you put two basketball on upturned baseball bats, so you have like the leg, and then you .

have like .

the that i've been some. I went to miami for the first time a few months ago, and I saw on the kind of terrified me. I look like a bag of cats from behind in a sad of leggings like a kicanas a sort of pause coming out like this poorly, poorly finished. I would say I just IT wasn't wasn't good. Anyway, my point being, neck for guys need to have a proportional to .

the shoulders yeah I mean, ah I I was start taking digs of people. I don't train their next it's also life insurance, right? I had an accident a few years ago when I fell off a second story roof and I walked away from IT because i've belonged on neck training because I injured my neck when I was Younger. And even if you don't do fight sports and I don't do fighting sports, but wouldn't be aligned with my my role, I needed my brain and I got nothing against people to do fight sports, but that's a choice that actively made not to do them anymore. Um but neck training is really important for .

the eighty twenty of next training. What's the biggest move is for improving your .

neck a well first i'll tell you the moment um but I think that you remember that your neck is you're upper spine so people are big on training their ABS for for spine stability and lower back hopefully as well responsibility the methodistic regions as well. But you know it's you're upper spine and and you want IT strong and you you'll get much stronger and other things as well. Everything is Better.

People's poster is far Better when they train their neck. IT actually changes the tony of people's voice. And I had a guest on my podcast after city chain, who's a chavez surgery at ucsf. I know him since we were kids.

Um isn't phenomenally smart and and creative guy and i've asked him about this offline you know why is that the necked training does that? Well the voice change that occurs in boys when they um when they developing go through puberty is a thickening of the vocal cords that android independent I have this weird mutation. I've talked about the solo bit but maybe not um that on a program as broad as this that actually have the same voice I always had from when I was a little kid, my voice never actually changed.

I have so i've an engine recept uh alteration. Okay um so fortunately for me, like doesn't cause any other issues. But this was my voice when I was five years old time. Yeah, they call me froggy. Yeah, I was kind of a joke.

I like the kid on the low racks that was froggie in any case, but for most people they hit puberty and then their voice changes because of a thickening of the local cords. But obviously I had some early energy en exposure that was clear as I outside hair on my Adams s apple when I was like four years old. So there were some early .

androgen exposure going .

now I was I was a kind kid until I was a teenager. And then I eventually I went through IT. But you know I was I was kind nonetheless. But in any event um when you train your neck, actually the IT IT does improve posture and and and and actually change is the timber of your voice somewhat um but for the people who speak a lot for a living, podcasts, ers, singers, actors at at a lawyers and lawyers seem to talk a lot um you don't want to do a lot of really heavy neck training because IT actually changes the way that your jaw moves in the way that you speak and know you specially like my solo podcasts sometimes take me eleven hours to record and so you want to maintain healthy air flow through through this region right um but the best way to develop a strong next safely is to unfortunate stay away from bridges which you know reston coaches love to give. Can the disks can can be under you can you can cause this function in the disks and then the pain comes on in a moment.

And then your your your host um this thing you to do is take a plate and start really light, lie on a bench, stabilize yourself by putting one ARM down OK. So you want to close the chain, so speak. If you get up a foot down as well and then put that plate, you probably start with a five or ten pm plate wrapped in a hotel.

I don't end up with an imprint of the five or ten on the side, your head or face and then you you're just going to go from neutral position, which is your head. You know it's centrally straight up and down, but you're lying on your side to just you know about maybe thirty or forty five degrees. You don't didn't like really sense to anyone to keep this is important.

Keep your tongue on the roof, your mouth, your jaw shut so that your jaw and are moving around. Because some people do network and then they'll get clicking of the job that get pain in the there's i've spent long time with skills, and I can tell you, human schools and other schools by virtue of my work in neuroscience and desecrate ff. And I kind of obsession with creamy of facial stuff as well. And you know there's a lot of muscular ure in leggings of the the skull that have to be content with so tonguing the roof, your mouth and you're just going to, you know naseer, breathe and you're not go in a failure. You're not training really heavy higher reps in the you know ten to twenty five repetition range.

three yeah three sets .

and then the other side and then you know rather than doing a lot of forward network, which people are already doing because they are doing a lot of phone reading and shaping themselves, like I see you want to lie on your stomach and put a plate on the package and and get into that you know the the deck extension straight back up but not pinching or ranch in your head back movements like where you're creating some torture up into the sides like this is a little more dangerous.

I don't recommend um the person is great tutorials on this and many other things as well as jeff cavalier athletes ax has a great neck tutorial. Make a link to that. What I learned over time, I worked up from a ten pound play. I can do five or six rubs on your side with a forty five pound .

play like kidding me. What have thought that twenty kilos the licence?

Yeah so i'll do that and I don't say that to be tough for any, but the idea for me to just have a really strong um neck so that also for pressing movements and pulling movements, you'll get much .

stronger there. But listen, the bar has now been set fledged cuba and husband's out there. They know that the neck training is an important part. Black shirt neck training, bit of a bid.

the black in that well, to be clear. And women should probably train their neck as well but lighter you know um for static reasons um and if they want have a bigger neck, they can do that. But I think most women don't want their neck.

This is one muscle, eric group, that does tend to grow pretty quickly. Um IT does. He does. And then the other thing, and this looks ridiculous, but that bot, the fighters know is very useful, is that there's the kissed the sky thing where theyll actually look up in, you know, and you will field in the deeper muscles of the neck.

So that kind of thing is, again, you know, some people use a tall for the stuff they don't access to weight. But network is really key, just like a twor k is key, just like lower backwards is he? Just like tib work is key.

Needs over toes. Guy love his content been amazing. So the smaller muscle groups are not going to be the mainstay of any workout. But they become so important when you're thinking about longevity because they are the muscle groups that tend to cause, if not trained, shine blinking in the neck kinking the neck is obviously is not a technical term, but pain in the neck, the turning in the shower after doing heavy pressing and then like you're out your neck, you can turn your head the lower backspin seattle often lower spine stabilization issues, everything. Jeff cavalier has some of the best zero or cost content on this that um I followed his content for years.

And if you put in, for instance, ince, sciatica, low backspin, he has diagnostic tools there that really help you establish whether not truly lower back pain or is a media glue issue and gives you the proper things to do. And neck is just one piece of the equation. Getting back to huberman husbands, uh, I chuckled the first time I saw.

I think I was a little frustrating to me because I thought, wait there, a lot of women that do these protocols to our protocols are we have had some male hormone health episodes and female ormon health episodes. But in general, we're just talking about stuff that's applicable to everybody. But listen, um I don't control the internet um I don't make the rules out there and you know and then traditional media amplified the huberman and husbands peace through a couple of right. And the next thing you know that that's at the black shirt, I should just say, is because I tried as we've talked about before, I don't want to act my tattoo to distract and I got a lot of them um I want to focus on content and teaching and people here in the content and um and the picture is something I did long before at a podcast that's because the great joe drama singer for the clash muscular is war. A black button known shot while he would do full shows and he would be soaking IT was like the punk st. Thing I ever saw, that he was like doing four shows, like in IT out in long sleep back shirt and he was just literally, the shirt was like stuck to his body and I was just in like, not only is an amazing humAnitarian writer, poet, singer for the clash, creative, miss him, he's gone but he still hear through music right as they say and he know he's just so pokey just up there in his forties or late forties and and soaking wet and i'm thinking, like that guy, like he's got he's gotten figured out, i'm going to know so anyway, I like the black shot.

What can I say? How can some you think we should be about? Wapping spoke about alcohol. IT seems like this a big vae is on netflix at the moment. It's a documentary about the rise of jewel and um i'm only one episode in but IT seems like raping is now catching an awful lot of attention. What how concerned do you think we should be about vapor?

Yeah so just taking a note here. I take notes during our podcast.

highly intense to he makes .

them just the things I can go back to. We should be very concerned. So when IT comes to smoking or waiting, there's the thing that's being consumed, the thing that people are trying to put put in their bloodstream.

Nickey canvas sade. I've done episodes. They have their applications. They also have their problems. Vapor is terrible because of the other chemicals that delivers to the lungs. It's also very clear, and we haven't released this episode a, but I talked to a female hormones. G from Austin and lately crafted. D so O B G Y N vapp is associated with disruptions in egg health and what they call eg quality can create certain mutations in the eggs um and serious underground issues in women.

Okay um personally I find that disgusting like I just find IT like that I don't do IT but when I see people walking like to me and listen, I used to wit, growing up I don't I quit smoking a long time ago, but I used to smoke a IT in the gateway growing up member out. I was a wild one, but that's not why I did IT. I just works for me as a drug, and I don't do IT anymore.

But the aping is so addictive. It's a mutagion. IT mutates the genes of cells.

IT mutates the genes of rapidly dividing ding cells. Most so breast cancers of varian cancers. Equality burner constantly turning over. So you know people always say no well, I think all the time and I got so so prey or whatever, you know when they have a privately healthy and that I might have been much healthy and also the kids not grown up yet, like introduced me the kid later I wish for that kid.

I pray for them um that their healthier can be but IT is so clear that you're introducing A A laundry list of toxins to the lungs and they're getting into the bloodstream and their. Are a number of them that cross the blood brain berrier. And once they cross the blood brain barrier, those neurons by virtue, the fact that neurons don't turn over across the lifespan you born with, the ones you're gonna die with, you might dadd a few cross your lifespan, but you're mostly born with the ones that you're going to die with.

Well, they're going to harbor those chemicals and those particulates. And, you know, yes, are we grandparents that smoke and lived to be ninety? But you know, those are generally the outlier, so I can't find one good reason why people should vb if if people want nickey in their system that badly. And here i'm not recommending that they would be much Better off relying on a trocha.

a patch or even .

toothpicks or or you know injectable. I know people.

I'm not going out anyway.

I'm not going out anyone here, but I I know people in our podcast community that rely on nicky injections .

for the clarity.

I don't IT IT causes elevation and blood pressure. IT causes um these construction but IT also will robustly increase focus on .

attention, will starting .

to see some companies that offers things like N D infusions also offer going back or patch gum.

Yeah smoking for a very long time, everyone knows huge campaign, which I think was pretty effective. Actually it's kind of discouraging people from smoking, at least making them aware about .

the do you remember how they got kids to stop smoking? They told them for years he was bad for their health that didn't work. They told them that he was putting money in the pockets of these like a like these old cackling White guys that we're like, rubbing their hands in in the, in the bedroom and making a ton of money. And then he became the rebellious thing to quit smoking. The effective I I .

think about this all the time that there was a big push to a both disincentivize and make more different, make more difficult smoking going to go outside as the smoking area. I remember I worked good one year before the smoking ban came in, yeah, in the U. K.

And then people had to go outside, you know, just friction, friction, friction all the way down. And then vapid came in and vapor is way more enjoyable of an experience than smoking ever was. You you going to have a highest of negative that tastes you enjoyable bubble gum flavor and respire unique on dust and whatever whatever.

I don't know. Um and it's not going to stink the house out. You know you don't have any of the accident talians of that. So I wonder whether we have ended up in a net benefit or net cost for public health from switching from smoking to vapor yeah others an analog here with you .

know cradock and opposites know if you really want IT that we just got out, put ourselves under attack by even bringing up the topic, but I did IT intentionally. You know, there are things like smoking and opiate addiction, which are, it's unequipped just terrible, right? Crushes lives, destroys lives. Yes, there are those rare individuals who smoke their whole life, lived into the nine years and okay, but they are outliers. Um so the question is did is waiting allowing fewer people to smoke and therefore improving their health.

Maybe if they are held bent on getting that nick tinner kenna is into their system and they are shoot, opting not to smoke and they onna vapp instead, then maybe we have to be objective and say, okay, if they are absolutely intent on on getting IT in through some inflation device, wapping is probably Better. But we don't know that for sure. We actually don't know that.

And then since I brought IT up and I really put the target on myself with this one, you know I I did a post about cradock which is over the counter um people say it's not an opp o IT taps the opp system attap other systems as well in a number of people have indeed um man should get themselves off of O P O S using cradock as a bit of a bridge kind like the methodist heroine thing um but the crater m adequacy groups are really growing strong right now because um there is the possibility that cradle will be made illegal and the not too distant future. And there is the reality that some people who are never oppoi add s have taken cryo m and then get addicted to cryo m and then people start arguing is that real addiction is a habit forming IT said a so I think the next year so is going to be an interesting time for dialogue about creating. And I have a couple of guests coming on my podcast.

Maybe um you'll do IT as well and i'd love that if you would. There's one thing, by the way, folks that so great about the podcast space. Unlike other professions, we love IT when one topic or one gas shows up on multiple podcast because IT IT actually doesn't hurt .

any of us have sent me in the last few months. You've sent me paul. You sent ricker rubin. It's and everyone's got a different flex, right? The conversation you're going to have with rick or paul is going to be way different to the one that i'm gonna, which going to be way different to .

the one that going to have yes, it's a very different thing than academic science and journalism of other kind. The idea it's a no scoop you know like an academia or or journalism. They say you know who got the scoop or you got scoop, someone else put IT out first in um in podcasting it's quite the opposite.

So I think the cradock versus the cradock topics can be really interesting, an important to cover. But I think look, my vote is to not vae. I think i'm just shocked at how many people.

Vae, and first of all, it's actually not unlike cigarette smoking is expensive. That's not the main reason people avoided IT, but it's a significant expense when you added up across the year. It's clearly addictive.

There's an no question about IT. It's clearly detrimental the lung function. And then people like how IT makes the brain feel and they think that they're already pretty active, physically active than they can offset some of then they probably can. But um I think in the next five years or so, we're just going to see a slow studies is showing that bing is just bad for us, especially for the developing brain because it's bringing in at a very rapid rate hypotension y nicky and hypotension y cans and you know from monolithic y's work and we know my college and for that that the the slope of that increase in dopamine and epa in a gentle and the see to calling is so important, the sharper that slope, the faster the rise, the more addictive potential these compounds have and so it's so far away different than the kind of dopamine or epa in or see the calling increase that one sees with exercise or with cold plunges or with um with sex or with with francy and things you know so and you know one of course could be addicted to any of the other things I just mentioned to but the the potential for this is far less than .

something like vapid he is my stand on IT that I understand maybe of the two evils, vapor is less of an evil than traditional smoking would be. But I think the enjoyably, the accessibility, the fact that isn't a stigmatized, all of that, I think the IT wouldn't surprise me if more people are now going to wake than ever previously smoked. And even if the difference between the two is is the vapor is Better, that the total area under the curve of public health degradation, I think that we've noted the laws overall for raping and um you know I see do I I go to a comment show and I find myself going and getting in before what I do IT. If I go to a comedy show and i'm not drinking and am tired, so there's like a certain little decision tree that I go through, I do maybe once a month .

something what .

do you vote? Whatever whatever disposable unpronounceable horseshit .

is available. What more in california? So people talk about kind of here. interesting. Yeah, I think wrap ID onset of these neumatic lats in the brain concerns me. It's just it's just so different also with with behaviors you can tie rate, right? You know people say what video games cause a huge increase in the okay, fine, but you can limit the total of time that you engage you. Um I think with with substances, even though you can control those or number of what they call IT on, it's not to be like a talk on the vet pen. What is it's going to be like .

A I got draw language .

lipping cosplay. I've got that you are teaching you everything today, everything I need to know. This is good because i'm going to be able .

to navigate the internet. Fanta Better talking about the internet. How worry to you about how technology is impacting .

people's ability to focus adult A D H C is clearly upon us. It's just clear. And so very I am very concerned you think .

that that's induced or or facilitated or worsened by technology to tell me what's going on in the brain. How was technology able to make such A A dramatic change?

Yeah, I think we let's turn you on the head. I'm not changing your question because I don't like when people do that to me. And so what you want question on my part and people flip they they like i'm going to give you a different question and answering that one like i'm going to answer your question a different way.

The circuits in the brain that are required for setting and maintaining focus are inhibited by the process of deliberately shifting one's focus over and over and over throughout the day. In other words, if ever there was a physical activity, they could undermine your cardiovascular exercise. You know, like, I think that turns out not to be the case, but you know, there was this idea few years ago that if you sit a lot during the day doesn't matter how much you exercise, it's not to make a difference.

That's not true, right? Exercise still helps. But we also know that moving and standing, standing and you standing up and sitting down quite lot throughout the day, getting as much you, the walks and things like that is extremely beneficial and can amplify the already known positive effects of exercise OK.

Well, when IT comes to focus, I mean, much of what our schooling is about growing up is not just the content that we're taught, but our ability is sits still in pay attention to keep the body still into focus. To some extent, keep the body still. Some people just stimulate more in the italians in certain area of countries and things like that.

Other people are farm more still. And we get back to this about body still this little bit later because some emerging ideas on that, that worth watching out. But the point is that if one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next.

IT undermines the stability of all the circuitry y in the brain that's responsible for prolonged focus. Now, I partaken social media, so to you. But the scroll function is a practice of shifting focus while maintaining gaze in one location, right?

Normally we would have focused by looking here, by looking there, just for try this for thirty minutes tomorrow, votes like this take thirty months of your day and decide you that you're only going to exist in the three dimensional world, meaning you're not onna. Look at screens for thirty minutes. okay? Obviously screens, your phone has a debt to IT.

But you know i'm talking about you'll notice that your attention is shifting all the time. You look at brick wall and there is and there's you, but but it's all harness by some sort of conceptual goal or physical goal trying to get here finished, conversation complete and answer to a question that's all within a tunnel of of of motivation. When you're on your phone and scrolling, and I think scrolling itself is the major issue when you're scrolling, you're essentially putting yourself into new context after new context after new context.

And the brain is to adjust to all of that. And the way that the brain works, in addition of controlling heartbeat and economic function at a is think about I like like A I I don't want to do IT, but I I took my sister, see the Harry potter play recently in new york. And while I was, wasn't a big fan of the the script at all.

was this the half blood something?

What was IT cold? Yeah, what is the like? The cursed child?

Because, yeah, mejor Peterson and doubles. Murray got thrown out. Need you got thrown out of that during covet. I've got to tell you the story once you do. This is one of the phenomenal thing that is.

So you went to go to see, I took my sister like steadier, and we go to new york each year for her birthday, and I took her to this show. And I wasn't a big fan of the scrip, to be honest. I only read one of the Harry potter box, liked IT, then abandoned that.

But SHE SHE really likes the Harry potter stories. I wasn't a fan of the script as just my unformed opinion, but the effects were spectacular. okay. And one of the things that occurred to me, they have this library there where the books are alive. And as I was watching this, I realized that very much how the brain works, that, for instance, when you walk into a room, it's a new context.

And that would be the same as if you were walking through a library and let's say you you're go to a soccer, your your pink football here and you sit down and also that your brain calls up all these books about european soccer and your favorite team is right there and then you open that and then always um you're looking at that something about your favorite team. What is your favorite team? newcastle? newcastle. okay. And then with unbeknown ned to you, unbeknown ned to you, this is the important but the books all around you, not the one you're looking at, are now changing to the competitors in the history of that team but also .

who's the um the directly agonised rival.

So that's the way the brain works. It's calling up context so that IT makes IT very easy to flip to a discussion about a particular rivalry in a particular year, in a particular match, in a particular point in player. That's focus.

Focus is not about maintaining a single tunnel of cognition. Focus is about calling to mind all these additional contextually relevant batches of information that you might need. And you know, the reason is the analogy.

The Harry potter library is that it's a dynamic library. So the moment we're done here and we walk out, yes, some of the the books, so to speak, of of this conversation will linger with us. But whatever we're focused on next, whatever goal directed behavior we have making IT to dinners to your traffic or wherever ver we're going, we will call up a new library.

Now somebody might say, well, dub, of course IT works that way, but it's not dumb because it's very dynamic. Now, social media is the opposite of that is one library, next account, another library, next account, another library, next account, another library, another library, another library. And the brain is calling up all these different libraries in rapid succession.

So what I look like, alban onest, the selected choice of things to click on tells me a lot about what i've been clicking on, right, that i've been obviously the algorithm. Yes, I confess, and i'm really embarrassed to say, but not so embarrassed I won't reveal that what I find now on that gallery of things to select are street fight. So beat down and really adorable, strange animals or cute animals. I love the .

flour and not .

the happy bara. Like, if ever there was an interesting animal is the happy bar. However, yes, the recon accounts are delightful to me. The, the, the nature metal account is very cool yes, there's an extensive community of cappy bar enthusiast on .

which a member of no.

i've actively avoided cappy's accounts.

Um you are big octopus. Ido.

I like sample pots. Um I like cuttle fish. My lab is to work on cuttle fish um and .

octopuses occupy and .

occur it's octopuses.

I've been told for so .

long that it's octopuses and actually .

just going to kill me .

because there was a mean about this because we did alive okay, so I know too much about this. I used to my lab is to work on several pods, which are one which are in the category. Molest could include cuttle fish um and octopus es and so it's octopuses is the correct plural and like ground breaking .

piece information that we ve got so rever .

the great sax who's now unfortunately that is neurologist and popular writer about the brain function. The men and miska's wife who has had at that A A real hero of mine um talk about this that you know it's also plata pusses and that he wrote about we can look this up he wrote about traveling to australia and then going to the farm north where they have a breeding program to establish the plant push and that the location of the bleeding, the breeding program, excuse me, is um literally the platefuls .

y wow yeah Oliver .

sex route about this so I have long been interested in the plant to .

push as an interesting animal.

They're very push.

Yeah, it's okay. no. So does that .

mean that the plural is the of? Or that the, where they breathe? Octopuses, the octopus?

Y, I hope so. I want to go that yeah.

according all of her sex, this is the great nature. And he's the neurologist expert in sapho pots so we can return to this at some point. I sure, sure people put in the comments where we're right, where we're wrong. Either way, they will have gone out and researched and learned and that's what .

that's what way for I want to show you, I wanted show you this video um we can put IT up on the screen, just press play on the middle of that and let me know what .

you think right? So the for those listening who aren't watching, this is an image of a kid flipping back and forth between the ipad and a phone um with incredible dexterity this is a family out to dinner and the kids are watching screens another kid without any phone his hands crying um attempting to swipe the phone that is not in his hand as if as if scratching at a an each but not successfully and a kid actually tapping the screen in their sleep yeah yes is indeed we are in the up thank you um what do you think going on the yeah .

um and thanks .

we're getting me out of the animal fights conversation the um what's happening is very clear which is that you the brain the human brain is an incredible organ because it's a map of our experience IT has certain parts that are hardwired that govern our heart rate and control of our heart radar controller, breathing um immune uh the immune functions and on and on, but then a vast percent of our r of the human brain is is open real estate that um is designated as one function or another depending on what happens due during development.

So we know this for sure. My scientific grand grandparents were on the nobel prize for this day with you. Want to some reason that what you see during development, really between the ages of birth and about age fourteen, mainly, but certainly extending longer, creates a set of modules or maps within the brain that allow you to predict what's going to happen in the future. So if kids are growing up doing a lot of swiping behavior, this member, we're in the first time in human history where people have written with their forms also right texting. Um there are entirely different maps of how languages encoded uh a motor I should say how motor functions and language interact um you know in the past meaning for tens of thousands of years of not longer just speculating, accord in speeches and grunting and shouting and pointing some of the primary motor communication not surprising therefore, that the representation of the hands and the digits, which is nerd speak for fingers, is right next .

to the areas of the brain.

They are responsible for generating language and speech language. So we now have the ability to speak with our thumbs, so so to speak, no unintended. By texting, we now have the ability to see many different contextual landscapes, as we talked about before, by swiping, typically up, sometimes down, typically up right.

So the up swipe has become, you know, as, uh, perhaps as hard, not as mapped into the brain as the wave. Hi you. What do you say? The babies, you know, hi people trying get their attention, get them to go wide.

I'd smile. You know, they do pick about these people doing this for a very long time. now. The swipe function is one of the ways in which human beings engage in the world. It's almost it's not as fundamentally as opening one's mouth to eat, but it's pretty close. So the brain is just adapted to this, but there's real estate set aside for whatever your experience was. And so what you're seeing there is just kids very adopted doing this because it's always a trade off human visual, in part on the nobel prize for showing that plasticity of the brain, mapping of the brain for one particular sensory experience or functions, say swiping, or the ability which back and forth three, two multiple screens is always, always at the expense of some other potential function. You can do everything.

So when children are invocate that particular habit, there is the Thomaso quote, like, there are no solutions, only trade, ffs. right? Yeah I I think i've got written on my Whiteboard on my fridge at the moment, the five most common death bed regrets.

And it's things like, I wish that I D not work as much. I wish i'd let myself be happy. I wish I stayed in touch with my friends.

Um IT will be unbelievable surprising to me if in forty years time I wish I spent less time on my phone isn't on there. I would bet pretty much everything that I have that that that would probably appear on average on people's five top death that regrets. I wish i'd spent less time on my phone, and we can see this happening in front of us.

And the best way that you can tell that this is going to continue to happen is that you can reflect on what you did over the last week. And one of the most common things that you wish that you done less of over the last week was, shouldn't I? I, I got captured.

I, I did a couple of youtube holes, or tiktok schools or instagram. M, and you know that this is happening in the micro spread that across a lifetime. You know, I think that very much we going to look back at this and hopefully there is some kind of solution. Maybe it's nearing, maybe you know, we have a way that we can kind of ethically engage with technology and get the communication and the stimulation and the exploration of different ideas and communities. But yeah right now kind of feels a little bit like um maybe a little bit like when cigarettes first came out like you're doctor smoke camels, you like we didn't nobody knew what the bad effects of this world. They didn't know long term what I was going to cause and did that video I would really wanted to show you because you taught me I I was, I think correctly, incorrectly categories people's phone uses in addiction and I think that you said it's much more like a compulsion, right? And that is a child that to sleep, or nearly a sleep protect, like compulsively scrolling through that problem.

Yeah, because a compulsion does not. The in obsession is mentally. This is classic definition, a compulsion as a behavior. But the compulsion in classic O, C D doesn't relieve the obsession IT actually exacerbates pay off.

So you you're not in like .

in each that you scratch and just get in each is more right. And there is something like that with so I don't see social media, but with phones growling. Now that said, I know, you know, you know of my waking hours most of IT spent forging for organizing or dispersing information, and much of that has done on the phone or computer.

Yes, but I do read books, your hard books, meaning physical books, I brought you on today. Thank you. Um I like audio books too I listen a lot of podcast. I watch your youtube videos so I learned when i'm on the internet but yeah occasionally it's the um you know well I i've learned from nature is metal but I but but I haven't learned anything from the reckon post nothing of substance anyway they that they're .

very like they are very like cute .

and very they wash food in my pool. Now I moved to a place and writing a place as a pool. I've never had a pool before. I escaped in a lot of empty pools, but i've never had one that water in IT. So and they come through the night recon olympics in the middle night and they're coming through, they make a tony noise and then they are washing their food is pretty cute the first time you see IT. But once I wake up the third or fourth direction, you're trying if yeah so you know, I haven't learned much from that from the record videos s certain ly, the fight videos s haven't really taught me anything about self defence or or anything useful except how, you know, just kind of cruel people can be sub trying to change the algorithm by by clicking on other things. But IT seems pretty slow to change.

I got to tell you this. It's got me on i've never been into star wars. I've seen some of the movies I have never been to for some reason is started delivering me short content about star wars law, like who would have won between df. Venter and dark mall and all IT, like who was more powerful as a jade master and all this stuff. And i've never been interested in this, and yet it's created in me the desire to actually be like, well yeah like wood master yoda have won however many eons ago if he was a full power the the city was I don't even know what i'm talking about, but it's like created at me this thing the interesting thing that you're talking about there is the when you're throwing you spend enough time on the internet and you do find something that gives you that uh wow. I never knew about that before and it's that um sort of needed in a haystack that you're looking through and that trigger of wow.

I found.

So I can talk about IT on the podcast. This is really trusting to me. That is the carrot I think that gets danced for for very many people who want to feel Better about the social media and think, okay yeah no, I wasted ninety minutes, but I did get that thing out of that.

I read that substate post, right. I found this new person that I really care about. You know, the variable schedule reward of, uh, intellectual satisfaction is also in the right.

It's not just a shock, 是 it's not just a cute。

The the pub md is variable schedule.

I remember when pub md first came out as as a like a very searchable database and and some of the journals later became electronic and all available. And I could not believe I was so excited because I used to go the library and I have to pay with, put money on the car in iraq, copy and put a also in the library. I love libraries.

And i'd spend so much time when I was a student and graduate student and you'd find something and is like, i'd look around, like, to anyone, like, you see that, you see that. But since I was a little kid, I was discovering stuff in books and then talking about everybody, even if they didn't want to hear. And so I was professing from a Young age in class on mondays and think so.

So for me, is hardwired into my system by now. And I think that I do think that social media holds certain, James. I think we think time about like mining for jam of social interaction to, you know, i've gonna know some people through social media where it's really enriched my life.

I've reconnected with some people up. It's really enriched my life. It's allowed me to connect the dots going backward in ways I hadn't anticipated.

And I think going forward, if you ask about the kids in the video that you showed me or you're talking about adult or anyone, it's the the the success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self discipline. I really do know it's always been the case, but I don't think it's ever been the case to the extended IT is now. So this is why i'm such a fan of taking some space from all action.

This is actually something I learned from rubin um you know fortunate to call him a close friend. We we communicate pretty much every day and I wanna spend a week with him abroad. The summer IT was the worst time to travel, and I decided to over to where he was in europe and just spend the week with them.

We had no planned and uh first all in the way over there, there was nothing to watch on the plane, but there was this time petty documentary I turned IT on, i'm not a huge time petty fan, but was interesting enough and then break wicks in the documentary and he's in the documentary lying down, doing the interview. Typical, typical, meaning unusual for most people, typical because it's unusual for rick, you lying down and I thought, okay, so get there. I I know his family well and I love them and and I was really wonderful as beautiful, beautiful party europe.

But I noticed. So we had this habit of we would tread water in the pool, in this, in the podcast, in the morning. And there's a wonderful podcast, by the way, uh, that, uh, we should all be aware of, I think, is a history of rockin role in five hundred songs by Andrew hicky.

Super nerdy. It's like getting up like a graduate degree in rockin role. It's actually like the music, but also what's happening in like organized ed crime.

How would impacted record sales? Very contextual, very climbed into that lately and in show on netflix s have you seen spy ops? Yes, very good, right? Because it's not just like shoot m up type stuff.

It's it's really about how spy Operations let me put this way, you can teach you a lot about history, international history and and geopolitical history um so um I go over there and we do some treading water listening to podcast I learned about the history of of rock room and five hundred songs podcast um we talk about a little bit and then I noticed that you know rick as a practice, hope he doesn't make me sharing this um because i'm about you um you know rick has a practice. He has many practices but one of them is you'll spend a good amount of time you're just sitting and thinking were lying down and thinking, and I I didn't occur to me at the time. But later, after I returned, I thought back to our first guest episode of my podcast.

I hope you guy in call dh is probably the finest byo engineer on the planet, is also a fully active clinical psychiatric y has got five children. He's on these phenomena, know this seems to be able to everything is a true genius. Um he went to school a band to Peter t and paul county they are all the same class yeah and I know very well he's a colleague at stanford and and everyone knows is he's a he's a super he's like the Michael Jordan of neuroscience accept still active um and that is not a statement about personality just in terms of of successful hit rate.

Coral described a practice that he does after put his kids to sleep of where he sits deliberately, sits completely still and forces themselves to think in complete sentences. And this set often a light in my head when I realized rick does a form of this, or as a form of this. If you read the new elon mosk book, they talk about elon doing a form of this.

The greg Richard fineman, fitz's nobel prize winner, talked about going into flotation tax and doing a form of this. I stood a form of this. So what are we talking about? So i'm a neuroscientist, but i'm certainly smart as any of those guys. What we're talking about is body still mind active.

Now i've become increasingly curious about psychiatric therapies, one of which is, and by the way, only in a clinical context it's set a legality is set a not in kids at central but the practice is essentially um macro o solicited but with the I mask on completely still mine very active. Okay, contrast that to a different behavior slash protocol that i'm very familiar with, which is I like to do long runs or rocks on sunday body. Very active mind, did not directed at anything, in particular sometimes to do IT without a booker protests and to do with the combination of both.

Many people talk about swimming or in the shower or um cycling, some sort of rithmetic movement, drumming. The great joe drama was really begun. campfires.

Know I was going to mention this earlier, but I mention IT now that has an alternative alcohol consumption. Get your friends together around a fire. By the way, the fire light, light from fire, does not disrupt the circadian system.

This is that you've been shown candlelight, moonlight, fire light as bright as IT is. It's just very low locks. So that's where great things happen, independent to alcohol right around a campfire that IT goes way back in our lining age.

So there are these two states of mining body that I find fascinating, to the point of being intriguing, to the point of having modified what I do now, because they, they are the universe of one another. Body completely still, or close to completely still. Mind, very active.

Could be was still sivan. But that's not the protocol recommending. I'm talking about some very, very smart, extremely accomplish people who all did the same thing.

The other is body very active. Mind isn't still but is not deliberately um channel to any particular linear kind of story or something like that. There's a state in sleep where our body is literally paralyzed and the brain is extremely active. It's called rapid eye movement sleep. So i'm so raising a flag for this potential protocol slash practice. I don't have any peer reviewed science to support what i'm about to say, but I have enough examples of extremely accomplish people now in front of me to realize that there's something special about divorcing mind and body function temporarily, deliberately sitting there and just thinking. And recently at a conversation with the great pal county in the edition of the words the great in front of him are appropriate here is I I believe, based on my observation of his clinical work and IT and uh, intellectual argument that is the final psychiatrists of our age, clearly integrating from so many backgrounds to .

worked with a ton of .

interesting people. amazing. And he's just phenomenal, right? Not just about trauma, but about everything.

Personality type is narcissa gas lighting. And me, people throw those terms around like crazy. Poll will tell you what IT actually means, OK what those terms. But the ability to think and to access the unconscious power refers to the unconscious as the supercomputer of the brain. For the the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are always in a dialogue.

But here's the theory, here's the the hypothesis that when we bring our body into states of stillness in rem sleep, in these deliberate states that I just described, that these other people actively engaging and have for a long time, that the unconscious mind can start to take over a larger percentage of that conversation. And we have access to new ideas, new ways of structuring thought at that. And I don't think one to require Sullivan to do IT, but I do think that is one avenue into IT.

Reliable that's reliable and also Carry certain has right ah because it's it's like being put on a mental rocket ship to some extent it's not like D M T, but um very little control of a where once cognition goes although there is some in there. Um anyway, I just want to throw this up on the wall because it's always fun to talk about new things and kind of what's coming what I think is coming next. I think I want to make a prediction.

I think in the next two years you're not just going to hear about meditation non sleeve depressed something i'm a big fan of yoga eja hip nosis but also whatever we want to call this, you'll be come up with a Better name that I can body still mind active states to access different aspects of our unconscious and cognition. And I must say that we do this with the phone. Sorry, I would just because i'd realize you about to say something and when you speak, you say interesting things .

and I learn .

cosplay and I learned put those of interest yes, there was one of the most interest concepts. But i'm learning at the point I wasn't I wasn't being sarcastic, that when we sit and we're just scrolling yeah where we're more as bodies still mind active. But guess what, none of it's coming from within. It's all coming from the outside.

So whether not it's sales and in the eye mask or or coral sitting their eyes closed deliberately still thinking or fining in the in the salt equilibration chAmber, you know that the flotation tank or or wick lying their thinking, whatever is he happens to be thinking, whatever amazing album he's gonna, you know, help produce more einstein. I mean, know we can think of the phone in the scrolling is is lending itself to less ability to focus on, add. But just the real crime, the real insult to humanity, for me, the real cost is, what about all the creative imagination of things that come from the inside that could be generated by by people in that time? So I, I ve started doing a practice of twenty minutes a day.

We're just sitting and eyes close. Typically sometimes it's right as I wake up, but usually it's not. And just trying to think about certain topics and hold those topics in the kind of a linear AR way or sometimes just laying stuff. Guides are up anyway. Some people might think this says like completely um wo W A new A G stuff. But the the list of names I I read off there are people that do that and have been doing this for a long time and attribute this practice as one of the major sources of their best ideas is a non trivial list.

When I think about that, there's a few different ways that are slightly similar. Uh, the number of people who've had great idea as while walking and attributed enough a lot of the success to walking and thinking, right I know what you're talking. Body still mind active, but it's body mostly still.

It's not exactly or perhaps there is a unique way to access this two. Maybe it's a different channel to different brain state. Maybe it's a different chance to the same brain state, like, I love doing long rocks and long runs on sunday.

That's my goal on sunday. Get out as much as possible into the nature and just move in some sort repetitive way, like a view through on a rock. s.

Peter. T, I got mean to that, sometimes with other people, sometimes alone, sometimes I listen podcast, sometimes they don't. Something is an audio book, sometimes they don't, but something about about motor repetition.

Uh, so this is not set in reps. This is not restarting the place. This is, you know, minimum amount of cognition require free, not mental space, to do other things could be on the rower.

So again, I think different people do IT differently. I've hanging around a lot of musicians lately um become good friends with one of my favorite musician song rs. Jm armstrong, leader for ranted transplants.

He and travel Spark ted transplants and you know it's um and you it's clear that musicians is especially dramas but other musicians, while they're always in hythloday their head there actually. Timi, the other day we went some place and we walked. Yes, did you hear that to hear what is you can hear that and you know that the news on and the radio on and know he's so tuned into the audio.

And right i'm not right. I'm not that audio um oriented more visually oriented. But you know if people who have an internal rythm that they're noodling on something in their head, I mean, this this is the substrates of creative work, right? And and again, the phone is in evil.

But the moment you're taking in sensor, you input from that includes things that have already been creative. I excuse me, creative. You, yeah, you could argue that those are the macro o nutrients that you're gna combine for your own creative thing that James in the internet so studies a significant s for me or interesting things on youtube. But there's also just the raw materials of creative work that come from limiting sensory input and just going into .

self generating IT. yes. So i've been thinking in one of the things that people want a lot more of, I think, is focus, attention, productivity. As someone who values the work output that you do, productivity is a word, is quite the furious, quite navius, quite sort of a famous how have you come to think about the concept of productivity and its constituent parts? Have you got any tools, any strategies, tactics that you use to kind of drop yourself into a productive state and stay that?

Yeah so I do all the things that I profess um you at the level the basics morning sunlight, non sleep, deep breath if I didn't get enough sleep, um physiological size when I need to bring my level economic roles or A K stressed down these all things have talked about three days a week of cardiff asked lar training.

Three days a week a system training one day a week of deliberate called deliberate heat minimum uh uh on the day after like day um I do all that stuff um and IT creates a structure and yes IT takes some time and a lot of that stuff can be combined, excuse me, with consumption of podcast and audio books at the same time and social time um but for me, the process of writing and working on a book now, but also just the creative process. I've been greatly enhanced and productivity overall by setting in this twenty minute period where I forced myself to just stop and have deliberate thought that are within a single context. I don't let my mind wander. So it's very different than maybe the suicide van .

journey feels IT sounds to me a little bit like active meditation or kind of like narrative meditation in a way you you're forcing your mind to come back to the you're not just allowing us self to branch onto a current into a new thought. Okay, here I am. This is the trunk of the tree.

I'm going to try and follow this trunk as high as I can. What about know you're sitting down at the desk, you have the research to do the emails to write the whatever. What have you got tactically in terms of a priming or a structure for that specific situation?

Yeah, I used handwritten sticky notes and i'll put the thing that i'm supposed to do and i'll keep looking at IT because i'm amazed at how often my mind will flip to other things was like, oh, I have to transfer some money as somebody that I owe them or have to pay that bill, or have to I mean, the number of excuses that lead to mind is outrageous for everybody, unless under deadline, fear or extremely rare.

But you know, high motivational states because we just simply love IT. So I give myself five minutes or so to break into the work or five to ten months. I don't expect full focus on that first five to ten minutes.

But here's what I told myself because I know from thirty plus years of experience the feeling that i'm going to get after I complete something, having like really had to push against the grain to force my attention back to that thing. The feeling of having accomplished even, as you know, one hour about of work, is so incredibly rewarding for me. And the feeling of having done basically nothing is such an incredible sense of disappointment and lack of life like such a like a vitality drain for me um i'm not as hard on myself as I gathered.

Some people out there are like David golden struck about his self talk and how he can be very hard on himself at times. But mine isn't like that. But I know how great is going to feel when I get to the you're projecting forward the reward that .

you're going to feel and trying to bring that into the now that's very small, and i've got written on my other. I've got to two fridge White board. The other is what would you tomorrow want you today to do, right? And that to me is the it's like a panache for avoiding bad decisions, you know, because you live with the story that you tell yourself about the decision for way longer than the enjoyment or lack of over the decision.

There is a cookie on the table. I promised myself I wouldn't at IT, and I make a decision about whether or not I eat a cookie. There is either enjoyment or reward enjoying in eating IT, or reward of satisfaction of discipline for not eating IT.

That happens now. But what's really important is the story that I tell myself tomorrow about being the person that is a cookie eater or is not a cookie eater. And I think that that framing that we place around the present moment largely determines our experience of IT. And I find myself trying to live for future Chris more. And the more that I do that, the Better that my life seems to get.

There are very few situations in which I make a decision today that I tomorrow would have wanted me to that turned out to be the wrong decision and um that projecting forward how I going to fill in future this is difficult now, uh, rick anson, neurons that fight together while together like, can you sit with some of the satisfaction after you've done something that's good? Can you may be even bring that forward a little bit, give you yourself a little oh yeah that's how it's going to do ah yeah one of the thing that i've just been so fascinated by recently, you have been a big proponent, and I think of really helps people in getting sunlight in the eyes early on. Let's get ourselves outside walk.

I think you taught me about the natural eye movement. Can down regulate the amida response all of the i'd found on my own just through doing a morning walk. And then again, like with the alcohol thing, gets legitimated through the science.

You know, it's something that I did found IT myself. And then i'm like, this wasn't just bro science of some weed, quite of my physiology. This was actually something that can be shown up in the literature to rian Doris, from the flow research collective, has the flow morning routine.

Have you seen this .

from having by no a, his morning routine developed with Stephen koller? To get yourself into flow, specifically for deep work and writing, is to begin working within ninety seconds of waking, because the state of flow and the state of sleep are not far away from each other in terms of brain frequency delta. And thea.

I liminal state, yeah, I i've been seen that yet, but I i'll check IT out. I I am a big believer in at the moment, you wake up if you were dreaming, keep your eyes closing, give your body completely still also similar, if you wake up from a nightmare and you don't, and you want to forget about that nightmare, you need to move your body. There's something about body movement that discards the prior cognitive map.

It's like IT clears the library. What about the dynamic a Harry potterish library? I don't want to give too much credit to Harry potter, certainly not to that play. But one thing that all i'll just about the productivity piece before um reflect on this further because something you said really, really struck accord with me. I can project to the future me but that's not exactly how I do.

What am I just know because i'm so familiar with IT the feeling that I get having actually accomplished some small percentage to large percentage of what I would set out to do feel so unbelievably rewarding to me. And I know that IT also enhances the social interactions, all have its like a feeling, a self satisfaction that turn sends to ability to show up with more clarity of mind. And one of the the problems for me in terms of productivity is i'm very strongly affiliates.

I'm very fortunate to have a lot of close friends. So if I get a text mesage from someone, I feel compelled to write them back, not out of responsibility. Because if if someone i'm closer, I love that person, like, I love my family, but I I love my friends.

I love my coworkers, colleagues at the podcast, I mean, IT IT extends. And this has to do with my upbringing, the fact that my nonbiological family became my family before I reconnected with my actual family in a really deep way. But um the one exception, me, my sister and I you know the whole time but for me you know a tex coming is is a distraction like that's the that's the good stuff in life.

That's one of the reason there. So I have this practice. Sometimes i'm imagining that my my crew right is the kids to say we're i'm pretty crude up these days um which is great because I wasn't always the case.

They want me to like forage off to where I need to go and collect the gems and come up with the ideas that are going to be the next post, the next podcast, the next scientific study. They want that I tell myself they want that for me like they're cheering me on because I know i'm cheering them on. Some of musicians, some do other things um i'm cheering them on.

I want them to know like i'm here and I want you to go get the stuff and do your thing. And so I imagine that they're doing that for me and I turned my phones off and there's some anxiety in doing that. I'll put in the car sometimes because it's not that i'm I need to neurotically ally check the phone because I don't feel safe if I don't hear from the like.

I love these people and I don't want them to feel as if i'm not available. That's really how IT is for me. But I know that and I think someone said IT and I forget the quote, so forgive me. But you know, if you're going to create anything of value in this life, you're going even if it's with other people, you're going to have to be willing to to be on your own for a bit, to forge on your own, to take walks alone and then return to people to your tribe, so to speak, and share with them what you've learned or maybe even just show up with whatever energy shift has occurred while off um doing your thing. And so you know the phones the phones are a wonderful tool. But I think over the years, I lost the ability to a be truly on my own and dropped into work um and it's something never recovered a lot in the last few years um by telling myself that indeed they want me to do that and indeed I show up so much Better to all the relationships in my life if .

i've done some real .

with sad you know just you got over that that barrier resistance you know the same press field thing of resistance that I wrestled with resistance and one I think we should all want people to win and I also and I confess i'm going to lose some friends with this, but I have variable latency in terms of my text replies. Sometimes it's a sometimes hours and minutes the month I love being on a plane and scroll through all text, hey, I was going to miss this and be like thousand months ago yeah. IT was and had been busy and and emergencies are dealt with, but IT happens.

What's happening in the brain and body when .

we procrastinate? H um yeah, so procrastination is super interesting. There are actually some data that adam grant shared with me recently that people who procrastinate um tend to we have access to certain creative states that non procrastinating don't because .

they happart justifying the procrastination. That's a dangerous nation.

I mean I mean what the origins of procrastination are are complicated and varied um to to really say a single concise statement as to what procrastination is. But the way to overcome procrastination is to do something harder than the hard thing that you're putting off.

That's very clear, do something harder, don't call clean you like suddenly if you want to do their taxes, clean their room, clean the garage, organized the gym, whatever, when they don't want to write a chapter in their book. But you have to pick something that's worse than writing the chapter in your book and do that for five minutes. That's the way that the the dopamine reward system works in some of these stress systems work.

What would be an example? Give me give me a tactical .

example of this. I need to write a chapter on focus um and tools for focus for my book i'm finding i'm doing everything but doing that was just said kind of fun example um i'll do anything but that OK. So then you have to find something worse than that.

So for me worse that is anything involving a spread sheet. This is the idea of a spreadsheet gives me hives. So I would force myself to do five to ten minutes of like, like, like establishing a spree chy of my expenses and taxes related to, I don't know, some segment of my work life.

I can think of anything worse in that moment that doesn't involve physical or psychological damage. So doing that and then you'll see you will make writing that bookshop ter very accessible. It's a dow.

It's a downhill creese from there. But people find themselves doing all these things that they would Normally want to put off as a way to avoid doing the harder things. So it's about understanding that what is difficult than what you want to put off or do is a dynamic hierarchy.

Think uh, you can think of IT is dynamic subordination ation. Um you know I don't know if that were barred from cosplay or from uh mata or B D S M. I don't know, I heard at some place but in any .

is you mind for information .

most frequently no is round and. No none of those none of those communities are communities that I I know very much about but was saying IT faraci ously but um but the point being, do something harder than the thing you're trying to avoid.

Now some people really like deliberate cold exposure for that reason, because here i'm going to really, if i've taken heat for no one intended for the deliberate cool exposure thing, now i'm really gonna get behind IT for the following reason, people who are really into exercise of various kinds of, but not deliberate cold exposure, love to push back on people to do post about deliberate cols. Oh, that's not doing anything. It's not much meta lic lift.

Okay, but let's really step back and be honest with ourselves that a general, the the the pattern of a journal in release over time from deliberate cold exposure is something that very hard to recreate safely with other endeavors. You know, sure, a hard workout is going to Spike your journal in in opaque also. But is is gonna Spike IT the way that deliberate called exposure is? No, also the amount of of a mental barrier that one has to get over in a moment. Not IT isn't like three warm upsets, like walk on the trade meal.

one three workout get.

Show me the pre cold plunge drink that makes IT easier. okay? It's called willow wer.

okay? And now some people come to love deliberate cold exposure, but that's usually for how they feel afterward. So I think there is so much utility to deliberate cold exposure. Now, do you people have to do IT? no. But deliberate cold shower delivered ice bath, deliberate cold plunge is is a world apart from all the other self post stressors, because of the speed of onset of the even.

even more so than a sooner. That's right, you get into a sooner and IT takes time for you to heat up.

IT takes time for you to get. I mean, so it's a very poor tool because of the amplitude and the timing of a dr. Nnl in that IT create .

what s what else in the a procrastination solving tool kit. So we've got do something that is harder than the thing that you're trying to get away from. If you can do call the exposure.

That's kind of cool, if you like. I GTA sit down and do this. I find myself for ten minutes kind of fluff in about trying to do so.

I go upsize. I have a cold shower. Okay, that was way more miserable than this going to be.

If it's miserable if you like IT, then no. But if it's way more miserable than that, the thing to do pick the miserable thing. Um I mean, sometimes i'll leave me like hard conversation you didn't want to have um some people are you know certain harder conversations are harder than others, easier than others. But you in business, i've never had a hard time .

having hard people slaying all sorts of demons and an attempt to get away from their proclamation. One of the things that I really wanted to talk about was the peril of over optimization. I think that before we knew about all of these signs based tools, everyone had an excuse not to be optimized, right? And now we're all educated about this stuff.

And I think that a lot of people feel guilt. They can feel guilt because the gap between how effective they are and how effective they could be is felt between them. So given that you spend an awful lot of time thinking about the tools that people can use, how can someone get over this, this guilt of lack of not being where they should be with getting all of the things dialed in?

Well, guilt is rarely an effective um emotion, although sometimes guilt and shame can really help us make significant change. Um you know the word optimization and optimize I think um needs clear definition. And i'm not suggestion that you you are the one that said this, but a lot of people think that means being perfect all the time.

Optimization is something that we need to look at in the context of the moment, the hour, the day, the week, right. Um if you have a viral infection or your secure, your tired or jet lag, optimization is whatever you can do to manage the basic five of you know sunlight, sleep, nutrition, exercise, relationships or productivity that you can. So it's about it's a it's a verb function.

It's not a state to be in like floating around optimized um its optimization. The verb is a process that we're continually in. I mean, people who are raising kids are keeping ly busy raising kids and they're trying to optimize raising the kids and hopefully taking care their health as well.

So I think people see or here the long list of science inform protocols that I talk about anything. Oh my god, how much Better to do all of that? What's why? Keep coming, actually, in the basics, right? And look, a little bit of sunlight is Better than none.

A little bit deming. The lights little bit is Better than, you know keeping them on a formal ask at night um you know making you eating a few fewer uh heavily processed foods. There are highly palatability Better than you know than not doing that right but um and there are certain people have immense amounts of self discipline.

I mean one thing that and they're going do all the things, I mean, one thing is absolutely clear, is that there is a pattern of people discovering things that make them feel much Better. And then I need to tell everyone about IT and that that that creates a bit of a divide for people. One thing that I ve tried to do is to say, yes, I do these tools, I do these protocols. But um i'm not just sympathetic, but I know empathy with the factor. Sometimes things happen, travel, kids, illness.

You get into an argument with a, with a significant other know at work or you're just feeling off you know and so um you know it's important to try and do these things on average is my belief and to be you know gentle with oneself when the time calls for and then there's no time you need to scrub yourself and say like enough for this like enough you mean like it's time to sit down and write this thing. I don't care if you phone is ring, you're not. I don't care you to or not and you build up your A M C C while you're doing IT, right?

You know that if ever there was a carrot for the hard for doing the hard thing is that amcore activation that makes your amcore larger, which makes you will power more accessible in the future. So it's not that i'm on in sympathetic to people who are like well is just feels like a lot. But we also have to remember um that we should all, I think as a species be in an individual and as individual, excuse me, be striving to do Better each day um Better than yesterday into on the backstop of what we happened to be dealing with today.

I I really, really do. I mean, last week, I had great week up until thursday, and then something happened thursday. I was a purely professional thing, and I was like, everything got dirai.

T. T. I literally didn't sleep that night, very rare for me very well. And I was and it's interesting the pattern that emerged, I did some reflecting on later after this event passed, which was there's always this moment where we're like where we don't want to do damage control, where we're thinking, gosh, I just hadn't done that or with that person just hadn't done that yeah you trying to control the past so is that moment and i've learned you have to let that process take place unless you have the amazing abilities of a you know of a special one, special Operations person that seems to be able just live in the moment, by the way, those guys, I know a lot of them very close to them, tremendous respect for them.

But a lot of them have trouble when they return from that kind of landscape where, well, that's done. You you got to focus on the next thing, because real life involves sometimes ruminating over the thing that happened and just living in that space of, I wish that hadn't happened. Now you trying compression that to be a limited amount time, and then you get to OK damage control.

And damage control sucks because there is the opportunity cost of all the other things that you're not doing, what you're doing, damage control. So you know the human animal, including me, needs to accept that there are certain things that we just aren't going to get perfect um and I hate doing damage control like everybody does, but I probably hate IT a little bit more and under those conditions I just think, okay, you know what this is in seventy two hours lost. This is an opportunity to learn.

And indeed, we came out of the situation Better than we not gone into IT. But i'll tell that realization didn't arrive until sunday and I was pretty upset on friday and i'm not a bad mood and people don't great on even with very different opinions. I live and I caught my bodog costolo.

So I guess to to answer your question very directly here at the end, I think optimization is not about removing all negative emotion or physical states. Optimization is about working with what's right in front of you, with the understanding that the human brain, in its capacity to think about the past, the present or the future in some combination, sometimes, occasionally, the anchor is still stuck in the sand a few hours or days back, or years back. And we have to accept that as part of our Normal neural functioning and psychological functioning, and and try and get know, and try get word and and move forward.

But that when we're in those moments, you know, we have to know that we're in them. And one of the most useful tools that for this was given me by a podcast cast. The episode doesn't come out yet. Doctor lisa feldman, marrett, who has done a lot in the newbie logy of emotions and psychology of emotions, and you know, SHE said, and he is so powerful, any time you feel a high activation state of any kind, you should stop because what is what's happening is it's revealing to use something very important. And if you don't stop to think about why i'm so good, sad, or why i'm so happy, you're gonna miss an important lesson.

So this could be positive states to any time you feel like you're getting above eight out of ten or seven and a half at a ten on some scale of internal alisal for good or bad reasons, you want to reflect what is the lesson to gotch? I really love this person. I love this interaction.

I love this aspect of my jobs. So that can inform the next job I take, because I all love the rest of the job or this really sucks. And there's a lesson, and I learned a very important lesson in that last thursday, but I didn't realize that until late saturday.

But I remember on thursday this thing hit, and I was pissed. I don't get pissed very often, but I was pissed. And I remember red hearing this, a voice of my head and thinking, okay, what is this revealing to me?

Three days later, I had in my journal, I still have in my journal of many journals, but i've won its permanent, that kind that is still LED out things that can rise to the top of truth for me. And IT revealed to me that I care oh so very much about certain things to the point where I they're not about my career. They're really about my my life, my quality of life.

And that small cluster of things is something that now I protect inside. I'm stealing policies, language here, but inside the castle walls of what I consider important. Like I brought some things in that I think before I wasn't reckless with, but I didn't realize that would be like if you have a prized horse or child and you lay them, play outside the castle walls and you know their murders out there, but also one takes a, you know, an arrow through the heart and you like, and is a huge loss.

Well, what do you do with your other horses or children? You bring them inside the castle walls, right? But you IT would be ashamed to have to have that experience in order to recognize how important they are to you.

But there were certain things that I was just not protecting, and now I feel so secure as I feel like I gained a huge lesson. So do so. The short list here is when when the ship storm hits to put IT in scientific nomenclature. Know that you're going na be focused on this for a while, except that as quickly as you can, but understand that accepting that itself as its own hard process be, pay attention to those states of heroes. There are lessons there, even if this is good stuff, even if is a great stuff, love your life.

You're now getting engaged, that there's a lesson that there's things to be clean, that you'll want to go back to later, then three or four days later, go back to those things and examine them from some different perspectives because I think they're huge lessons in these higher rows of states, whether not its higher les, because of terrible things or higher is because of good things. And I think having a process for moving through that is something I didn't have and i'm still learning you to cultivate. And you know gosh, I A you wished you can spend as much time on the phone or other people's have and spends much time on the phone. I wish I had known up or had a process for dealing with things that happened to me or that I created um that we're unfortunate for myself or others they created for me a process of moving through that that semi structure that accepts that you're giving up some degree of control but that there's the opportunity to regain control and establish lessons that you never ever would be able to access purely retroactively.

Yeah, that's kind of like alchemy, like taking something which is objectively a pretty crap situation, turning IT into something which is really, really useful. Those are a quote that stuck with me that you tweet last to her, or maybe you just taught IT to me. I count, remember advice I got early in my career, don't over engage in any controversy unless we are willing to stick your entire reputation on IT rather keep focused on discovering new things, on creating or else you become known for the controversy and nothing else. There is no going back.

right? Yeah this um isn't about avoiding being cancelled because I think some people might translate IT to mean that, which is why I say it's not about that. It's about you know we're given this enormous um privilege to communicate our thoughts very fast now through social media and whether I have a big following, small following or no following, IT is still a privilege and it's something that i've learned to really think through and guard and protect as an asset right that we have. And i've thought about this from the beginning of posting on things online and set up certain rules for myself.

Uh, for instance, I try to ensure that ninety percent of my posts are really for the pure benefit of the the audience and not for my own entertainment. Occasionally i'll see something and i'll have one of these like i'll see something the animal post or something h that's so cool. Or the other day I saw something on on an x account about you, bumble bees that sleep inside of flowers and IT was really cool about how they look at polar ized light and step.

But I just was really tickled by this fact. I thought other people might be as well, but there was more for my own entertainment, Frankly. But ninety percent of what I put out there, i'm really trying think, will people benefit from this? Will they learn from IT not are they they going be interested in, but are they they going to learn from IT? Will they get them thinking or doing something beneficial to their mental health or physical health?

Lord knows i've been attacked for, you know, saying, hey, this is an interesting study about deliberate cold exposure than people like h it's underpowered and you know it's a marginal effect and you know and I love this because I come from the field of science sort of funny and turn people lose on a paper well because, you know you're going na get a range of opinions because no two people read the same paper the same way. And everyone would like to say that they are the truth and how to read papers, which just makes me chuckle. Normally those people have not published very many papers themselves that sort of this inverse relationship.

But nonetheless, I like to put things out there that stimulate thinking, a positive thinking. I don't like controversy for sac, controversy by you. And I have colleagues in the podcast space. And there are many people in were public facing who see a current event, and they just say what they think, and you know what more power to them. But IT is, and I will say IT is a distraction from a larger message that they likely have if they have one at all.

But and and you see this and it's not that they go down, what happens? They they take their audience that has been built around a certain set of topics and suddenly they're talking about current events. I guess what i'm basically saying is I don't talk about current events.

Yeah, you've never rely away. You have never commented on politics. You've never made any.

No, I actually this is i've politics came to around to me in an interesting way. I'll just share this because it's exactly how IT happened. Rogan had Robert kenney junior on his podcast.

okay. And I um liked the post and I commented and the comment was the following. I said I hope all um I I hope all presentin candidates uh go along for podcast because I happen to believe that it's a .

great way to get to know candidates didn't .

a in this so this is interesting. So I got calls from colleagues of mine at stanford. I got literally calls and text.

I got calls from major media outlets asking whether or not i'm A R F K supporter slash antitax, or to which I said, I don't know how you concluded that. Okay, that certainly not my stance, right? My politics are my politics. But but there was a huge leap from and I said and I in my comment, I said, you know, I I look forward to listening and I hope all the candidate going long form podcast, I also see robbert in the german always looks like he's training hard. He trains hard.

He's in good condition yet.

He wears jeans, which I don't understand when he trains, but anyway.

but he trains hard. Odd choice od choice.

but is free, free country. So so be a. So was I commenting on the content of the of his pocket? No, he was I commenting on, listen to IT and listen to IT. So what was interesting was in the subsequent days, I got an on slot of kind of assumptions or presumptions, really what they were. And then, yes, my I mean, this isn't about maybe this is the time I I publish over seventy peer reviewed articles that are index on pub md um you know many of which who had secondary ressources in time and and other major outlets that covered the findings further relevance to the general public at the time around twenty sixteen mostly, but in the subsequent years as well that was scraped from my wikipedia scrape from wikipedia.

You mean like real all my research .

contributions are not there on wikipedia and um and then I was there were assurances that I was an antidote or there were certain that um that I was supporting certain a political agenda and and so on and then the the page was locked by the editorial staff I ve had communications with the founders of wikipedia who the pages been adjusted somewhat um but not none of my researchers has been put back.

I actually at this point, I I think it's sort of interesting because it's such it's more actually it's kind of fortunate that that happened in the sense that it's more telling about how the kind of editorial alizon around wikipedia exists and IT this is really not about me. I'm telling this this ancient um as a way to sort reveal what was my experience makes very clear that um you know now IT includes some some pauseless some negative about the pocket that's fine. We cover supplement some people and promote supplements in certain context most of behavioral tools but supplements to and so i'm privately fine with that being included because that's true um but is very interesting to see how um when a the the way that serve people will pick up the ball and run with things.

And um and it's and it's it's been super useful for me to understand this because what is allowed me to do? At first I was like, hey, like what's this about? Then I tried to figure out.

Then I went straight to the top in terms of trying to understand. And I realized, say, OK, what do I really love doing? I love forging for information that can benefit people's mental health and physical health. I love organizing that information.

I love dispersing that information to the best of my abilities and um and those are the things that make me happy and those are the things that um seem to resonate with a certain number of people, also some of the same things that seem to irritate a certain number of people. And and I love doing IT and so what i'm going to do is just return to doing that. And I learned a lot about the landscape of online information in the process.

Very formative service.

very formative and as an academic and all that my papers are on pop matters no. Most of papers retracted or corrected. There's no removing things from the library.

yes. So your google scholar just be kind of a lot .

like no one's going in. The dex is fixed. And it's not to be very clear. I want to be very clear because I don't want to contradict the the very thing that I opened up the question which is this is this is not something I want to like die on the sort of right but IT really alerted me to the fact that so much of the information that's on on the internet um has been massaged in a particular direction based on presumptions.

So one of the reasons i'm taking this opportunity to talk about this is not to counter major media news out there are just going to make a living for its convention and they have a lot of the same advertisers that my you know I don't advertise fd bags but but you know they use advertisers, we use them that makes IT free to everybody um as a consequence. But I think that it's really important for people to realize that this question of like, what can we, who can we trust, what can we trust? We all have to learn to be good scientists and forgers of information. And and and the macro for me is that hopefully people are learning to forge for information Better as a consequence of understanding that, like yet no one person holds the truth. This is not mount emps.

right? So I think the interesting thing of one of the reasons why you might have ve seen an outsize response to this is people on used to you being in anything right, like the the biggest conspiracy that Andrew human is gonna a part of is like some new study on sunlight in the eyes or something. It's like so where the p value and stuff it's it's it's accessible to the .

cold lange mafia, precise. There is, by the way, a cold plunge mafia. Well, you .

brother.

but it's a pretty it's a strong Green politically, socially, financially. So it's why people are nervous .

about lunch. Lots of lots of people online get known for their expertise within one area and then start to think themselves, well, why? Why shouldn't the world know about my opinion on the ukraine conflict? Like i've got lots of things to say, and everybody thinks that is very, very valuable.

So maybe I should contribute to what we should do about climate change, what we think should happen in the next election. And I think that, you know, to your credit, you've done a really good job because you will have opinions. You've just chosen not to share them presumably, right? I vote yeah so but you've chosen not to do that.

And I think that it's almost like a the sensitivity dial was turned up so much, it's like was the first ever so that we knew we knew was the tatoes and the beard. We always knew that that guy was like like an offer or you know I mean, and any opportunity for somebody to jump on this, right? So this is something that i've been kind of noticing in myself, somebody asking me this, these live shows at the moment.

So I know that you do live shows too. I want to do one. Your live shows. We're not doing lay.

i'll find, learn state before .

you step on stage.

Oh, I mean, I have a whole process of protocols.

Would would you send me them? sure. Yeah, I would have.

I spend the whole day basically in a rhythm, and I talk to only a limited number of people. And i've got a rythm in my head. And i'm, I mean, N S D R H nosis part of the day i've send and receive a few taxes of rick, my friend tim armstrong, my friend jim bo.

I touched base with my team. I do prayer. Um i'm like i'm an altered state. I need all the help looking .

forward and looking ford to the protocol. I've got my tour, my first U. K.

And island tour is happening in november. And then i'm going to buy. I ve got a huge two thousand person showing to buy.

Then we're going to do, uh, canada in the U. S. anyway. I got asked recently. I'm doing working progress shows like a comedian for these, so i'm doing forty person shows at east stand comedy club. All of the profits go to charity.

I wanted to work out my material right before I went on stage even though it's it's not comedy stuff um but I wanted to to do and it's been really, really useful because i've been able to watch. I shouldn't really open with that story. It's not so we can move that a bit later.

a bit heavy to .

whatever whatever. So somebody asked me at one of these shows what some of the unseen Prices are the you pay for building a platform of the size? And what I realized was. Both you and I just like doing the shows that we do like I love I do is nothing that I would prefer to do at four twenty three P M. On a friday afternoon, then sit down and have have this conversation.

There is nothing that I would rather do, right? And if you do that for long enough, you end up accumulating the size of an audience that Carries with the responsibility that you didn't ask for. You didn't ask to have my like and comment on my friend jose instagram post scrutinised by mainstream media and trended across the .

twitter that I colleagues calling the same. Not what is happening to you, but literally what happened to you.

Is that awesome?

But the same way that we published a clinical trial. So as long as if like my scientific career, so I was pretty interesting, actually had very fruitful conversations with those people. I I know what i've actually figured out what the answer is to the the question asked before, which is still in the vain, which is here's the thing, there's a certain segment, in fact, a very large segment of listenership viewers and media that want to see you and me and other people do what they would do in a given circumstance.

For instance, why didn't you counter so? And so when they said black, yes, why didn't you stand up for this group when you had the opportunity on that situation where they are basic saying is they wish they had to had the opportunity and they're angry that you're not tip of the spear for them in circumstances that they don't have access to. I get IT, but one thing that I learned early on by observation is that a sense of justice and a sense of strong opinion about certain things is incredibly important.

I mean that that runs in my family. But you have to know when justice needs to line up with action, or when justice is time to walk away, when you're not the best suit for something. The other thing that, and I had to say, joe rogan is the best at what i'm about to describe, and I admire IT so much, first of all, algo on record saying that I think joe rogan has been clearly net positive for science bringing about lots of different conversations about tons of topics.

And just leave the vaccine thing aside for the moment but sleep the the cause on A M key right um Peter tea and on and on okay. It's very clear whether not he's aware that or not that he's not to be leveraged by anybody. No one's gonna come on to show he can he doesn't alm self to be used, right? So when someone gets upset that you're not taking a stand that they would take, they're upset that they can use you to reach their ends.

And you know, I have many flaws like anybody, but maybe a few extra I really do. And but, but, but included in that extensive list of flaws is not the capacity to be used IT just is not. I have strong opinions and there's time for justice and action along particular lines.

And I preferred red to do that, not using my social media platform or podcast platform, in part because there is a tremendous number of things that I want to learn about and teach about. Guess I want to have on to educate as many people as possible. So i'm not being political or diplomatic.

I'm being extremely tradition. I'm saying i'm not going to be used to achieve somebody else's end. I want that basically what IT is.

And so I think very hard about like the things I want to take on, and they're mostly about helping people regulate circuiting, rythm, stress, sleep, even disorders, depression, understanding yourself through a mental health series, addiction, sleep. But you know, I said sleep multiple times and on and on. And the other stuff is really barbed wire. You can get snag on IT and stuck there, and then you're tossed up against the barb wire and you're fighting and your bleeding out. And guess what, a bunch of really great stuff is happening so that you could be fox.

I often, I always think really what IT is. I always think about how much of some of the smartest minds of our generation time has been taken up arguing over. Pick your topical issue headline of the moment, like what what else could have been achieved if these people who, outside of the my opie and and like catastrophe, that is most of pop culture headline stuff, phenomenal thinkers, and yet they have a it's like the crypt onions that there's something that pulls them away.

I won my start buzz mode irk that get me anting to put something. How often do how .

often do you type and delete?

Does that happen much? Three times a day? You're kidding. No but not because of political yeah but more sensitivity issues but um yeah about three times a day.

And there are a lot of posts that just don't go up because I like it's not in a land, right? I don't touch on current events. I mean, our friend like freedom covers a lot of current events, gets right in the middle and he likes that he'll travel to current events.

Yeah he he'll land himself in in in dangerous territories. I think also something that really helped to me. I great scientific advisers and mentors coming up.

I also, I understand the limits of having one brain, one personality and one history. And I have a council of people that I referred to often. It's only I brought my notebook today, which I always Carry around on these notebooks and writing on cards and things. And in the front of this notebook is a list of names. I didn't think we get into this at all, but you are list of names of people that I I look at this.

the council of heber and right IT is the.

well, I I would give you a non exhaustive but accurate list. I mean, IT includes rick rubin, close friend, Peter tia, close friend. IT includes joe drummer, all of our sex, both of whom are dead and who I never met. But i've consumed their writings and I know people close to them and I have stories about the mitts. Got a couple people whose names are not going to disclose um there there are few others here that maybe my dead advisers, all three of them my dog costello had he couldn't be he he was so stubber you could not get him to do something he didn't want to do IT was like he you couldn't move him and he always was right about the things he didn't want to do yet an incredible sense of understanding about his his environment. Uh, my sisters on here.

And then, you know, my team would be who aren't just my team, but rob, mike yan, Chris Martin, gary, greg, like Sarah, they're here, right? So these are like any time of when I put something into the world, I look at this list and I think like, okay, I don't need a in, but like, what would they say about this? And because I don't need to text them at most times, nine times, infer IT by knowing them, absolutely.

So is something I really, I really wanted to kind of touch because you have gone and there are .

others on that list. So for those that I didn't include, it's like a um I want to be jm c bo, right? Um yeah.

i've joes on here. Yeah is on here. I M I an it's .

just so clear to me that my brain can do IT right all the time, and I need to call on people alive and dead like known, and that I haven't known to to help me. And, you know, he feels so corny. Y to talk about. But if there's one thing I try to do with the podcast, it's to Normalize some of the conversations around things like anxiety, stress, sexual health. We've doing a lot about hormone sexual health.

Are women and men communication um you know Normalize some of the discussion around these practices that that to some people might seem kind of hockey, but to me, I mean, this list isn't like three out of ten in terms of the potency scale, like my productivity and feelings of of safety and life so that I can go do my best work. It's like eleven out of ten, eleven out of ten. And it's the kind of thing where most these people don't even know.

No one knows they're on the listen until on this, listen until now. But i've always had this list in different forms and its updated over the years. And as a kid, I mean, growing up a hero, listen to him every day of my life from thirteen on tim armstrong differences Operation I V transparently, like literally every day.

And through some magical stroke of luck, we become very close friends. So he was guiding me all along. But he he's ten years older than I am.

He has deep is extremely smart, extremely smart. And he has deep understanding of human dynamics and had to be in the world while trying to do creative work. Now he's a musician, not a scientist, but his level, curiosity, intellect, memory.

I mean, it's like IT doesn't just IT for years that inspired me but now, like all texter called him, I did that last week like, hey, this is a tough situation, really helped me I called a few other people too, but he's on this list and he husband says I was thirteen. How child does that? And turns out, you know, never meet your heroes, right? Well, IT turns out this hero ended up like wildly exceeded my expectations in the positive direction. You do know that is someone listening to this.

There's probably millions of people listening to this, at least not thousands to whom you're that person, right? They have this para social relationship with .

you even if you .

didn't ask IT, even if almost para whatever was cosplay and we've got a good list and cuba husbands, cuba studies. I'm really fascinated by what's what it's been like to be a relatively unknown academic working in the animals, just doing a thing, doing a research to know as a, by productive, a passion to share science space tools for people now being sort of thrust out into the public. What's the felt sense of this rapid increase in exposure and scrutiny .

and famine? Like so I love to tell you this disorienting, but truly, by virtue of feeling very lined with the work and purpose of the work that i'm doing, I feel like i'm at least in terms of my daily activities and were my is that i'm exactly where I for the first time i'm like exactly where I I feel like i'm exactly where I belong not because i'm known and the the podcasts achieve this uh recognition for which i'm very grateful and humbled by but because I love ford ging for organizing and dispensing information so ninety five percent of my cognitive powers are set toward like the episode i'm preparing for next week or the week after and I have to like literally pull in my impulse did not take off on attention about my use of tow spaces to fix this like imbaLance because of like food health and i'll go there, that's a thing but like it's all going teed up.

I prepare for podcasts, someone as how long IT takes me. And I realized in total, because I start so many months ahead, somewhere between very low and the lowest ever would have been twelve, but is typically more like a honor and fifty to two hours of preparation. And I love every week and second of IT.

And so for me, IT feels great because IT allows me to do what i'm doing now in terms of being public facing. I mean, i'm a pretty introverted person. I love close dynamics.

You, if I think for a second about meaning, one of one dynamics and small group dynamics, small parties in my house and things comfortable in crowds, but i'm not interested in in being in them persue. But if I think for a second about how many people are going to listen to something out, I don't know. I don't think about IT because I best not to do IT. Um you know it's changed my life dramatically in in mostly for the positive um in positive ways you know getting filmed all the year in the gym is um for any because you know I always like if ver I need to use perfect form, like now I really need i'm like going on the tree.

That's the real that's the real scandal. It's not that you like to joe and R F K post is the fact you can't do preaches .

with perfect time a for ign motion y range emotion guy but I am the guy in the tip machine every day, not every day, but any down in the gym. Um you're getting filmed when you're not aware that you're getting filmed, some security breaches that is not directly towards me but toward to members of my family and community that have been annoying. But that goes with the territories and to be mostly lucky.

Ninety nine percent of interactions are immensely positive when people come over and say hello. I I enjoyed out. I don't always have a lot of time so there are those kinds of things, but i'm somebody who's genuinely curious about other people.

So in those interactions, like I want to learn about them um I really know about me. I want to learn about them. I i've always been genuinely curious about other people.

This isn't a line like I i've been friends with the garbage man, the gender. Um you know my dentist like you know there i've got stuff in my mouths. I can't it's a one way conversation. But um you know learning about people I think allows one to also deliver information in a way that's more accessible to people.

This is something, but I would guess I would go as far as to say that the level of fame and recognition that I have now is about is like goldie ox zone as IT as is possible to get IT maybe once every ten to fifteen minutes if i'm walking in a crowded area somewhere and they'll be a ten minute, ten second conversation of hymen really love the podcast. And like the amazon, a prime delivery driver shouted out .

of the and those are the people that allow us to do what we do, right? Like there's IT. Like, i'm so grateful that people are interested in the kinds of information that you put out.

And then I put out, I mean, I talked at them. I look at anyone I interact with as the students in my classroom, the same way I would the way I managed my comments section on social media, classroom rules. You can say whatever want to me, but don't be, don't be a uncool other people.

And or i'm gonna block you why I not like, I can't take IT. listen. I grew up in skateboarding.

I grew up in academia. The hazing process in those communities very different, was intense IT was physical, psychological, emotional torture at times. And so you develop a very thick skin. I mean, skate boarding, if you do something and you don't make IT look right, or something is a little off you like you're gonna own that reputation for years.

And so that's your .

new nickname ah you have to have your I don't want to say the way I say then, but like I mean you have to have every your kit has to be right, everything has to be right and yet you have to try things.

And so you know the learning to work through the narrow constraints of of social media is nothing compared to trying to come up through academi a where people say, oh nice, nice, great to see you and then they kill your papers are granted behind your back. It's a game of backstabbing. Now they put a reviews on on names, on paper. So IT conditioned me before I will say this, i'm very grateful that all of this happened in my forties. My mid forties start the .

five forty eight. why? why? Why that?

I just think about the Young brain, the twenty years thirties, you know, so much of of our identity is formed earlier in life, but we're still trying to figure out who we are. I know exactly who I. I'm the guy that since age five has been gathering, organizing december information.

I like lots of different kinds of people. I like miss food and runs and win IT in like, and, you know, jokes and punchers and happy. And I have gay friends and stray friends like live and let live.

I love at all. I said I orient toward the skateboarding in pencroft because he was like, all the styles, all the hair styles. So, I mean, people think like, just like bullet belt and mohawks.

And no, then you got your peace poncy at your vegan poxy and all is like, and I have my thing what I like, but I love the variety, because I love the florida and hana of life. I don't love rains or copy y bars per say, but I love how they fit into the animal kingdom. And I have an obsession with animals and weird animals and self lop, and the auto push and the, you know, uh, the plata puts and all of IT.

And so for me, like being on social media, I get to step back and look at all of, but i'm gonna let anyone decide who I am or who i'm not like. The guy was a wearing black shirts before my colleague David felt home will tell you that he's a professor, uses hankers. He once tweet.

He was like he always wear the black short as a it's true. I didn't change IT all. I didn't feel like I to modify myself. I know, you know I always try hold the door for people I, I, I tried and I perfectly know um so it's changed things a lot and yet IT hasn't changed me at all.

I love IT docker under human. Ladies and gentlemen, do I really appreciate you very much appreciate the support you've give me over the last year? When i've needed to text you, i've needed little bit and pieces IT really does mean a lot to me. So what can people expect remainder of twenty, twenty three? What have you got coming up?

Okay, I can tell you. But first, can can I just please just take a moment, say thank you for this opportunity. Thanks for the kind words. I will say something very important about you, which is that you coming up in the very sports, I A escape warning in science.

I have a really good eye for the the person like I put my money on that person to be at the top at some point down the line. It's interesting because i'm not talented at many things. I'm proficient at certain things. I work really hard truly um if I have any inborn abilities that my memory is always been sharp but loving the thing your learning helps.

Early on when I saw your content IT created some sense in me based on how you are delivering IT the passion, the honest behind and the ways in which you were like like moving through and trying to figure IT out that I was like, this guy is gonna be like at the top. And I I was I was right in that your accent trajectories predicts that, like, I OK there's still room for upward trajectory ory great. But you know, everyone, and while someone comes along really like you just love is what he does is so clear that he meant to do this like you love.

And I think IT has a lot to do with the genuinely which which you invite on and meet your guests like you're not going to put someone on because they are not going to get clicks. You you're going to invite people on because you really want to talk to them. And that that's very clear.

And I think I know that resonates with people. So i've been truly in an abid consumer of your content from go, and it's been awesome to see your accent, and i'm sure that this is just the beginning. So I want to say thank you thank you you thank you and and I I look forward to deepening our friendship um and that's a real thing because really on with legs.

And I became friends through podcasting. Some point I realized we need to hang out without these microphones in front us. I went out to Austin for two years.

We just hung out, hung out. It's also where he did the judge to think where he choked, got me there. I get you back like, but not what you did to psychological did too.

But I hope we get the chance to spend time. And I really just want to say whatever you're doing, keep going because it's awesome. It's clear that you're really working hard aircraft, and i'm really excited about the lives, and we can talk about that.

Thank you. Rest of twenty twenty three. I'm going to trying to finish this book that i've been procrastinating for a few years now.

It's mainly going to be a book of protocols. So it's very straight forward to what to do. It's kind of what to do stuff not so much story. I think there's a need .

for that is going to break the world.

I'm putting my heart and soul into .

the idea of completion date.

popular probably be february and come out of four. So I am putting everything i've gotten to that book um while still podcasting, we're going to do a series we've done these guest series we did won with doctor and galpin on fitness. We did one on mental health with doctor paul county.

We're gona do one with doctor Matthew Walker on sleep and one with doctor on olympic on addiction and dopamine soon so that the guest series um are are that going forward? And then you know there were times when we thought, okay, we need to do something else like we need an APP to need. We've really taken to step back or to sleep just onna keep searching for organizing and dispensing information, mainly in the form of the monday podcast occasion, these gas series.

We do have premium channel that generates revenue that is directed toward scientific studies. I'm talking much about this, but significant portion of that has been put to philanthropy. The laboratories working on eating disorders on mind body states .

on the intermitted. You recently read your website. We did the website. yeah.

So if you go to her room lab that calm the engineers have done a great job, but it's highly searching now. And take you a specific time stamps. You could even say like dopamine procrastination, i'll take you that particular time stamp and I think is the A I tools get Better um they'll be more things like that. But really it's going to just be more of the same live shows.

any more live shows.

We ve got live shows coming up in australia. So the first one in sydney sold out. The upper house one sold out, but there's another one being in out soon. And then there's a melbourne and .

brisbane people go if they .

want to sign up for huberman lab dot com slash tour to get tickets. And those are fun and they're very different in the podcast. And you know i'm not a joke a few months back with uh, traditional media.

I wasn't joking that you know and I run for off for someday like from what i've seen of the experience of politics like I want to retract that I have zero minus one interest in running for office um but I have every interesting just continuing to to indulge this this obsession slash uh the light that I get from learning and teaching and sharing information so like, yeah that's the plan and the main thing the same thing yeah that's the thing you know and I never know like I come from a long line of academic advisors that all died early like I hope I live a long time, but I don't know if this can be cancer able or a bus is can take me out or old age. I have no idea. So i'm just, yeah, i'm just leaning into this as hard as I can.

Well, yeah, I appreciate you and thank you for today.

I appreciate you thanks so much because.