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

There's been a lot of controversy over the last few months.

The Internet's been ablaze with speculation.

I think it's important to get it up top.

What is happening with the state of the adenosine system research within the first 90 minutes of the day?

Adenosine is an incredibly interesting molecule.

It exists in the brain and body.

It accumulates with the number of hours that you're awake.

So the longer you're awake, the more adenosine accumulates.

It does many things in the brain and body.

One of the most important things that it does is to give us the subjective experience of feeling sleepy and the objective feeling of our body being fatigued, of feeling literally heavier, requiring more energy to move ourselves.

When we sleep and when we allow ourselves to go into states of deep rest that are similar to sleep, we can talk about this, the adenosine system is adjusted so that there's less effective adenosine circulating or bound to adenosine receptors.

So this sort of adenosine 101.

There's a lot more to it, but that's sufficient for what we need to talk about for now.

The drug, the most commonly used drug, the drug we're using now and that we're on right now, caffeine, which is consumed by, it's estimated more than 90 % of the world's adult population, effectively works by blocking the adenosine receptor.

There's some nuance there, but we can think of it that way for simplicity's sake.

And in doing so, it prevents the sleepiness inducing actions of adenosine.

However, when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that was around trying to bind to those receptors is still around.

In fact, it's accumulated even more, which at least partially explains the so called caffeine crash or the dip in energy, the fatigue that is that we experience maybe three or four hours after consuming caffeine.

Okay. As I mentioned before, when we go to sleep at night, adenosine is cleared from our system.

There was a lot of debate over the years about why we sleep.

In fact, the great Matt Walker wrote the book, Why We Sleep.

And a lot of that has to do with the cell biology of regulating potassium and other ions that are in neurons.

And for those that are interested in the cell biology, it's about readjusting the amount of potassium inside and outside the cells, which is happening on an ongoing basis.

But you could think of the time that we sleep as doing many things.

But one of the most important things is to bring those adenosine levels down, whatever adenosine has accumulated to bring it back down such that when we wake up in the morning, we feel alert.

Okay. There are a lot of reasons why we feel alert.

Some of them we can call pro alertness mechanisms, like the release of cortisol.

Some of them are about removing the break on wakefulness, like reducing adenosine.

Here, we're talking about removing the break on wakefulness by reducing adenosine.

So let's say, what time do you go to sleep at night, typically?

If you add your way, 10 o 'clock, and what time do you typically wake up feeling great with no alarm clock?

6 .30, 6 .45. Great. So let's say you go to sleep at 10 .30 and you wake up at your usual time.

Chances are you will have cleared a lot, but not all the adenosine that's required for you to wake up feeling very alert.

Let's say you stay up a little bit later.

Maybe you stay up until 11, maybe you wake up twice that night to use the restroom for whatever reason, you consumed a bit more fluid, maybe it takes an extra 10 minutes for you to fall back asleep the second time, and then you wake up in the morning and you didn't get the total amount of deep sleep

and rapid eye movement sleep that you're used to getting.

Without question, your levels of adenosine upon waking are going to be slightly higher than they normally would.

Okay. Once you understand what adenosine does, you think about that scenario, it's kind of an obvious thing.

However, most people don't sleep until they naturally wake up feeling refreshed.

Most people are using an alarm clock.

Most people are not going to sleep as early as they need to or sleeping as late as they need to or both.

So as a consequence, when you wake up in the morning, your adenosine levels are not zeroed out to the place where you would be maximally awake.

There is a lot of or some residual adenosine present.

What do people typically do?

Typically people get out of bed, might look at their phone.

As you know, I encourage them to go find sunlight if the sun isn't out to turn on bright lights and then get outside and get sunlight in their eyes as soon as they can.

But chances are they're going to grab some caffeine.

They're going to pour themselves a cup of coffee, or they're going to have some if you're me or Bamate.

They're going to perhaps have an energy drink, all fine and good.

But now think about what we just said, which is that what you're doing then is blocking the adenosine receptors effectively.

Whatever residual adenosine was there, because you didn't sleep enough to clear it out, persists.

Plus, you're now starting to accumulate more adenosine such that by mid -morning, that adenosine has accumulated, the caffeine has worn off.

And maybe by early afternoon, especially after a meal, many, not all people experience an afternoon crash in energy somewhere between 1 p .m., typically, and 4 p .m., somewhere in there.

For me, the trough in my natural energy levels in the afternoon is consistently between 2 and 3 p .m., regardless of how well I slept the night before.

Many people also find a consistently placed trough in their energy independent of all this.

OK, so what can we do?

Some years back, I started suggesting that people consider, if they have an afternoon crash in energy, that they delay their morning caffeine intake for 90 minutes after waking.

Some years after that, an academic review was published saying, well, there's really no evidence that that specific practice is necessary.

But I still think and I stand by the fact that it can be very useful for those that experience an afternoon crash.

Why? Why? Well, two things.

First of all, by delaying caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, there's an interesting phenomenon whereby even though you are out of bed and walking around, you're not asleep.

If you don't block those adenosine receptors, there's still clearance of adenosine occurring in part because residual rest.

You're sort of still asleep.

Wow. The other thing that works remarkably well to clear out residual adenosine is upon waking, if you don't feel rested enough to do something I've talked also a lot about, which is another one of these zero cost tools that has a growing amount of impressive science to support it, which is non sleep

deep rest or NSDR, also called yoga nidra, which is its proper name.

The ancient practice is yoga nidra.

So we want to be fair to its proper naming a 10 or 20 or 30 minute yoga nidra or NSDR, if you prefer.

Done upon waking, but before getting out of bed or maybe you go into the living room and put on your headphones or listen to an NSDR script, they're available all over the internet, done by me, done by a woman named Kelly boys, who has a really lovely voice.

If you prefer a woman's voice, it's actually the one I typically use.

You will emerge from that feeling much more rested.

Now, Dr. Matt Walker himself and I are collaborating on a project to evaluate how NSDR impacts brain states to see if it actually mimics sleep.

There's some beautiful studies already published out of Scandinavia showing that longer yoga nidra type practices, non sleep deep rest can replenish dopamine stores in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which prepares you for mental and physical action.

So this is a very well established tool from the sort of yogic perspective.

It's a it's a tool that's gaining increasing scientific evidence.

And it for everybody I know that has tried this, who reports back to me about it.

It's a remarkably energetically replenishing exercise that requires no payment, no nothing, just 10, 20 or 30 minute NSDR.

Now, what could be happening in that state?

In that state, the body is still, the mind is active, which mimics very closely rapid eye movement sleep.

So the test that Matt Walker and I are doing with the experiment is to see is having your body completely still, but your mind active, able to clear a stores in the same way that being deeply asleep is.

My guess is that it's not the same, but that it might be a midway effect.

That's the hypothesis.

We could be wrong. I look forward to seeing the results.

So by delaying your caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, but making sure that you hydrate, get your electrolytes, you know, something like element, which we both, both enjoy and make good use of, you are clearing out the adenosine that is residual in your system.

Now, why do I also keep harping on this idea of going out and getting bright light in your eyes, ideally sunlight, but if, especially on cloudy days, but if it's not out yet, you can turn on bright lights.

Well, when one does that, you actually amplify the naturally occurring peak in cortisol that occurs soon after waking.

So about 30 minutes before waking, your cortisol starts to rise.

It's part of the mechanism that wakes you up without an alarm clock.

As soon as you get out of bed and you start moving around that cortisol increases further, your body temperature, by the way, is increasing in parallel.

When you view bright light, and these are very well -established studies in humans, as well as animal models, but in humans, when you view bright light, 10 ,000 lux indoor light, if you're using a seasonal affective disorder treatment lamp, or getting outside even on a cloudy day and looking toward the sun,

looking east in the morning without sunglasses, eyeglasses and contacts fine, you induce a near 50 % increase in the height of that cortisol peak.

That might sound like a bad thing because everyone's afraid of cortisol, but that's not a bad thing.

It prepares your day, prepares you for a day where your immune system is bolstered, your energy and alertness is bolstered, and your ability to learn and your mood, I maybe said mood twice, forgive me, are bolstered.

And in addition to that, there are interactions between light and the adenosine system.

Light impacts the functional availability of the adenosine receptor in very interesting ways.

Light increases bright light, that is, viewed by the eyes, increases the height of that cortisol peak, and then the cortisol peak also helps to counteract the adenosine system.

Now, in addition to that, when you get sleepy at night, part of that effect is due to the increase in melatonin, which is released from the pineal gland, a pea bright light at night or during the day, and especially in the morning, it quashes those melatonin levels.

So when you wake up in the morning and you haven't slept enough, or even if you have, your adenosine levels are still not to zero, your melatonin levels are still not to zero, and your cortisol is rising.

So you've got a pro wakefulness system cortisol that you can accelerate or amplify rather by viewing bright light.

You've got a anti -wakefulness system in the form of melatonin and adenosine that are pushing back on your wakefulness.

You're in this kind of like grogginess and you can further suppress those systems without caffeine by viewing bright light.

So viewing bright light both increases the pro wakefulness systems in the brain and body and suppresses the anti -wakefulness systems in the brain and body, both pushing down on the accelerator of wakefulness and mood and alertness and reducing the break, right?

Otherwise, you're sort of trying to drive with the emergency break on.

Then if 60 to 90 minutes later, you ingest caffeine, now you're blocking the adenosine receptor.

Sure, that's fine. I love caffeine.

I certainly drink a lot of caffeine and enjoy it for all its effects.

And you're now in a position where the arc of your wakefulness is going to be a nice concert with the also increase in adenosine that's naturally going to accumulate throughout the day.

And again, there's no requirement to delay your caffeine 60 to 90 minutes after waking, but for people that experience a market afternoon crash, it's an incredibly effective way to offset partially or eliminate that afternoon crash.

Well, that's pretty much everybody.

Who doesn't get tired in the middle of the afternoon?

Tell you what I've done with - Jocko Willink doesn't get tired period.

Ever, ever. Do you think he's got that genetic mutation?

I don't know. You know, I went down to visit him after his podcast.

I actually did a sauna session with his family and some of their family friends.

And they had heard that I've been pushing the heat on the sauna a bit more.

And by the way, I don't recommend this unless you're very heat adapted.

I'm not great at the cold.

I put my cold plunge at about 48, 45 degrees.

Rogan and other people make fun of me for this.

Lex is Russian, so he doesn't have to cold plunge.

He was born into the cold of Siberia.

There's a photo of this actually on the internet.

From the time he was young, they were cold conditioning him.

That's why he has such a warm heart.

But in terms of the heat, I'm pretty heat tolerant.

So I've been cranking my sauna, traditional sauna to about 210 to 20.

But mostly 210. I went down there and Jocko challenged me to what he calls the factory reset protocol, which is 30 minutes at 225, brutal.

And we had about eight or nine bodies in that sauna.

So it was probably claustrophobic.

It was probably hotter than that.

I was the one guy down on the floor.

All the others, men and women were sitting up there laughing at me and I almost tapped out.

And then they do a five minute cold plunge and they go back and forth three times.

I did one round with them.

So I don't recommend it because if you're not heat conditioned, you can give yourself brain damage.

By the way, for people that don't know, if you put a towel over your head or you wear one of these Bonya hats, it actually insulates your brain.

So you're able to stay in longer.

People think, oh, it must be that much.

Make me longer. But you're actually insulating the brain from the heat.

So Jocko, he's obviously tough.

He's legitimately battle tested.

And at the same time, it's remarkable to me how much energy he has.

He finished dinner.

So we did the sauna.

We did a four hour podcast.

Then we did the sauna cold thing I just described.

Then we did dinner.

And then he went off to see a chromatic show starting at like 10 o 'clock.

And then the next morning, of course, he posted his watch.

So he does seem to have more energy or he just forces himself to ignore whatever fatigue.

Chronically, that seems so unlikely to be able to continue to do that.

Just sheer will. It feels like your body would eventually come in.

Perhaps I'm not accounting for the will of Jocko.

But yeah, what is it?

It's a very small number of people, but there is a genetic mutation that allows certain cohorts to exist on between sort of three and five hours sleep.

And that's just where they're at.

Yeah, very rare. Probably they have very fast adenosine clearance systems view differently.

Perhaps they don't accumulate as much adenosine during the day.

Someone test Jocko.

Get his blood. I imagine that when you try and get him with the needle, it just bends.

I've talked about some of these before, but the comments on YouTube about Jocko are the best.

Like when Jocko was born, the doctor looked at his parents and said, it's a man.

When he does a push up, he doesn't lift himself.

He pushes the world away.

He doesn't do pushups.

He does earth downs.

I've seen that one.

And there are a bunch of other ones that are really amusing.

He's the new Chuck Norris.

But I think those guys are selected for the teams in part through their ability to cognitively and physically push aside fatigue.

I think for most people, they need six to eight hours of sleep per night and less growing teen years, battling some illness, that sort of thing.

If ever you're used to going to sleep at 10 p .m.

or something and suddenly at 7 p .m., you feel incredibly tired, you're probably battling something and you should go to sleep.

I need about six to eight hours, but the other night I got nine.

I rarely get nine. But like a super human.

Yeah. Typically for me, it's about seven hours.

And then I do this 10 to 20 minute non -sleep deep rest.

On the drive over here, I did a 10 minute non -sleep deep rest.

Have you ever seen that meme where it talks about the different hours of sleep that you have and it's got a sort of a face of a guy and it's zero, his sort of face is falling off, one hour, his face is falling off.

And it really accurately represents exactly how it feels.

Six hours, face falling off, seven hours, face falling off, eight, great.

But for some reason, and I totally agree with this, two hours, the guy is fucking superhuman.

What is it about that period?

It just seems like maybe it's the 90 minute, like up and down.

It allows you to really align that one sleep cycle and you're like, well, okay, if you're sleeping two hours, you know that you're going to feel like shit.

You know that this is just, okay, I mean, I'm in sort of war mode.

But thinking about the team's guys, Jocko.

Well, sorry, just what I think you're seeing in that somebody sleeps just two hours every once in a while and feels really great.

You'll notice that they get hyperverbal.

It's a mild form of mania before the crash.

No way. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

And you know, we don't talk about this terribly much because rapid eye movement sleep is critical for removing the emotional load of previous day and previous day memories and experiences.

But rapid eye movement sleep has also been used as a clinical treatment for depression, right?

Which is kind of odd because one of the primary symptoms of depression is waking up at three or four in the morning and not being able to fall back asleep again.

So, you know, there's a kind of a mystery in the relationship between sleep and mood, but I think it's fair to say that on average you need to get sufficient amount of sleep for you.

And for most people that means six to eight hours plus or minus two hours, right?

Depending on your age and what else you're dealing with in life.

And I think it's also fair to say that if ever you had to stay up all night or you only get two hours of sleep, you will probably experience some sort of hypermania for you.

And then, or hypo, excuse me, hypomania, talking a lot, feeling really energetic.

And then boom. You're going to get smashed.

Yeah, I mean, I've tracked my sleep in one form or another for a decade.

SleepCycle, the app on mobile, which is really great, by the way, if anyone's sort of on the road and needs to use an alarm, SleepCycle is fantastic.

If you pay for the premium, I'm not a partner, no way affiliated.

No, I just want to give it a try.

I've used that thing for probably a decade.

I'm not a fan of using your phone as an alarm clock, but if you're on the road, I've been in hotels a lot recently, it's a good, it automatically triggers recordings when you begin to snore, when you begin to sleep, speak in your sleep, and you can play those back and it just records them and puts them

on the cloud for the rest of time.

So I have a couple of friends who have full sentences, entire conversations, a very well -known podcaster and previous guest of this show has entire debates in his sleep.

People should post them, we should do the actual sleep podcast.

I'm trying to get him to put them online because they are so funny, but I love SleepCycle and that's great.

I think I've averaged over a decade, about six hours 45 of active sleep, but I was a club promoter for a long time.

That six hours 45 is closer to probably six and now seven 30.

So I'm kind of splitting the difference from my previous life to my to my new one.

One of my favorite tweets from you is don't ask people how they are doing, ask how they are sleeping.

You learn a lot more.

Yeah, you get a window into what's really going on for them because we have this throwaway response to how are you doing?

I'm like, I'm okay or I'm great or damn fine.

When you ask how people are sleeping, it speaks to a bunch of previous day and week experiences and how they're integrating all that.

The mighty Rick Rubin always asks, how are you feeling, which I really love.

I'll get these types like, how are you feeling?

I'm like, that's interesting.

I start responding.

It forces you to think a little bit.

When we are emotionally troubled, we sleep less well, obviously.

I feel like there are a lot of us, myself included, that would like to just take a long nap until after this upcoming election.

I mean, it's really important to see what's going on back and forth, but sometimes it just feels so emotionally distracting.

I definitely chart my sleep.

I use the tracker inside of 8 sleep.

Have you got that new thing that lifts your head up?

I do because I have a snoring issue.

I didn't know I had a snoring issue.

It's not terrible, but I didn't know I had a snoring issue.

Then I started using the nose strips.

That helps me. Yeah, but then I made the mistake of taking one of those off far too quickly and I had a nice linear size strip removed from my nose.

That was good. They can help.

They actually can really help because it reduced the percentage of my night that I was snoring from something like 22 % down to like 11%.

Is that based on what the 8 sleep report was?

Yeah, but now with the new 8 sleep, it tilts you up and that really helps.

That really helps. Intake make great nose strips.

There's a hard piece of plastic.

It's a molded piece of plastic and then you put two magnets either side of your nose.

Pulling your nose. And this shit locks you in.

Then Alex Hormozi who has two deviated septims.

Was that why he always wears that?

Correct. I was wondering why he wears it in the daytime.

He can't breathe really very well without it.

I see. One's 100 % blocked and the other's something else.

He's found some other thing that goes inside your nose and opens it out from there.

He says he can only use it two nights in a row or else it starts to sort of cut away at the inner lining of those two nights.

Really, really good breathing.

Getting a lot of oxygen to your brain during sleep is part of the optimal sleep routine.

It's just that sometimes the number of different things that one needs, earplugs, eye masks, it can get to be a bit much.

Whenever I'm on the road, the most important thing for me in hotels is to try and get a hotel where the window faces east in the morning and the window opens.

I have this weird kind of morning anxiety if I can't get fresh air.

You can always go downstairs and go outside, but the little things make a big difference.

I think this is one of the things that's so dreadful about being on a plane for many hours is that it's all the short wavelength light, the blue light plus you can't open the window, then you're in an airport, then you're in an Uber.

You really think about just how unhealthy that is.

I'm 49 next month and I feel pretty good.

I probably haven't been getting as much sleep as I should have this last year, but getting more fresh air, just that simple, I can't even call it a biohack, right?

Just getting more fresh air and sunshine has made an enormous difference in my nighttime sleep.

Just sort of advice that your mum would have given you.

Just get more fresh air.

Yeah. She used to kick us out of the house.

We'd come home, we were watching cartoons or something, and then she'd say like, all right, you're leaving.

I'm kicking you out for her own piece of mind.

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Just sort of related to what we've spoken about there, how can people become a morning person or learn to get up early more easily and more regularly?

Yeah. Three days of pain, the rest is easy.

So it takes about three days to shift the biological mechanisms to make you a morning person.

Now, if you are a very strongly genetically determined night owl, that's a thing.

That's a thing. So there are genetic mutations, they call them polymorphisms that make some people night owls.

They feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about 1, 2, or 3 AM and waking up somewhere around 10, 11 AM or noon.

That exists, not just during development or teen years, but that exists, not just for social reasons.

Other people are true morning people.

They feel absolutely best going to sleep around 8 PM or 9 PM, 10 PM will be late for them and they feel great waking up at 4 or 5 or 6 AM.

Most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between 10 and midnight and waking up somewhere between 6 AM and 8 AM or so, maybe 5 30 to 8 AM.

Okay. So those are three bins of the night owl, the morning person, and then the more typical schedule, but it's heavily weighted toward that typical schedule if you look at the general population.

So if somebody wants to get up earlier, you need to stack the four primary what are called zeitgebers or time keepers.

So named because some of the early chronobiologists that discovered this stuff and the underlying mechanisms were German as it were.

So the number one zeitgeber, the number one way to shift your circadian clock, which is this cluster of neurons that sits a few centimeters above the roof of your mouth is to view bright light at a time when you want to be awake, AKA the morning.

Okay. So that's why I say get outside, look at the sun toward the sun.

Don't force yourself to stare at it.

Don't think as needed, no sunglasses, eyeglasses, corrective lenses and contacts are absolutely fine.

Even if they have UV protection.

Okay. However, if you combine that with another zeitgeber, the second most powerful zeitgeber is exercise or movement.

So if you do some jumping jacks, you skip some rope or even just take a walk while facing the sun.

Now you're starting to stack different zeitgebers.

And I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment.

If you then also add caffeine.

Now this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes ago, but if you were to add caffeine, you can entrain as it's called the circadian clock to be alert at that time a bit more.

And I'll be honest, if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning, I need caffeine.

I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes.

If I need to jump right into exercise, I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking, three hours after waking or 11 hours after waking.

And a lot of people find that the same, but of course exercise when you can, because it's that important, but if you want to quote unquote optimize your energy levels for exercise, typically people will notice that has to do with your temperature rhythm.

Okay. So we've got sunlight.

We've got exercise or movement of any kind.

It could be jumping jacks, could be walking.

You don't have to do a full workout and then caffeine.

And in some cases, food.

I'm not big on eating first thing in the morning.

I don't like to eat until 11 a .m.

or noon. That's when my first meal arrives for me.

Just naturally, that's when I get hungry.

It's to eat something first thing in the morning.

You, that's part of the way you entrain your circadian clock to wake up, to essentially wake you up earlier.

And then the fourth one is a social rhythm.

If you're interacting with other people, you're going to entrain your clock to that as well.

No way. Yes. So there's a socially, there's a social component to circadian entrainment.

Now, the pathways for these are from the eye in the case of viewing light to the circadian clock, the super charismatic nucleus.

In the case of caffeine, it's more general.

In the case of exercise, there's literally a brainstem to circadian clock connection, a big super highway of neuronal connections that then so -called in trains your circadian clock.

Remember your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24 hour rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light, you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap.

It just is what we call free run.

It would drift a little later each day.

This is what happens when you go to Vegas.

This is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the day the sunlight rising and setting cycle.

Sunlight, exercise, caffeine and eating, and social interactions bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeitgebers.

So when I said it takes three days, if tomorrow you want to start beginning the process of becoming an early riser, you'd set your alarm for 5 a .m.

No matter what time you went to sleep the night before, you're going to get up and you're going to do the four things that I described.

Maybe leave out food if you don't want to eat.

Maybe leave out caffeine if you want to delay by 90 minutes.

It's going to hurt.

And then by the early afternoon, you'll be dragging a bit and you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine, which will then cause you to fall asleep later.

Then you want to go to sleep at your now naturally slightly earlier sleep time.

The next day, you'll notice it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine I just described.

And by the third day, you ought to be waking up with or before the alarm by a few minutes or moments, because your circadian clock has phase shifted.

It's phase advanced, as we say.

Your circadian clock intrinsic to you generates a 24 .2 or a 24 .3 hour rhythm.

It's not perfectly 24 hours.

And that we believe, we don't know.

But the just so story is that it's that it's such that that you're able to then shift that clock in in one or the other direction.

You can phase advance.

You wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier.

You can phase delay.

How do you phase delay?

Well, you're probably doing this already.

Everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not so strict criteria of shift work, which is, are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after nine p .m.?

Are you viewing any kind of bright lights after nine thirty p .m.?

Most people would say yes.

So the diabolical thing about the circadian timing system is that it requires a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, but a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person.

But it requires just a little bit of bright light, even from an artificial source after the hours of about nine thirty p .m.

till four a .m. to cross your melatonin and make it difficult to sleep or if you sleep to make that sleep not as effective.

There's a simple remedy, however, which is and this is a beautiful study published in Science Reports in 2022.

If you view sunlight in the afternoon, even for five minutes or so, could be late afternoon, could be sunset, take off your sunglasses, look in the direction of the sun.

So now looking west, you adjust the sensitivity of your retina, the neurons in the back of your eye, such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to suppress melatonin.

It reduces the melatonin suppressive effects by about 50 percent or offsets those.

So I think of this afternoon viewing as well, first of all, it's nice to look at a sunset.

If you're indoors in an environment like this, even if there are bright lights on, get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets.

This is especially important in winter, even if you can't see the sun as an object, get some sunlight in your eyes and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night, partially.

And I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation so that that night you can be on your phone or watch Netflix and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much, but it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat.

But let's, you know, unless like Rick Rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses, I've started doing that as well.

But if you don't do that, well, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening.

He's very attached for good scientific reasons to the sunlight thing.

But these are little things that take just moments, right?

They're essentially zero cost that can really improve your sleep.

But that's how you become a morning person.

If you want to become a night person, you do the opposite.

You view bright light between the hours of 4 p .m.

and 10 p .m., and then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way your circadian clock, making you want to wake up later the next morning.

I wonder if dogs count as a social interaction.

Absolutely. And they have all of the same mechanisms we just described.

So I'm just thinking, how can we stack that everything first thing in the morning, morning walk, if you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high north, dog, social interaction, moving around, and then caffeine if you do or if you don't want it.

If you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run.

You're going to have to chase after it.

If you have an English bulldog like I did, you'd be lucky if you get out of bed by 10.

Yeah, you're in. Their eyes are droopy and they don't like to move.

But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun.

And people always ask, do dogs have the same mechanisms?

Absolutely. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, the one that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian entrainment to sunlight are present, as far as we know, in every extant mammalian species, every mammalian species that's alive today.

And this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opsins, the light absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye.

It's a very primordial system.

It's organized very differently anatomically in the retina.

And to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in all of us.

In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat, you're never going to biohack away is circadian biology.

This 24 hour fluctuation in energy and focus.

Some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms.

And it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest.

Neuroplasticity occurs during sleep.

They push down adenosine.

It takes us through these natural ebbs and cycles of cognition.

I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep, the conscious mind obviously is not in control.

The unconscious mind can geyser up thoughts.

The brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols, time and space are very organized very differently in dreams.

And there's a lot of information to be gleaned from dreams.

It's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean, the kind of classic Freudian Jungian interpretations are certainly not going to be complete.

But I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep.

And I think thanks to the great Matt Walker, we now understand that the whole thing about sleep when I'm dead is a really dumb mindset.

And, you know, my team at the Huberman Lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping.

You know, when we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to like get rest, you know, get rest like we really prioritize sleep.

It's so essential. One of the best little cliches there, which is too much of a generalization, but I think works is there's no such thing as being overworked, only under rested.

I like that. I like that a lot.

I also think that, you know, we know a lot about the different stages of sleep.

We know less about the different stages of wakefulness.

I've recently started embracing my natural cognitive and physical cycles.

And I've come to realize, and I think Ed Mylett says he does this, but he does it.

He thinks of his day as consisting of three days, which is awesome from the productivity standpoint.

I noticed that also because he mentioned these time blocks.

So I just want, you know, you've got a new daily routine.

Yeah. What's your routine?

Yeah. So I came to realize by observation, right?

I didn't force this.

So this is something I observed in myself, which is that from 6 a .m.

until noon, my brain is very capable.

My body is very capable of doing certain things far more easily than at other times of the 24 hour cycle.

So I consider that sort of, you know, the first phase of my day, sometimes I'm up by six, sometimes it's seven, sometimes it's eight.

Usually it's about six, six, 30.

So I consider that one opportunity block.

The second opportunity block is between noon or because I eat lunch typically around noon between, you know, one and 6 p .m.

or noon and 6 p .m. So second opportunity block.

And then the third is between 6 p .m.

and bedtime, which for me typically is 10 30, but sometimes late.

I'm half Argentine.

Sometimes I go to bed at midnight and I just got all taken out the next day.

I mean, you have to live.

I mean, come on. So what I started to realize is that I can do really focused work in two, but not three of those blocks consistently.

I also noticed that if I exercise early in the first block, like between 6 a .m.

and before 9 a .m., I have more energy all day long.

This is what I observed experimentally on myself.

But if I exercise starting at nine or starting at 10 or halfway through that block, the second opportunity block is diminished.

I'm kind of dragging.

Maybe it's related to when I eat, but that wasn't changing when I eat or what I eat.

So I do think that people could benefit tremendously, not necessarily by following the schedule that I follow, but by paying attention to their natural cognitive and physical rhythms.

And so as a consequence, what I now do is I take a look at the day like, for instance, this is afternoon.

We sat down together here at one.

I think we're probably somewhere around 2 p .m.

I don't know, somewhere around there.

But I realized, OK, I could work before I got here in this early day block or this evening.

What I chose to do this morning was kind of more procedural things.

Took care of some posting for our Monday episode, took care of some phone calls.

I took a walk, took care of some email, made sure I ate some food before I came here.

On the way here, I did a brief 10 minute NSDR because I didn't sleep quite as much last night as I would have liked.

But I walked in feeling great and I don't get paid to endorse, but I nor did we have any kind of arrangement to say this.

But this new tonic energy drink I'm loving.

It's got an eye on it.

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Really tasty. It tastes so good.

So I can work two or of these three blocks.

And then the third one ends up being kind of a mishmash of procedural stuff.

So today, the early part of the day, the 6 a .m.

to noon block was kind of like handled doing non it's work, but it's not like focused work stuff.

And I didn't train today because I trained yesterday.

And today was a day off in any case.

Hopefully we'll do some sauna cold tonight.

So now we're working.

I'm focused. And I imagine that, you know, two, three, four hours of this and my brain will have, you know, expended some pretty serious cognitive effort.

And then I'll take a little bit of I'll expect a sort of dip in energy.

I won't force it. And then this evening, I'll get some work done and then hopefully we'll do some sauna cold.

So I'm very aware of the fact that I get two opportunities from these three blocks.

Now, my ideal schedule would be to work in the first two blocks really, really hard.

Still eat, still train, train early.

So it'd be train early work in the first block.

So get the training done by 8 a .m., no later.

Work, super focused work.

Then eat something super focused work in the second block.

Maybe do an NSDR to recover my mental and physical vigor.

And then in the evening, social time, social time, relax.

I've been watching a lot of documentary.

What have you been watching?

I watched Anthony Bourdain documentary yesterday.

I'm not, I obviously knew who he was.

We have friends in common.

He, you know, he's a few, sadly passed away, but took his own life, which is tragic.

But I was aware that, you know, because Joe's talked about him a lot.

David Cho, the artist has talked about him a lot and is in that documentary.

He also was part of the New York City, you know, 70s, 80s punk rock scene.

So the Ramones, I'm a huge Ramones fan, Joe Stromer, like kind of of that ilk.

And the documentary is called Road Runner.

And it's very, very good.

And it's also very interesting to see how he was such a sensation seeker.

You could almost feel him veering toward something.

And then, you know, and I've never watched any of his documentaries.

Very, very good. And very, very good.

Have you seen, just to interject, have you seen World War II from the front lines?

No. So this is Netflix.

Netflix have done at least two or three colorized World War II documentaries.

In fact, there's one that's World War I.

I saw that one. Yes.

So at least three. World War II in color, World War, the Great War in color, and something else.

All of these will be available on Netflix.

Watching archive footage, there's something distancing about seeing it in black and white.

It sort of reminds you that it's not now.

And they've used a combination of AI and manual recolors to be able to sharpen the image.

Everything's 4K. The facial appearance of everyone, the emotions that you can see on their face, the smiles, their teeth, and now in color as well, to me just drives home that story in a manner that I'd never, I've never watched a documentary about something from that era and felt so emotionally connected

to it, which is interesting.

So I've really been enjoying that.

World War II from the front lines?

Yes. Okay. Because the World War I doc I really liked.

I read All Squad on the Western Front, of course, when I was in school.

Fascinated by World War I.

Yeah, documentary, it's kind of an obsession.

I love the Oliver Sacks documentary.

I've seen some others recently about true crime.

You're a true crime guy.

I used to watch that stuff when I was living alone.

And then it was like, then you're kind of like, you're checking closets and stuff.

I don't know if it's good for me to watch that stuff.

It can be interesting.

The one that they did about Richard Ramirez, the night stalker, fucking brilliant, terrifying, terrifying, especially given that it's in Los Angeles and just the brazen nature of his of his new one.

I just watched called American Nightmare.

Yeah, I don't want to see this man.

It's really, really interesting and harrowing.

But Shane Gillis warns that watching World War II documentaries is early onset Republican.

That's what he refers to having an obsession with World War II documentaries as early onset Republican.

So you just need to track that in your mind if you start sort of shouting magma in your sleep and your sleep cycle picks it up.

Yeah, unlikely. But I'll look at it in an unbiased way.

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We're in an election year at the moment.

I think as much as you might want to fall asleep for the next three months and - No, I was just sort of joking.

I mean, the political process is critical.

It's been a lot as they say.

I don't think that it's unfair to say that.

I think a lot of people hold this sort of cognitive superposition, which is I understand the future of the country is very important and I as a person with a vote need to be an active participant.

That's the whole reason for doing it.

And also this is exhausting and it's sapping an awful lot of my will to live and I feel overloaded.

Have you looked at any strategies spoken to anybody that has any psychological tools to be able to deal with a rapid media cycle, sort of very activating stories?

Basically, how can people psychologically manage this upcoming period?

What would you suggest?

Yeah, I actually hosted a guest who is expert on the psychology of politics.

It was super interesting.

We looked at all of this through the lens, a completely nonpartisan lens, because we have listeners on both sides of the aisle and probably some who are undecided.

First of all, the further around this upcoming election, the intensity of everything certainly convinced me that I'm never going to run for office.

Despite some speculation out there from friends and family and some people, it's not my arena, but it's obviously a very important one.

And one of my concerns is that if the intensity around all of this continues to increase as much as it has.

I can guarantee you it's going to.

Yeah, that young people who would consider running for office out of a genuine desire to serve might be dissuaded, because you hear these things like, oh, it's impossible to get anything done, or in order to be effective, you have to be the other kind of person.

And that's a terrible message.

It might be true, but it's a terrible message, because I think ultimately what you want in any field, whether or not you're talking about music or sport.

We're seeing this at the recent Olympics or podcasting.

You want a big pool of people funneling into it so that you can discover the incredible talents and virtuosos.

And so that's what you need is a bigger applicant pool to reveal talent and for a field to progress.

Okay, enough editorializing.

I think the best thing that one can do to navigate this whole cycle is to pay careful attention to what draws attention.

And what I learned from this expert is a political science professor, is that what you're listening for and what people are orienting towards is dominance language.

But the dominance language over others is far less effective, believe it or not, in shifting people's minds than the dominance language associated with expressing one's true beliefs.

So their argument was, if you look historically at presidential and other forms of election, and by the way, I'm paraphrasing now, so that you could predict who was going to win based on who told you what they really think and believe, as opposed to telling people what they want to hear.

Like, I think that we have a sensor for when we're being told what people think we want us to hear versus what somebody really believes, even if we disagree with them.

And, you know, this probably gets to our origins as an old world primate species, but we tend to put leaders into office who can communicate either through their words or through the, you know, timbre of their voice or through their gestures or a combination of things.

Maybe it's redundancy and how often they hammer on a message, what they really believe, as opposed to flip -flopping, you know, according to what the polls say, we're blowing with the wind.

Right. So I think we hear the words dominance language and we default to, oh, it's about one person kind of, you know, dominating the other person.

Now, ultimately, it's a competition between mostly two people, we have a third party in this country, but it seems to be boiling down to two at this moment.

And so this thing about dominance language is often couches dominance over the other in a given scenario, over a given topic in separate venues, you know, at one gathering versus another.

But what this I consider brilliant political science professor was explaining is that the dominance is really exerted and impacts voting at the level of one or the other candidate, perhaps both, expressing what they really believe about something in clear terms with conviction, with conviction.

And it and it being true, I think this is the sort of thing that they can't fake.

And that where people lose faith in a candidate is when that candidate, you know, says, well, at one point, you know, I said this, but now I'm saying this, and they don't give a reason that feels legitimate to their actual beliefs or they don't address it.

Right. Or they don't address it, or they simply focus on the beliefs of the other candidate.

So my strategy in this current election is to put, as I do for many, not all things in life, much to the dismay of people in my life, a neuroscience lens, a psychology lens, a science based lens on what's happening around me.

And I'm listening for, does that sound true in the sense, does it really sound like that candidate really believes that?

Or does it sound like they're trying to tell me this, or are they spending more time talking about what the other candidate believes or doesn't believe in an effort to sway me?

Because ultimately, yes, there does seem to be some, and this guest pointed it out as well, that there's a, there is a tendency to orient towards people that we recognize that feel similar to people we grew up around.

But that's not actually the thing that impacts voting in the end, that ultimately the people who are undecided, because there is always going to be a group of people who are voting against the other party period, like they're just literally voting against one party.

But there, I do think that there's this group in the middle, what, you know, and I didn't coin this term, but Dr.

Paul Conti, who was on my podcast, psychiatrist and yours talks about the league of reasonable people, which are, which is, has nothing to do with politics per se, but this is a group of people who are really evaluating evidence on the basis of what they see and what they feel and what they hear and trying

to move away from the silence middle that, you know, and so people that are trying to evaluate evidence and are really paying attention to does this person feel genuine?

Do they really believe this?

Do they, or are they telling me this because it's what I want to hear?

I think that's, I think that's the way I plan to navigate this time.

How will that help with psychological health, using that, you know, you're still going to be peppered with the story and the worry and the concern and oh, here's a new, and I've got to forget the last thing, but it's still in my mind and there's a new thing and I got to spin all of these different news

stories. Yeah, great question.

In a very Paul Kantian way, it gives you agency.

It gives you a sense of control over the fire hose of information that's coming at you.

You can say, okay, I'm going to, there's nothing, there's nothing I can do about the fire hose.

There's nothing I can do about getting just blasted back with all this information, but I'm going to apply a very specific filter to try and hear what people are saying about specific issues that matter and paying attention to whether or not they're telling me what they really believe.

You can disagree with them and vote against them or you can vote for them.

But ultimately, the data show, I, as I understand that people ultimately are voting for the candidate that they has the greatest conviction.

And what I think has been lacking, frankly, in the political discussion, I say this as a citizen, not as a political scientist, but as a citizen who votes has been a clear picture of what the future could look like if a given candidate wins.

I want a vivid picture of the world they imagine.

I don't want this like surface level stuff like imagine a day when this is not like, it's like they start each sentence correctly and then it just kind of goes to like, it just kind of, and you know, as a scientist and somebody who's a public health, public science communicator, you know, I'm constantly

under the scrutiny of like, wait, what exactly is the protocol?

What exactly justifies the protocol?

Okay. Delay caffeine 90 minutes after waking.

If you crash in the afternoon, well, what's the randomized control trial?

I'll be the first to tell you there isn't one.

I'll also tell you the mechanisms that support my statement.

Now, if you talk to Dr.

Lane Norton, someone who I respect tremendously, he's been on my podcast twice, have tremendous respect for him.

He'll tell you, unless it's a randomized control trial, that doesn't meet his threshold.

And I'll tell you, well, you know, I don't eat seed oils.

I avoid them most of the time because I like olive oil and butter.

I'm not afraid of them, but you know, it's not based on a randomized control trial.

I just feel better when I don't.

So I'll tell you my reasons for believing strongly why I suggest A or B or what I do.

Does it meet the same standard that Lane requires?

No, but I'll tell you exactly what I'm grounding my statements on.

And what I want as a scientist, what I want as a citizen is for the candidates, presidential candidates, all candidates.

Just tell me what you believe.

Tell me the rationale.

The rationale could be, listen, they're telling me to say this, but just tell me what you believe and why.

And when you do that for somebody, certainly when that's done for me, I just feel an immense relief and an immense trust that the person actually understands their own process.

They're letting us look at the underlying mechanics.

And I also want to know what they envision for the future.

Right now, I'm hearing very little about that.

I'm hearing a lot of aspirational things on the one side that are very vague.

And I'm hearing a lot of kind of like dogmatic language on the other side, also pretty vague.

And so I want to know, I want to list like send me the one page PDF.

I want to know like, what are your protocols for for making this a better country?

I think so. That's my threshold.

And I do get worked up about this, but not enough to run for office.

I found this really interesting study that's been done recently.

Stories don't care about your statistics.

In controlled experiments, researchers documented a pronounced story statistic gap in memory.

The average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73 % over the course of a day.

The impact of a story fades by only 32%.

So 73 % average impact of statistics on beliefs, 32 % on a story.

So in short, people's beliefs are more durably impacted by stories than statistics, huge implications for how voters beliefs can be more easily swayed during the upcoming elections.

Yeah, I have part of the reason I love you.

I really mean that like you have an unbelievable ability to find studies that are relevant that I would never find.

Here's why I believe stories are more impactful than just citing statistics.

The reason is that the brain organizes memories of all kinds in beginning, middle, and end.

And a graph has a structure, but it doesn't really have a beginning, middle, and end.

Now it can be a time course plot.

It can be a time course plot.

There are all sorts of caveats to this, right?

And the scientist in me always has to mention all the caveats.

But from the time that we are little children, we organize things in terms of beginning, middle, and end.

The best example of this is the ABCs.

You don't do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, M, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

For a moment there, I was worried I wouldn't remember, but I'm so far so good.

And I've been drinking my new tonic.

Good man. Flying. But how do children learn the ABC?

A, B, C, D, E, F. So the brain is learning the inflections.

It's learning what's prosody, right?

The inflections, the lilting fall of voice.

And we know that this is one of the ways that we organize information.

My friends who are like world -class musicians who sing, I always say like, I remember lyrics really well.

And I always say, oh, what about that lyrics?

And they go, oh, I can't remember.

And then they'll start with the first line.

And then all of a sudden they remember the whole song.

That's right. That's the way memories are organized.

They sort of peel back.

Some people are very good at memorizing lists where acronyms can help us.

But in general, we sequence our life on the basis of a beginning, middle, end type structure.

So I think when people, now the exception to this would be flash bulb memories.

Like for instance, about a month ago, one of the presidential candidates, there was an assassination attempt on his life.

I think that was the first time since 9 -11 that I recall everyone in the country being tuned into the same event.

Online. Wild. I mean, there may have been intervening things, but there was an earthquake this morning in Los Angeles.

Did you feel it? I was busy preparing and I had my AirPods in.

All right. Great. And everybody else went, oh.

That was a little one.

But I grew up in California.

This one was kind of a, it was a ripple, not a rumble.

So usually if it's a bigger one, you'll hear it like a train coming through the environment.

In any case, not a flash bulb memory, right?

Obviously, but not, but you remember what you were doing.

But a few weeks ago, we had, or about a month ago during that assassination attempt, we had a flash bulb memory.

I can recall it was a Saturday.

I was sitting on the couch, you know, my girlfriend and I were talking and then all of a sudden I was like, oh my goodness.

You know, she's like, no, oh my goodness.

You know, and all of a sudden we're on the phone.

Right. Exactly. So, you know, flash bulb memories are an exception to what we're talking about.

And they grab all the context around that.

I remember when my mom picked me up on 9 -11 from school and I remember listening to it in the radio.

My memory, I know yours, I really want to get into this later on about you have a very self identified, very good memory of life experiences going quite a way back into your youth.

Yeah, for better or worse.

Yeah. For better or worse, I'm the opposite.

But I remember that one, light bulb memory, like in a big, important event.

But yeah, the story thing's so interesting.

And I think, by the way, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but you know that the origin of flash bulb memory is adrenaline.

You know, it's adrenaline released from the adrenals and in a quote unquote alertness center, although my neuroscience colleagues are like, there he goes, calling brain structures by the function.

But, you know, it releases epinephrine into the brain and kind of a sprinkling fashion.

You know, there's, we know, and there's a beautiful review by James McGaugh, one of the leading researchers in memory about this, that, you know, dating back to medieval times, if they wanted kids to remember something, I'm not making this up.

They would, I can say it's an annual review of a neuroscience starts off by describing, they would take kids, give them a tutorial.

Typically, it was a religious tutorial back then, then they throw them into cold water.

So you get a spike in adrenaline.

And then you remember what you had heard prior.

So it's, you know, when you have a spike in adrenaline, the brain, the nervous system knows something's different, it cues the memory system.

So just to think about why that might be adaptive, ancestrally, any dump of adrenaline of that kind of size would probably be indicative of such a important strategic learning moment opportunity.

Do not go near that cave that happened to have that bear in it again.

We'll make sure that you actually hold, is that the justification?

Yeah, so much so that there's what's called condition, place, aversion.

So in fact, if you see a drawing of that cave, or you go back to that cave, you start to experience some of the same somatic stuff.

What is the same somatic stuff?

Well, the nervous system is fairly nuanced, but it's also crude.

You're releasing some adrenaline, it's the increase in heart rate, the increase in breathing.

It's like, oh, that cave.

Now, the issue becomes it's not nuanced enough that such that some people then they see any cave and then they think that could represent danger.

So, you know, the adrenaline system is a way to obviously cue alertness very fast, milliseconds fast, but also to change the chemical milieu of the brain so that whatever memories or experiences were being charted in the brain now are locked into your memory.

So for instance, let's say we were to walk out of here, we walk out to the car and we're not thinking about something bad that could happen.

And all of a sudden, crack, crack, can someone get shot right in front of us?

Whoa. Okay. Now, you know, all sorts of things are going to happen.

Okay. Hopefully no one's heard of it.

Let's say it's a bad tragic incident.

Now, the adrenaline released into your system grabbed and consolidated the memories of this house, of the lawn of walking out there.

This is why people who experience trauma oftentimes have kind of odd recollect, like seemingly odd or unrelated recollections about the things leading up to an event.

Okay. So because ultimately, what did you need to learn?

Not to avoid streets, not to alert, avoid this street necessarily, but like, what were you doing?

Your brain is trying to grab something.

That's right. What brought you to that location?

What things brought you to that incident?

Interesting. And of course, some people dump these experiences more readily than others.

You know, part of the logic behind a lot of, not all, but a lot of trauma therapies is to literally bring the brain and body back into a state of high intensity and then to rescript the story.

Others are designed to bring you back into the story, but keep you calm.

So there's sort of two general approaches, just as there are approaches to treating depression that involve, you know, bringing a lot of salience and emotion to the surface, the cathartic approach.

These are tested and some work very well, as well as the use of drugs like ketamine, you know, FDA approved drug for dissociating your emotions while in the presence of MDMA.

Right. Or MDMA, which just recently, day before yesterday, did fail to pass approval by the FDA for the treatment of PTSD.

I didn't know about that.

Yeah. Big deal in the community, the psychiatric community.

This could be summarized as very impressive clinical trials showing up to 67 % even remission of PTSD or significant reduction in PTSD from people that did two sessions of MDMA with a qualified therapist in a clinical setting.

But the FDA had a number of different stated reasons, including lack of control group.

It's very hard to have a control in the sense that people can take no MDMA, excuse me, methyl dioxymethamphetamine, but then they knew that they were in the control group, right?

It's this whole business of how do you blind people to the to the drug?

You know, if you've taken MDMA, you know it.

Yeah. And then there were some other issues, sadly, that seemed, at least by my read, not unique to MDMA therapies, but that unfortunately it happened during the course of the trials, which made the results not satisfactory enough for the FDA.

So I think that the effort needs to continue.

Did they get another crack at this?

Yeah, one hopes. But there are a lot of people out there with PTSD and intractable types of stress disorders that now are tractable with treatments like MDMA provided you have the right therapeutic support.

And that's the issue is, you know, these drugs without the proper therapeutic support can send people down bad trajectories.

And so this is the big, this is the big thing.

And you can tell I'm kind of agonizing over this because, you know, we need to like the way these things move forward is we need to be very objective and say, OK, why did the FDA say no?

Why we can we can kick and scream about it, but that's not going to do any good.

Why did they say no?

And then address those issues like a scientist, you get a paperback, you think it's the greatest paper in the world, you get the reviews and they have issues with certain things you go, well, wait, but but but and you just you have to go systematically until those issues are dealt with.

You're going to get the same result.

So we need to be very objective about this.

And, you know, I look forward to a day when the FDA is satisfied based on the best criteria.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not being political there.

I just like I think these drugs can really help people in the right circumstances.

But it's been it's been a slog for the community of people trying to get these drugs through.

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Yeah, one of my friends, her husband has suffered with PTSD, with alcoholism.

Oh yeah, get the switching out flavors.

Wild citrus. You know what's weird is I study the visual system.

I have an appointment in ophthalmology after all, and I can see great at a distance.

I can read small texts, but I'm actually running into trouble seeing things up close recently.

Like if I put it here, I'm blind to it.

Well, I told you last time about my Lasik, right?

And I can see absolutely everything.

Ancestral trauma at 500 yards.

I'm like Tim Kennedy.

I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at it.

I'm not laughing at it at Tim Kennedy.

Lord knows, I'm not laughing at Tim Kennedy.

Don't hurt me. I'm a fan.

I'm just the fact that you could see trauma at 500 yards, that's a high acuity.

My goodness. Tim. He will come and find you.

So I've got a story.

I'll tell you a story that he told me about him and Brian Callan.

One's good too. Good.

Happy days. So Brian went over to the UK with them.

He was going to go surfing.

They were doing some sort of adventure in the UK.

And Brian arrived late and Tim said, we're going to go swimming in the morning.

He's like, no, no, Tim, I just got in like my flight.

You've been here for a little bit longer.

And he said, no, grabbed him by the arm like that and said, no, no, we're going swimming in the morning.

Lucked him in the eyes and Brian was like, Tim, I don't want to.

I'm going to be tired.

I'm going to be whatever.

Anyway, Tim made the threat sufficiently plain that he wasn't joking.

So six in the morning, Brian hears this little knock on his door.

Six in the morning.

Brian. So Brian pretends to be asleep.

Brian's an actor. Brian's been in Hollywood movies, big Hollywood movies.

Comedian too, right?

Comedian and actor.

Yeah. And he said he channeled every single ounce of acting ability that he had.

So he's laid on one side and he even so give a little snort here and there.

And he heard the door open and then he felt the bed move one side to the other like that.

It sort of rocked from left to right.

And then Tim's face came down to his ear and he said, Brian, do you know how many terrorists I've stood over when they pretended to be asleep?

Next thing you know, he's in the water.

Correct. And sure enough that you know, you're talking about the cortisol spike.

Yeah. That is a reliable way to give that would be the ultimate alarm.

The Tim Kennedy alarm.

Forget using sleep cycle.

Forget everything that I said.

Just pay Tim Kennedy to come and pretend that you're a terrorist.

Yeah. It actually raises an interesting and relevant biological point, which is that, you know, if you wake up at five in the morning and you glance at your phone, something I don't recommend doing, and you see a troubling text message, you'll be wide awake in a moment.

And that's adrenaline, epinephrine.

In the brain, we call it epinephrine.

In the body, we call it adrenaline for uninteresting reasons.

But that structure of neurons, that cluster in the brainstem called the back of the brain area, let's just stay with, you know, broad nomenclature.

The locus coeruleus has, there's a cluster of neurons that do many different things there, but some of them provide, you know, these wire -like axonal inputs, as we call them, in a kind of sprinkler fashion to the brain.

And when there's something that alerts us that we need, you know, it's triggering to us, if you will, it just, it's sprinklers the brain with epinephrine, adrenaline, and boom, the brain wakes up.

And then in parallel, your adrenals release adrenaline and within, you know, a couple hundred milliseconds, you're, you're up, you're able to move and you're not thinking about fatigue.

And the denosine doesn't mean anything.

And, you know, and sometimes I think that the, you know, earlier we were only half, half joking, Jocko, about Jocko Willingson, the sort of 4 .30 AM thing and waking up, you know, you can train these systems.

Earlier, we were talking about entraining the circadian clock to different stimuli to become an early riser or a late shifted person, as it were.

All of these neural circuits are subject to kind of conditional plasticity, right?

So like the alarm, boom, like you can be wide awake, or in my case, you're like hit the snooze, right?

Nothing was like the sleep that you get during a snooze.

It's so good. It's so good.

But, you know, you can be conditioned to, you can condition these locus coeruleus systems, the adrenaline system.

We, in fact, we were talking about it a minute ago in the context of PTSD, in the context of fear, in the context of non -nuanced alertness on the basis of a broad stimulus.

Like, you know, you know, if something terrible happened to you in a garage, we're in this beautiful garage with all these vintage cars around, but if something bad happened to you in a garage, it doesn't have to be that garage.

It can just be garages, the smell of metal, you know, different sensory cues get embedded in those memories and then can feed into these alertness systems.

And this is why, you know, there's, it's such a challenge to undo, to unpeel a trauma or chronic anxieties.

You have to sort of get to the combination of things that is the combination lock that lets you undo it.

That was one of the most interesting things I learned from Paul Conte.

I told him a story.

When I was 20, I was in a head -on collision with a snowplow at 60 miles an hour on the main artery motorway of the UK going up to Scotland.

So they were driving the snowplow.

And they sort of listed gently across into our lane, only clipped.

You're driving a little MG or something.

It was a Ford Focus with my business partner in.

And they only clipped maybe about a foot or so into the car.

But for him, what we think happened was he was probably looking at something not looking like bink.

And what was that? And just kept on going.

Didn't even notice.

For us, all hell broke loose.

And I said to Paul, you know, I had a little bit of travel anxiety for a short while after that.

And it dissipated about six weeks or so.

I was uncomfortable with contraflow traffic.

So I didn't like being on that lane.

I would always be on the or on the other side of the road in the UK.

I would want to be on the outside lane or the inside lane.

And he said, one of the interesting things about the way that trauma can repattern memories, old memories, is that you could have convinced yourself, well, I've never liked driving.

I've always been uncomfortable of this.

You can forget that there was ever a time before the incident.

Interesting. When you felt differently.

And this is where I think, first off, our brains aren't always necessarily our best friends.

And secondly, the story, what's the story that you're telling yourself?

What's the story that your brain is telling yourself about these memories?

Paul was adamant. He said, you absolutely could have begun telling yourself because I like I love driving.

I miss not having a car in the US.

I finally did get a car at the start of this year.

And I really enjoy being back on the road since the time where I get to listen to podcasts and I can't use my phone.

I really like it. But he said, how did it have been a more significant issue?

Or had you dealt with it in a different way?

Or you could have convinced yourself, I know, I've always been a nervous driver.

I've never enjoyed driving.

And then how sort of infectious and pernicious is that kind of a memory?

These individual instances, which I think are why it is so important to connect with those emotions, to look at the things that are driving you.

What are your, what are your unspoken assumptions about the world?

So I'm just wrapped with the tension is here.

So I have this notebook, I like these bound notebooks.

And I started writing kind of journal format.

But then recently I started just jotting things down.

Sometimes it's podcast notes.

And but the other day, I had this thought it's going to seem very, oh, this is a funny one.

You want to hear a funny one?

I do. So I, a long time ago, I used to make a joke, but I decided to just script it out.

This is only a three word entry.

It said, you know, my goal in life has been to go from like, oi, to oi, to just peace.

So I have oi, no, I have oi.

And then I have no, I have oi.

And then I have oi.

And then I have just like peace, like that, like basically, aside from sleep, like these are the three states that I can be in.

So in any case, idiot aggression, chill.

Yeah, yeah. So so assumptions about the world.

So the one that I woke up the other day, well, I spent a lot of time the other day explaining to a friend that because they were going through something that was really unfair.

And we were parsing, I'll get back to this, but we were parsing the difference between mistakes, misunderstandings and betrayals, and how some people respond to mistakes and misunderstandings as if they were betrayals.

And some people mix these up, you know, so that was an interesting one.

But to me anyway, but the thing that you said, assumptions about the world, I know it's in here someplace, I wrote it down.

And it felt so true.

This is it. This was the other morning I woke up, and I was like, I don't feel right.

Like I don't feel right.

Like I got all this stuff to do like something just, and I was like, I can't remember a time.

This is why what you just said queued me.

I can't remember a time when I woke up just feeling like there was nothing bearing down on me that day ever.

But now based on what you're telling me, perhaps there was a time and I just don't remember.

But then I was lying in bed as I do, keeping my eyes closed.

Rick Rubin taught me this trick.

Not in the same bed, but he taught me this trick.

He said if you wake up and you're having a dream right before you wake up and you want to remember the dream or you want to stay in mental state, keep your eyes closed and stay completely still.

However, if you're having a nightmare or you don't like the way that you feel, move your body.

There's something about the movement that dispels it.

Absolutely. And if you think about rapid eye movement sleep, which is the most dream rich sleep, your body is paralyzed and the mind is active.

So I've started doing this and it's made it very easy for me to remember my dream.

So Rick, who's not formally trained in science, but is Rick, gave me that tool and it works exceptionally well in my experience.

But I woke up and I said, you know, maybe the illusion is the pain.

Maybe the illusion is the pain.

Maybe the mental anguish I feel, maybe the challenge of life, like maybe that's the illusion, right?

Because we hear so much about how the pleasures are the illusions.

Now Dopa means a real thing and chasing dopamine is a real thing at its extremes.

It can be addiction at its less extremes.

It can be compulsions and it can also be a joyful life.

But I was thinking to myself, maybe pain is the illusion, right?

Maybe the idea that there's all this like challenge and maybe that's the thing that we're supposed to remove.

And then I thought back to something that a friend who's a very, very talented trauma therapist, his name is Ryan Suave.

He's out in Florida, runs a trauma treatment center out there, once told me.

He said, yeah, you know, in some of the Buddhist traditions, they talk about that your work in this life is in part, not completely, is to burn down, I think they call them, I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong, but someone will tell us in the scumsaras, like burning down to the roots, like the weeds

of life, like your misperceptions about what things are.

And I started thinking about this, especially after Martha Beck was on my podcast, who I really love.

She said, you know, you're not here to suffer.

And I thought, I'm not.

She was like, you know, you're not here to suffer.

You know, I've endured a lot of suffering in my life, more than some less than others.

But I think we all endure a lot of suffering, largely as a consequence of what happens between our ears.

Unfortunately, some of us also because of things that actually happen to our bodies, but we're self induced or otherwise.

But, you know, maybe we're not here to suffer.

Maybe a lot of the suffering that we experience is this illusion that we create.

And so I started really, I wrote it down.

Maybe the illusion is the pain.

And so maybe we need to challenge this.

Like maybe it's okay to be joyful, a little more joyful.

I have so much. It's great.

No, not at all. I have so much to tell you.

So overthinking creates more problems than it solves.

Definitely. Unless you're solving a really hard problem.

Correct. But on average, yes, everything is.

Joe Hudson, do you know who he is?

I don't. Art of accomplishment.

Phenomenal guy. Really, really interesting dude came on the pod.

And he has this very unique definition of efficiency.

And he thinks of joy as efficiency.

So efficiency is how much you get out for how much you put in.

Right? What is the return?

What is the output that you get for the input that you've had to spend?

And if you do something, which is joyful, you have to expend less.

And on the other side, you get out more.

That's like what a lovely redefinition.

So joy, enjoyment for him is the ultimate version of efficiency, that if you're using your passion, if you're doing something which you find enlivening, you are by definition, helping to make your system more efficient.

So his question while we were doing this podcast, it was a virtual one.

And he said, this is one of his favorite little cues that he asked, because he says, what would this be like if it was 10 % more enjoyable?

I love that. What's the guy's name again?

Joe Hudson. And I wrote down joy as efficiency.

Joe Hudson. Joe Hudson, yeah.

Art of accomplishment.

And not that it matters, but what's his training?

Is he a psychologist?

It's very lengthy. So what would this be like if it was 10 % more enjoyable?

And that is a cue. 10 % is achievable.

And what he said there, so I'll notice when I said that just now, I sort of shifted in my seat a little bit.

So my back, my t -shirt was a little creased under my lower back.

So I'd move that and maybe I'll get a little drink.

I'll look after myself.

I'll look after my body.

Maybe I'll allow the peripheries of my gaze to just sort of open out about, or maybe I'll take a little slightly deeper breath and I'll oxygenate a little bit more.

I'm having fun right now, but we're going to have 10 % more fun.

Just 10 % more enjoyable.

Loosen the bolts 10%.

So that's one thing.

The other thing, an insight that I've been thinking about a lot recently, things are not what they are.

Things are what we think they are.

For instance, doing a hard workout gives you a signature feeling.

You're laid on the floor, panting, heart rate at 180, sweating from everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth.

This is oddly enjoyable.

But if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while you were sat in traffic, you'd call the ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack.

Framing is everything.

This is a quote from Rory Sutherland.

Do you know who that is?

One of the greatest living advertisers on the planet, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising.

He's the only man I've ever heard swear in a TED talk.

And this is a direct quote from his TED talk.

He says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window.

The problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window, you're an antisocial friendless idiot.

If you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.

The power of reframing things cannot be overstated.

It's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy.

That's like alchemy.

It's kind of alchemy.

I like that. I'm both taking notes and listening very carefully.

Yeah, I think people exist on a continuum of bias toward more joy or bias toward more pain.

And I agree that we have a lot of cognitive control over the middle range, right?

Because of course there are experiences that are awful traumatic.

Unequivocally. Unequivocally, yeah.

Excellent or terrible.

There's no question about that.

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I turned 49 next month trying to think about like what I've learned, where I'm headed.

And I have unfortunately at times, but also fortunately my memory is very good.

My memory is very, very good.

How good? What's good?

I mean, I can close my eyes and hear conversations that I had with people with a fair degree of accuracy, I believe.

How far does that go back?

Oh, I can remember walks I took with my dad when I was five or six years old.

I can remember the layout of my room to find detail when I was a kid.

I have strong recollection of faces and facial recognition.

I don't track time well.

As a professor, we get some leeway, but I perpetually run late.

I don't track time.

And until recently, I didn't really have a sense of death.

I mean, I knew it existed.

I've had people close to me die.

All three of my academic advisors died, suicide, cancer, cancer.

You have the joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you.

I was going to say, I'm the common denominator.

Yeah. And for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city or military, I've had quite a few friends die.

Drug overdoses, suicides, and it's kind of hard to know if it's on average more or less.

I was a teen in the late 80s, early 90s, and there weren't a lot of people doing therapy.

There were no psychological meds for the treatment of different conditions.

Maybe that's it. Who knows?

In any case, if I spend any amount of time thinking about anything of the past, I can easily drift into it.

In fact, until very recently, very, very recently, much of my cognition each day was a battle between trying to anchor in the present and thinking forward and being pulled into memories of the past, kind of orienting toward the past.

Such a rich opportunity to ruminate.

Yeah. And we're seeing even music from the past acting as a cue to the past.

Something happened in the last eight, nine months where I feel hyper focused on the present.

Very, very little focus on the past.

Very little. I have exquisite memory of the past, but very little.

In fact, one of my journal entries was I was trying to think of, and this is somewhat embarrassing because it's not the way I would have scripted it, but I was thinking about from the time, as early back as I can remember, the different animals that I felt like I sort of related to or embodied it.

You know, when I was a kid, I had the same voice I have now.

They called me froggy, you know, because I was like the kid from the little rascals is a show that most people now don't know.

He liked the kid talk like this.

And I had, you know, my Adam's apple was out when I was a little kid.

I had Harrow my Adam's apple.

It's like there's a, I have a, I'm a heterozygote for a certain genetic mutation.

I overproduce androgen from my adrenals.

If you have two copies, it can make you infertile.

Fortunately, I don't, I have one copy and it doesn't result in any other like bodily differences or anything like that.

I'm very fortunate in that way.

And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm aware I can reproduce.

Let's just leave it at that.

Okay. So, but then, you know, there were different animals at different stages of my life as I grew and matured and experienced different things.

I was like at one stage of my life, I felt very oriented towards the mustelids and then other times towards like a certain species of, of cat.

And like, I just, I identified with them in a number of ways.

And then recently I was on this long run.

I do these long Sunday rucks and runs and I was seeing myself like, where am I at right now?

And all of a sudden I just went, oh shit, this is about the least exciting animal I could think about.

And I realized like right now at this stage of my life, I don't know how long this will last.

I'm, and this is very personal, but whatever.

Eff it. Like lately I'm just kind of opening up on podcasts, my own and others.

I realized and know it has nothing to do with butterflies.

I realize I'm in total caterpillar mode and it has nothing to do with becoming a butterfly.

Not that that would be a bad thing.

It's that I'm able to orient towards the tasks of the day, the day divided into three parts.

I can basically, I basically have vision about this far in front of me.

Despite what I said a few minutes ago, I can think about what I need to do.

I know where I'm headed.

I can move forward, not backward, but I can't seem to bring my thinking any further than that.

And it's so, it's such a new place for me.

I can't think in, I have to consciously try and think into the past.

I'm like, that was yesterday.

It was yesterday. I can't do it now.

Not in denial. I can do it if I need to.

But for me, this is a very functional way to be at this point in my life because of the enormous number of tasks in my life.

Fortunately, the enormous number of people that I love and that I want to spend time with and make time for, but somehow I have just like, so I drew it out.

I was like, I'm bringing caterpillar, and we'll see what happens and where this goes.

But the other animals in here, there was a rhinoceros phase that was interesting, moving very slowly, but with a lot of force on anything that was in my way at one stage.

There's been times when I've felt like a raptor where I was just placed and really observant.

I spent an entire year speaking very little, believe it or not.

People in my life will be like, what year was that?

I didn't talk to you that year.

Exactly. You didn't talk to me that year, and I didn't talk to you, if you're wondering where I was.

So right now, by identifying with this mode of caterpillar vision and movement, everything is in small increments.

I even feel it in the way that I talk and the way I parse ideas.

I'm writing the bonus chapters for my book, which comes out in April of next year.

Everything is line by line.

Everything is iterative, and I am not oriented toward the past.

It's there if I need it.

It's like a book on a shelf I can go grab and look things up.

But until now, I have existed very much in sort of thinking about the losses of past, the winds of past, identifying with that.

I don't know what caused this.

I can't point to one single psychedelic journey.

Not that I've been doing a lot of psychedelics.

We could talk about that.

I was involved in some psychedelic trials, but I don't think that's it.

I think the brain matures your whole life.

I don't think we have childhood and adulthood and then death.

I think we have a developmental arc that starts when we're born, probably before we're born.

After all, we were embryos.

Who knows if we have consciousness, but we were alive.

Born, and then we have a developmental arc.

The great psychologist, Erickson, talked about at every stage of life from birth until death, until one to 80s and 90s, you're working out some core conflicts of agency versus autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do.

I forget the stages off the top of my head because it's not my area of expertise.

But look at my dad, who's turning 81 in November, who fortunately God willing is going to live another 20, 25 years with immense vigor.

He's still cognitively super sharp.

He's working out whatever it is you work out when you're 80.

I'm working out whatever it is now, but right now, it's like caterpillar vision.

As a consequence, the past, while important and informs a lot of who I am and what I do, it's not like it's not in my consciousness at all.

I must say, it's a great place to be because throughout my 30s, I felt very stricken, very pulled in different directions based on past, present, and efforts toward the future.

I say this in part because if you're struggling, feeling stuck in your life story, there's great advantage to just letting some time pass.

Just getting older is the best.

As long as you train with weights three times a week, run three times a week, long, medium, and short, it runs, and you take a cold shower, and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods, and you try and get sleep, and you limit your alcohol, and you deal with any addictions you might have,

and you work on your traumas.

You're going to have a great freaking life.

You're going to be healthier than 90 % of people in the world.

Are you going to take gold at the Olympics?

Are you going to be Cole Hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final 100 meters of the 1500?

No, unless you're Cole Hawker, but you can still have an amazing life.

I think there've been so many years where I've just been like, God, this just feels like a battle.

I can't complain. I've been given so many opportunities and gifts and trying to make the best of those and share, but I just feel like, listen, it's a freaking caterpillar.

It's a caterpillar.

Then I got back from that run, and I was thinking to myself, I don't know.

Now I've got to think about the butterfly thing, and this is turning out pretty soft.

Then I thought, hey, well, that's pretty cool.

I started researching caterpillars because this is me.

I started reading about caterpillars.

They are amazing. Some of them have adapted different poisons so that the birds that eat them don't die, but literally survive and transmit the discomfort by feeding their young.

Then the young are like, ugh, and they actually know they form a permanent memory not to eat those caterpillars.

I now look at caterpillars completely differently.

I spent a lot of time drawing caterpillars.

I haven't yet watched a documentary about caterpillars.

I'm sure you'll find one.

Anyway, I'll avoid going down this hole any more than I already have, but I think there's great wisdom in trying to think about different animals and how we orient toward them as people.

I certainly look at other people and think, what dog are they, et cetera?

In part because I think that other animals, in the absence of their self -awareness, they're displaying to us the biases of different components of the nervous system.

Dogs that move their tails a lot and have a lot of spontaneous movement, like the pit bull breeds versus a bulldog, which doesn't move unless it has to, they have different spontaneous temperaments.

Then you look at people.

I have a colleague.

He's Hungarian. He has a blab in Switzerland.

The guy is all staccato movements.

He's like this thin and has like 5 % body fat naturally.

Then I have other colleagues who more resemble melted candles.

They don't move so much and they need to exercise more because I love them and you don't see many overweight 80 -year -olds, so it'd be nice to have you around longer.

Three times a week, resistance training and cardio.

Thinking about the last few months for you, probably one of the most difficult periods that you've gone through.

I will say not to undercut where I think we're going.

Definitely a challenging time based on what I perceive as a lot of misunderstanding.

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I've been through a lot of hard times, more than some less than others, but hey, it's all in reference to our own nervous system.

Definitely hard, but not the hardest time, certainly not the hardest time.

The hardest time was probably years earlier when I had so much less agency and my community wasn't as established, but definitely not a joyful time.

Talk to me about what you learned about yourself and your own psychology and the motivations and dynamics of public scrutiny and pressure like that.

If I may, I'll lathe into this from a bunch of perspectives.

This is usually the point of discussion like this where audiences are like, oh, this is where he prepares the diplomatic talk.

Look, I've done a number of sessions talking about this kind of stuff publicly and privately since then, so I'm just showing up to this how it feels and my read with the understanding that language is sometimes deficient, like conveying what's really going on, but I'll do my best.

I learned a couple things at a kind of basic factual level.

I learned that while there are wonderful aspects to media, there are also a lot of lies in the media.

I actually didn't know that or believe that before.

You hear about it, but I didn't really understand that stories, literally fiction can be woven from lack of context or from outright lies.

That, for me, was an eye -opener.

It was like, whoa, no, that's not true.

That actually didn't happen that way.

Or, well, yeah, but you left off the second half of that sentence, which would put it all in context and make this seem completely different.

For a scientist, it was extremely jarring because it was like I could see what they were doing, but if you tried to do that in a scientific paper or in a talk, you wouldn't be giving that scientific paper a talk.

You wouldn't make it 10 feet into the business because that's called cherry picking.

It's data selection.

It's not what we do.

It doesn't mean people don't have biases of conclusion, biases of interpretation, but you reveal those biases.

Again, as we talked about earlier, you reveal the origins of your thinking and decisions.

You state your motivations.

It woke me up to that.

That was a bit of a, oh, man, really?

That sucks. I wanted to believe that all media was wholesome in its intentions.

I also learned that if you have a, this is hard to say with, I say this with humility, but if your face and name clicks, then you're a target.

What's that mean? It just means that the bigger your platform, the more attention your name or face draws, and therefore your name and face is leveraged for clicks.

People are making money off of you.

It's a profit -driven business.

I also learned that many people are very reasonable and they can see through BS.

They can see the tawdry efforts or the attempt to spin a narrative that just isn't right, isn't true.

What I'm saying there is, whereas I definitely had to face stuff where I felt I was being badly misconstrued or misunderstood, our audience, the podcast audience and people outside that audience, reached out in droves and supporters at all levels reached out in droves to say, listen, we see what this is.

We love what you're doing.

We get it. Not a problem.

That was great. It also brought forward my friends and people in the community, both podcasters and academics, family and friends.

Basically, the essence of it was when my dad and I, who in the past, we've had some challenges in our relationship but now are really good, when he called me and said, they tried to pit us against each other.

I'm like, yeah. He was like, I can't believe it.

At 80, he couldn't believe it.

He's a very smart guy.

He's a theoretical physicist by training.

He's a first -generation immigrant.

He's not here on accident.

He had to work his ass off to get here.

He worked very, very hard to provide for us as kids.

He was like, I can't believe that they would do that.

I was like, well, this is apparently what they do.

He said, I'll never forget what he said.

He said, well, he's very logical, his physicist after all.

He said, well, one trial learning.

One trial learning, meaning we're not going to make that mistake again.

That was the media side of it.

Then I also want to acknowledge that there are people in media and there are both journalists and news platforms that I think really are well -intentioned.

It also provided this amazing contrast for me.

Then I'll get into the more personal aspect, I promise.

It made me realize why podcasting and podcasters like you and Joe and Lex and Whitney and David Senra and Tim Ferriss and Rituel and on and on are so amazing.

Rick Rubin. It's real.

We're not pretending to be somebody else.

We're not doing this to get clicked.

Sure, you want the success of your platform, but you're being you.

I'm being me. Lex is being Lex, Joe is being Joe, and that's why it works.

It's been so interesting to compare that and contrast that to traditional media, which has its merits, certainly, but for which it's become this kind of senator of a thing where you're not sure what the motivations are.

Why would they go after you?

You said this in a clip.

Why would they go after you?

Well, you generate clicks, but they're going after you because you actually have two, three, four, five, 10X their reach.

Why? Because people know when something is real if somebody is being genuine, even if they disagree with that person.

We like realness. We like authenticity.

We love that as humans.

We want that. It's the artistic expression, and it made me realize that like the obvious, which is that we're in the golden age of podcasting right now and never before in my life have I sort of been in the golden age of something.

I, you know, came up early.

I want to be involved in skateboarding.

Friends made it as professional skateboarders.

I didn't. Okay. I wasn't talented enough.

Fine. Got into neuroscience, caught the wave in neuroscience, meaning at a time when you could, you know, I would always funded my lab with grants.

I even still have some grant money, you know, and even though I still teach teaching again next spring, you know, I've definitely shrunk my lab down.

You know, the media said, Oh, you know, he doesn't have a lab.

Yeah. I shrunk my lab down.

Like, what's that mean?

It just means I, I got my students in postdocs jobs.

We published two papers, including a clinical trial in 2023, but I've shrunk my lab down.

Like, so I teach and I'm still tenured at Stanford still going.

Well, I have grant funds in a new department where we're doing some human clinical trials.

Okay. But I no longer run experiments on animals.

That was a very personal choice for me.

And also when you have students in postdocs, you need to be able to give them a certain amount of time in order to nourish their development.

And then they all, all of them, every one of my students in postdocs has gone on to jobs or positions they wanted.

So I took care of my academic children.

I think they would say that if they don't hear from them, you know, but they're doing phenomenally well.

And I'm very proud of them.

They deserve the credit.

So it made me realize that, okay, I did this.

I'm still a neuroscientist.

I still read papers.

I'm still on editorial boards.

It's, it's, and yet right now we're in the golden age of podcasting, this new form of media of people being themselves.

It's not like radio.

It's like radio, but different.

It's not like television.

It's like television, but different.

In fact, this, this arc might be of interest to you.

I watched this documentary about game shows recently hosted by Alex Trebek.

The documentary, frankly, is far too long, but it goes like this during the world series when DiMaggio was making effort towards the home run record was the first commercial, okay, to sell a product.

And it was designed to grab the housewives and people that purchased things for the home.

Okay. Back then, then came eventually game shows and game shows were just an excuse to sell products.

But they eventually found that the human narrative in the game shows, the Price is Right host kissing the, the contestants on the, it would never happen nowadays.

Okay. Things have changed, matured.

Eventually it was the human story.

Then it became reality TV shows, right?

And then now I see social media as the reality TV show that we're all casting ourselves in on a daily basis.

And then within social media, right?

I mean, I think Elon sitting down with Trump today.

Right. Exactly. We didn't mention that just to really track back just in case you thought that things were going to calm down.

Trump's back on Twitter.

Right. He did. I know they released his account.

Has he tweeted anything today for the first time?

What did he tweet? A couple of videos, one mocking Kamala, one bigging himself up and two announcements saying I'm going live at 8 p .m.

tonight with Elon on X.

Okay. But I wonder if they'll correct the Rogan narrative because over the weekend there was this narrative that Rogan had endorsed.

Yeah. And then it turned out not to be true.

No, he just said that he liked him, which he said a million times before.

I see. And then Trump post social truths.

I don't know what you call it, posted on Truth Social.

I wonder how much Joe Rogan's going to get booed the next time that he goes to the UFC.

That may be fact check false.

I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that that's up.

I mean, that's a tone death.

Rogan is the hero. He is.

Yeah. It's Dana White.

It's like small Dana White and big Dana White.

Happy birthday, Joe.

His birthday was over the weekend.

Yeah. So I guess the point is this, that the fans, the listeners of a podcast are part of the podcast in a way that no medium has existed before because they can comment and give feedback in a way that has not been available before.

Now that's, that's the media side.

So give me tremendous appreciation for all of that.

The personal side. How do you personally deal with a few or like the one that you want?

And also I'm particularly interested in the lessons that you've learned longer term, but what does it feel like to wake up that day?

You know, you understand the neurochemicals, you understand the hormonal response, but you've got this just flood of phenomena going through you.

Yeah. So, and I've, I think one of the hardest things is being misunderstood and then understanding, you know, the motivations of the media or the motivations of the people that gave stories to the media, the, the blatant lies, although there was a portion of, of what was said that was absolutely true.

And that's the part that I was overly doting on my bulldog.

That is absolutely true.

That's absolutely true.

But well, what I decided to do is what I've done at numerous times in my life when things felt potentially overwhelming, which was to get a committee of people around me that I really trust and rely on their optics when I couldn't rely on my own.

So that meant my podcast producer, Rob Moore, that meant other people, including my family were amazing.

People from my high school, you know, it was interesting because they interviewed many people from my high school, but discarded with those narratives because they were positive.

They interviewed many former girlfriends of mine who I was in touch with regularly and still am who were very positive.

And they discarded with those narratives.

And you're not looking for yes people, but you're looking for people that can really help steer you through something and help you see where, Hey, like maybe you need to pay attention to this aspect of your life a bit more that a little bit more, but you know what?

No, there's a thick black line here and that's simply false.

Um, Lex Friedman literally showed up in my home, showed up.

I just looked up. There's Lex, Jack and Ty.

Hey, what's up, brother?

He's there. So my home during that week and the week's following, the week's following consisted of many people coming to stay.

Um, I recall very clearly one day walking out into the yard, I'd taken a little nap and must've been 15 or 20 people there, including my good friend, Tim Armstrong, other people there supporting me, just being there.

Right. Um, we also continue to work in that time.

We released solo episodes.

We released posts. We released podcasts.

We were not going to stop working.

Are you able to get yourself into the right mode of mind?

Are you not, have you not got split brain problem there?

You half of you over here, the other half's trying to be professional.

Um, I learned in that time, but I took some tools from prior to prior experiences to, um, take five to 10 minutes, um, take the first couple of minutes and meditate, concentrate on one's breath, try and get as present as possible.

Your mind complete is always flitting to these other things that are trying to distract it.

Realizing every time you can hold on to your present cognition, bringing things present for a millisecond longer, you're doing that much better ratcheting back and then getting into action, doing generative work, teaching science and health information, because that's why the people that listen to the Huberman lab

podcast, I don't think they listened to it to hear anything about my personal life or attempts to malign my past story.

I will also say there were some things that infused a focus and energy into me that I didn't anticipate that were very beautiful.

For instance, you know, one of the narratives that was getting spun out there is that my backstory about growing up in the skateboarding thing, getting into fights that maybe that had been constructed, which is categorically false.

Those are true stories in other words.

And, uh, Steve Ruge, the guy who was my team manager at Thunder and Spitfire, skateboard companies back then, uh, wrote to me and he said, yeah, you know, I got this outreach from reporters and they kept kind of trying to pull and get me to change my account of you calling me from being locked up and saying, Hey,

Steve, like I'm in this place and me saying, you're the most normal person I know.

And you know, that whole thing.

And he's like, and I don't understand why they're doing that.

And I was like, I don't know either.

And he's like, well, I told them the truth.

I told them exactly what happened.

You called me. I remember where I was at the deluxe office.

He's okay, fine. And then he goes, and I told them that I'd put you on Thunder and Spitfire.

And I was like, do you realize what you just did for me?

From the time I was 14 years old, I was still uncertain whether or not you had put me on the team and I was too embarrassed to ask.

And he's like, of course you were on the team.

And I was like, Oh man, I waited my whole life to hear that 30 years.

So there was, it was like, you know, these things that it kind of vexed me for years.

Like, was I really part of that or was I not part of that team?

Like, so what ended up happening is people from my past showed up, not just my family, Jim Thiebaud from the world skateboard, Steve Ruge, people from my past, people from my present.

And then I just got outreach from men and women in droves, some very high profile people, very, very high profile people, some lesser profile, some no profile, reaching out by email, by phone, by text, showing up at my home and encouraging me, encouraging me to continue on the mission.

And at that point I was buoyed by the fact that I'm like, okay, you know, people can see, they can see the truth.

They understand context being warped.

They understand lies versus truth.

And they understand that a single sided story is never, ever, ever the right way to resolve issues.

And so it was amazing to see.

And then what happened was we started growing.

And I was like, oh my goodness, you hear about this, you're going to grow from this.

I always thought that just meant psychologically and internally, but then it was like, we grew.

Then the next thing I know, I'm on Jimmy Fallon.

Okay. Some people might have thought that came about before.

Next thing you know, we're a jeopardy question.

Like all of a sudden, like things started growing.

And then I started realizing, let's just get back to work.

Was that the fastest period in the show's growth history?

Among, I don't know.

Cause I don't track the numbers that closely.

I decided early on to remove my dopamine circuits from the numbers.

I do my own Instagram.

I do my own Twitter.

And I manage, I don't have someone manage my comments.

I manage all of that myself.

So yes, if I say thank you in the DMS, that's me.

But it was definitely among the sharpest inflections I've ever experienced.

I think Joe said something similar about the CNN horse pace dewormit scenario that although, you know, might feel back.

He had a sort of a one, two punch.

He had his infamous n -word video and the CNN thing within six months of each other.

But he said the quickest period that they've ever had was the CNN thing.

So if you were one of the sensations, I imagine you must have his indignation.

This isn't true. And I want to correct the record.

As he said, one of the worst things is being misunderstood.

Was it a strategic decision to not issue a statement?

Here we go. Here's the four hour long breakdown.

You know, you've got the tools, you've got the platform, you've got the followers.

Why not get it out there?

Yeah, well, I certainly was tempted at times, but the consultation I got and what I eventually arrived at was that no matter what I would say that.

Well, first of all, there were elements to some of that that needed to remain private to protect other people.

So in that sense, there were a few things I had to take on the chin to protect other people's lives.

Not their actual lives, but their well -being.

The other piece was that it was made very clear to me and I wholeheartedly agree that the media will cherry pick statements and cluj together things.

They're still doing it in order to spin a narrative that makes it such that no matter what you say, it won't be understood the way you want it to be understood.

And that was extremely frustrating to me, extremely frustrating to me.

In fact, last night, late at night, I had a conversation with a male friend and colleague with whom we had a misunderstanding.

This gets to something I mentioned a little bit earlier, not a betrayal, not a mistake, a misunderstanding.

And we actually didn't speak to one another for about a month and a half.

And it was very frustrating for me and for them.

And then he and I, I wouldn't even say hashed it out last night.

We just brought to the table.

I said, listen, I think there was a misunderstanding, not a mistake, not a betrayal.

I own my part and I'm sorry.

And I've learned you say you're sorry.

That was it. You say you're sorry.

And he said the same thing.

He goes, you know, I think I overreacted.

And I said, I didn't say no, you didn't or anything, even though I have my feelings about it.

And he said, I'm sorry.

And I said, we're good.

We're good. We had done the work internally, right?

Now, unfortunately, when things are done at scale, you don't get that opportunity.

You don't get like an immediate scale.

And I think also, personally, I mean, obviously, I'm human, there was the need for reflection on the things that have passed and present that I wish I had done differently.

And that I, you know, you make the change, you know, and you move forward.

I'll also say and people can roll their eyes if they want, they can come up with any theories they want.

But prayer was extremely grounding for me in that time.

Just to not meditation, not seeking approval, validation, and support of others, although, you know, support from others was critical, as was constructive critique.

But prayer to just spend time in prayer, listening to any messages that I needed to hear about what needed changing in me, in my personal life, in my family life, in my work life, in my public facing life.

And that was honestly the cornerstone.

That was the center of it all.

That was the piece that allowed me to go, okay, you know what?

This sucks. There's silver linings.

There's misunderstanding, outright lies, lack of, and you know what?

I see all that. I see the changes that need to be made.

I see where I also draw a thick black line and say, no, that's not that.

And we're not going to 10 times a day.

And it wasn't just praying like, oh, please make this stop or anything like that, you know, please, it was more help me see with clarity.

This is the way I would do it.

And again, people can decide what they want.

I'm not telling anyone what to believe.

It was like, you know, literally on my knees, God, please help me see and feel and think with the kind of clarity that's going to allow me to make the best decisions now and going forward.

Let me get through this morning, making the best possible decisions given what's happening.

I'm turning over all control and agency over the things I can't control to you.

And I'm going to put every ounce of effort I can into trying to continue teaching people about science and health and becoming a better person as I go.

And that's still my prayer, among other things, before I go to sleep at night, I'm on my knees at the side of the bread prayer kind of guy since the new year, since just before the new year.

Before that, it was kind of in my head a little bit kind of here or there.

And before every podcast, I just went in the bathroom now and prayed before this, I go there for privacy, not because it's the bathroom, but, and I know for people thinking like, okay, this is a scientist or now he's, he's kind of claiming the God thing.

I'm not claiming anything.

Like for me, this has been the most powerful thing that I've ever experienced because it's just given me peace and a compass and a rudder forward, even if I have to be at caterpillar levels of horizon view, like this far out in front of me inching forward.

I'm just grateful to God.

I'm grateful to God for the chance to keep going forward.

What would be your advice to somebody who's going through an emotionally intense period?

It seems to me like if I was to try and deconstruct the, not to make protocols out of a nightmare scenario, but social cohesion groups around you not being on your own too much.

Yeah. And if you, you know, I'm, I'm blessed to have a huge network, but I'll say this.

I have that network because I put work into that network.

Yeah. Some of these people I work with, but, you know, Jim Thiebaud didn't show up at my house because I'm a podcaster.

He showed up there the same way he did two years before when I got slammed to the concrete in life.

He showed up when I was 14 and I was a depressed kid sitting at the Embarcadero with a busted foot because I couldn't skateboard and he just sat with me and gave me a book to read and encouraged me to write.

You know, you know, I took what Jim did for me and did it for other people.

So I like to think perhaps it was God returning the energy, returning the favor.

You know, people, you build your support system in good times and when they're down, you support them and you don't do it because you might hit bad times.

You will hit bad times and that's one reason to do it.

You just do it. And so there's that.

So if you're up, build your support network doesn't have to be huge, but make it strong, make it strong by doing the right thing, setting examples.

And, you know, if it's medium, fine.

If it's huge, fine.

Definitely, I definitely use tools, right?

The physiological side works to limit stress, get sleep.

I didn't rely on pharmacology to get sleep.

I know some people need to.

I just didn't want to go that route once.

Months earlier, I took a little, it was prescribed to me.

I took a half Xanax to try and sleep in the sleep.

I got felt like crap.

I woke up. I was like, I'm not doing that again.

I use breathing tools.

I use NSDR. I use some supplementation to sleep.

But sleep is key. You win by sleeping.

That was one of our mottos during that time in all times.

When we're out on the road doing lives, it's like we're going from one city to the next.

I mean, we're podcasting and we're doing AMAs and we're busy and we're talking all day and go, go, go.

Like we were like, we're sleeping and we don't drink and we're serious.

We're like professional athletes, right?

So there's that. Training, hot cold.

Definitely did some hot cold in really stressful times.

I'll pair back on training a bit.

I train as preparation.

So for me, lifting three times a week, I love training.

Yeah. I do my legs, I do my torso, I do my arms and calves and neck.

Okay. Sure. I do my long run.

I do my medium run.

I do my sprint day.

I do the cold and heat, but I do that in part as a means to an end so that when it's time to sprint for the airplane, when it's time to take a week and just lean all your physical and mental energy into a crisis, you can do that.

And then I go back to training.

I think I would have struggled to regulate without training each day.

Listen, taking a walk, getting a good shower, getting your hair cut, these things make a difference.

The other thing is I learned to be able to call on people to pick up the phone and say, hey, listen, I'm spinning here.

I can't make sense of this strategy or that strategy.

What do you think? And then writing down what that person said, taking a few things and then just going inward.

There is this tendency, especially with text, to constantly be increasing the size of your committee.

I'll say, this was interesting.

Some people came to me immediately and said, you should do blank.

And I was like, really?

And they're like, absolutely do blank.

And then I didn't do blank.

And then a week later, they're like, oh, you absolutely did the right thing.

You should do exactly the opposite of blank.

And then I realized I was like, oh goodness.

Not that I'm never going to listen to advice from that person again, but they were just saying stuff.

So you need to be a selective filter and it can be very hard.

And I will say, anyone going through a crisis of any kind, any kind, you need a committee, however big or small.

And if you don't have people, you need people in books, you need people in podcasts.

And I'm not a recruiter, but you might give prayer a try because there's real peace at the center there.

And from that piece, you can see the right decision.

And from that right decision, you can make the right decision for that circumstance.

And there are just too many circumstances to say, you should always say this, or you should never say anything and this kind of thing.

What I do know is that, God forbid, if they come for you, Chris, or anyone, we got you.

I don't know what the best advice will be in those circumstances, but we got you.

And we got you because you're a truly good person with your heart out there being you, right?

Up until now, you've just been being you and that's why you're successful.

And yeah, I mean, I got calls from people can guess the names and there were some names also, I couldn't believe it.

I was like, these are people with enormous stature that I thought probably would fall on the opposite end of the spectrum.

It would be calling me to yell at me.

And in fact, we're like, you're doing all the right things.

Don't let it get to you.

Keep going. Think about X, Y, and Z.

And I was like, whoa.

So what you will find in hard times like those, God willing, they won't happen to you is that you'll find your inner resolve.

The world will come to you and show you who your real friends are, who your real supporters are.

And I wasn't counting off who stuck their neck out for me and who wasn't.

It was beautiful to see people who did.

And the ones who didn't, I get it, like they have their own incentives.

They needed to do whatever it is they needed to do.

I think I regretted not messaging me that day.

And the reason that I didn't was it's kind of like when it's somebody's birthday.

And you think, does he really need an additional thing?

So I texted Rob instead.

Rob can be the filter.

And he passed it to me.

And thank you. And listen, it's also a felt thing.

And he raised a very important point that goes, and I hope people hearing this can understand that the reason to have this discussion is not about me.

It's that we all are going to go through these sorts of things at different scales and in different contexts, is that, you know, it's like when somebody dies, everyone's like, my condolences, so sorry, so sorry.

The time to reach out to them is also afterwards.

And, you know, again, call me non -scientific.

Fine. I have enough science under my belt.

And to be totally confident in what I'm about to say, which is like last night in my prayers, I prayed for somebody who had posted something about losing their mom.

I actually didn't know his mom, but I just like it came to me.

I was like, you know, like we all flooded in in their condolences, thoughts and prayers, but like, he's probably hurting like crazy right now.

And so you pray for that person.

Now you say, well, how does that prayer impact them?

I don't know, but I believe in that.

And you reach out to somebody by text, they're just checking in.

And this is the beauty of what you do.

And it's the beauty of what podcasters do in general, which is you're creating things in perpetuity.

The AI is going to be trained on these conversations.

You know, your great grandchildren will be able to glean knowledge from things that you shared.

And I think that putting that out into the world in a way that other people can benefit from is nothing short of spectacular.

You know, when I was a junior professor, I'd listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast.

At that time, it was just that.

And like, I remember thinking like he, this podcast is like my friend in a city where I don't know anyone.

You know, now I'm fortunate to call Tim a friend, right?

I could actually call on Tim, but I think that the lone, the loneliness and isolation that people feel, especially people that are striving and don't have a big network can sometimes feel so overwhelming.

But I was that guy.

I was that kid who didn't have anyone to call or I was confused about something that was happening.

And I didn't have the network of people to call.

You build that over time.

But podcasts and what people being themselves out there in the world, mainly podcasts, it's like I really care.

I hope that if bullet busser cancer takes me out tomorrow, that some of the things that I've shared, hopefully many of the things I've shared could help people now and going forward.

That's a real thing.

It's not, it's not about selling us advertisement or a supplement.

Like that's incidental.

It's, it's about the material.

So I, you know, I'm kind of spooling it now, but like within me, I feel immense gratitude.

I wouldn't change the experience of the last year for anything.

I don't want to experience it, you know, for its own sake, but what it brought me was huge gifts.

And yeah, it grew us like crazy, but shit.

I mean, if I could have done it a different way, I would, but, you know, God served up this meal just the way he did.

And, you know, have I ever told you my idea of the lonely chapter?

I told you about this.

No, but I feel like I've had a few of those.

Yeah. So, uh, I learned this with Alex Hormozi, uh, last year and the lonely chapter describes a time in which you're growing, you're changing as a person and you're now so different that you can no longer resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not sufficiently developed that you've got the new

set of friends that you're going to grow into.

And this is the lonely chapter.

And the problem with it is that you're always, the desire to sort of regress back to where you were is always going to be there.

And you're going to have, you're going to have uncertainty.

There's not even the promise of glory or success or triumph when you get through the other side.

What am I pushing toward?

You know, I, I, you're telling me that I'm not going to go out on this night out with my friends, which I've done for the last five years or 10 years in the town that I grew up in or went to university and or whatever.

You tell me that I'm not going to do that because I'm going to get up and I'm going to meditate or read who even knows if meditation works, right?

Like all of these questions in your mind and all of your friends and all of the dynamics and the temptations pull you back toward that.

It pulls you back toward the old version of life.

So this lonely chapter is a period through which I think everybody needs to squeeze.

Anybody that decides to go from a place they are to a place that they want to be is going to have to let go of people who can't go there with them.

And this isn't a value judgment about the people that are doing the personal growth thing are better than the people that already fine as they are and are happy leading a different sort of life.

It's that if you know that there is something that you're meant to do, if you know that there's something that you're meant to change, you will have to let certain groups, friends, routines, places, activities, recreations that you do, you're going to have to let those go.

And there is this, you know, the Rocky cutscene lasts for 90 seconds in the movie, but it can last for five years in your life and you have no idea whether or not it's even going to work.

And that's the bit that always got to me.

The bit that always got to me was I didn't even know if there was going to be any glory on the other side.

It's like ordering an Uber and never knowing if it's going to arrive or not.

You think, well, I'm just stood here doing the thing, but I don't know if it's going to come out on the other side.

And I can promise you anybody that has done anything moved from any place they were to any place that they want to be has gone through this lonely chapter.

And I think about personal growth, like the velocity of a rocket that's taking off.

So you've got people moving and as you start to take off, you can begin to move a little bit more quickly.

And as you start to pull away from people, there's a tension between the two of you, because sometimes your behavior, especially if it's positive and you're moving yourself in a more developed direction, can throw into harsh contrast the behavior of the people who maybe aren't doing that.

And then you start to sort of become friends with some of the suburbia.

And then the worst or one of the really difficult sensations is if you then do that and you go past somebody who previously you were with and there's this sort of sense, well, I'm on the journey too, but maybe I'm not moving in the same kind of way that you are.

And I came up with this idea of personal growth guilt, like survivor guilt.

Somebody comes back from war and they were sat in the back of the Humvee and the piece of shrapnel that was supposed to kill them and killed all of their buddies hit the engine block and they come back and they feel like they should still be back there, but they're not.

And it's almost the same with the personal growth stuff that I feel like I'm almost sort of betraying this older version of me, this past version of my life that I should be there.

And there's this scene in The Matrix that Alex talks about where Neo doesn't know if he wants to move forward.

He doesn't know if he wants to take the journey that he's called to and he opens the door and Trinity says, you've already been down that road, Neo.

You know where it takes you and you know that's not where you want to go back to.

And I think about that a lot, that lonely chapter.

And for me, it lasted for a good amount of time, transitioning from being a guy in his twenties that does the reality TV thing, does the party boy thing, and then goes, okay, I decide to stop drinking, which 10 years ago was revolutionary, especially as a club promoter.

It's now very common to do low and no, but pretty different back then.

And all of the incentives were for me to go back to partying.

Why are you doing that?

You're going to be boring on a night out.

I realized that, if you need to drink to be around your friends, you don't have friends, you have drinking partners.

If the only way that you can bear to be around your friends is to drink, then you really need to find yourself a better social network.

And all of the things, I used to leave the front door of a nightclub and I would sit and I would wedge my phone into the top of the steering wheel.

So I have a party with 1500 people there.

It's my party, my company.

And I would leave to go watch a Landebaton School of Life philosophy videos.

And it was evident that I just had this odd sort of discordance in my mind.

I was being ripped away from where I was to where I am.

And yeah, I think, you know, The Lonely Chapter is one of the most important insights that has come out of the show over the last 18 months because it's reassuring to, I think, a huge portion of podcast listeners.

Why is it that people resonate and have this parasocial relationship with some bloke that's on the other side of the planet?

And I think it's because, well, they're struggling to resonate with any of the blokes or girls that are around them where they live.

And, you know, you end up finding solace in this person that speaks to you because you struggle to find solace sort of personally.

So yeah, the overarching lesson is just keep going.

The Lonely Chapter is a feature, not a bug of personal growth.

It's the cost of doing business if you want to develop yourself.

Yeah, I love that. You know, I recall in high school when getting hurt, skateboarding, realizing I didn't have a future there, which fortunately was a good thing for me.

I mean, it was God again intervening saying, nope, you're going to get broke off again.

You're not going to, this is not going to be your path.

Following a high school girlfriend to college and then realizing after the first year that, you know, drinking and getting in fights was not a good path and get my life in order.

And then studying a lot at a school where at that time people weren't terribly studious and it was incredibly isolating.

I even lived alone, lived with my girlfriend or I lived alone.

I'm being very isolated.

And then in graduate school felt more social connection.

But then as a junior professor, you know, there are boundaries between you and the people you work with and those are important boundaries.

And so not having many male friends and, you know, my fortunately at the time, my romantic partner who I'm still good friends with, you know, was a great source of family and support, but feeling cut off from friends of other types.

And then again, you know, in this more recent iteration of entering the podcast world, but then you find your community.

I also think while I totally agree, you can look to podcasters, to books, also to people who are no longer alive, you know, mentors like the great Oliver Sacks, who I've never met, but I've reached out to people that knew him and that have given me information about him.

That's given me, you know, gotten me through many hard times based on his life experiences.

Biography is autobiography.

That's why I like biography and autobiography so much.

You can feel a kinship with people.

That's why David Senra's show is so great.

That's one of the reasons founder's podcast is so great.

I just got to meet Senra himself recently.

Is it just amazing?

Amazing podcast. He's amazing.

Highly recommend that podcast.

You know, Rick Rubin has been a great source of support.

Tim Armstrong has been an enormous source of support.

Jim Thiebaud has been an enormous source of support.

Joe Rogan's been an enormous source of support.

Lex Friedman's been a big source of support.

You've been a great source of support.

Whitney Cummings, yeah.

And on and on and people showing up and people from entirely other industries, investors, people in, let's just, I want to, because it's only fair to protect their identities, people in media that are not of the podcasting ilk, for instance, people who I never thought I would meet, you know, explaining

the commonalities of their experience, you know, and if you're wondering, okay, well, then, you know, those are all these people, but who's going to come for me?

Well, I'm going to, and Chris is going to, you know, when you're coming up and you're in your thing, like reach out, right?

I mean, it's, it's kind of incredible the way that humans will move into support one another when they need it.

Good humans. Good humans.

And it's kind of incredible how good humans help lift each other up, even when we don't know each other, right?

And I don't want to get into it here because it's not appropriate for here, but where I look at people that have really just disappeared, not always, but a lot of times it's like their motivations weren't right in the first place.

Something happened to them and they're gone.

And you go, what happened to them?

And it's like, you know, again, there are exceptions to this, but I don't know, their heart probably wasn't in it.

Their heart probably wasn't in it, or, you know, there was enough of a terrible circumstance there that it had to go that way.

But, you know, I think it's just a, you know, I heard from a former postdoc of mine recently and another one, both of whom are professors now.

And through the philanthropy arm of my podcast and some donors, I'm able to support scientific research.

We do this, like we don't do it for public recognition.

We do it because I want to support the best science and we're able to do that.

And I can't tell you the, the, the joy, just pure joy that it brings me to hear about them and their students that they're mentoring.

Like there's a passage of this stuff over time.

And look, none of us live forever, except Brian Johnson.

Just kidding. And by the way, if people want to know my take on Brian, I've known Brian for a long time.

We go way back. And I think it's wonderful that he's doing what he's doing.

And I think he's, you know, I don't know him well enough to say like, people always want to know like, what's he, you know, I think it's great that somebody's exploring the field of longevity from the perspective he is and other perspectives.

So for that, I got to give you my take on Brian.

So I was at, I was at a, I've seen Brian in person, maybe two or three times.

I was at Roatan, an island off Honduras with him.

Okay. At the start of this year.

And then I did a Jeffersonian dinner, breakfast with him.

Very Bay area to do a Jeffersonian dinner.

Yeah. Well, he brought, he brought some of the Bay area over and I had some of his nutty pudding and I had to sit down with him.

And the way that I think of Brian is kind of like a scout in an army.

So it wouldn't do to have an entire army filled with scouts who be a pretty shitty army.

But I'm more than happy to have that one guy who apparently is built to be a scout, go up that really dangerous hill over there that maybe the view is beautiful, or maybe slip and catastrophe occurs or something and come back and tell us what he found.

I love that. Yeah. Thank you.

He's a bit of an astronaut.

Correct. Yeah. You expend time and effort and resources and all of that, finding out stuff.

I'm all for him doing that.

And I'll take the top 20 % or whatever that gives the 80 % of the insights from him.

Yeah. He's part of this incredible tapestry that's being built to public facing health and science information.

Never before in human history has health and science information been dispersed in the way that it is now through podcasts, through traditional media, from physicians, from scientists, from ancient wisdom stuff.

I mean, I can sit back from all of it, see Brian, see my position in the field, see the Lane Norton, see the people that attack us, see the FDA, see the NIH.

And I can look out and listen, I was on a grants review panel until a little over 12 months ago.

I was a regular member on there.

I've reviewed grants, written grants, fortunately gotten many grants funded.

Planning grants didn't get funded too.

I understand the process and I understand people's different orientation and realize that we're all after the same thing.

We all want to live longer, healthier lives with more vitality.

We're all after the same thing.

And what I'm interested in is the overlap in the Venn diagrams.

So if you call it yoga ninja or NSDR, if you're talking about REM sleep and the dynamics of spindle waves in the brain, or you're talking just about your dreams and you're doing a dream journal, ultimately, I'm interested in the practices that are true now that have always been true and that can evolve

through technology that are going to allow us all to be healthier mentally, physically, et cetera.

That's the mission.

So you nailed it. You want a Brian Johnson on the mission.

You want a Lane Norton on the mission.

I like to think you want an Andrew Huberman on the mission.

You want Chris on the mission.

You want all these people on the mission and the FDA and the NIH.

And you want the arguments, what you don't want.

And what I see is incredibly counterproductive is people taking the stance that only their view is the appropriate one.

As long as people voice their motivations and their logic for proposing what they propose, it's mostly all good, except the stuff that's dangerously bad.

That's not good. But listen, I chuckle at the idea that any one of these perspectives is going to be the perspective.

And in fact, I throw my head back and laugh because if you look historically, all you have to do if you really are having trouble sleeping or if you really want a dense book, The Prince of Medicine is a beautiful book that talks about Galen and how our understanding of the human body and medicine really

evolved from really people being allowed to do more and more in terms of human dissection and analyzing the human body, something that wasn't allowed prior because of rules about dissecting human bodies.

And the understanding that government bodies plus funding, plus curiosity have all been these competing forces and that the acceleration of science and medicine is now taking place at a rate that is unprecedented, crisper, brain machine interface.

And yes, I'll say it, psychedelics and supplementation, they're just compounds.

People go supplements, none of that's regulated.

Yeah. And you could also have a conversation about SSRIs, which have huge value, but can also do huge damage.

So any qualified psychiatrist will tell you that.

So right now we are on an accelerated path.

And I think the challenge for most people is they're drinking from the fire hose and they don't know which filters to put up.

And so all I can say is it's super exciting, right?

It's super, super exciting.

But you want to argue about these different orientations about as much as you want to argue about what genre of music is best.

There's just no answer, right?

Most people love Taylor Swift and there are people that also love other forms of music and you're always going to find outliers at the extremes.

So unless something is dangerous, right?

I think that most of the ideas I see out there warrant further exploration and some are just really darn good.

So I'm glad that Brian came up because I think he represents one spoke on the wheel and it's an important one.

In his absence, I think the field will progress less quickly.

I just wish that people would look at things through these lenses.

I also think for the generation coming up that were weaned on social media, it's very important that they realize something that David Goggins has said.

I just feel like it's appropriate to say this right now.

Right now, because most of what's happening online is a consumer -based environment.

I think he said it's easier than to become extraordinary now.

It's hard to overstate the power of putting away the phone and doing some writing or putting away the phone and doing some musical training and then using social media as a place to put your efforts out into the world as opposed to place your efforts while standing there obliviously in the real world.

The people that realize that the direction of flow needs to be from real world into electronic world and out as opposed to the other way are going to be the ones that are going to succeed in life.

Barring some accident or injury, you're almost guaranteed success relative to your peers.

It's that simple. I remember, and we've spoken about this before, but I remember when NMN, Rapamycin, NAD, Sublingual, mix it in the yogurt, do all of this stuff.

I state of the world of longevity, drugs, supplements.

Now, what's happening with that?

Yeah, I just did an episode with Peter Attia.

Here's the deal as I understand it.

Peter is pretty bullish on Rapamycin.

Remember that mTOR, which is expressed at very high levels in essentially all cells of the brain and body during development, declines across the lifespan.

MTOR, mammalian target of Rapamycin, that's named after the drug that targets that receptor.

Rapamycin targets the MTOR and in some sense mimics fasting.

This is broadly speaking, keep in mind that the studies showing extension of life in different species, including mice, show that being fairly dramatically submaintenance caloric extends lifespan, but you're also potentially sub -happiness when you're that sub -caloric.

Potentially pretty weak immunologically too, potentially.

Potentially physically weak.

Yes, starving yourself within reason can extend your lifespan, but you also starve yourself of joy and vigor.

At some point, you are sub -caloric enough that testosterone levels plummet in men and women, libido plummets, fertility plummets in men and women.

It's a trade -off. I don't take Rapamycin.

I don't take metformin.

I don't even take berberine, which is poor man's metformin.

It makes me very hypoglycemic for reasons that make total sense based on the mechanisms of metformin and berberine.

I do take sublingual NMN, but it's very important, but I don't take it to extend my lifespan.

I take sublingual NMN, and by the way, I have no affiliation to any supplement company that sells NMN.

I take it because it has for me in my experience, again, this is not a randomized control trial.

This would not meet Nortean criteria, lane Nortean criteria.

It causes my hair to grow very, very fast, which is odd, but other people I know who've taken it report the same effect.

Nails very thick and gives me a lot of warning energy.

Yeah, me too. So that's the reason I take it, but I don't expect it to make me live longer.

Now, the history around NMN is worth paying attention to.

It was David Sinclair that popularized NMN.

Remember, NMN is a precursor to NAD, NR is the precursor to NMN.

So there's a phosphate group that gets removed.

People that are not David Sinclair are fairly bullish about NR being preferable to NMN, but the people who are proponents of NR, true nitrogen associated folks, et cetera, tend to focus more on the anti -inflammation effects of NR and point to the fact that NR has been shown to convert to NAD in cells

[The Science of Energy: Adenosine, Circadian Rhythms, and Personal Growth]-[#836 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The New Science Of Longevity, Resilience & Breaking Bad Habits]

📋 Summary

The Adenosine System and the Morning Routine

Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) and Energy Management

The Mechanics of Circadian Entrainment

Resilience and the "Lonely Chapter"

The Power of Reframing

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript