I'll tear up if I talk about it
because things were going well in my life
and then one day just, frack, everything came crashing down.
And I've learned that friendship is super powerful.
I had people descending on my home to be with me.
One day I just like look up and Lex is in the room
and they sat with me, picked me up
and they reminded me who I am.
And, you know, I've just such immense gratitude for that.
Dr. Andrew Huberman is a world-renowned neuroscientist,
Stanford professor and podcaster.
Revolutionizing how we understand the brain
and how we can adopt change, break bad habits
and achieve peak performance.
Growing up, I was scared, depressed and confused.
My parents split up.
I was getting in multiple fights.
Found myself locked up in this residential treatment program.
And I realized that I need to take control of my life.
I'm so intrigued by that
because so many people feel stuck in their lives.
So how does someone even make those life-changing decisions?
Well, there are so many zero cost tools
that can change your brain.
We can go through all of them.
So I want to talk about dopamine in this graph.
The dopamine is kind of like a wave pool.
In every domain of life, whether or not it's food, exercise,
for some people it's work or sex.
If you push things to the max,
you're going to feel depleted and understimulated afterwards.
And you need so much more energy to get the same output.
And when you're in that dopamine depleted state,
typically what people do is they try and access things
that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry.
And all it does is drive them further
and further into that trauma.
So how do you fix that?
So it's hard to exit, but start with.
This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life.
We've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube.
And I want to say a huge thank you to all of you
that show up here every Monday and Thursday
to watch our conversations.
From the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team,
who you don't always get to meet,
there's almost 50 people now behind the Diarrho Versio
that work to put this together.
So from all of us, thank you so much.
We did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes
for people that subscribed to the show
up until 7 million subscribers.
And you guys loved that raffle so much
that we're going to continue it.
So every single month, we're giving away money,
can't buy prizes, including meetings with me,
invites to our events, and a thousand pound gift vouchers
to anyone that subscribes to the Diarrho Versio.
There's now more than 7 million of you.
So if you make the decision to subscribe today,
you can be one of those lucky people.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Let's get to the conversation.
Andrew, at the very heart of what you do,
at the very, very high, if I looked at all
that you've produced and I had to encapsulate it
into just one or two sentences
that encapsulates your mission statement,
what would that be?
I want to share the beauty and utility of biology.
I want people to understand how incredible
the human body and brain are,
and how even a small understanding
of the underlying mechanisms
about how we interact with light or temperature,
exercise, thoughts, emotions, et cetera,
how that can impact our health in really powerful ways.
You have become a cultural phenomenon
because of the information that you've shared.
In your view, why and how has that happened?
I guess maybe most importantly, why has that happened?
What is it that you've kind of catered to
that was absent in people's understanding of themselves?
Well, I think people are intensely curious
about themselves, meaning our species,
why we feel the way we feel,
why other people feel and act the way they do.
And I think most everybody, I like to think,
is deeply interested in how to be
the best version of themselves.
And I think what I've done is I've provided
a lens into all of that through biology,
through neuroscience in particular,
but also I'm a practitioner.
So since I was pretty young,
I've been actively involved in sports and psychology
and interested in what one can do,
in some cases, take things to avoid
in order to be the best version of oneself.
And so I'm an academic, right?
I have a laboratory
and I'm a tenured faculty member at Stanford,
although I should mention that I've shrunk my laboratory
considerably in the last year or so,
but I've done experiments on animal models,
on humans and human clinical trials.
So I have the understanding and expertise
of a research scientist.
And at the same time, I think very deeply about
how to translate the information
in these peer-reviewed papers,
how to translate the information
in the fields of science and medicine
into actionable, what we call protocols.
And I do my best to distill things down into
actionable things,
but I'm not a big believer in dumbing things down.
I decided to go the opposite way,
rather than give little snippets, 90 second videos,
we include those,
but rather I decided to go for full one to three hour,
maybe even four hour lectures on a topic,
because I believe, and I'm not the first to say it,
that people have near infinite ability to learn
if they are told things in a way that's clear.
So I believe that people want to understand,
they can understand,
and it doesn't require decorating things
in a lot of complicated language.
Sometimes we need to include some complicated language,
just because that's the way science and medicine are,
and that people are willing to learn that
and carry that along.
And once they understand how they work a little bit better,
you arm them with a little bit of knowledge,
then really they're just off to the races
and the rest takes care of itself.
I may, a couple of times today,
just ask you to explain something to me
in more simpler terms,
because I don't have any fundamental understanding
of science.
So much of my objective is just to be completely honest
if I don't understand something,
because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening
that also probably don't understand something.
One of the things that was most surprising to me about you
was your background.
And I think the interesting thing about your background
and where you came from and the struggles you faced
and in contrast to the man that sits in front of me today,
I think it speaks to one of the fundamental points
of curiosity that I have about your work,
which is it's all well in good knowing protocols,
but there's something else required
to be able to pursue them.
Now, people say that this is discipline or motivation
or whatever it might be,
but when I looked at your background
and where you've come from,
it wasn't a straight line.
There's an element of transformation that's gone on there.
There's almost the early Andrew Huberman,
who I never would have guessed would have been the man,
that is almost unrecognizable
from the man sat in front of me today.
And then there's the man sat in front of me today.
And the reason I'm so fascinated by that
is because if I can understand how you went
from that Andrew Huberman to this one,
it gives me, it liberates me from the excuses
that I won't be able to pursue your protocols now.
Yeah, well, certainly there's been a lot of adventure
and transformation, certainly some hardship.
Listen, I'll be the first to say,
my life has been easier than it has been for others
and harder than it has been for others, right?
So I'm not trying to plant a flag
as having had the hardest or the easiest life.
I only know what's my experience, right?
So all I've got is my experience, my knowledge
and my words to convey that.
But yeah, it was not a linear path.
I would say the kind of key milestones along the way
and the relevant pieces are for as long as I can remember,
I've always had an intense curiosity
and an intense desire for adventure.
So I wanna learn and I wanna learn firsthand.
I also suppose I've always had an intensity.
Like I've been told since I was a young kid,
I sort of like forward leaning a little bit,
forward center of mass, so to speak.
But yeah, my childhood on the one hand
was very conventional and very sweet
in the sense that I had two parents.
My dad's actually a scientist.
He's a theoretical physicist by training.
He's Argentine, but then did his graduate training
in the United States.
My mother's a writer and she was a teacher.
She didn't work a whole lot when we were kids.
She was mostly focused on raising us.
And my childhood to my memory was marked by
dinners together at the table.
I was very, very interested in all things,
biology in particular, fish.
So all things, aquaria, birds, anything, tropical birds.
I would learn all about them, learn about fish.
I would then lecture about these things in class on Monday
as a way to try, the teachers to try and get me
to not talk to students around me
because I'd be telling them about it otherwise.
So I've been giving little lectures since I was a kid.
And then I suppose as I matured, so to speak,
around adolescence, my parents split up.
It was a very high conflict divorce.
And that sent me in the direction of more kind of
wilder foraging, let's call it that.
I was a bit feral.
Just the circumstance led to a situation
where I was seeking out sports and friends
for which there wasn't any parental involvement.
So for me, the immediate attraction was
to skateboarding and punk rock culture.
And so I was very fortunate that I was drawn
into skateboarding and punk rock culture
in the late 80s, early 90s.
I'm 49 now, we're almost 49.
And at that time, that was a very nascent culture.
There was no X games, there were no major sponsors,
that sort of thing.
And so there were all these, not parentless,
but rather feral kids, some were parentless.
And I got to be exposed to some incredible skateboarding.
And I was not a particularly good skateboarder,
but I certainly had the drive to try and do it.
I kept hurting myself.
So that was actually an important event.
I kept hurting my body, trying to push myself
to get really good.
Friends of mine were getting sponsored.
Close friend of mine got picked up as a pro
while we were in high school.
We were traveling, going to contests.
What you probably may have noticed is
there wasn't a lot of attending school.
So I don't recommend this to young people.
Stay in school, at least at the early stage,
get that basic education
while your brain is still hyperplastic.
But I was exposed to, and fortunately did not partake in
a lot of drugs and violence, but I saw that.
I also saw a lot of incredible skateboarding.
Some of these people went on to start huge companies
and do incredible things in the realm of action sports.
So like DC, I know the guys that started that.
Danny Way, Colin McKay, I knew at that time,
I knew of, I wasn't close with,
but Tony Hawk watched his ascent.
He was a few years ahead of me,
but I would attend contests, skating contests.
So I was in this world where it was all DIY.
It was all self-created.
Now at some point, I got a girlfriend
and got into other things and kind of left skateboarding.
Thought I might be a firefighter for a little while.
I was always very physical.
What age is this?
So I was 16 when I got my first girlfriend
and I wasn't doing well in skateboarding.
I kept breaking my foot.
People were moving on without me.
That was just the nature of it.
I was in love with her, wanted to spend time with her.
And so I thought, well, I'm not really doing well in school.
I'm not really attending school.
I don't need to work and take care of us.
I was really thinking kind of like an adult at that point
in terms of what I would do.
And so I thought I'd get into the fire service.
So I started trying to strengthen my body.
I started doing resistance training.
Keep in mind back then,
the only people that lifted weights were,
pre-season American football players,
people going to the military and bodybuilders.
And I wasn't interested in any of those three things.
But I started doing resistance training and realized,
wow, this is a really powerful tool.
I can make my body stronger through work.
I couldn't do a single pull up when I started.
I was always pretty skinny.
I shot up a full foot in height, but was very, very skinny.
You know, at that point and within a summer,
I could do pull ups.
I could do these things.
I thought, wow, like there's this remarkable relationship
between doing physical effort and kind of ability or outcome.
And then I also started running a lot for whatever reason.
I ran cross country my senior year of high school.
And also there, I felt like there was a direct relationship
between effort and outcome.
If I ran further,
then the next time I could run even further.
If my lungs burned on a hill run,
well, the next time I could do that hill
without my lungs burning.
Whereas in skateboarding,
no matter how hard I seem to try,
I just couldn't match the level of effort with the outcome.
So it was from that point forward that, you know,
16 years old forward that I made running
and resistance training just part
of my regular weekly schedule.
What ended up happening was she went off to college.
I ended up just basically living in my car
or her dorm room while she was off at college.
She was a year ahead of me.
And I realized I wanted to be near her.
So eventually I applied to college and somehow got in.
By the end of my freshman year,
I had been getting in multiple fights.
So I was still had that kind of wildness
from the world I was previously in.
I was getting into physical altercations.
I was never into drugs or alcohol.
That was fortunate.
I don't have a propensity to be addicted to those things,
but my life really wasn't in order.
And it was really,
it was actually nearly 30 years ago to the day.
It was July 4th, 1994.
I went to a barbecue.
I got into an altercation with a bunch of people
that were robbing the house that we were at.
And by the way, they're sort of a little tangent side story.
One of my friends in college, we weren't super close,
but my girlfriend at the time had lived
with the now wife of Jack Johnson, the musician.
So Jack recalls that party.
We have other friends from that party.
That was kind of a meaningful day for me
because I got into this altercation.
Everything turned out okay,
in the sense that we got our belongings back.
No one was badly hurt.
But I remember going back to the place
where I was staying at that time and thinking to myself,
okay, this is bad, right?
I'm like 19 years old,
or I guess it was just shy of 18.
I am not doing well in school.
My freshman year was a disaster where I went to college.
I don't think I flunked out,
but it just wasn't really attending class.
I wasn't doing well.
I'm getting in physical altercations.
I'm working at this little bagel shop, delivering bagels.
And there's nothing wrong with that,
but it's not much of a future in it for me.
I didn't end up going to the fire service.
I didn't end up a professional athlete.
I thought like, what am I going to do?
Like, what am I going to do, right?
Because the story of whatever happened to me prior to that
was kind of meaningless unless I made something of myself.
So that day I actually wrote myself
and my parents a letter saying
that I was going to turn my life around.
And I actually still have this letter.
My mother still has this letter.
And what I decided to do
was to take a leave of absence from university.
I didn't drop out.
A leave of absence allows you the option to go back.
I moved home and I worked.
So I was a bus boy at a little restaurant
in town where I grew up.
And I still continue to run and do resistance training,
three times a week each or so.
And I went to community college,
which is typically where kids who can't afford
to go to university or get to that,
just stay back for whatever reason.
It's a wonderful aspect of the educational system
in California still.
And I made learning and filling my mind
with formal rigorous coursework based knowledge
my absolute mission.
Now I didn't care if I liked it.
I just, it's like, I'm going to trust my ability to learn
because I could tell you a lot about tropical fish,
skateboarding, punk rock music.
A fair amount about physical training.
At that point, I sought out the right people.
This has always been something I've been good at
is seeking out the right people with knowledge.
So I got great knowledge from the late Mike Menser
who had trained Dorian Yates.
I was reading every book I could on physical fitness
and rehabilitation, trying to get my body strong.
Never wanted to be big.
I was always interested in being strong
and being able to run far and fast.
That was always the goal, like a capability.
I've not been one of the people to like really care
about like hypertrophy.
That wasn't something that mattered to me.
If some came along as a consequence of training, great.
But it was more about a capability to do things.
So at that point, I just became a voracious learner.
I took every bit of energy that I had applied
to these other areas and put them into learning math,
science, art history, English, literature,
whatever coursework was thrown at me.
And then after a year of that, went back to university,
lived alone in a studio apartment.
And basically for the remaining portion of university,
all I did was study, workout, hang out with my girlfriend,
run, listen to, at that time,
like early 90s punk rock music,
which is still a wonderful genre.
So mainly like Rancid, Operation Ivy, Bob Dylan,
always loved Bob Dylan, classical music when I study,
and that was it.
I didn't do anything else.
And at that point, I started getting straight A's.
People didn't recognize me.
They're like, aren't you the guy from freshman year
that was getting in all these fights?
I will admit that I wasn't completely devoid
of the typical college phenotype.
Once a month, I would allow myself to go out to a party
and I'd party once a month,
but stayed away from drugs was never my thing.
And so drank, which, you know, eventually I realized
wasn't my thing either, but I was just completely committed.
So I graduated university with honors.
I went to graduate school, did a master's at UC Berkeley,
then did my PhD, did my postdoc at Stanford,
and then eventually got a laboratory first at UC San Diego,
excellent neuroscience program,
eventually was recruited to Stanford with tenure
and all along maintaining physical fitness
in the background, focusing very heavily
on doing primary research,
meaning making discoveries in neuroscience
and publishing papers.
And then in 2019, I decided to start posting science
on Instagram, just really nerdy stuff.
No protocols, just telling people about sunlight
and the relationship to the eye, dopamine,
and I just enjoyed talking about it
just like I did when I was a little kid
telling people about tropical fish.
And in 2020, my plan was to release a book.
So I got a guy, a PR guy, his name is Rob Moore.
He's now a close friend of mine.
And we were talking about how we would, I don't know,
maybe go on podcasts or do something of that sort
when the book came out and then the pandemic hit.
And I said, you know what, let's pause the book.
And he said, oh, I'm just maybe go on podcasts.
So that year, 2020, I went on,
I think somewhere between 20 and 30 podcasts.
No book, no website, no nothing,
just like talking science and delighted in that.
And then January, 2021, I got a little place
in a little kind of canyon region of Los Angeles,
a little sabbatical like retreat and set up some cameras.
And my bulldog Costello there, Rob Moore
became my podcast producer.
And on January 1st, more or less,
we launched the Huberman Lab podcast
where now I still just blab about stuff
that I find interesting
and that I think can be useful to people.
So that's the kind of, that's the arc.
And as I tell all this, I also just wanna make sure
that people know that it sounds like this magnificent arc,
but along the way, there were absolutely times
when I thought, I'm like, what am I gonna do?
Like this is working, but this isn't working.
And my life at times became very lopsided.
I focused mainly on work and research.
I'm 49 years old.
Now I've had some wonderful relationships across my life,
but I opted to delay on marriage and family as a way to,
well, it wasn't the intention,
but as a way to really just continue to pour my energy
into the things that I was most passionate about.
So there's always sacrifice.
There were, sadly I've lost a lot of friends along the way
to some to drugs and alcohol, suicide, depression,
and so on, others to just unfortunate consequences or age.
But I think the major themes have been,
I just simply can't pull myself off a desire to learn
and adventure through a particular space.
And then once I learn things, and as I learn things,
I can't seem to help but just tell everybody about it,
provided there's somebody there to listen,
then I'm eager to share what I learned.
It's funny in life how some of the most traumatic things
that happen to us, and trauma is such a subjective thing.
So what's trauma for me is not for Francis Inghani,
who I've heard his story and walking out of Africa
and jumping over a barbed wire
and walking across the Sahara desert.
His is an amazing story.
I just can't, it's like-
I hear he's a very nice guy.
He's exceptionally nice.
He's a wonderful individual, but I'm really interested
in how our traumatic experiences end up dragging us
in whatever shape in life, dragging us or making us driven.
That is almost two sides of the same coin sometimes.
But I just wanted to zoom back in on when you were younger,
because I was reading about at sort of 14, 15 years old,
you were put into a residential treatment program?
I was.
So one day in school,
and by the way, I wasn't in school much.
And if I was there, I was the kid with the hoodie on,
it was head on the table,
just kind of like sleeping or drawing,
or I was not tuned into what I should have been tuned into.
I was looking back, I think I was depressed.
I was sad.
I was confused by the fracture of my family.
And listen, divorce and family reorganization
can take place without all that.
Unfortunately, this was a very complicated situation.
And maybe it was also puberty combined
with general confusion about life.
Those things combined to put me in a state
that I think looking back,
I was scared, depressed and confused.
Like a lot of young people happen to be at that age.
So a number of things happened.
I was getting into trouble.
I wasn't attending school.
I was truant a lot.
And yeah, one day they came to get me.
They basically called me into the office.
I was sitting there talking to the school counselor.
It wasn't my first time doing that.
And then some other people showed up there
and I started to realize like,
uh-oh, I think I know what this is,
which was they were gonna take me away.
Now, the exact stimulus for all this,
whether or not a friend, I think I know who it was,
had been concerned about me and had intervened,
or whether or not it was purely from the parent side
isn't clear to me still.
I have my theories, so they have theirs.
But in any event, I soon after found myself
in a residential treatment program.
And it was interesting because it was the first time
that I had ever had my freedom taken away from me.
That was an experience, like doors go locked
and you're like, whoa, you know, like,
my freedom taken away.
Well, you're locked in a treatment program, basically.
These were all kids that were delinquent
or had problems of various sorts.
So you're on a hallway with a bunch of other kids.
You know, you're staying there at night.
You're not leaving.
You're not free to walk to leave.
And they make you do group therapy.
You have to do one-on-one therapy.
You have an hour to exercise outside.
You're not leaving the grounds.
Yeah, this is like the combination of like,
if you were to just sort of merge in your mind,
like youth detention and hospital, right?
That's kind of the unity of these.
Now, kids there, and we were kids, right?
And there was a unit of much younger kids.
And there was a unit of people much older than us.
And I'll never forget what they said.
One of the counselors there said to us, listen,
the kids over there, the younger ones,
and the adults over there, they're crazy.
You guys, you're not crazy.
You just have problems.
And I'll never forget.
One of the kids that was in there with me goes,
yeah, but that's exactly what they're telling the people
in the other two units.
So pretty quickly, I realized like this place is problematic.
And I was scared.
I won't forget, like my roommate,
who turned out to be a very kind person,
but he looked like Richard Ramirez, the night stalker,
and he had a cutting problem.
And he was like a scary looking guy,
but as I got to know him,
I realized that he was just a kid with a lot of problems,
different than mine, but a lot of problems.
So you're in there with kids with severe drug issues,
with some were suicidal, some weren't,
some had aggression issues.
It was a co-ed unit during the day.
Obviously you're housed as boys with boys,
girls with girls.
And after about two, three days, I realized,
okay, the only way out of here is to do the work.
So they did the work.
I sat down and I started for the first time
really talking about what was going on for me and listening.
You can learn a lot in those places
by listening to what's going on for other people.
And I realized that a lot of what was going on internally
for me had to do with the fact that,
I mean, what do we need?
We basically need safety and acceptance at some level.
From parents, we also need guardrails.
And at that time I was lacking all three.
And I think my inherent intensity,
and I'm not an emotional person in the sense
that I don't emote easily, but I'm a very feeling person.
I feel a lot.
I don't know how other people perceive me, but I feel a lot.
And I think what was happening in my family unit
at that time felt devastating.
And I missed my sister, she was off in college.
She had gone off to college.
I've always been really close with my sister.
And really, because this was late 80s, early 90s,
I also didn't know many people from homes
without a mom and dad, this kind of thing.
And I had been exposed to a lot already.
One of the beautiful things about skateboarding,
at least back then, it's different now,
is that it was completely self-organized.
So whenever I could, I would get a ride with a friend
or take the bus up to San Francisco.
There was this now famous slash infamous scene,
the Embarcadero Plaza, it's called EMB,
was this kind of self-organized place.
You have these in major cities elsewhere.
There was Love Park in Philadelphia,
the Washington Square Park in New York.
And back then, I learned a lot from the older,
it was mostly guys that now there's more women
in skateboarding, girls and women in skateboarding,
and they rip, they're so good.
But back then, it was mostly guys.
And so I learned all sorts of things there.
Some of which, I was far too young to learn.
I got basically a street education
from kids that weren't going to school
and who were just living this wild free life.
And I do wanna be clear that even though there were,
let's call them untoward elements,
there was also an incredible beauty.
And my friend, Jake Rosenberg,
started going up there as well.
He had his own challenges that I only learned about later.
And he brought a video camera, high eight video.
He started filming the now just truly iconic videos
of Mike Carroll.
These names will mean things to Henry Sanchez,
like Mark Gonzalez.
So he just started filming all this.
And then he made the first Plan B videos
and he made the Waiting for Lightning documentary
about Danny Way jumping the Great Wall of China.
And our friend, Mike Blayback,
who's the photographer for the Huberman Lab podcast,
of all things, who became one of the most iconic
action sports portrait photographers,
was a kid who basically drove out from Michigan.
I don't even know if he graduated high school.
He probably did.
And then he slept in the clothing stacks at the Gap store,
hung out in Embarcadero and took photos.
And those photos and those videos that Mike and Jacob
and other people took are now iconic in skateboarding.
And so I was also exposed to this incredible world of DIY,
like take your passion, take your circumstance
and pick a craft and just document stuff.
And so in many ways, like what happened at Embarcadero
and what happened in skateboarding,
and I always loved punk rock music and going to shows.
I have no musical talent and I didn't suck at skateboarding,
but I wasn't going to go anywhere with it.
But what I saw was if you love something
and you want to learn as much as possible about it
and you love the culture around it,
you do have to learn how to sort out the untoward elements.
Don't get yourself into trouble.
But you take that energy and I just took it to academics.
I remember realizing when I got to graduate school,
I found a wonderful lab to work in
with a wonderful woman named Barbara Chapman.
Unfortunately, she passed away.
And at the time she said,
listen, I'm going to have a couple of kids,
but we have grants you can.
So she said, I'm going to have a couple of kids.
So I'm going to be very busy, but we have grants
and here's the lab.
She said, don't burn the lab down.
Don't hurt yourself, but just do experiments, have fun.
And I realized, I was like, this is the best.
And I had so much energy and I thought,
I never have to go home.
So I lived there a lot of the time,
brushed my teeth in the sink there,
work out at the gym, go shower, come back.
And I remember people saying, you're going to burn out.
What are you doing?
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And I would work 80, sometimes a hundred hours a week.
I was so happy.
And I realized like, this is the exact same feeling.
I'm just taking my interest
and I'm just pouring myself into it.
I did that when I was a graduate student.
I did it when I was a postdoc.
And actually when I was a postdoc,
I started writing some music articles for Thrasher magazine.
I've always kept some little tie
to the skateboarding industry that way,
just to make some extra cash.
And then when I was a junior professor,
I had to really pour myself just into the laboratory,
but it still worked out.
And I guess the point is that,
earlier you and I were talking about if you have,
and I'm borrowing in this phrase from one of my heroes,
Martha Beck, who's a wonderful person and teacher,
is such wisdom and she calls it
a interest-based attention system.
Some people might call it ADHD,
but have you ever noticed that even people,
and we know this from the scientific literature,
people, kids, adults with ADHD,
when they're so-called ADHD,
when they are doing something they really love,
they're like a laser.
They're not gonna peel off that.
Their attention is like level 11 out of 10.
So I took that energy that I've always had in me
for fish, for tropical birds,
skateboarding, punk rock music, eventually it was biology.
And I just went, okay, here are my chips.
I'm all in, all in.
But the goal has always been and remains
to take what I learn and share it.
Because the real joy in doing anything,
for me anyway, is the ability to share in that knowledge
or in that experience.
And so those early years were really choppy
and really dangerous, frankly.
But then when I started a laboratory and decided,
hey, I'm gonna study human stress,
let's go get VR of stressful circumstances.
And my friend Michael Muller,
who's a very accomplished portrait photographer
in Hollywood and also takes photos
of great white sharks out of cages,
he said to me, oh, you know,
your VR stimulus in your lab?
I mean, here's what he told me.
He's like, it sucks.
He said, it sucks, it doesn't look real.
It's all CGI, it's not scary at all.
How about we go film some great white sharks
down in Guadalupe Island and we leave the cage?
And the young Andrew was like, okay.
So got dive certified, went and did it one year,
stayed in the cage, went the next year, exited the cage.
I'm not recommending people live this way.
I'm not because I had an air failure at depth
the second year while I was in the cage.
I bailed out, I made it, I lived,
but it was super scary
and it was not an experience I want to repeat.
And I realized, you know, that's the line.
Like I, you know, the great Oliver Sacks,
another hero of mine, British trained neurologist
and an author he wrote was basically
what became the script for Awakenings and things like that.
There's a quote about him that resonates a lot.
And the quote I think is, I mean,
an early teacher of his said,
Oliver will go far provided he does not go too far.
And so, you know, you have to be careful, right?
These adventures, leaving school, doing,
you can't be haphazard about it.
So if you look at the broad arc, it's highly nonlinear,
but there's a common thread through all of it,
which is this desire to learn curiosity,
desire to share intensity.
And when I'm involved in any one thing,
and I recommend that if people are involved
in any one thing, if it's podcasting or sport
or video games or math or AI or program,
whatever it is, skateboarding, whatever it is,
that you can't be haphazard in that world
because forward progress,
even if you change things over time
is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness
that we each have and whatever level of intensity we have
and making sure that you do take steps forward.
And there, what I've learned is as a child,
as an adolescent and as an adult,
there are all these traps along the way.
There are all these shoots down to failure and destruction,
and you have to be very, very thoughtful.
And so you can't be reckless.
I'm really compelled as well
by the letter you sent to your parents.
Yeah, they must've been very surprised.
That letter was written in a house on a little street
in a little town called Isla Vista on Passato Street,
where I'd essentially been squatting
for the summer with my ferret.
That was the, I tell you that,
because that was the picture I had of ferret.
Her name was Iris, that my first girlfriend
who had left me by then, because she was smart,
because I had nothing going on.
Me and Iris were living together.
I didn't even have a bed in the place.
I thought, well, why pay rent?
Like no one, like where I had grown up
with all these like riffraff kids.
Now the town, to be clear, the town I grew up in, Palo Alto,
now is known as like one of the wealthiest places.
At that time it was like kind of upper middle class,
but when I say like riffraff kids,
I mean like the people that congregated
around skateboarding in the late 80s, early 90s,
were the kind of like parentless feral types.
So I learned a lot.
I learned I can sleep mummy style anywhere,
in a car, in a van, in a corner.
So like why pay rent that summer?
I'd have more money to keep and save
if I just like got a pillow and a couple blankets
and a sleeping bag, and this little place,
I was living there with my ferret.
And I came back from that fight on July 4th,
and I thought, okay, like this is it.
And I think it was by the end of the weekend,
I had written out this letter that said,
essentially the following.
It said, look, I don't know why you guys decided
to just fracture everything.
I understood why my parents didn't want to be together.
They were incompatible.
By the way, they're both happily married now
to wonderful people for many years.
So there's a happy ending there.
But at the time I was very confused.
It wasn't that I needed them to be together,
but the level of friction in their separation
was just like, I felt like a lot of it fell on me.
And there are reasons for that.
But I basically forgave them.
I basically said, listen, I forgive you.
I realized that I need to take control of my life.
I was 18, so I'm a fall baby.
So it was like, I was almost 19.
I'm 18 years old, 19 years old,
and I need to do something with my life.
And the only way I'm going to do that
is by getting super focused and super organized.
So I somehow had the idea to externalize this.
And then I wrote essentially the same letter to myself.
And then I just, as my girlfriend
who eventually got back together with me,
that was interesting.
As soon as I started working hard in school,
I'll never forget what she said.
We're still friendly.
She's married with her own family
and they have a beautiful family.
But every once in a while I'll hear from her
and I will never forget what she said to me
about a year later when I was just
absolutely rabid about learning.
She said, you know, you've become a monster.
And I was like, a monster?
And she's like, yeah, a monster of learning and class
and getting up early and you tuck your shirt in.
Like I got into this whole thing of like dressing
the opposite of everyone else
that lived in that little town.
It's a little beach town.
Everyone wore flip-flops, rode beach cruisers.
At that time it was like baggy shorts, long t-shirts.
And I started tucking in my shirt, a belt.
I would get like all like, you know, like cleaned up
and I'd go to class and people were like,
what is wrong with this guy?
I just wanted to go completely against the grain
and just be as disciplined and organized as possible.
And I basically was parenting myself.
And I think that this is something
that I learned how to do early on.
I love my parents, but I learned how to mother
and father myself.
And that was powerful.
It was like as a young guy, but let's face it, you know,
at 19 you're young, but you're not that young
in the sense that if you screw up, you know, if you,
you know, I don't know, I had friends
who got into drunk driving stuff.
A friend of ours was killed in a drunk driving accident.
I wasn't real close with him, but I knew him real well.
This guy Phil Shao, great skateboarder was killed
because someone drove drunk.
He wasn't driving drunk, dead.
Bunch of people dead are in jail.
So, you know, when you're 18 or older,
like the consequences go super, super linear, you know, shift
where small mistakes can lead to really bad outcomes.
So yeah, I just kind of scruffed myself and was like,
let's do this.
And, you know, here I am.
I'm so intrigued by that because in that moment you have,
I think a moment in which a lot of people are searching
for in their lives where you have,
you have a decision to do it differently.
And I've always wondered what it takes
for someone to get there.
And is it something that you can accelerate towards?
Like is there, if I am laying on the couch right now
and I'm feeling that, is there something I can do
to get me there or do I need more pain?
Fear.
Fear.
I'll tell you, super scary being like almost 19 years old,
girlfriend left me.
I'm not good at anything.
I wasn't good at anything.
Not skateboarding, couldn't play an instrument.
Everyone in that town surfed.
Family.
Family, I mean, I didn't, yeah,
I could have gone to the fire service
and that's a wonderful career path.
Yeah, I didn't have any like marketable skills.
I couldn't really do anything
except I knew my capacity to learn.
I've always had a very good memory
and I've always enjoyed learning.
So I thought, okay, school seems like a good option.
They tell you what you need to know.
In fact, at one point I realized,
and I think it was Ryan Holiday that said that, you know,
the people who should absolutely not drop out of college
are the people who are not doing well
because the real world is a lot harder in many ways.
It's a lot harder than college.
In college, they tell you what to do.
I remember taking a class in Greek mythology.
You go there, if you sit near the front, you pay attention,
you try not to pay attention to anyone else,
you sit down, they tell you what you need to know.
Now, sometimes it's complicated, you can't keep up,
but then they have these things called office hours
where you can ask, they have teaching assistants.
I mean, the whole thing is set up
so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps.
Whereas with skateboarding,
it's like I was always getting broke off as they say,
you know, I was always rolling my left foot,
snapped again, nothing, couldn't do it.
There's so much uncertainty in other things,
at least with a college education.
For me, it was like, okay, I can learn this stuff.
And then what I found is when there's a desire to learn
and then you learn and then you do well,
and I'd started doing very well,
but there's that one class that I got a B plus in
that I'm still pissed off about, you know,
my first year was this disaster, then it was always,
and then there's this one class in neural development
from Ben Reese and I got a B plus.
And as a consequence, when I went to graduate school,
I studied neural development.
You know, it's the thing that you don't get,
the place where you make an error
that you forever carry that signal,
I need to get better at that.
So I think a lot of it is just having the knowledge of self,
right, what did the oracle say?
Know thyself, the knowledge of self to really think,
okay, like what are my strengths?
Do I like to learn if I'm interested in something?
Do I have a voracious appetite?
Maybe if you're a person with less energy,
maybe you're more reflective or you like to journal
or you need more time to process.
I think turning what often appear as weaknesses
into strengths is really possible.
And then I do think that we are all each endowed
with some unique gift.
I really believe in this.
It's not mystical for me.
I think that we all have some wiring of our brains
that's very similar and we all have some unique wiring
based on our genetics and our experience.
And I just thought I'm going to keep paying attention
to what fills my body with energy.
One of the most inspiring and I think liberating things
that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity
because if the brain can physiologically change
based on what I'm doing,
then it means that who I am now, my identity,
that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing
with the ferret isn't who I always have to be.
I can literally change.
We've spoken a little bit around
what causes the motivation to actually change,
but knowing that my brain will actually change,
those two things are really inspiring for me
because it means that whatever rut I'm stuck in
isn't necessarily a permanent one.
Now you said that the motivation to change comes from fear.
Well, in my case, it took a fear circumstance,
fear of becoming a permanent failure
to motivate immense change.
That was that circumstance.
I do believe, however, that the best work,
our most creative and best work
comes from a love of craft.
But sometimes in order to find what you truly love,
you have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it.
And that goes for relationships too.
Sometimes to find the right relationship or relationships,
it could be friendships, romantic relationships, et cetera.
One has to be deathly afraid of having to remain
in the relationship that you're in enough to leave.
So neuroplasticity is absolutely real.
It actually worked out
that my scientific great grandparents, two guys,
David Hubel and Torntson Weasel,
won the Nobel Prize for neuroplasticity.
Now they weren't the people who discovered it.
It had actually been described for centuries.
People understood that young kids
can learn more easily than adults can.
But David and Torntson won the Nobel Prize
for essentially formalizing the,
and discovering the principles of neuroplasticity,
how it works.
And then some years later,
mainly one guy by the name of Mike Mersonic,
but there were others that worked with him,
discovered that neuroplasticity is actually a feature
of the nervous system, the brain,
throughout our entire lifespan.
The rules change a little bit
in terms of how you rewire your brain.
But if the question is, can a person change?
Can you learn new things?
Can you unlearn certain patterns?
Can you overcome traumas at any age?
The answer is absolutely, categorically, yes.
How?
Well, it's very clear that as a child
until about age 25, more or less,
just passive experience will shape the brain
for better or worse.
After about age 25, and again, these are not strict cutoffs,
we can change our brain, but what's required
is a market shift in the neurochemical environment
under which something happens.
So one of the reasons why any traumatic event
will forever be remembered,
although by the way, you can remove
some of the emotional load of that,
trauma does not have to be traumatic forever,
is because when we see or experience something
very intense of a fearful nature,
there is the release of certain,
what we call neuromodulators,
things like epinephrine, adrenaline,
and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift
in our body and brain.
And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual,
and as a consequence, in the subsequent days,
there's reordering of the connections
so that the brain can prepare for that event
should it happen again.
This is why we have what's called one trial learning.
You go to a certain location,
something terrible happens there.
You will forever associate that location
with something terrible.
But there are tools, therapy and other tools,
that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that
so that you could go to that location and feel calm,
no fear whatsoever.
The good news is you can also learn anything
you want to learn,
provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment.
This is why when we are very interested
and focused on something,
two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity,
we have to be alert and we have to be focused.
We can't learn passively as adults.
We can't just play a lecture about AI
and large language models or neuroscience in the room,
and then it just,
the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis.
But if we pay attention and we're alert
when we pay attention,
there's a shift in the neurochemicals
associated with that attention,
what we call the catecholamines.
It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine,
and norepinephrine,
all which cause an increase in alertness,
all which cause an increase in focus,
a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field,
so like cones of attention is one way to think about it.
And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes
such that if we get adequate sleep that night,
maybe the next night as well,
there's reordering of neural connection
so that that knowledge,
that new experience is consolidated in your brain.
You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience.
So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing,
everything that we encounter changes our brain,
that's not true.
Why would the brain change unless it needed to?
As a child, the brain is basically a template for change.
It's trying to understand the environment
and make predictions.
And so that's true.
Neuroplasticity is a cardinal feature of childhood
and adolescence and the teen years.
Just think about the music you listened to
when you were a teen.
No other music will ever have as much significance.
And that's because as a teen,
your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators.
The amount of meaning that comes from
now seemingly trivial events
when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense.
That song meant so much
and it's because of the neurochemical meal you creates in you.
But as an adult, it takes a stronger stimulus, as we say.
And if you were to fall in love as an adult
or see something, a painting that just strikes you
as just so unbelievable,
yes, then you are forever changed.
But just going to see a bunch of paintings
that the Met doesn't mean that every single one
of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain.
The nervous system is very efficient in that way.
It doesn't change unless it has to.
And it always changes if it needs to
in order to keep you safe.
This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear
as opposed to just interest
in terms of what will shift our brain.
But it's nice to know that love and excitement
and appreciation are very strong stimuli
for changing the brain.
And I can kind of draw to mine conversations I've had
with my good friend, Rick Rubin.
I'll get accused of name dropping,
but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick.
And Rick always talks about how when you just see
and experience something and you just have this love for it,
it changes the brain.
He's not a neuroscientist,
but in many ways he's a neuroscientist.
So in any case, you absolutely can change your brain
but you have to pay attention to the thing you want
to incorporate into your brain.
You have to be alert while you do that.
And then you absolutely have to go get some rest
because it's during sleep and during meditative states
and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs.
There's a phrase that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
And I think as we get older and older,
we become stubborn in part because we're very comfortable
with the way things are in routine and whatever.
But also I think we start to believe in this idea
that we can't change.
And that in and of itself makes it harder to change.
Are you telling me that you can teach an old dog new tricks?
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up.
Let's just destroy that myth now.
You absolutely can teach an old dog or human new tricks.
We know this.
In fact, there are studies, incredible studies
that were done down at the Salk Institute in San Diego
showing that even in people who are very old, right?
These are people in their eighties and nineties.
You know, the human lifespan,
probably maximum human lifespan as we understand it
is probably about 120 years, more or less,
but most people don't make it to a hundred,
so 80 or 90 is pretty old.
There's still the addition of new neurons occurring.
These people who were unfortunately dying
of terminal cancer, I believe, but other causes,
agreed to take a dye that actually gets incorporated
into new neurons.
And then after they died,
their brains were looked at under the microscope
and there was the addition of new neurons even at late age.
Now, I want to be very clear that most of learning
is not the addition of new neurons, at least not in humans.
But from everything we know about neuroscience,
it's clear that it doesn't matter if you're 90 years old,
70 years old, 50 years old,
if you want to learn, you can learn.
And that learning occurs through neuroplasticity,
which is the reordering of neural connections,
strengthening of certain connections, weakening of others,
and in some rare cases, the addition of new neurons.
But brain change is absolutely real at every stage of life.
I also wonder about habit formation.
So you said there that some of the more
sort of startling stimuluses like fear are great ways
and obsessive sort of deep focus are great ways
to start forming these new behavior patterns.
But if I want to break a habit,
because there's habits I've got in my life
that I've kind of just told myself are who I am.
And accordingly, I've just kind of accepted them.
Well, you've been very successful, so.
Yeah, but there's all things, thank you,
but there's many things I'd still,
I've just accepted as part of who I am.
Some of those come from my childhood.
So one of them is that I grew up in a very disorganized home
where like the doors inside my house had holes in them
and our house, there was like some rooms
that looked like a hoarder lived there,
just piles and piles of stuff to the roof.
House demolished in many respects,
like the back of the garden was six foot high,
it was a mess.
So I've grown up with mess
and I'm therefore still pretty messy today.
And it's something I've always wanted to defeat,
but I just, sometimes I tell myself,
well, it was hardwired into me when I was a kid
and it is just who I am.
And a lot of people go around saying that.
They've just kind of identified with and accepted
a certain bad habit is part of who they are.
Well, I will say that some of the most brilliant people
I know had terribly messy offices
and they were very internally organized people.
It was kind of interesting.
They were like a laser beam in their ability
to kind of sort through mess.
They didn't see the mess.
In fact, my postdoc advisor, who also sadly passed away,
an incredible human by the name of Ben Barris,
he used to walk into his office
and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere.
And I'd say, Ben, I think we should clean your office.
And he'd say, don't touch anything
because if you move anything, I won't know where it is.
And I said, how could you possibly know
where anything is right now?
And he said, I know where everything is.
And so I think some people also,
by growing up in or being in that environment,
also maintain an uncanny ability to find things.
Whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work
until everything is cleared away.
And so I see myself as on the weaker side
of this ability.
But to your question,
I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous.
Stories are the way that humans organize knowledge
by and large, right?
We don't tend to organize things into lists.
We have these narratives that we call stories
because from a young age,
we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them,
but they are compartmentalized into narratives
that have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Sometimes they have a kind of a crescendo
and then a relaxation.
Just think about a childhood song
of learning like the ABCs.
They don't teach you the ABCs,
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J, right?
They don't do that.
What do they do?
They give you a song, which is a story.
Musicians will understand this inherently.
Again, I'm not one,
but when I started researching neuroscience of music
and the brain, came to understand,
so it's A-B-C-D-E-F-G, right?
The change in the inflections,
as one does the alphabet as a young kid,
is the story of the alphabet.
Now people might say, okay, what is he talking about?
What's happening here is you create variation
in terms of batching of ideas
so that something has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
So if you think, okay, I grew up in this house
and it was really messy, and now I have too much mess,
and in order to undo that,
there's this kind of hardwired, dangerous words,
hardwired neural circuitry in my brain
that I would have to work really, really hard to undo
and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person
or a more tidier person, whatever it is,
that's very dangerous because there's a beginning to that,
a middle to that, and an end to that,
and it has immense meaning as a consequence.
One of the most powerful things is to understand
that neuroplasticity really involves taking
an existing story and dismantling some component of it.
What could the component be?
Well, there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work,
which says you take something that you believe as true
and you say, okay, like I'm an untidy person,
and then you counter it.
How do I know that?
Well, okay, I have this experience.
Okay, that's the story.
And then you start running counter narratives.
You say, I'm actually a tidy person.
And then people say, well, this is silly.
You're just lying to yourself, right?
Where they say, is it always true that you're a messy person?
You start challenging this story from different sides.
Now, I believe, because I'm a neuroscientist,
I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world,
that the brilliance, the kind of unconscious genius
of that approach is actually that what one is doing
is you're starting to create a new story.
You're starting to kind of infuse different questions
into the existing neural network.
Now, the brain loves questions.
Like the brain, since we're young kids,
we're asking questions.
And so if you take an existing story
and you start challenging it with questions,
you're not saying lie to yourself.
You're not suddenly gonna say, okay, like I'm super tidy.
Cause you're not gonna believe that.
But if you start challenging why it's that way,
or you've been able to change so many other things,
why wouldn't you be able to change that?
Well, you say, well, it's just a habit.
I can't do it.
You say, well, what's a habit?
And you start poking and pushing and pushing.
What you eventually arrive at is this kind of, huh,
actually there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person
except this kind of fluency of a particular story.
And what you've done is you've interrupted
the fluency of that story.
So then when you go to the behavior of, you know,
do you set things down all over the place
or do you put them in an orderly fashion?
You start interrupting the habit,
the fluency of your typical behavior.
So I raised this as a way to kind of shine light on
essentially what I do in my podcast career, which is,
you know, I believe very strongly
in the fields of psychology.
I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer.
We've got ancient wisdom that goes way back.
And when you start to look at things
through the lens of biology,
you start to see that all of these things
actually have merit and they're just different paths
to the same outcomes.
So if you wanted to become a tidy person,
I would encourage you, here would be one,
let's just say neuroscience supported approach
would be to write out one page
about what a tidy person you really are.
You'll know that's a lie, right?
And then to look at it and realize that in many ways,
if you just replace tidy with, you know, messy
at any location, it'd probably be the exact same story.
And so what you're really talking about here
is just a default that your nervous system is running.
And if you were to just swap the words,
would you feel differently or do differently?
On the one hand, you'd say, no, that's kind of trivial,
but I bet you the practice of writing it out
would forever interrupt your notion of like
just going to set something down.
And he'd be like, ah, now you have something
to kind of disrupt the habit.
Cause so much of habit disruption that you'll look like,
some people say, oh, you flick a rubber band on your wrist
or something like that.
There's nothing special about the rubber band.
There's nothing special about the pain on your wrist
or that you put a sticky note.
We know sticky notes work for about one day.
Why don't sticky notes work?
Why don't reminders on the mirror work?
Because they don't have enough salience.
They're not new, they're not different.
The nervous system only changes
if something is new and different.
So anyway, we can talk a lot about habit formation,
but fear works, but so does disrupting the story.
How do you disrupt the story?
You essentially give the opposite story and you think,
well, that's just lying to myself,
but neurally it makes sense because the nervous system,
again, likes to be very economical,
likes to do everything with the minimum amount
of energetic expenditure.
And to change anything requires attention
and attention is expensive.
Attention is expensive.
And also I would say, as I'm kind of rambling all this,
things are going very well for you.
So you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space.
PA now and another PA and I have a clean answer.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, you outsource it.
Great.
Well, there is incentive for all the folks
that feel like they're not tidy enough.
You have two choices.
You can either start to be tidy now
or you can be successful enough
that you can hire some assistants.
And I actually think, I say this in all seriousness.
I think that one has to ask like,
where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted?
I think about this every day.
I mean, we are living in a war of attention.
I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer
or a creator.
If I reach for my phone, I'm a consumer.
If I go to my journal, I'm a creator.
My advice to anyone who wants to be successful
in any domain is to do things away from where you broadcast
and then take it to that broadcast.
I mean, take your real life to Instagram
and be very cautious about taking Instagram
to your real life.
Does that make sense?
If you look at successful people,
they're doing things away from the platforms
and putting them on the platforms.
So I have to be very careful.
Then I go into the kitchen.
Obviously I talk to people in my home,
but if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call,
it's like, is this call really about moving the needle
forward or is this just kind of like passive use
of attention?
We have to be so careful nowadays, so, so careful.
It's really challenging.
On that point of focus and attention
and thinking back to when you were 19 years old,
one of the things people ask me a lot,
and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self-help world,
is from a neuroscience perspective,
is manifestation and this idea of like visualization,
visualizing who I want to become and where I'm going,
is there any neuroscience to support that that works?
There is, and I'm not trying to be negative,
but I'll start with the negative counter example
for which there is evidence and it's less often discussed.
So there's a wonderful researcher at New York University
by the name of Emily Balchettis,
who talks about how for goal setting
and habit formation,
fear setting is often one of the best tools.
You spend some time, maybe five minutes or so,
thinking about all the terrible things
that are going to happen
if you don't actually accomplish your goals.
Nobody likes to do this, but guess what?
It turns out to be pretty darn effective.
Really?
I know, it's really frustrating that this is the case.
But again, you know, that has a lot to do with the way
that the human brain is wired and likes to rewire itself.
Now, that said, it is important to envision goals,
visualizing goals in detail, writing them out,
in some cases talking about them,
although we can discuss that,
why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance.
And it can be very beneficial
because it's hard to conceive something
that you can't imagine.
But I think when people hear that visualizing goals
or visualizing outcomes is critical,
we sometimes forget that we don't always know
what the end goal is.
Sometimes we have to break this up into milestones.
This is where I think Rick Rubin,
even though he's not a formerly trained scientist,
has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity,
which is, you know, Rick is about largely, you know,
sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea
and being able to explore that
without too much self-judgment or filtering
or thinking about how it's going to be received.
In other words, that the metamorphosis
that leads to great music, great poetry,
great scientific discovery, podcasts,
finance companies that one is building, et cetera,
is a series of iterations
that occur on the time course of about a day, you know?
And so we can't always imagine the end
or the end product as the outcome.
This is why I said university is easy
compared to other goals because the end is a degree, right?
As you pick up your diploma.
Like, whereas in other areas,
it's far more mysterious often.
Now, visualization I think can be very powerful,
but perhaps what's more powerful
is to learn the brain and body state
that best serves the work you're going to do.
So for instance, if I'm going to do some writing
and right now I'm working on a book,
it's largely done, but I'm writing some bonus chapters.
Unless I'm hyper-motivated to do that
when I sit down and hyper-focused,
I'll spend two, three minutes just closing my eyes,
focusing on my breathing.
It's meditation of sorts,
but what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing
for two or three minutes,
how in the world am I going to focus on writing
for two or three hours?
That sort of thing.
The other thing that I want to make sure I don't forget
is I mentioned that telling people your goals
oftentimes can be useful if it stimulates
a little bit of fear, like you have some accountability.
But we also know that because of the affiliative nature
of people, in particular people that support us,
there is this danger.
A friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this.
He said, you know, be careful who you tell
that you're going to start a podcast or write a book
because oftentimes the response will be,
oh yeah, that's great.
You absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast.
And people get a sort of reward from telling people about it.
And then they never actually go do it.
Whereas I can cite numerous examples
of where people were told,
you're never going to be able to do that.
You're never going to be able to be successful in that.
And my goodness, those people dig their heels
and they show that they can do it.
Now, I get into debates about this with Rick
from time to time.
It's unclear to me whether or not the energy
around trying to prove oneself
is detrimental to the outcome.
And I sense it is, right?
This kind of grinding against like, take that and take that.
As opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft.
I think about the way I felt about aquaria and fish as a kid.
And it's just like pure delight.
That's the word that comes to mind, just delight.
I want to learn more about it.
I want to do it and tell people about it.
That's the wonderful romantic picture
of effort and progress and outcomes.
But in reality, you probably need both.
You need to be able to access some fear
and sense of competition, but also delight in craft.
Like Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One, as I recall,
defines competition as anti-creativity in many ways.
Because through competition, you are, by definition,
changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else
or something else.
And so you're morphing your creation
in order to kind of overcome something.
Whereas if you're just purely thinking about
something you want to grow and cultivate,
there are none of those barriers.
But in the worlds that I've been in,
science, to a lesser extent, podcasting,
and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting,
but certainly in science, it is hyper-competitive, right?
Two laboratories working on similar things.
People are concerned that if one publishes first,
the other will not be able to publish.
Certainly not in as high quality a journal.
And jobs are created through these journal publications.
Podcasting is actually a wonderful field,
because let's say you and I have the same guest
on our podcasts.
All it does is raise it in the algorithm.
It's not like, you know, and it's such a,
and so I think there's a lot of collegiality
and camaraderie in the podcast field
that exists in little pockets in science,
but science is a brutally competitive field,
which doesn't mean it's anti-creative,
but in a dream world where there's infinite amount
of money for scientific research,
because that would better humanity in my view.
And people didn't have to be competitive
about grant dollars or publication.
I think we would make far more progress as a species.
So competition fosters outcomes.
This is clear in markets, it's clear in a lot of domains,
but pure love and delight of craft and creativity,
that's definitely the way to go.
But in most endeavors, you gotta have both.
If sitting next to someone in class and realizing,
okay, because this was me back when,
I'm thinking, okay, I love this topic,
but gosh, I want that top mark.
I want that top mark on the distribution.
And like she and he are really, really good,
and we're gonna study together,
but my God, when it comes time for that exam,
like I'm going for it.
A little bit of competition
can bring out our best, I think, certainly in sport.
But when it comes to creative endeavors
that are really about our own unique contribution,
I mean, you could tell me more about this in business
because I don't, I have a company,
but I'm not a business person.
But I always feel like competition
can bring out more energy, but not more creativity.
Yeah, and I think a big point I was thinking
as you were talking was just about how much you let
that new energy that comes from competition distract you.
And it's the distraction that can destroy you.
Because if Apple are going this way
and they're building this product without the keyboard
and without the stylus, and that's they've got their vision
and they see Samsung doing over there, something over there.
And if they divert from their own mission
and their own first principles
towards what someone else are doing,
then that's when it can become destructive.
But if it means that they see Samsung doing something
and they speed up and invest more in their vision,
then it's okay.
I think that's, and it is this dichotomy
between competition does drive better outcomes
for everybody that's competing, but at the same time,
yeah, it can harm you if it distracts you
in a fundamental way.
It's kind of how I think about it.
Even with podcasting, like, you know, as you were saying,
there's so many podcasts is doing so many amazing things.
Like I look at your podcast and I learned from it,
but I know in my core and we all know
I'm never going to be Andrew Huberman.
And I'll never be you.
And I'll never be a Joe Rodin.
I'll never be a Lex.
And I admire your podcast very much and Joe's and Lex's.
I think it's, we each have our own unique style
that we bring to it.
Chris Williamson, you know, it's been a lot of fun
to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up
and how similar that is to the world I grew up in
and skateboarding, the observations from the music industry
that I saw firsthand or that, you know, Rick has passed along.
You know, in the end, I think any creative endeavor
is really about, and here I don't want to sound mysterious
or woo, it's about the energy that we bring.
It's about taking our life history
and bringing it to that thing in whatever form.
We don't even need to tell people our life history,
taking our unique wiring and bringing it to that thing.
And we can, again, look at things through the lens
of biology and say, well, what are we talking about
when we're talking about energy?
What is this energy thing that people are talking about?
And I think it largely boils down to these catecholamines,
the dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine cocktail
that is setting the brain into a mode of attention,
of motivation.
We now know dopamine is more about motivation
to seek rewards as opposed to feeling of pleasure or reward.
There's a lot to be said about that.
And keep in mind that these three neurochemicals,
dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine,
has been the neurochemical cocktail
by which humans and other mammals have set
and pursued goals for hundreds of thousands of years.
So we don't have like a unique system,
a unique neurochemical system
for seeking out of mates versus food,
versus creating shelter,
versus creating technology and whole societies.
And it's not just these three neurochemicals.
Certainly there are other things involved,
acetylcholine and a bunch of other things,
neuroplasticity for that matter.
But it's clearly the case that the currency
that the brain has set around getting us
into forward center of mass, as I say,
to like envision something, explore.
Nope, not down there, this way.
Ah, there's a scent here.
And trade out an actual scent for,
oh, there's something interesting here.
There's someone interesting here.
And like exploring that,
nope, that's a dead path to cul-de-sac.
Turn around, go, oh, here.
And then connecting these nodes of progress.
What's progress?
Ah, there's kind of another surge of these catecholamines,
which sets us in forward center of mass.
I don't wanna oversimplify the biology,
but when we talk about energy,
for instance, taking time to rest at night, sleep.
Taking time to maybe meditate a few minutes
or do this practice that I'm a huge fan of,
non-sleep deep rest,
which is kind of a body scan, deep relaxation, long exhales.
It's a practice very similar to an ancient practice
called yoga nidra,
which has been practiced for thousands of years.
It's a kind of pseudo sleep.
And we know from a really nice study
that an SDR, non-sleep deep rest, aka yoga nidra,
can increase the baseline levels of dopamine
in a brain area called the basal ganglia,
which is for action generation and also withholding action
by about 60% from baseline.
Just a short period of doing this practice
can kind of re-up dopamine levels to a considerable extent.
It's a remarkable study and there are others like it.
So what does that mean?
Well, it means that in rest,
we build up this capacity to be forward center of mass
when we emerge from rest.
That's why I think we have to sleep every 24 hours.
This is why practices where we deliberately calm ourselves
and still ourselves allow us to be more forward center
of mass mentally and physically afterwards.
It's kind of a duh when we hear it,
we kind of go, oh duh, of course, rest, action, rest, action.
But there's a lot more to it.
If you start exploring the layers,
you start realizing that excitement for things
versus burnout, what's burnout?
It's just trying to be forward center of mass for too long.
It's misuse of our dopamine circuitry.
It's ignoring the fact that these catecholamines
and dopamine in particular,
they are not infinite in their availability, right?
There's a reservoir of them that can be depleted,
but it can be replenished as well.
And one of the best analogies for this
was actually explained to me
by a guy named Dr. Kyle Gillette.
He does some online work as a public facing physician,
endocrinology in particular.
And he said, with dopamine, it's kind of like a wave pool.
You have this reservoir that can allow you to pursue things
or scroll the internet or build businesses, whatever it is.
If you are really forward center of mass very intensely,
you start generating these waves.
And if you get big waves of dopamine
and they crash out of the pool,
you start depleting the reservoir.
So when I think about drugs of abuse like cocaine,
which leads to huge surges in dopamine,
or amphetamines, huge surges in dopamine.
What do we know about huge surges in dopamine?
Well, after those huge surges,
you drop below your initial baseline
to a state in which the same thing
doesn't feel as good anymore.
You need so much more energy to get the same output.
That's what this is, right?
That's what this is.
I'll put this on the screen for anyone.
Yeah, so my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Ana Lemke,
who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic
and wrote the wonderful book, Dopamine Nation,
described this best.
You know, it's sort of like a seesaw,
but whereby you get a big peak in dopamine,
let's say from a drug of abuse like cocaine.
People on cocaine, it's all about ideas and what's next.
They're not like, hey, let's just kick back.
It's all about what's,
in fact, they have a million ideas per second.
Most of them are terrible ideas,
but they're very forward center of mass, motivated.
And then when the drug wears off,
they feel very low and very depressed.
The dopamine is actually depleted below baseline.
People that work excessively, right?
We all have different abilities to work out,
but people that work excessively and abuse stimulants
in order to do that achieve these peaks.
Is that like, so what would be an everyday example
of that working excessively?
Do you mean like a pre-workout or something?
What do you mean?
Yeah, I'm not anti-pre-workout.
Listen, I love to be well rested, hydrated,
have a nice pre-workout drink,
maybe even a little shot of espresso,
listen to some music and have an incredible leg day workout.
It's an amazing feeling, right?
But if you do that every single time,
you start stacking all these catecholamine
release inducing drugs, okay?
So you're getting adrenaline, you're getting epinephrine,
which is adrenaline, excuse me.
You're getting adrenaline, you're getting noradrenaline,
also called norepinephrine.
You're getting dopamine release.
You're highly motivated.
You're in that state that everyone is seeking
and you try and do that seven days a week,
you're not gonna do it.
And then you wonder why in the afternoon
you're just completely cooked
and you can't do any cognitive work.
Well, your dopamine and other things
have crashed below baseline.
So I think it's important to understand that being,
as I'm calling it, forward center of mass,
like really kind of motivated and pursuing goals is great.
But most of the time we're probably best off
just coming off the gas pedal just a little bit
to maintain that ability to continue
to be forward center of mass.
The same thing is true for stress.
We hear stress is bad.
Well, stress is bad,
but it also sharpens your ability to learn.
It creates energy.
It actually boosts your immune system in the short term.
I say tolerate as much stress as you can,
provided you still behave like a kind person, right?
Don't say or do things that are unkind
and make sure that you still get great sleep at night.
Most people stress, stress, stress, stress, stress,
run around and then they can't sleep at night.
And then the next day they're depleted.
But a little bit of stress is healthy.
Life is stressed.
Things are stressful.
But again, you're going to be in your best state of mind
if you're calm and alert.
Alert and calm is the magic recipe
and the ability to sleep at night.
If you want to take a bunch of pre-workout
and you want to listen to some loud music
and have a great crush at workout, great.
But you should probably also be able to train
without all of that.
If you're somebody who loves new goals
and you're very excited about travel and this and that,
great, but do you have to layer in 50 things?
And then you're sitting around at home
and you're wondering why you're so bored
when you're back home and why life is so depressing
and you need more travel, more stimulation.
In every domain of life, we see whether or not it's food
or exercise or stimulants or sex or media.
If you push things to the max,
you're going to feel depleted and understimulated afterwards.
And this trough below baseline,
as Anna Lemke taught us with dopamine nation,
that trough is a state that can last a long time
and it's how long it's proportional
to how high that peak in dopamine was.
Not how long, but how high that peak in dopamine was.
And when you're in that trough, that dopamine depleted state,
typically what people do is they try and go out
or access things that are going to reactivate
the dopamine circuitry.
And all it does is drive them further and further
and longer and longer into that trough.
What's needed is a period of waiting,
of non-indulgence in any of these excesses
that allows them to return to baseline.
We know this from drugs of abuse.
It takes more and more drug to try and get
what turns out to be less and less of a high.
Most all addiction, most all compulsive behavior
can be cured essentially through a period of abstinence
lasting somewhere between 30 and 60 days,
which to somebody who's highly motivated
to seek that thing or do that thing
sounds like an absolute horror,
but that is highly effective.
So for some people it's work and stimulants,
you know, a number of people taking Adderall
and work, work, work, work, work.
I hear from these people all the time.
Typically they are from the tech and finance world.
And they're like, why am I burnt out?
Well, you've been blasting
these catecholamine regulated circuits for years.
You need to just accept
you're going to feel a little low for a week.
Then you're going to feel a little less low.
And you're going to come back to baseline.
And then, and only then can you really get back
into like full forward center of mass.
But at that point you can introduce, you know,
I do think there is a clinical use case
for certain ADHD meds, which are amphetamine.
There are certain people that need those meds.
Other people have driven themselves
into this dopamine trough.
And so they're seeking out anything and everything
to get them out of that trough.
When really what they need to do is stay away
from all that stuff and just wait, just wait.
Go on holiday or something.
Go on holiday, try and find reward in smaller things.
You know, this is why dogs are wonderful in simpler things.
And if that sounds heavy and dull to you,
chances are you're a bit in the dopamine loop.
I've been in these loops before.
They're hard to exit, but once you exit them,
you look back on them and you go, what was I thinking?
Well, you were in a different state.
You're kind of a different animal when you're in pursuit.
I think this is so unbelievably important
because it really helps people to understand
why they do what they do.
And before doing a research on you coming here today
and before understanding some of this stuff,
I thought dopamine was, I don't know,
it was this thing that came in these hits maybe.
And if I did something, I got ahead of it.
Then I returned to baseline.
If I did something again, stimulating,
I'd got ahead of it, then I returned to baseline.
But what actually is happening is I'm doing something
that's stimulating in some way.
I'm getting this huge peak,
then I'm crashing below baseline for a while.
And when I'm below baseline,
that's when I'm most likely to want to do something
that's going to give me a hit again.
And when I saw that, it reminded me of the CGI monitor,
the continuous glucose monitor that I wore,
because it was a very similar pattern.
If I had a lot of sugar, I had a big peak,
then I crashed below my baseline.
That's a great observation.
It's the perfect analogy, perfect analogy,
because these regulatory systems
are all about trying to maintain homeostasis.
We all hear about, we learn about homeostasis,
like the desire for balance,
that the human body and human physiology
is actually geared more towards something called allostasis,
which involves kind of stress modulation,
but without getting into too many details.
These are dynamic systems,
meaning brain systems that are designed
to allow us to overcome challenges if need be.
This is why I always push back on the idea
that stress crashes your immune system.
You know what crashes your immune system?
Being very, very stressed, working a lot a lot,
caretaking for someone else, and then stopping.
You always get sick when you stop.
Because actually, stress activates the immune system.
Makes sense that it would do that evolutionarily, right?
And then when we rest, boom,
our immune system kind of relaxes a little bit,
and then we succumb to the bacteria or virus.
So what does it mean?
It means that we should probably learn to modulate.
It's like driving a car.
Anytime we feel that we're headed toward or in a peak state,
we should probably kind of like lean back off that state
just a tiny bit, just a tiny bit,
especially if that peak state is coming
by way of pharmacology or some extreme circumstance.
Just back off a little bit, maybe a lot, okay?
So when we do that,
we learn to master the transition states between these,
what I'm referring to as forward center of mass,
flat-footed or back on my heels.
It's a term I learned from a former Navy SEAL operator.
He said, with anything in life,
you can either be back on your heels,
like really challenged, flat-footed,
kind of like common and forward,
or forward center of mass, like full tilt.
I think most people would do very well
to learn to master the transition states
between waking and going to sleep, right?
Many people can't fall asleep.
Many people just kind of can't turn it off.
You can learn how to do that
by doing things like non-sleep deep rest,
some long exhale breathing,
simple self-directed zero cost tools
that help adjust your autonomic nervous system
to be more what we call parasympathetic,
more rest and digest, just long exhales.
Might not work the first time,
but over time these become very effective tools
to self-direct the shift from forward center of mass
to flat-footed to just kind of laying back on your heels.
And there you go, you're off to sleep.
When you wake up in the morning,
some people are just depleted.
Maybe you didn't sleep enough,
but learning to get forward center of mass
shouldn't require excess caffeine and stimulants
and super loud music and a shocking text or email.
Ideally, you can transition pretty quickly
into being forward center of mass,
but not full tilt forward center of mass.
And why do I say this?
I think for anyone who seeks to be successful
in any domain, academics, business, creative endeavors,
whatever, if you want to have a long arc life
and a long arc career,
you really strive to control these transition states.
And when I say control,
all it really takes is paying attention to them
and paying attention to the fact that,
yes, some people just have inherently more energy.
They can do every single workout at max output,
then shower, they're talking in the gym,
then they're off to the, some people are like that.
Some people like myself,
if I give 100% to something in the morning,
by the afternoon, I'm a little bit depleted.
So I require a 10 or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest
or a nap or just some quiet, long exhale breathing,
maybe a little bit of caffeine, which I'm drinking now.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with healthy stimulants
provided they're consumed in moderation.
Maybe an energy drink, those can be great too,
for some people.
And then, you know, really going like full tilt,
focusing one's attention.
And then afterwards, taking a few moments,
just moments to downshift.
I think we hear so much about the power of meditation
or non-sleep deep rest or ice baths.
What do cold plunges and cold showers do?
They stimulate the release of what?
The catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine,
norepinephrine, long duration release.
That's why it's useful in my opinion.
For all the debate about deliberate cold exposure,
does it increase metabolism?
Does it not?
The answer seems to be probably not much,
but it's absolutely clear that it causes a huge increase
in adrenaline, dopamine, and norepinephrine
that are very long lasting.
And that makes you feel great,
especially when you get out of the cold.
And I think that's the value of it.
It also saves you on your heating bill.
Like you don't have to have a cold plunge,
you take a cold shower.
Nobody likes it, but the point is you get out
and you feel different, it's a state shift.
So that's great, but you don't want to do it to excess
because then, you know, for instance,
people always say,
how long should I go in the cold plunge or cold shower?
And I say, do it the minimum amount
so that you get the effect that you're seeking,
which is to be more alert and motivated.
I have a friend, he did 30 minutes,
for some reason naked.
He said, I did 30 minutes naked in the cold plunge,
and then I got sick and I'm feeling really low.
And I'm like, because you did 30 minutes.
I mean, I don't know about the naked part,
what that had to do with it.
But you had to throw that in there.
He's kind of an extreme guy.
And I said, how about one minute?
How about 30 seconds?
How about, don't even pay attention to the time.
Just get in and stay in as long as
until you want to get out,
and then push through that barrier and then get out.
That might be a minute, might be three minutes.
You know, protect yourself, be safe,
but just learn to overcome some challenge and then get out.
You know, we have this fixation that more is better
and more is not better.
You want the minimal effective dose,
maybe a little bit more
because we don't know where minimal is.
People say, how many sets in the gym?
Is it, you know, now it's like all about
the volume hypertrophy or like,
I've always fairly low recovery quotient.
So for me, I like to do a couple of warmups,
a few hard sets, two or three hard sets,
another exercise, two or three hard sets.
That's it for that muscle group, move on.
People always say, well, volume is where it's, okay, great.
But when I do 16 to 20 sets per week per muscle group,
I'll tell you, I'm depleted.
It doesn't work for me.
And I sort of, well, I'll just be honest,
I kind of chuckle at the exercise scientists who say,
well, this is the way it is in this study.
Great, that's not how it works for me.
And even though I'm a scientist and I trust data,
I also trust my own experience.
And no one's going to tell me that it's placebo
because it's what's worked for me.
So I think that you have to find what your capabilities are.
And I do think if you look at dog breeds,
of which I'm obsessed by, if you go to a dog show,
which everyone should go to a dog show once,
but don't watch the show, go behind the show
where you see all the different dog breeds.
What you'll see is what I saw the first time I did that.
You have dogs where they're wagging their tail all the time.
They're super excited.
They're alert.
You can see their eyes, right?
They're just bright eyed.
You can see the Great Danes.
They're super still.
And then my favorite breed, and the reason I own them,
is the bulldog.
The essence of economy of effort.
They don't even lift their head off the ground.
You walk over, you pet them, they'll like look up at you.
They might wink.
Very still animals.
Very powerful, but very still animals.
Now I'm not wired like that
as you're probably getting the impression.
I have a little bit more spontaneous movement, et cetera.
So I need a lot of mental and physical stimulation
in order to be happy, in order to feel fulfilled.
So for me, there was a lot of work
and I still do a lot of work
in order to learn how to downshift,
take it down, become a good sleeper,
become a good resetter,
reset myself during the middle of the day
with things like non-sleep deep rest,
which for me has been one of the most powerful tools
or long exhale breathing to just bring myself down.
Other people, they tend to have a little bit less energy
than life demands of them.
So they need to do a bit more cold shower,
a little bit more caffeine,
but then those people probably need a little bit more rest.
They're like the bulldogs of life.
I think even though we're all the same species,
just like dogs, there's a lot of variation there.
So you have to know thyself, as the Oracle said,
understanding a little bit about the catecholamines,
understanding that certain things like exercise,
deliberate cold exposure,
stimulants like caffeine and prescription drugs
like Adderall, et cetera,
powerfully caused the release of these catecholamines,
dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine,
leading to big increases in energy and focus,
but then always, always, always there's a cost,
a trough that follows, accept that, relax through it,
then return to baseline and then go forward,
or avoid those things altogether.
I'm not telling people what to do.
Obviously the prescription drug thing in particular
can be problematic for some people, even addictive.
And certainly I'm not a fan of drugs of abuse
like cocaine, amphetamine, absolutely, categorically,
never done them, never will.
And then other people who tend to veer toward
being hyperactivated, a lot of spontaneous movement.
These people tend to be a little bit thinner,
a little bit leaner, or just have a ton of natural energy.
These people should really learn to incorporate
more kind of what I would call calming
and relaxing practices,
maybe a bit more sauna than cold plunge.
Maybe don't crank the sauna to 220.
I find myself doing that.
I'm like, just relax, enjoy the sauna.
And so I think the key to a good life and a productive life
is again, to learn to master the transition states,
understand some of the biology,
and to really know yourself,
not just your natural tendency, more bulldog-like
versus, I don't know, pit bulls always have their tail going,
a lot of spontaneous movement.
There are other breeds as well.
But also know that on any given day,
you may be more or less rested.
You might be more or less depleted from life experience
and kind of recognize where you're at
and figure out what's optimal for that day.
In fact, I forget who the guy is, he's on Instagram,
and there are a lot of self-help account,
then there are a lot of self-help accounts out there.
But one of the best things that I've heard recently,
and I try and incorporate it into my life,
in fact, it's in my notebook,
is when I wake up in the morning,
I sort of take stock of where I am
in terms of how rested I am.
I certainly take stock of what I need to do that day.
And then I ask, what's something that I can do
to make my life that day and the life of others better?
Sometimes that means rest a little bit more.
Sometimes that means push a little bit more.
Sometimes that means call a relative
that you haven't spoken to.
But thinking about how to make things better
on the timescale of a day for oneself and for others,
I think is what's manageable and it's what's realistic.
And it takes this whole concept of protocols and biohacking
and prescription drugs and supplements and workouts
and it brings a real world perspective to it.
So I think we're living in the time of kind of
almost avatars of these different things.
Like I think about David Goggins, who I know well.
Well, from the perspective of coworker, right?
I consider him a friend,
but we've never hung out outside of the work context.
But I first met David back in 2016.
And I'll tell you, he's always that way,
at least when I've interacted with him.
He's always been, you know, forward center of mass.
It was late in the day on a work.
This was a thing in Silicon Valley.
It was down in San Jose, Santa Clara, San Jose area
in, I believe it was 2016.
And we had been working all day
in this part of this consult for this company.
And in the afternoon, you know, there was like,
do we take a break or do we push?
He's like, no, we push.
We're going to do this.
And I thought, well, like this guy's intense.
And he was changing
because he was going to run to the airport,
but not run to the airport in an Uber
or drive to the airport.
He meant run to the airport and he did.
So, you know, he's forward center of mass.
He clearly has the energy or he's found the energy.
Can you train that?
Can you raise your sort of baseline dopamine level?
Or are they two separate questions?
It's a great question.
I don't know that we have the answer.
I think you can, if you become more economical
about whatever dopamine or other neurochemicals
you happen to harbor inside.
We know there's a lot of genetic
and individual variation to these things.
You know, there's a joke among parents, right?
Like how they come out is how they stay.
Like the mellow kid, the mellow baby that didn't cry much.
The happy baby remains the happy person.
There are circumstances that can alter that
versus the fussy baby that's always fussy.
As even as an adult, you know, parents talk this way,
but parents say all sorts of things.
But, you know, I know people, for instance,
like Rick Rubin, for instance,
who is very high energy, but very calm.
It's part of Rick's magic.
He knows how to regulate and control his energy.
He has this uncanny capacity to get near things,
in particular, art, music,
and to experience them, really feel them,
but not get absorbed by it.
Not feel, at least to my knowledge, depleted by it.
Some people get kind of absorbed by things
and then depleted.
It's just like the introvert-extrovert conversation as well,
because two people can be in the same room,
and I consider myself to be a bit of an extrovert,
sorry, introvert, where if I stand in a room
for two to three hours doing small talk,
I, the way I describe it, it's like my brain feels fried.
Whereas my assistant, Sophie,
it's like you've poured fuel into her.
Yeah, I'm similar to you,
and I have an ex-girlfriend who loved parties.
She would just get so much energy from parties,
and I like certain parties,
but I like the small conversation I might have at a party.
So that resonates with me.
I think we can shift, well,
to answer the introvert-extrovert question,
I do think that some people get energy
from social interactions, other people less so,
but I know people who are quite quiet
who like social interactions.
They're just more an observer in those interactions,
as opposed to a participant.
The introvert-extrovert thing also,
at least my understanding of the science,
is that it depends a bit on how quickly you fill up
with social engagement.
Like, I like a good party, but after a couple hours,
I'm like done, you know,
and other people, they can just go, go, go, go, go, go, go.
They get more energy from it.
I think, you know, we think of Goggins
as kind of an iconic example, because he is,
of somebody who is capable of pushing himself,
regardless of what the internal narratives might be.
That's my sense, having spoken to him about it
on my podcast and observed him on social media
and other podcasts.
Some people like Jocko Willink embody the,
don't even think about it,
you do it because it's 4.30 in the morning,
and at 4.30 in the morning, you work out.
Like, don't think, do.
Whereas when I think of David, I think of many things,
but in particular about overcoming the voice in the mind
that's trying to pull you down and defeating that.
In fact, having multiple representations of self
in the brain, which is a fascinating thing unto itself.
And then when I think about Rick,
I think, you know, Rick is iconic in my mind
for his sense of creativity,
his ability to sense what is truly new and unique.
He has incredible taste, right?
To really be able to sense like this is new
and different and exciting.
And he seems to understand without trying to seek
what people are going to like, what people inevitably love.
So that's his, one of his many superpowers.
And everyone has their superpower.
Those are just so extremes.
I think of Lex Friedman as somebody who is so thoughtful.
And I mean, I don't think people really understand
just how hard Lex thinks about the tragedies of the world,
the darkness in the world,
but also the love that's in the world.
I mean, he really like hyper-affiliates
with what's happening in his mind.
And he's able to really like absorb himself in that.
And you can feel like he gets right up next to the fire,
like right up next to these things.
And I think he represents the kind of iconic example
of an explorer who will look anywhere,
even if people are going to give him a hard time for it,
but I think mostly people celebrate him for it.
So I think different people have different lenses on life
and different capacities.
I think if one wants to increase their baseline level
of dopamine, I think it's important to regulate
those peaks and troughs.
I'm not a believer in like never having peaks in dopamine,
a great wedding party.
Like I've been to some weddings where we just like
partied all night or great concerts.
I'm actually a huge fan.
It's kind of a genre of music I don't know much about,
but I've always loved that band, James.
Do you know the band?
We are James.
Oh, it's so good.
Okay, I'm gonna lose punk points for saying this,
but best live shows ever,
just the best live shows I've ever seen.
And I know there are,
and I know there are a lot of different ideas
about best live shows based on genres of music.
It's like the best party you've ever been to.
And I get a lift in energy that lasts two,
three days from that.
I don't consume any substances at those shows.
They happen very seldom, but when I've gone
for two or three days, I feel like a changed person.
It's a market shift in neurochemical state.
And I don't feel a trough afterwards.
So I wanna be very clear.
There are certain things like celebrations, concerts.
They seem to give us these big surges in neurochemicals,
but they don't leave us depleted.
And I'm very intrigued by these experiences
because when I look to some examples,
I have some friends who've been very successful
in the tech sector and finance sector,
they make a lot of money.
And I always worry about them afterwards.
Inevitably, they end up depressed,
not knowing what they wanna do.
So I always encourage them to keep working.
In fact, the happiest people in tech and finance
are the ones that keep working even after they get rich.
So the people I see who are very happy
are the people who take stock of their natural levels
of energy, curiosity, motivation.
We could say dopamine, but that's kind of a surrogate
for a bunch of other things.
And it's incomplete, right?
There are other chemicals involved,
but for sake of conversation, we could say dopamine,
catecholamines, epinephrine.
And you sort of know what they're capable of
on a consistent basis.
I think one of the best pieces of advice
that I ever got was from a neurologist
by the name of Bob Knight when I was a graduate student.
He said, figure out how much work you can do
over the course of the next four to five years
on a consistent basis,
because it's gonna change as you get older,
might not even go down.
So for instance, I know that I can work
a good solid 12 hours a day.
That's me, 12 hours a day, five, maybe six days a week,
but I like one full day off per week.
I just like that.
Typically it's Sunday for me.
I'll do some exercise and some other things,
but if I try and go 15 hours a day
or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,
I'm gonna run aground.
For other people, they need to work less.
And now some people will say,
okay, but do you have kids?
And this and that, I'm not saying what work means.
It could be career, it could be family or both,
but I'm not somebody who has an infinite amount of energy,
but I have a lot of energy.
If you have less energy, you can do things
like try and get great sleep,
try and eat as well as you possibly can.
You may have to do more to get more energy,
but sort of have to accept your own kind of baseline state.
And I think, I certainly know many people
who are like mellower, calmer,
have quote unquote less energy.
They're just more efficient with that energy.
They place it correctly.
They're not wasting their energy.
I know people that can scroll Instagram all the time,
talk about what's going on on Twitter,
watch three podcasts, program and do a million things.
I'm like, they're fine.
So I think we have to know where our groove is
and that we can deviate from that about 15 to 20%,
but anything more extreme than that,
we're gonna end up in trouble.
I think a lot of the reason why people are curious
about dopamine is because ultimately they want
to be more productive or effective
at some goal they have in their life.
So it might be building a business.
It could be some, it could be a podcast, whatever.
So taking everything you know about dopamine
and how it works, if you were giving me advice
on how I could be a better entrepreneur, podcast
or whatever, the first thing I got from you
was really about this idea of transitioning between states
and also allowing time for my reserves to replenish
after a high dopamine activity.
Is there anything else that I should be thinking about?
Yeah, so we could operationalize this in a very clear way.
Get enough sleep for you.
For some people it's six hours.
For some people it's eight hours.
I'd like to dispel the myth,
even though my friend Matt Walker will probably get upset
at me for saying this.
Not everyone needs eight or nine hours of sleep.
Okay, I got six last night, okay?
Actually went to bed at midnight last night.
Oh, excuse me, I got six hours and 45 minutes last night.
I went to bed at midnight, which is kind of late for me.
Woke up at 6.45, but get enough sleep.
If you wake up in the morning
and you can't get more sleep for whatever reason,
can't fall back asleep or you have to get out of bed.
If you do not feel rested, I recommend doing a 10
or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest or a yoga nidra protocol.
They are available zero cost on YouTube.
You could put NSDR my name.
If you want to listen to me do one.
You could put NSDR Kelly boys does wonderful yoga nidras.
She has a very pleasant voice.
If you prefer a female voice,
there's some wonderful yoga nidras
by a woman named Kamini Desai.
Anyway, these are all zero cost scripts
that are available on YouTube.
What is that?
So non-sleep deep rest, similar to yoga nidra.
You did one today.
I did one today on the way here.
Yeah, here's what we know it does.
Replenishes baseline levels of dopamine
in the basal ganglia, prepares you for action,
both mental and physical action,
can indeed help offset some of the sleep
that maybe you didn't get, but you needed.
We know that the brain goes
into a kind of pseudo sleep in this state.
And there's also some evidence that yoga nidra
and similar practices can improve rates of learning.
Okay, so that's sort of the benefits.
What is it?
It involves what most people will call meditation,
but it's different than meditation.
You lie down, you could do it seated as well,
but you lie down, eyes closed,
and you do long exhale breathing.
When we exhale, we actually slow our heart rate down.
I could talk about how this is.
This is through respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
This is a relationship between the vagus nerve
and the beating of the heart.
But in any case, when we inhale,
our heart actually speeds up, it's beat slightly.
And when we exhale, it slows down, it's beat slightly.
So it involves a lot of long exhale breathing.
It involves a body scan where you deliberately relax
different aspects of your body.
So your first, your feet, then your legs and your hands,
it's sort of a body scan of sorts with long exhale breathing.
And it takes you into a state that's pseudo sleep.
You're somewhere between sleep and awake.
Now, the beauty of NSDR and yoga nidra
is that part of the instruction at the beginning
is to stay awake.
Now, if you fall asleep, it's okay.
Just make sure you set an alarm if you have to go to work
or do something else.
But by staying awake while being very relaxed,
it seems that the nervous system can continue to stay
in a sleep-like state enough that you replenish
some of these neurochemicals that prepare you
for cognitive and physical action.
Now, there are 10-minute NSDRs,
there are 20-minute NSDRs,
there are even hour-long yoga nidras
and things of that sort.
So it depends on how much time you have
before you need to get up.
So if you sleep well the night before,
you wake up after six, eight hours,
and you're ready to go, boom, go.
But if you're not, I highly recommend doing
a 10, 20, or 30-minute NSDR practice.
You will find that you will be far more rested.
You will feel far more mentally and physically vigorous
when you emerge from that.
It's remarkable.
And Matt Walker's laboratory and I are gearing up
to do some studies on this
to figure out exactly what's happening.
Is the brain really going into sleep
or is it something entirely different?
We don't quite know yet.
In any event, it most certainly works.
And soon we'll know the exact mechanism in the brain,
but this re-upping of dopamine is very, very clear
from the existing studies.
So what are you doing there?
You're essentially filling the reservoir
for the day of activities, okay?
Then I recommend hydration,
which has a profound effect on energy levels.
So 16 to 32 ounces of water.
People debate, drink out of plastic
or don't drink out of plastic.
Do you have to purify your water, et cetera?
Listen, it depends on budget and interest
and level of paranoia.
I drink a filtered water.
I tend to drink out of ceramic or glass,
but I am somebody who will occasionally drink
out of a plastic water bottle.
I'm not neurotic about that sort of thing,
but look, if you are, fine.
And we could all do well to limit the amount
of plastic waste in the oceans.
So there you go.
Hydrate.
Then some people like myself do very well
to get some exercise and sunlight,
ideally simultaneously, but certainly get some sunlight
and exercise prior to caffeine.
Some people do, some people don't, okay?
I also understand and totally support people
who just want their coffee or tea first thing in the morning.
There's no rule that says that you can't do that.
But for me, what I would do is I'd get up,
use the restroom if you need to,
hydrate and then get some bright light in your eyes,
ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning.
Why?
Well, there's a whole story about circadian biology here
that I could tell you,
but I've done that many times before.
Suffice to say that getting bright light,
ideally from sunlight in your eyes,
even through cloud cover,
so if you're in the UK, even through cloud cover,
increases the amount of cortisol release
in your brain and body markedly.
That is a good, healthy increase in cortisol
that is associated with the transition to waking up.
So we know that bright light in the morning,
especially from sunlight, increases daytime mood focus
and alertness, and it will improve your sleep
later that night.
Can I ask then?
Because I woke up in a hotel this morning
and because of you, I now think about sunlight a lot.
So I woke up and I have a balcony in the hotel,
but I can't see the sun
because the sun is on the other side of the hotel.
Right, so you're west facing in the morning
and it's coming up in the east.
So here's the ideal circumstance.
You go outside, you take your sunglasses off,
eyeglasses and contacts are fine,
even if they have UV protection.
You face east, it's a clear morning, the sun is there.
Maybe it's even rising across the horizon
and you watch it for five, 10 minutes
and then you go back inside and carry about your day.
Here's the realistic situation.
You wake up, you're in a hotel or an apartment,
you've got things to do, your phone is on, et cetera.
What do you do?
Get out onto the balcony, get some natural light.
The ambient light, as we say, is still far brighter outside,
even on an overcast day,
then it would be indoors
with the brightest possible overhead lights.
Now, there are seasonal effective disorder lights,
so-called satellites that are designed
to generate 10,000 lux or more and simulate sunlight.
There's really no simulation for sunlight,
but those special lights are a special circumstance.
Here's what I know for sure.
And everyone will agree that it's much brighter outside,
even on an overcast morning, than it is at night.
Okay, you can see even on an overcast day,
typically without a flashlight,
that tells you there's a lot of photons,
a lot of light energy outside.
So the best thing to do is just get outside,
especially on overcast days,
and get some ambient light in your eyes.
When I say view morning sunlight,
as soon as possible after waking up,
two questions always emerge.
First is, what happens if I wake up
before the sun comes out?
Well, listen, unless you have powers that I'm not aware of,
you're gonna have to wait for the sun to come out.
Okay, I just don't have any way
to make it rise any faster for you.
So, and if you do, please like email me
and let me know how that's done.
But the point here is that on an overcast day,
or even if you're not looking in the direction
that the sun happens to be rising,
you're still getting sunlight.
The photon energy is what arrives at your eyes,
eventually triggers activation of cells
in the neural retina,
this pie crust-like tissue that lines the back of your eyes
and signals to your brain, it's time to wake up.
So when I say view morning sunlight,
a lot of people think they need to see the sunrise
across the sunset.
I don't mean you need to see the sun as an object,
you need to see the light emitting from the sun.
And even on overcast days, that's there.
Now on densely overcast day in the thick of winter
in the UK or Scandinavia, it can be quite dark
even in the morning and throughout the day.
In that case, you'll really wanna strive
to get some bright artificial light exposure
in the morning and throughout the day as well.
But this business of getting sunlight,
and we can put light in capital letters,
not necessarily seeing the sun as an object,
but getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day
increases that cortisol peak and its duration.
This is great for your immune system,
it's great for alertness.
And when we hear cortisol, normally people think bad,
oh, cortisol is bad.
No, cortisol is terrific, you need cortisol.
Trust me, people who have deficits in cortisol production
or regulation have all sorts of problems.
We're talking about getting a healthy,
big increase in cortisol early in the day
that carries your energy until the evening
and then the cortisol drops off.
What about shift workers?
Shift workers, God bless them, they're essential
for so much of what we do and consume and need,
so we have to be grateful to them.
They unfortunately are in a very compromised health state.
Often they have digestive issues, mood issues,
it's a real problem and it's very dependent
on the particular shift.
The worst case scenario for them is the swing shift
where they're working days, then they're working nights
on the order of three days on, three days off, et cetera.
It's terrible.
We know that health outcomes
for shift workers are so much worse.
We know that a few things can help.
For instance, regular meal and exercise times.
We know that red light, and here I'm not talking
about red light therapy, I'm talking about working
under lights that are a bit more red shifted,
long wavelength shifted as we say,
as opposed to bright fluorescent lights,
can help reduce some of the cortisol release associated
with shift work that occurs at the wrong times.
This is a pretty nuanced topic that again,
depends on the shift.
Ideally, one doesn't work shifts their entire life.
If you absolutely have to do shift work,
go to your boss, tell them I said this,
try and stay on the same schedule,
even if it's a nocturnal schedule,
which is the most unhealthy schedule,
try and stay on the same schedule for at least two weeks
before shifting back to another schedule.
If you're somebody who's required to stay up
until three in the morning and then sleep
until 11 a.m., does that mean that viewing morning sunlight
your morning at 11 30 a.m. is not useful?
No, it's still useful.
Try and keep things as regular as possible.
That's my advice.
But for people who are on a typical,
what we call diurnal daytime active,
as opposed to nocturnal nighttime active schedule,
this business of hydration, sunlight, movement,
even if it's skipping rope for five minutes
or jogging in place or just swinging one's arms
or getting a little walk in the morning,
immensely beneficial.
If you can do a full workout first thing in the morning,
great, if you don't have time for that
until later in the day,
I'll be the first to say exercise
when you can do it consistently.
So don't think that if you don't work out in the morning
that you shouldn't do it later.
We know everybody for sake of longevity and immediate,
I guess what we call health span and lifespan
and wellbeing for that matter should be doing
at least two or three days per week
of resistance training of some sort.
It's true for men, women and cardiovascular training
in order to ensure healthy neuromuscular connections,
brain health, heart health.
This is just very, very clear.
If you do that early in the day, fine.
If you do that on your lunch hour, fine.
If you do that in the evening, fine.
Just make sure whatever you do in order to get that workout,
whatever caffeine or pre-workout that you're taking,
doesn't inhibit your ability to get a great night's sleep
because sleep is the ultimate restorative.
It's what really is the foundation of mental health
and physical health.
And I can say if you want to be,
because this question started off,
what can you do to be, you know,
have the best dopamine system,
the best energy, the best creativity,
as you move through your day, notice your energy levels.
Eat, well, certainly I believe that people should eat
mostly non-processed or minimally processed foods.
That's very clear regardless of whether or not
you're vegan, vegetarian, omnivore or carnivore.
And eat amounts and foods that allow you
to have sufficient mental energy.
So for me, that largely means high quality protein
and fibrous vegetables and fruit throughout the day.
What's your advice?
Any carbohydrate with melted Parmesan cheese.
So thin crust pizza, pasta with Parmesan cheese,
especially if there's like a diet coke nearby or,
oh goodness, I can just consume, consume, consume.
It is very hard for me to hit my threshold with those things.
This is a slight tangent,
but I will return to this dopamine conversation.
It's related, but when you have that thin crust pizza
or all that, whatever food that spikes your dopamine,
for me, I've got a bit of a sweet tooth.
So that's my advice, carrot cake or something like that.
Oh yeah, carrot cake's good.
Especially if the ratio of the frosting to the cake part.
Yeah, it's all the ratio.
If it's too much frosting or too much cake.
Facts.
Yeah, exactly.
No go, but if it's just the right ratio.
So if I had that carrot cake yesterday,
which no one knows about, I kept it to myself,
but does that mean that I'm more likely
with the understanding of dopamine
to want carrot cake again tomorrow, the day after,
because I've gotten to a bit of a carrot cake cycle?
Because I think everybody,
when they think about their relationship with sugar,
understands that if they just laid off sugar
for like three or four weeks,
the craving seemed to die down.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
I don't think we have the exact answer.
Some would argue that we should have more
of a kind of balanced relationship with food,
whereby if we really crave something
that we should allow ourselves,
that provided it's not some addictive substance or something,
you don't want the addicts relapsing.
Here, we're talking about food.
We're not talking about drugs of abuse, et cetera.
But is food not addictive in the same way?
Well, food can be very compulsive.
I think some people are addicted to food.
I define addiction as a progressive narrowing
of the things that bring you pleasure.
We could probably attach to that.
The classic definition of addiction
is where continued consumption
or engagement in a given activity
is actually maladaptive for your life, right?
I mean, if you have four pieces of carrot cake this week,
I doubt given the shape that you're in,
it's going to shorten your life.
You might not feel great,
but it's not going to shorten your life.
You're certainly not going to lose your income
like somebody who's a gambling addict would.
This kind of thing.
You're not going to throw your life away
or go rob somebody in order to get that carrot cake.
But is it doing that?
And I'm pointing out the dopamine wave thing.
Am I having a dopamine crash?
You are.
And Anna Lemke describes this best.
And you can do this experiment.
It's kind of a fun experiment for you chocolate lovers.
Abstain from chocolate for say a week
and then pick your favorite chocolate
and take a little piece of that chocolate
and put it in your mouth and taste it.
And of course it will taste delicious.
It'll taste wonderful.
But if you notice very quickly,
your brain shifts to a sense of wanting more.
Not so much savoring the chocolate that you're eating,
but wanting more.
And you're thinking about,
well, how much am I going to take?
I'm going to take this square.
Oh, that other square next to it broke off a little bit.
Guess I got to eat that one too.
So that's the dopamine system in action.
And then what happens is you eat half the chocolate thing
and you go, oh, I don't feel that good about it.
But I kind of want more anyway.
Why?
Well, you're in that dopamine trough.
The same amount of something
is giving you diminishing returns.
What's the way to make that chocolate
taste absolutely fantastic again?
Abstain.
Now there's also an interesting phenomenon.
And this is why I said,
I can't be exactly sure how to answer your question.
Accurately that is.
I have several friends just by way of example,
who reached their forties quite overweight.
Fifties quite overweight.
30 to 60 pounds overweight.
And they'd come to me and they'd say,
I want to lose weight.
Every single one of them has been highly successful
in rapidly losing that weight
and keeping it off the following way.
And I'm not a nutritionist.
I say, you can eat meat, fish, eggs, chicken,
fruit and vegetables, and that's it.
And drink water and caffeine
and don't consume calories and beverages.
And every single one of them lost 30, 60 pounds
and has kept it off.
Now, Lane Norton and I,
who are friends and colleagues in the health space,
he'll say, well, they created a caloric deficit
and so they lost weight.
I'd say, absolutely.
I would also say,
and I think Lane would probably agree,
although there's no randomized control trial to prove this,
that in eating that way,
mostly whole unprocessed or minimally processed foods,
they did several things as well.
One is you start to learn the relationship
between how something tastes,
it's caloric value,
it's micronutrient and macronutrient value.
What do I mean?
When you eat a steak, like let's say a 12 ounce ribeye,
if that's in your nutrition plan,
meaning you allow yourself red meat,
let's say you eat that.
You taste it, it's very savory.
Hopefully it tastes really good.
If it's cooked properly, it's a great cut.
And your brain learns the relationship
between steak and calories and nutrients and amino acids.
There's this whole amino acid foraging hypothesis
of nutrition.
Then you eat fruit, you taste the fruit,
you actually taste it.
Now, this is far and away different
than if you're consuming hoagie sandwiches
and hamburgers and cheeseburgers.
There's something about removing the bread.
There's something about removing the pasta.
There's something about removing those foods
that I believe has nothing to do with those foods being bad.
In fact, I love bread and pasta,
high quality bread and pasta,
and I do consume those,
but I'm not trying to lose weight nor gain weight.
When people eat in that way,
meat, fish, eggs, chicken, fruits and vegetables,
and nothing else for a couple of months,
what every single one of them says is,
well, then we had this party,
and the kids were having birthday cake,
so I decided to allow myself a slice of cake.
They ate it, and it tasted disgusting to them.
Or they, in some cases, threw up,
where they just felt like it was gross.
Whatever positive association they had with it before,
it no longer exists.
And then they get right back on their,
let's call it diet, and they continue along their way.
And they're very relieved to learn
that they actually enjoy healthy foods.
I think that we can rewire,
in fact, we know that you can rewire your association
between nutritive value, taste of food,
calories, and micronutrients.
And so when I hear about
these highly restrictive elimination diets,
where people do only meat,
which frankly does not seem healthy to me,
I think some fiber from other sources is good,
although I'm sure Paul Saladino will come after me,
probably with a drumstick or something.
It's Jordan P.
Or Jordan, whatever Jordan's doing
seems to be working for Jordan,
so I'm not gonna argue.
People should do as they will,
but I'm an omnivore and enjoy that.
But I think when people do elimination type diets,
the more important thing is that they're learning
this association between taste and calories
that seems to really work for them,
and the pleasure of eating certain foods
and really dropping into the quality
and the taste of that food.
When we crave a food and it's kind of an indulgence food,
like chocolate or carrot cake or something,
it's more along this dopamine transition
from peak to trough.
Now, when I love steak, my dad's Argentine,
I'm half Argentine, so I love a great beefy chorizo
or like a, you know, like I love red meat,
but I don't eat two ribeyes, I eat one and I'm good.
And so I think that there's something very sating
about high nutritive quality food
that includes fruits and vegetables,
and the vegans have their choices
and the vegetarians have their choices.
And so, so much of what we think about
when we think about dopamine and food
is yes, highly processed foods, candy, package goods,
cookies, chips, they drive this craving for more,
but people don't actually enjoy them that much,
they just require them,
or at least they think they require them.
So I encourage anyone who feels addicted to those foods
to take a, you know, healthy approach,
when you consume enough calories,
don't go on a crash diet,
but try eating really high quality, unprocessed
or minimally processed foods for just a couple of weeks.
At first it's murder, they just can't do it.
And then inevitably they call me and they say,
I feel so much better
and I don't even want that stuff anymore.
It's interesting how that then correlates
with your own motivation.
And we fly out here to do this podcast
and we come out sometimes for two weeks, three weeks,
sometimes even four weeks,
and we all eat the same thing pretty much
throughout the day for those four weeks.
So it's almost a dietary intervention for me
because when we finish recording,
my food is gonna be there, I know what it's gonna be.
It's gonna be basically a salad with meat in it,
certain vegetables, et cetera.
And so it becomes this like intervention.
Going to LA is this dietary intervention.
And what happens is when I come here
and have that salad every day with various different meats
and various different vegetables every day,
is my motivation to go to the gym for some reason improves.
My sleep ends up improving.
And it's like that one sort of dietary intervention
has this really downstream impact on everything else.
I get in the best shape of my life.
I'm motivated, I feel good.
I drive around, it might also be the sunshine out here,
and I think people don't realize that even as you say,
a week or two, having that dietary intervention,
where are we intervention?
Cutting out the crap can have such a big reframing
on your perception of food, how you experience it.
And now I'm excited about the bloody salad.
Yeah, it's wild how healthy foods become more attractive
to us the more we consume them
and the more we avoid unhealthy foods.
I think also a lot of people don't know
how great you can feel getting some morning sunlight,
great sleep, eating nutritious food.
And once they do, once they experience that lift in energy
and mood, it's kind of addictive in its own right.
Now, I also think it's important
to not be too restrictive, right?
You know, around the holidays or something,
I mean, I love a great slice of pie, like I do these things.
I think if one gets enough movement, then you're fine.
You know, if nothing else, this whole kind of trend
toward the use of these GLP-1 glucagon-like peptide agonists
like Ozempic and Monjaro, if it's taught us anything,
it's that people are obese
because they consume too many calories.
They just ingest too much relative to their activity levels.
And here, in particular in the United States,
people are walking and moving far less.
Most people get no regular exercise
and they consume about 3,500 calories per day on average.
So they're just on a steady weight increase
for most of their life.
More activity, less food intake is fairly easy
to accomplish if you do just a few subtle things.
So there are these levers, these major levers,
like eating better, as you said, meat and salads.
I mean, it's one of the most satiating meals you can have.
I also find that if I consume fewer carbohydrates
during the day, this is just me.
It runs counter current
to most everything you'll read out there.
But I like to fast essentially until about 11 or noon,
just because I'm not hungry.
I like to exercise in the morning.
But then I'll have a lunch that is some meat, some salad,
maybe some starch, like a bowl of oatmeal or rice,
but not a whole lot.
And then toward evening, my final meal, dinner,
which is around seven or 8 p.m.,
generally includes a few more starches
and a little less protein, and I sleep best that way.
Some people, it's the opposite.
They like a big bowl of oatmeal
and just a couple of eggs in the morning
and some nuts in the afternoon
and then they like a big steak for dinner.
I think everybody's slightly different.
Some people are just naturally have more energy.
I think about Jocko Willink.
I mean, the guy has so much energy.
And I think it's not a coincidence
that he works out at 4.30 in the morning.
I think that if you work out early in the day,
you often have more energy throughout the day.
I find if I get my workout done before 9 a.m.,
I have more energy all day long.
However, if I work out mid-morning, late morning,
pretty sleepy in the afternoon.
Everybody's different.
Is there like a physiological rationale for that?
There probably is.
As our body temperature rises in the morning,
we are waking up.
So when we exercise,
we accelerate that transition toward being more alert.
Now in the afternoon,
when our body temperature typically peaks,
after that is usually when we get a bit sleepy.
Typically after lunch, people get sleepy sometimes
because of the volume of food they've eaten.
Most often it's because they've hit that temperature peak
in the early afternoon.
And we know that as body temperature drops,
one to three degrees in the evening and nighttime,
that's when we fall asleep.
In fact, in order to fall asleep,
your body temperature actually has to drop
by about one to three degrees.
This is why sticking a foot out of the, you know,
the comforter or if you have a cooling mattress,
which some people require because they run hot
or keeping the room cool facilitates falling asleep.
Although it's not completely the case,
so I should mention the best scenario would be cool room
with warm blankets to fall asleep.
And then toward morning, it's sort of a warmer environment.
We actually get a little bit more rapid eye movement sleep,
dream sleep, elaborate dream sleep toward morning.
So you can get really nuanced in this stuff.
All the biohackers know this, but you know,
basically if you work out early in the day, you know,
before eight or 9 a.m., it's going to accelerate
that increase in body temperature
and you'll feel more alert.
There's also this beautiful phenomenon
in circadian biology called entrainment, whereby,
let's say you're not a morning person, you hate mornings.
If you force yourself to get up and exercise at say 6 a.m.
for three days in a row, by the fourth day,
you'll naturally start waking up around that time
because the circadian clock of the brain,
we call the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
The main inputs that drive when you're alert
and when you want to be asleep are sunlight,
exposure to the eyes, this is the whole basis
for that morning sunlight exposure, physical activity,
when you eat and social engagement.
And there could be a whole discussion about this,
but suffice to say that if you start getting
some morning light, some exercise,
maybe even before the sun comes out, some caffeine,
hydration, and then a meal in the early part of the day,
your body will start to anticipate all of those activities.
And even if you're a so-called night owl,
you'll start to shift your clock toward being an early riser
and lo and behold, around 10 or 11 p.m.,
you'll start to notice you're getting sleepy.
Then you just have to have the discipline
to turn off the phone, put it in the other room
and go to sleep.
I wonder that, I do wonder if I'm a night owl
because of bad habits or because of some kind of biology.
Typically, people fall into one of three categories
and it is genetically determined of,
you can be a morning person, a more typical,
would be somebody who goes to sleep somewhere
between 10.30 and midnight,
wakes up between six and eight a.m.
And then the night owls who like to stay up
to one or two in the morning,
wake up around 10 or 11 a.m.
It changes with age.
I'm a bit of a weirdo in the sense that I like to do
most of my mental and physical work between six a.m. and noon.
Then I'm not super effective in the afternoon.
My brain doesn't work so well.
I can take care of some little things
unless I offset that.
And then between six p.m. and midnight, I'm alert again.
I don't know, maybe it's my Argentine roots, who knows?
So given it's the afternoon now
and I knew that we were going to be podcasting,
what I did is I did indeed get up at 6.45 a.m.
I did a bunch of work this morning
for the podcast, some other things.
And then on the way here, I did a non-sleep deep rest.
I listened to that for about 10 minutes.
I kind of sensed I was somewhere in sleep,
I don't quite recall.
And then when we arrived, I'm a little bit groggy,
a little bit of hydration, a little bit of caffeine,
and I feel completely alert.
So you can learn to offset these troughs and energy.
I think that at every stage of life,
meaning for every five-year block of life,
you can kind of predict what the best schedule
for you would be.
So when you're a baby, you slept all the time,
that's your best schedule.
When you were an adolescent, it was different.
I have a niece, she's 17,
and I went and stayed with my sister recently,
and it was unbelievable.
She went to bed at 10.30 at night,
probably fell asleep at midnight
because she was on her iPad with her friends.
She would wake up the next day at noon, it's summertime,
get up, say hello, get a glass of water,
go back to sleep, and sleep for another hour.
And that's exactly what she should be doing.
Why? Because she's growing, right?
She's in youth.
In your 30s, it might be a different schedule,
in your 40s, a different schedule.
And then of course, kids come along
and they force the schedule.
So I would say whatever stage of life you're in,
you probably know what the best schedule is for you,
and you just have to work with the realities of life.
But if you can adhere to that, knowing, okay,
you have a peak in energy and focus at this hour,
a peak in energy and focus at that hour,
by all means do it.
I mean, Rick Rubin shared when he came on my podcast
that his best day is to transition slowly into the day,
take a walk outside in the sun in the morning,
slowly into the day, and then he does his work,
really his main focused work in the afternoon
and in the evening.
Some people are more night shifted,
some people are more morning shifted.
I tend to get my best ideas, I think,
right before I get asleep, which is annoying,
because there's this temptation to go to my laptop
and begin writing and begin working.
Do you write them down?
Yes. Yeah.
I write down little cues and then my team will know
because it's useful when I'm on this timeframe
because my team in the UK are getting my memos
at 7 a.m. there.
Oh, right, right. But they don't know
it's like midnight or 1 a.m. here.
I'm so glad you mentioned this.
I think for people who are interested
in having a great life, a great career,
it's very important to have a mode of capture.
So for me, it's this notebook
and it's not just blank pages in front of me, I promise.
These are just like little things that come to mind.
Doesn't matter what's here.
And I place them into the notebook.
And then at the end of each week or so,
or if I'm on a plane, I'll start to look back and see,
you know, what are the ideas that feel sticky?
Like, oh, there's something there.
There's like a concept there.
I'm actually thinking about doing a drawing book
to teach neuroscience at some point.
I'm also very interested in animals.
So I was listing out, this is very embarrassing,
but the different animals that I feel I embodied
at different stages of my life and where I'm at now
because of the different energies.
And that is very personal, right?
Like in the sense that it's not gonna mean much
in the kind of classic neuroscience sense,
but I think having a mode of capture
for these thoughts that spontaneously arise
out of our unconscious mind.
I mean, that's what's happening
when you're falling asleep.
Your conscious mind, which is involved in thinking
and planning and organizing knowledge is starting to tire.
Those prefrontal cortex circuits are starting to tire
and your unconscious mind,
which is the main driver of all your ideas
and so much of what you are about as an individual
are starting to geyser to the surface.
This is why in dreams, even though it occurs in symbols,
we are playing with different ideas
and ordering of different ideas.
This is not Freudian, okay?
This is not just Jungian psychology.
We had an expert in this.
Dr. Paul Conti did a mental health series on our podcast
and he said, the bulk of your brain activity
besides the stuff that's just regulating breathing
and heart rate and digestion, et cetera,
is really devoted to this unconscious processing.
It's taking events from your childhood,
plans that you have that you don't even know yet
that aren't aware of yet.
Experiences that are happening today
and looking at those from different perspectives
and offering those to you in what?
In dreams, what are dreams?
In stories, in narratives that are really disrupted
in space and time.
A lot can happen in a short period of time.
Then you're in a different room.
Dreams are very distorted in terms of their representation.
But when you're falling asleep,
you're in that pseudo awake state, obviously,
where your thinking, planning and action parts of your brain,
your logical mind is turned off
and these ideas are geysering to the surface.
And this is why sometimes people have their best ideas
in the shower while walking,
when they're not trying to have ideas.
And you can see this by writing down a few things
before you go to sleep.
You can think, you know, like,
wondering what to do next year, don't know.
Okay, maybe it's that vague.
Does that mean you'll have a dream
that solves it that night?
Maybe, probably not.
But chances are, if you pay attention to, you know,
during the day, you'll be walking along
or for some reason this always happens to me
when I'm urinating.
I don't know why.
I don't know why.
Like I go, like, I don't know,
maybe it's because I'm relaxed.
Like I go, especially if I'm in nature and I'm hiking,
I'll go like, take a pee behind a tree.
And I'll be like, oh, I have an idea.
I don't know why it is.
I think it's because I'm not thinking about doing anything
except, you know, I'm digging a leak behind a tree.
I guess this is very forthcoming for me to admit this.
But, you know, some people stay in the shower,
other people while they're running.
One thing that I think is really useful
for coming up with ideas,
I seem to be mentioning Rick a lot today,
but one thing I observed when I spent time with Rick
is he has a kind of a practice,
although he's never said this formally,
where he'll be very still with his eyes closed.
And I thought, maybe he's meditating, maybe he's sleeping.
And it turns out, he told me
that his mind is very active in that time,
even though his body is very still.
Now, that sparked something in me
because I have a guest or had a guest on my podcast
by the name of Karl Deisseroth.
He's one of the luminaries in the field of neuroscience
and one of the best bio-engineers in the world.
He's also a psychiatrist, a brilliant guy.
And when he came on my podcast,
he said that he has a practice every night
after he puts his five kids to sleep.
He's one of these hyper-productive people
where he sits down and he makes himself
stay as completely still as possible
and forces himself to think in complete sentences.
And I thought, this is interesting
because it was also reported or purported
that Einstein would take walks
and then occasionally just stop
and let his mind continue in thinking
while he stopped his body.
And when you start looking back through history of science,
history of music, et cetera,
you'll find that there are these hyper-creative,
hyper-productive people that have a practice
of making their body completely still
and their mind very active,
not meditation where you're trying
to just focus on your breathing,
but they're actually actively thinking
while keeping their body very still.
Now, I find that fascinating.
I also find it fascinating that some people,
for instance, myself, if I take a long run,
which I do every Sunday,
I make it a point to run for 60 to 90 minutes every Sunday.
Not fast, but I just go, go, go, go, go.
Inevitably, during those runs,
I come up with some of my best ideas.
It puts my brain into a state where I can,
things geyser up from my unconscious mind.
And so that state of mind is one
in which the body is very active,
and I'm not trying to think about anything.
So you have these two inverse states.
One is body still mind active.
The other is body active, mind kind of free running,
kind of just like spooling out.
When I'm running, I'm not thinking about anything.
And then ideas spring to the surface.
In the neuroscience of creativity,
we know that there's a meditation practice
that's been studied called open monitoring meditation.
Most typical meditation is you sit or lie down,
close your eyes, maybe lotus position, maybe not,
and you concentrate on your breathing.
You bring your attention constantly back
to your third eye center.
Work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at NYU
has shown just 10 to 13 minutes of that practice every day
can improve memory, in particular working memory,
which is your ability to keep thoughts online,
lower stress and other benefits.
There's a different form of meditation,
which is open monitoring meditation,
where you sit or lie down, close your eyes,
and you actually are paying attention
to everything around you.
You focus your attention there in the room,
there in the room, there in the room,
or you just let it all just kind of sift over you.
You're not actually focusing on your breathing.
And that practice of open monitoring meditation
is associated with improved creative capacity.
Now, improved creative capacity in air quotes
is something that's measured in a laboratory.
So synthesis of new ideas, creative solutions
to a puzzle, et cetera.
We're not talking about writing great works of music,
but in a laboratory, you only have so many things
that you can sample or measure
clinically in undergraduate students.
So I'm kind of just tossing all of this out there
as a means for people who are interested
in improving their creativity or exploring creativity
to not just wait, not just wait, have a mode of capture,
write things down, or maybe jot them into your phone
or voice memos, maybe do open monitoring meditation,
maybe sit and force yourself to think in complete sentences
with your body still, maybe go for a long run or walk
where you're bored, you're not listening to anything
and see what comes up.
I think everyone does this differently,
but if you're able to access the state of mind,
it can be immensely powerful
because great ideas come to you.
So movement was the last one in the dopamine.
We were doing this nice dopamine, like tree things,
we did the NSDR, non-sleep deep breasts,
we did the hydration, exercise, sunlight.
If I'm trying to use what I understand now about dopamine
to be productive in my relationships,
but also in my professional life,
is there anything else I need to be thinking,
we also did food.
And you can spike your dopamine and epinephrine
and norepinephrine, the so-called catecholamines
with a cold shower or a cold plunge.
It is a state shifting tool.
That's really what it is.
I like to do sauna and cold at least once a week.
Most people don't have access to a sauna.
If you don't have access to a sauna, no big deal,
you could take a hot bath, just don't scald yourself.
And if you're a male-
Let's get how sauna is now,
because someone told me that it might fry my sperm.
Oh yeah, let's have a very frank discussion about that.
It won't fry them,
but it will definitely deplete the number of viable sperm.
So if you're interested in conceiving,
just understand that the cycle for genesis of sperm,
spermatogenesis takes place over the course of somewhere
between 60 and 90 days,
depending on exactly what part of the cycle
you're referring to.
Heat is not good for sperm.
This is why testicles exist outside the body,
why the scrotum can both contract and sort of relax.
And if you go into a sauna or a hot tub or a hot bath,
you will lower the number of viable sperm
that you produce over the course of the next 60 to 90 days.
So if you're trying to conceive,
you probably want to avoid those circumstances,
unless of course you go into a sauna
and you take a cold pack with some insulation, please,
and you put it in your groin.
That's a straightforward way to maintain coolness
of the testicles and maintain sperm while in the sauna.
It's not going to permanently deplete your sperm,
but it will dramatically lower viable sperm
count forward motile sperm.
We know this also from people that sit too much
or people that have larger legs.
I mean, these studies have actually been done.
If you look at the correlation between amount of time seated,
especially driving or on a hot car seat
and sperm count and viability,
there's kind of an inverse relationship there.
Does that mean that you should actively cool your testicles
or there's a whole culture of this on the internet.
There are products that people can buy.
I think they're, what are they called?
Snowballs.
It's like, I think they're called,
which is like cold underwear or something.
I think that's getting a little bit excessive.
However, there's a kind of basic understanding
that excessive heat isn't good for sperm.
And the whole rationale behind cold plunges
for sake of testosterone and sperm
probably can only be substantiated by the fact
that if you get into a cold bath or cold shower,
and then you warm up, you vasoconstrict,
so you reduce the blood flow to the area,
and then you're going to allow much more blood flow
into that area after they warm up again.
But again, heat is bad for the testicles.
So if you're not trying to conceive, no big deal,
or you could bring an ice pack in there.
I will also say,
and this is a very important public service announcement,
don't think that you can use hot tub or hot bath
or sauna as contraception.
I don't know that it's that effective.
And I can assure you without having looked at the data
that many a child has been conceived,
despite the fact that people were in a hot tub
or bath or sauna, whether or not they were actually conceived
in the bathtub, hot tub or sauna
is obviously none of my business.
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The other thing that I'm curious about
as it relates to dopamine is pornography.
I think pornography has become more readily available now
than ever before.
Certainly.
I can go on any social media platform, especially X,
and I scrolled down for long enough.
I will be exposed to pornography
whether I chose to go and seek it out or not.
Yeah, it'll find you.
It'll find you on pretty much every application.
So especially concerning for young people
who are in those formative years.
But what is your view on pornography, dopamine
and the overall social harm of pornography?
Yeah, so this is a controversial topic
because obviously people have different opinions
on limiting personal freedom, right?
Both expression and consumption of pornography, right?
But moving that aside and just focusing on things
through the lens of biology and the dopamine system,
we know that the more stimulating,
the more intense an experience,
the greater the increase in dopamine.
I mean, it's very clear based on neuroimaging studies
that more amphetamine causes bigger increases in dopamine
than less amphetamine.
More cocaine causes bigger increases in dopamine
than less cocaine.
Caffeine can cause an increase in dopamine
but it's not nearly the kind of increase,
the peak that is that you observe
with amphetamine or cocaine, all right?
So we can't just say stimulants and we can't just say sex.
We can't just say pornography.
We have to ask within the domain of pornography
because we know that sexual activity
and in particular anticipation of sexual activity, okay?
This is important.
Anticipation of sexual activity raises dopamine levels.
Then the question is what is the range of things
and the range of dopamine increase?
Now, while there hasn't been
a very systematic exploration of this,
we know that a lot of pornography is extreme, right?
It involves more than two people.
It can involve all sorts of dynamics
that for some people are going to be hyperstimulatory, okay?
So this is very different than I guess
what people would call soft pornography, quote unquote, right?
And here, these are subjective labels.
So let's just pick a hypothetical scenario.
A person is viewing a lot of, let's say high intensity,
high dopamine for them releasing pornography, okay?
For some people that might be pornography of genre A.
For other people it might be pornography of genre B.
For somebody who never looks at pornography,
maybe it's quite mild,
but for them it's actually quite intense
in terms of the amount of dopamine it releases.
Now, what do we know based on dopamine dynamics?
Remember, dopamine is the universal currency
of motivation seeking and reward.
It's not like there's dopamine unique to pornography
versus dopamine unique to food.
It's just a matter of levels and duration.
If somebody is consuming, let's call it very intense,
AKA high dopamine releasing pornography on a regular basis.
What do we know?
That peak in dopamine will start to lessen.
It'll be lower and lower.
And the trough in dopamine after they view that pornography
will be deeper trough and longer trough,
meaning they are very likely, we don't know for sure,
but very likely to seek out more and more intense experiences
to try and just get them back to baseline.
Pretty soon, the pornography that at one time
was very stimulating for them is no longer stimulating.
Now, the concern here is that, and let's just be frank,
we're not just talking about viewing pornography.
We also have to ask ourselves,
what are people doing as they view this pornography?
This is a conversation that should be had,
but I have to do it in a way
where I'm not imparting moral judgment on any of it.
I'm not saying people should masturbate or not masturbate.
That's none of my business, frankly.
This is highly individual.
It relates to all sorts of things
in terms of values, et cetera.
The point is, however, that we know
that orgasm is a dopamine related event,
and post orgasm, there's a increase
in a molecule called prolactin in the brain.
Prolactin actually, in part, sets the refractory period
in which there can't be further erection in males
and orgasm in males, okay?
And in females, it really depends.
I mean, there's this whole world,
I mean, Dr. Rina Malik is far more skilled
to discuss this than I am,
about different types of orgasms in women, et cetera,
the extent to which multiple orgasms
can occur in some individuals, not others.
I think the general belief is that it's possible
in most anybody, including males and females, right?
But that it's more typical in females than in males,
this sort of thing.
Here's the point.
Dopamine and prolactin generally are in a kind of a push-pull
or seesaw relationship, whereby very stimulatory,
high dopamine-releasing activities and pornography
and things like that, increased dopamine,
but repeated exposure to that,
regardless of the activities occurring during that time,
lead to big, long troughs in dopamine,
such that more stimulation is required
just to get any sense of arousal.
We also know that prolactin, when that is increased,
tends to create a kind of subdued lack of dopamine,
I'm using these terms broadly,
kind of a-motivated, non-motivated state.
There are reasons for this biologically, right?
After ejaculation, the idea is that animals won't then,
or humans won't then, copulate again and again and again,
at least not for some period of time.
The duration of the refractory period is highly individual.
It's determined by age, by species.
There's the so-called Coolidge effect.
Are you familiar with the Coolidge effect?
I'm familiar with post-nacclarity.
Okay, slightly different.
There's an anecdote that,
at least to my understanding is true,
at least the Coolidge effect is a known thing
in neuroendocrinology, whereby President Calvin Coolidge,
reportedly, was visiting a chicken farm with his wife.
They were touring the farm and there were a lot of hens
and a lot of chickens generally,
and the docent, who was showing them around,
said, you know, this rooster here, pointing to a rooster,
copulates more than 300 times per day.
It's remarkable.
And Mrs. Coolidge turns to President Coolidge and says,
you hear that? 300 times per day.
She's obviously quite impressed in letting him know that.
And Coolidge, that is President Coolidge, says,
ah, but let me ask you a question.
Same hen or different hens?
And the docent says, different hens.
Now here's the phenomenon, the Coolidge effect.
It exists in rodents, it exists in chickens,
it exists in dogs.
People can speculate whether or not it exists in humans,
whereby if an animal copulates,
then the male is in a refractory period,
lasting anywhere from minutes to hours to days,
depending on age, species, et cetera.
During that refractory period,
they can't achieve erection and or ejaculate again.
But if you replace the mate with a novel mate,
the refractory period is shortened substantially.
Why?
The answer is very clear based on actual measurements
of brain dopamine.
Why?
Because dopamine is also associated with novelty.
Now, the refractory period probably serves
an important evolutionary role,
whereby it improves pair bonding,
so that post-ejaculation, post-orgasm,
okay, here where I'm interchangeably talking
about these for males and females,
anytime you hear ejaculation, then people think males,
et cetera, post-orgasm, post-coital bliss,
pair bonding, the sharing of pheromones,
the sharing of stories, the sharing of affection,
the sharing of a bed to sleep in.
These things are intimately involved in pair bonding.
So I'm not saying that the refractory period
is a bad thing.
What I'm saying is that dopamine
can overcome the refractory period,
but the refractory period itself
is largely due to an increase in prolactin
that suppresses dopamine.
So let's go back all the way
to this question about pornography.
What's the typical scenario?
Well, this is not something I choose to think about a lot.
You're talking about some individual
in their apartment or home
watching intense dopamine stimulating pornography
in which they presumably are aroused or not aroused.
They do or don't do whatever they choose to do,
but that over time has less and less of an effect
in getting them aroused.
And keep in mind that none of this necessarily translates
to real world human safe interactions
between individuals, right?
Pornography is very, very different
than real world sexual interactions.
So there is a phenomenon
that is starting to surface on the internet.
What do I mean by that?
I mean, there are a lot of questions posed
in podcast forums,
meaning in the comment section on YouTube
about is pornography dangerous?
Is it bad, et cetera?
I think the thing that we can say for sure
is that any behavior, any substance
that stimulates a lot of dopamine
and that is easily accessed without effort
is potentially problematic.
Again, big increases in dopamine
that are not preceded by effort are potentially problematic.
Let's think about methamphetamine.
Huge increase in dopamine.
Was the brain designed to release dopamine
in response to amphetamine?
No, the brain was designed to dole out dopamine,
give out dopamine at a level and duration
that is commensurate with the pursuit
of some evolutionarily adaptive goal.
Methamphetamine bypasses that,
gives you a huge surge in dopamine,
which is why people feel miserable afterwards.
They crave more just to get back
to a lower level of dopamine.
Same can be said of gambling in particular
and people that are very prone to gambling addiction.
Certainly can be said for food,
for certain people that are very prone to food addiction,
certainly can be true for anything.
But when it comes to pornography,
because of the, as you pointed out,
the ready availability of pornography,
in particular, let's just call it intense pornography
or that includes a lot of different
other stimulatory elements, multiple people,
a lot of scenarios that can be accessed on the internet,
certainly not things I'm suggesting people go look at,
but that is potentially problematic
because it raises the threshold of the person
that's viewing this as what is arousing
to the point where pretty soon
they need those hyper stimulatory environments
or stimuli in the form of pornography
in order to get aroused.
And again, none of that translates into the ability
to have conversation with partners
or the ability to have discussion
in real world circumstances.
And of course, everything we're talking about
could also be translated to real world circumstances,
but the data really point to the fact
that younger people in particular
are consuming more pornography.
So we're talking about bigger dopamine increases
with less, when I say effort,
what I mean is kind of the more traditional thing was,
at least when I was growing up,
was you'd go out on a date or you'd meet somebody
and there's a series of events that would happen
prior to physical interactions, right?
So this is potentially serious and problematic.
There's a lot of judgment and understandably so
because people arrive to this sort of discussion
with a lot of different backgrounds
in terms of religious backgrounds
and what they think is okay or not okay.
What I can tell you for sure is that
I hear from a lot of young males
about their challenges with porn addiction
and they wanna know how to get over porn addiction.
And the answer there is difficult, but very simple,
which is abstinence.
It's abstinence, it's taking a period of abstinence
from pornography, maybe forever, maybe reducing the amount.
This is where it gets very tricky, very subjective
and it's almost impossible to kind of have the discussion
without getting into some murky territory.
But it's a real issue and I know it's a real issue
because I hear from thousands
over the last few years of the podcast,
I've heard from thousands of males that are like,
they were addicted to porn.
How do they feel?
It sounds to me as if they feel very dejected.
And some of them actually have said
they felt very kind of misled,
like almost like this thing,
this natural stimulus for them was dangled in front of them
and they just gravitated towards it
the same way that any biological organism
would gravitate towards something
that was triggering its dopamine system
and now they feel depleted and kind of stuck
and they don't know what to do.
And I don't necessarily think I'm the person
to remedy all of this, I certainly am not,
but I think there needs to be a conversation
much in the same way that Jonathan Haidt
has done an amazing job with anxious generation
of talking about some of the severe detriments
to overuse of social media and social dynamics
on social media, in particular in young girls
and how we're now finally realizing
that we're in a mental health crisis,
at least in part because of some of that
and we need to pay attention to it.
I think there needs to be a discussion around pornography
and some of the challenges it can potentially present
in particular for young males,
which is not to say that girls and women
aren't also looking at pornography
because we know they are, the data tell us that,
but it does seem to be more of a problem
that's being vocalized by young males.
And this of course dovetails with a whole discussion
about dating behavior and how that's changed
in dating apps and how the ready availability
of the possibility or anticipation of a partner is there,
but actual dating behavior
and real world sexual behavior is reduced.
I mean, there's a lot that needs to be discussed
and ideally we would have a psychiatrist, a psychologist
and a panel of experts to talk about this.
And maybe we do this together as a service to the world
because I hear about this a lot.
For instance, just by way of contrast,
I'm not getting a ton of YouTube comments
and emails from people saying,
hey, I really struggle with ribeye steak addiction
or with coffee addiction or energy drink addiction,
maybe a little bit with energy drinks,
but it's not crashing lives.
It's not causing people to feel depressed,
miserable about themselves.
It's not causing people to have sexual dysfunction issues
and real world interactions.
I mean, this is also the concern, right?
That young people are getting so attuned
to certain dopamine dynamics related to pornography
that they don't either get aroused
or know how to handle real world intimate interactions.
Erectile dysfunction, all those kinds of things.
For instance?
I have to be honest, I just have to be honest
because nothing else is useful.
But I remember the first time I saw a pornographic image
when I was young and it was just a picture
of like someone with like a nipple out.
And it was the most arousing thing in the world.
And obviously as I've aged, I'm now 31,
it would take a lot for me to see, for me to feel aroused.
I certainly wouldn't get aroused at seeing like the thing
that aroused me when I was 16 or whatever that I found,
for example, and that, as you were saying,
I was thinking, gosh, even my arousal cycle
as I've gotten over the last 10 years has changed
because of the availability of pornography,
but also just sex in real life has become more extreme
as it tries to keep up with the expectations
that pornography sets.
And then I thought about a lot where you said
about people messaging you thousands of them
about pornography.
And the unfortunate thing about the abstinence advice
is it leaves them with, many of them with what alternative?
I mean, one would hope, depending on the circumstances,
that they would seek out healthy relationships.
And then this goes to the social elements you described,
which is it's really difficult.
And I've had multiple people sit here saying to me
that it's pretty the top 10% of men
that are having most of the sex.
And this bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for a year.
I go, so you're gonna, we got to tell
a 19 year old horny young man
that he's got to abstain from masturbation and pornography.
And we might not be able to offer him an alternative
for a year.
Well, I'm not telling anyone what to do.
No, I know, it's not you, but I'm-
Right, or maybe throttle back his behavior,
or think about ways in which things he could do
could lead to healthy, romantic and sexual interactions,
assuming that he's of an age
and the circumstances are like for that.
I think that it's, as you can tell,
as I'm kind of stumbling here,
I'm not trying to be careful.
I'm trying to be as accurate as possible
while also not stating things that I don't believe are true.
Like, can pornography be consumed by certain people
in a healthy way?
Well, probably yes.
Do a lot of people get carried away with it
and it starts to become a detriment in their lives?
Maybe even an addiction,
maybe even impede other aspects of romantic
and workplace behavior.
Yes, we hear this all the time.
Do you know where I am now?
I'm arriving at the position that I think pornography is bad.
Because, you know, again, I get lots of DMs and messages
and the more I've understood about the brain
and the body and dopamine, et cetera,
I just can't find a net positive of pornography.
I can't find one,
especially as it relates to my relationship with my partner.
I've been with her for five years now.
And do I think that me watching pornography,
especially if I'm watching it frequently,
is gonna help my performance in the bedroom?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Yeah, it's sort of, what's that old saying?
You wanna get good at pushups, do pushups?
You know, probably the best place to get good
at intimate conversation and behavior
is in the context of, like you said,
like a great relationship with great communication,
that sort of thing.
I do hear about this concern from people a lot.
I think that it's hard to imagine more benefits
than kind of concerns or risks
when it comes to pornography, especially for young males.
I too grew up in an era where, you know,
someone would have knowledge
of like a Playboy magazine or something.
Typically it was stashed someplace in town
and then people would go visit it, you know?
It was like a library or something.
It was sort of like an urban library type environment
where, you know, people would know, oh yeah,
behind the, it was always like a dumpster
or something terrible, like behind the dumpster,
behind this building, like there's a stack of Playboys
and like then people would go there, right?
But it wasn't a big part of my childhood.
It wasn't a big part of my life, you know?
I never found any pornography in my home.
Like, you know, some kids will stumble
across their dad's magazines.
I never had that experience.
I think that a lot can be said about the requirements
and importance of creating healthy dating behavior.
And that's a real world experience kind of thing.
And, you know, this is a bigger discussion
that deserves a lot of time.
I'm not sure we have time for it now,
but, you know, we're growing up in a world
where so much of the input arrives through the internet.
Again, a low effort threshold, high dopamine scenario, right?
Somebody wants to find something on the internet.
They just Google for it and they can find it.
You know, I think you want particular food
that's extremely tasty, you can order it to your door.
This is not potentially problematic.
This is problematic.
What it requires ultimately, however,
I believe is self-regulatory mechanisms.
There is no way that legislature is going to prevent us
from having access to things.
It's just not because people have always found a way.
You know what I mean?
You think about prescription drugs
that deliver dopamine without much effort.
You know, even if people don't have a prescription,
I think the data or something like 80% of college students
have taken prescription stimulants without a prescription.
I mean, when I went to college, nobody did that, nobody.
We drank coffee.
Occasionally someone would take a no-dos,
like a caffeine pill or something,
and that was considered extreme,
and I still don't recommend it.
Now, you know, there's all this consumption of pharmacology,
there's consumption of porn,
and I think that successful individuals will learn
and understand this relationship about dopamine,
especially their own, and they will learn to regulate,
and they will be very careful about anything
that spikes dopamine really high
without much preceding effort,
and that has the capacity for addiction.
So I worry far less about the energy drink,
the loud music, and the workout.
Far, far less, maybe not at all,
than I do high-intensity pornography
consumed on a regular basis,
people taking prescription stimulants who don't need them.
I mean, that's a recipe for burnout, depression, or worse.
How does this kind of dovetail
into having meaning in your life?
Because I'm thinking now about those young men,
and in that sort of stereotype,
they're maybe sat in their bedroom alone,
probably don't have a romantic partner,
maybe don't have a lot to be aiming at in their lives,
and the group of people that fall
into those gambling addiction behaviors
or that pornography behavior oftentimes,
not always, but often,
are also lacking in some kind of meaning.
Is there like a correlation between the two?
Are they associated, and does one help the other?
If I go out and start pursuing
some great goal in my life, start a company,
am I less likely to then be engaging
in the dopamine-inducing pornography addiction?
So to answer the second question first,
I absolutely believe that when we are in pursuit
of healthy goals, meaning goals
that are building our life forward,
that are going to improve our social relationships,
sure, you're income, although it's risky
to just be in pursuit of money, right?
Another great way to encapsulate
the dopamine conversation is,
I think it's in that movie, Wall Street,
where the guy says, what's your number?
You know, how much money do you want?
And he just says, more.
Well, that's dopamine.
That's the essence of dopamine.
He just wants more.
It's not really about a number.
It's about the pursuit and acquisition of money for him.
It's the verb of acquisition.
It's not having that money.
And you see this in people that get a million dollars,
they want 10.
They get 10, they want 100.
They get 100, they want to be a billionaire, right?
And I can tell you, knowing many billionaires,
that some of them are happy
and some of them are intensely unhappy people.
It really depends on how well they've managed
their relationship to dopamine.
Because ultimately it's not about money, right?
Dopamine is just a currency.
So healthy relationships are absolutely fundamental.
Here's what we know.
Many, many people are struggling nowadays
from what we hear of as the isolation crisis.
But all it takes is one trusting, reliable relationship
to start to shift that in the right direction.
I am so adamant about this.
One of the most powerful things that anyone can do,
believe it or not, is to have someone each morning
that they text good morning to.
I know this is going to sound trivial, corny,
and I'm happy to take the heat on this one.
Find a friend.
And in particular, men who lack friends completely
because there's a greater percentage of those,
although it's certainly in the case that many young women
and women are lonely as well.
Find someone who you can communicate with each morning.
Just a good morning text.
Seriously, this is one of the most powerful things
you can do to check in with another member
of your species each morning.
You don't have to have a conversation.
You don't have to talk about
what you're going to do each day.
Knowing that someone else out there in the world
cares about us each morning when we wake up
makes us feel incredibly part of the tribe.
I do this with, let's see, one, two.
Two friends religiously, one from time to time.
And a few others kind of fall in and out of the mix.
It's an extremely powerful thing to do.
You're part of a community.
Can I ask that?
Does it matter what you say?
Because in my group chats,
we tend to tell each other to fuck off and stuff,
and we roast each other.
That's fine too.
Even better if it's elaborated with, how'd you sleep?
What are you doing today?
What's your plan for the day?
And you reach back.
Is it about showing concern and care for them
and having that reciprocated?
Or is it just about the communication itself?
Someone cares enough to think about you
first thing in the morning.
You know, people are really isolated.
We move away from our families now.
And by the way, these could be family members
that you're communicating with.
But the idea that someone is thinking of us
first thing in the morning,
even if it's just like an operational thing,
like, okay, here we go, good morning.
The idea that there's some regularity, some expectation,
and understanding of a social connection that's reliable
is immensely powerful.
You know, we've heard a lot even from the US Surgeon General
about the isolation crisis
and the need for more connection.
And certainly that can and should be in the form of walks
with people, coffee, meals, et cetera.
Yes, yes, and yes.
But a great starting place that's very low bar
is just a good morning exchange, even by text.
Phone would be better each morning.
I do this as an adult with two friends.
Good morning, good morning.
If I don't hear from either one of them by noon,
I start to worry a little bit,
not because they're in any kind of trouble,
but it's just become such a routine part of my day.
It allows you to feel part of something bigger than yourself.
We are not meant to live our lives in complete isolation,
in complete relationship only with our goals.
It has to be in relation to other people and our goals.
This is the importance of going to the workplace.
This is the importance of having a place where you work.
If you don't have a place of work,
going to a cafe or a library, seeing faces in the morning.
Now, some people don't want to see any faces in the morning.
They're not ready to quote unquote face the day.
That's fine.
But at some point seeing other people
for some period of time,
even just briefly on the street saying hello,
vitally important.
You know, we evolved, we are a primate species.
We are old world primates.
We evolved to look other people in the eye
and for them to look back at us,
even if just to say hi as they walk their dog.
Now, some people don't have anyone, it's really sad,
but some people don't have anyone
to even exchange this basic text with.
In that case, I highly recommend that you adopt an animal.
A dog can accomplish a tremendous amount,
not everything, but a tremendous amount
in terms of making us feel connected.
We are then a caretaker, they're taking care of us.
There's empathy there.
There's all sorts of wonderful things.
If you can't have that, you can get a fish.
Seriously, some being a plant,
some living being that we're responsible for
and that relies on us.
And to some extent that we rely on as well is so crucial.
We have huge amounts of neural real estate devoted to this.
Humans especially.
Most of the brain is designed for visual processing,
for movement, and then you start to look at,
okay, what's kind of the third element?
Well, it's language and social connection.
So find someone that you can exchange a morning text with
on a consistent basis, ideally every day.
Has this come naturally to you?
Because you don't strike me as an individual
that this comes naturally too.
I'm not also.
Okay, you mean I'm a bit of a loner?
Is that the sense of it? I'm a loner.
I would be perfectly okay,
and there was a year of my life where I feel like
I didn't interact with anyone
when I was building my first business in a small room
in a rough area of the UK.
But I'm someone who, if left to my own devices,
probably wouldn't interact with anybody.
But you strike me as the same.
I have my dog as well.
Yeah, a bit.
I don't have a dog right now.
I'm getting another one soon.
I must say I can spend long periods of time alone,
but I crave social connection and more so as I get older.
I think most of the challenges in my life
have been around trying to resolve the need to get work done
that I'm really passionate about,
and the, let's just call it what it is,
the isolation required for that, the discipline,
the organization that's required for that,
and the desire to be socially connected.
Now, I've been very fortunate
to have a lot of really close friends,
and I'm in communication with them on a regular basis.
And I've been closer to some than others.
There's some that I'm really close with.
I talk to all the time every day.
I'm close with my sister.
I talk to my parents a fair amount,
more than some less than others,
depends on the family structure.
And a few friends are just absolutely central
to my life and wellbeing.
I think when you have a romantic partner that you live with
or that you're in communication with,
then it becomes more frequent.
But even there, I think it's important
to still maintain healthy friendships.
And of course, people differ on this spectrum.
I don't think you need a lot of friends.
I think you need one really reliable, good friend,
or more, depending on what your needs are.
And I think that as I've gotten older,
I realized that the best things in life,
success in particular,
but also hard times are best shared with other people.
And the best way to make friends really is twofold.
A friend of mine once said this.
He said, people with interests are interesting.
So if you're interested in things,
going and interacting with those things,
even if they're within books, et cetera,
have interests, genuine interests.
Don't just learn things for learning's sake,
but just have interests.
And then the other is that if you are not the sort of person
for whom friendships are just pouring over you
and people want your time, then be of service.
This notion of be the person
who sends the good morning texts.
Now, if somebody never reciprocates,
well, then, okay, maybe you look elsewhere
and send your energy elsewhere,
but be the person who checks up on somebody
on a family member or friend on a regular basis.
Be the person of service and you can volunteer.
You can help people in any number of ways.
I mean, the great thing about a dog or just taking walks
is that you'll find if you do it continually
in the same neighborhood over and over,
you start to run into the same people
and it becomes a hello.
Maybe they become a friend.
Maybe it's just the familiarity.
Maybe it's the barista that you say hello to each morning.
You know, these things are really what I think we evolved.
In fact, I know we evolved to do
and they trigger activation of these circuits
that are so fundamental to our sense of wellbeing and safety.
It largely has to do with our ability to predict the future.
I mean, right now we're in a political landscape
and just a world landscape that's so uncertain
and so divisive, you know, just having some things
that are just good, let's just call it what it is, goodness.
Just good natured humans being good natured, you know,
being kind to one another
and not in any kind of manipulative way,
just really being kind to one another.
And then upon that one can layer, you know,
a couple extra hours of work where you're highly motivated
then getting back out, take your, you know,
your lunch outside and maybe you don't see anybody.
You know, people who are isolated
probably have to do more work to interact with other people
but there are ways to do this.
And, you know, for people that struggle with addictions
like the pornography addictions or alcohol drug addictions
and other like behavioral addictions,
I mean, there are zero cost programs
essentially in every city around the world
that people can access some of the social connection
and support for those that again are completely zero cost.
For people that are interested in exercise,
you know, there's usually like running groups.
There's usually a threshold one has to get over.
I'm not one to join a running group
or work out with other people.
This is not my kind of thing.
But I do require, I've found,
I need healthy social connection.
When did you figure that out?
Because there was an age where I can tell exactly
when I figured it out.
So I know there must be one for you.
You kind of figure it out.
Yeah.
I mean, I grew up in a big pack of boys
at the end of my street growing up.
We all played together.
Then skateboarding in that world,
I was just really surrounded by people all the time.
When I got serious about school and research,
there were a lot of days and nights I was alone.
And at that time I'd listened to books
or I'd listened to music.
I still had friends, but I was less social.
And I think it wasn't really until my mid thirties
that I started to realize like, whoa, like, okay.
Even though, you know, I had a girlfriend,
I was lonely and I was starting to accumulate
some unhealthy patterns of behavior
where I was just seeking connection in unhealthy ways.
And as I've built up my friendship group,
and that also of course requires being a good friend.
And I suppose there are a few people out there
that probably say that I'm an unreliable friend,
but I think if you were to pull my 10 or 15 closest friends,
they'll tell you, I'm the guy that checks in.
Now I've probably upset a few people
because I don't check in on everybody, but it's true.
I've got a list, I actually have a list.
It's not in this notebook of about 10 or 15 people.
It's a list of 30 people total
that those are my core people.
And I make it a point.
It's not because I'm regimented or protocoling any of this.
I make it a point to check in on that person.
I haven't called that person in a little while.
But then there's that core group of people
that I make sure to check in with every day,
at least every week.
And that without whom, I don't really wanna live.
It's not that I wanna die,
but life's just so much better with those people in my life.
How does someone make that list, that 15 names you have?
It's all feel.
It's the people that I accept and that accept me.
My patterns of communication are a little weird.
It's gotten me into trouble in life for sure.
I'll be, a good friend of mine once said
I'm like the little orbiting flying robot in Star Wars.
I'm like there, and then I'm gone.
And people that know me,
and by the way, he's a very close friend,
know that I'm gone, but I'm back.
And so I tend to give things my full attention.
I'm like 10 out of 10 attention.
And then I need my space to reset.
And that hasn't always been healthy,
but I've done my best to try and get better at it over time.
And people that make that list
are either the same way,
a few of them are definitely the same way,
where I'm like, I haven't heard from them in a while.
But then when I sit down with them,
or we have a phone call, it's like, they're really there.
In fact, some of these people will say,
let's talk tomorrow, let's talk tomorrow.
And it never happens.
And I know they're not flaky.
I know that they're doing other things.
And then when they're ready and we get on a call,
man, it's the richest interaction I've ever had.
It's so deep and so rich.
I'm like, I get so much out of a 10 minute conversation.
It's like, yes, we're an hour long conversation.
And then there are friends that I'll hang out with
for a week, I'll go visit, go for a hike with.
But it's the richness of the interaction
that matters for me.
Not the frequency.
Not the frequency.
That's right.
And then for me, I think people who consider me a good friend
or people who understand the intensity
that I bring to things,
and the love and care that I really have for them,
and that if they need me, I'm there.
Like I will tell you, I've hit some hard times,
some recently, and it was amazing.
I had people descending on my home to be with me.
You know, I'll tear up if I talk about it.
Some of them are names people are familiar with
in the podcast space.
And I was like, oh my goodness, like I've not had that.
You know, I will get emotional.
You know, they came to my home and they sat with me
and yeah, they picked me up and they reminded me who I am.
And you know, I've just such immense gratitude for that.
You know, I'm a 49 year old man.
I've done some things correctly.
I've done some things I regret.
I've strived to be the best person I could be at the time,
doing the best I had with what I had.
And they know that.
And I know they know that not just because they told me,
but like you can feel it.
And I've been blessed enough not just to know these people,
but also that when they've been in need
that I've had the opportunity to go to them.
You know, and I had to do that several times recently,
things that had nothing to do with me.
You just, sometimes people will outright ask for help.
Sometimes they'll say they're in danger.
Sometimes you just sense it and it's like, that's it.
I'm driving, you know, getting in the car.
And I've learned the best thing,
the way you build that kind of friendship and network
is by showing up when that hard stuff isn't happening.
And you try and give your full attention.
And sometimes that requires putting away the phone.
And sometimes it means you're both on your phones
and you're just hanging out and you're watching a game.
Or, you know, it doesn't mean being,
like forcing yourself to be somebody you're not,
but it means paying attention.
And yeah, and giving a significant portion of ourselves
to try and really like be there for people.
Because ultimately I think that's what we want
in social interactions.
You know, we want listening, we want shared experience.
We want all that stuff.
And that stuff's great.
But ultimately it's like, when you ask who makes the list,
it's like, I'm thinking of these people now.
It's like, I feel like they're always with me, you know?
And I wouldn't trade any amount of money,
any amount of anything for that.
And I think that like a really good life
includes some of that.
So, you know, forgive me for being emotional or don't,
it doesn't really matter to me.
I just feel like that's the real stuff
that makes life really worth living.
And it has nothing to do, you know,
with dopamine or maybe it does,
or it doesn't matter what the mechanisms are.
What matters is that we all have that capacity
and it starts by just showing up on a regular basis,
showing somebody that you can care about them enough
to think about them each morning
and send them a quick good morning text.
That's it.
And if they don't reply, okay.
And if they do, okay.
And once the reciprocation starts
and you start to feel kind of crude up just a little bit,
you're like, oh, wow, like there's something I could rely on
in this crazy dizzying,
sometimes exhausting, really hard life.
And then when the good stuff happens,
you got that many more people to celebrate with
and that much more intensely.
So, yeah, I appreciate you letting me share that.
It's something that at this stage of life,
I'm like, okay, like, I know a few things.
There's a lot I still have to learn,
but that one's for sure.
Yeah, friendship is, it's vital.
You went through a bit of a storm this year,
to say the least.
And I've been through many a storm in my life.
I've been through many a media storm
when the media came for me and wrote things about me.
And I've, and I don't think anyone
that's not been through that before
understands how it feels.
Because for me, when it happens to me,
there's this real sense of injustice
and there's this desire for me to jump out
and correct things and scream and shout and correct the world.
But I also know that I can't.
And I, when I saw, again, I didn't see anything,
but I'm from afar looking at social media.
When I saw you going through a similar thing,
my two things happened.
Thing one was I wanted to understand the protocols
of a man who writes about protocols,
has a book coming out about protocols.
I wanted to understand what he does in that situation.
And if he's any more immune than I am,
because I'm certainly fragile in that regard.
But then also I saw this other wonderful thing,
which I think you've expressed there is,
I saw your friends show up.
I saw them speak out about your character
and who you actually are.
And I saw them literally show up at your location.
I saw someone like Lex Friedman show up for you.
It showed up in my home several times.
He was just there.
Like literally one day I just like look up
and Lex is in the room.
It's not like a dream, right?
Like Lex Friedman with the suit and the whole thing.
And he was just there to just be there.
Yeah, that was a challenge.
As you pointed out the hardest thing about that,
and I realized like most people who aren't public facing
won't experience this,
but I think everybody experiences something similar
at some point in their life,
especially now with social media,
where things that are being said about you
are just fundamentally not true.
Fundamentally not true.
And they're being cast in a way
and a context that is just wrong.
And you want to say, no, that's not how it was,
or the context is completely wrong,
or there's a completely other side of the story
that you'd love to tell,
but either because of how that will land
and how people misperceive or contort that,
or simply because you have the etiquette
and the respect to not do that,
because there are sometimes many different parties involved,
you refrain.
And in our case,
I decided to just mainly focus on the work at hand,
although I've talked a bit about this
on Chaka Willing's podcast.
Let me talk about it here.
The pain comes from being potentially misunderstood,
and also from the understanding
that we didn't always necessarily do everything right.
In fact, we may have made some mistakes.
And the understanding that the public forum
is not the place to work out the details of that.
That's not how healing comes,
despite what people might believe.
That is not how healing comes.
And I don't care if it's a high school situation
or a podcaster or a celebrity
or a politician that is just not the way
that humans effectively settle their differences.
There are consequences,
but it's not how things really get settled.
And I think we have proof of that given the last few years.
So in that case,
and I'm not trying to be diplomatic
or kind of slalom through this,
I think what I'm trying to do is make it effective
and hopefully useful for everybody.
What do you do when you're hearing and seeing things
about you or others that you affiliate with
that you just fundamentally disagree with?
Well, you have three options.
You can counter the narrative.
You can say nothing, right?
Or you can agree.
And herein, I think lies the challenge in being an adult,
a real adult in the realest sense of the word.
A real adult knows when to say,
you know what, some of the stuff they're saying,
yeah, wish I'd chosen differently.
But a real adult also knows to say,
but some of the stuff they're saying, no.
That is not what happened.
That's not the context.
And this is categorically false.
Now, those things often are interdigitated, okay?
Now at the extremes, they're not interdigitated,
but oftentimes they're interdigitated.
And what people have to realize is that online in comments,
in certain forms of media, it's just highly skewed.
You're getting just one perspective.
In the context of science,
we'd say this is like cherry picking data,
looking at one particular portion of the graph
or throwing out a bunch of experiments
because the data weren't what you wanted,
which in science is like terrible,
only second in terms of terrible
to actually making up data, right?
Okay, so I think the challenge is to the,
so I know that the challenge in those circumstances
is to do what in the end I ended up doing,
which was to sit down
and realize that was the circumstance I was in,
and then to try and make a really good decision
about what to do.
And that I do believe is best achieved
through having really good friends,
really good coworkers and family members
who can be really clear optics for you
when you don't always have the clearest optics,
meaning they can hear your ideas
and you can spitball what might happen in case A, B, or C,
but it's not about being tactical.
It's not about being strategic.
It's about remaining true to yourself.
And in my case,
I just felt that I didn't wanna get into the details.
And at the same time,
I acknowledge there's always a learning in these things.
You asked whether or not knowing protocols can help.
Well, certainly sleep was important.
I managed to sleep.
There were some days I slept less than others.
People had theories.
He looks tired, this and that.
Sometimes that was related to earlier recordings
that I tended to just push too hard anyway.
Sometimes it related to being kind of troubled
about the circumstances.
So I think that one can use physiological size.
You can use non-sleep deep rest.
And I certainly relied on those tools and continue to.
Friendship and social support,
getting a pull of opinion from people that you really trust.
You don't wanna get too many opinions often.
You wanna get just enough and just a variety of them
that you can make the best informed decision.
I don't really believe in polling 100 people
about a circumstance and then taking a vote,
pros and cons.
The mind doesn't work that way.
So in the end, I voted my conscience
and I voted my heart by continuing to just put out content
so people could learn about science-based tools
for mental health, physical health and performance.
I think as time goes on,
I may elaborate more on some of the circumstances,
but I think in the end, people listen to my podcast
because they're interested in getting better sleep
in exercise protocols
and hearing from the best scientists and clinicians
so that they can better themselves in their own life.
And people speculate all sorts of things.
It's also interesting to see how we presume so much,
not just about public facing people,
but about other people in the comment section.
For instance, on my Instagram page,
I have rules, it's classroom rules.
You can call me names if you want,
you can say most things,
but I sort of treat it like a classroom.
What would I tolerate in the classroom?
And if people start attacking each other,
you're gonna get a warning and if you keep going,
I'm gonna block you.
Just because, first of all, it's my page, right?
This whole notion that you're not allowed to block people
is crazy, right?
It's your webpage, it's your classroom.
You have every right, you can do whatever you want.
I mean, where is the rule
that says that you won't tolerate
or that you need to tolerate whatever?
People swearing at each other,
very different to me than people swearing.
So people can swear, fine, swear at each other.
Well, then I'm gonna say, hey, hey, hey, stop this.
Do it again, you're done.
At least here, go elsewhere.
And there's so much presumption.
We think we know these people on the internet
and we really don't.
On the other hand, there's certain people,
like Lex, like you,
I'm really delighted in this conversation, like Rick.
I like to think like me,
like I am who I am.
Now you're not seeing every dimension of my life,
but frankly, you're not supposed to.
And I think there's this inherent desire
to know everything about everybody
that we see online and comment sections and on Instagram.
And frankly, it's inappropriate.
I grew up in an era where that wasn't right.
In fact, my father once told me,
again, he's from Argentina and he said,
you know, there's this funny thing in the United States.
You go into somebody's office
and they've got all these pictures of their kids
facing outward.
He said, you go into somebody's office
in certain parts of Europe or in South America
and their picture of their family is facing them.
So on my dad's desk in his office, when I was a kid,
he had a picture of me and my sister and my mom
and it faced him because those are for him.
He wasn't like, here are my kids, here's my life.
And I love that.
And that's kind of how I was raised.
You know, you keep certain things inward
and certain things are outward.
So I don't know, that's the model I was raised with
and I rather like that.
This notion that we have to share every aspect of ourselves
on social media is crazy.
And I think it's actually detrimental.
If I was a fly on the wall
when you were going through that, what would I have seen?
And what I'm trying to add,
the reason I'm asking this question is super clear
because if you were a fly on the wall
when I was going through some of my hardest times,
you would have seen someone that was really struggling.
Okay, so I'll say this,
that was definitely not my hardest time.
Hardest times for me were,
the door's locked.
I'm 14, I'm like behind locked doors.
I don't know if I'm going to get out
when I'm going to get out.
You know, I called the one person I knew would pick up,
guy named Steve Rugge, Shrugge,
he was my team manager for Thunder and Spitfire Wheels.
I called him, I said, Shrugge, what am I going to do?
I'm locked up in this place.
And his response was,
bro, you're the most normal guy I know.
What am I supposed to do?
I thought, oh my goodness, what am I going to do?
Yeah, that was scary.
That was like, what do I do?
I'm 14, I have no agency.
I don't mean like marketing agency.
I had no ability, like no money, no anything.
No, it worked out.
Other hard times, that time I talked about July 4th
after that fight, what am I going to do with my life?
I'm a complete loser.
Other times, you know,
I've had this weird karma with mentors.
I've had three amazing scientific mentors
and the relationship between mentors and science,
mentor and students in science used to be much closer.
You'd get really close.
My undergraduate advisor was an amazing person.
My graduate advisor was like a mother to me
and was a truly amazing individual.
And my postdoc advisor also incredible.
And I was incredibly close with all of them.
And it was suicide, cancer and dead at 50,
cancer and dead, early sixties.
Like three people I was super close with.
And when Ben, the third guy died, I thought,
well, there's only one common denominator.
That's me.
I thought I was cursed.
Really?
Yeah.
I'm like, I work for you, you die.
You know?
And I was like, shit, like what is going on here?
But then I did what I only know how to do,
which is you transmute the pain into useful things.
And I started thinking, okay,
how do I want to spend the rest of my life?
I want to be of service.
I want to take what I know in science.
I want to teach people things that help them.
And I didn't know exactly how I was going to do that,
but it birthed the podcast.
I also had three dead mentors.
I was a scientific orphan.
In science, there's also a lot of trying to live up
to the reputation that they expect of you.
Well, mine are all dead.
So some people say,
what are your colleagues think of the podcast?
I would say about a third of them like it.
They think it's cool.
And they say that to me about a third,
probably think it's great that people pay attention
to science, but are like,
some of it is more health oriented.
And the third probably hate it for whatever reason,
either jealousy or they don't like the way I present things.
And I'm good with all of that.
Cause guess what?
My advisors are dead.
I'm a grownup.
You do you, I'll do me.
We're all good.
And frankly, we'll see how it all works out.
Meaning they're the ones who have to live with themselves.
I'm the one who has to live with me.
So like, I'm not responsible for other people's feelings
and they're not responsible for me.
So cool.
So it's symbiotic.
What I eventually discovered was,
huh, you can reach 40 and have a great career.
I was tenured at Stanford and a bunch of things,
but wow, like certain aspects of my life
are still challenging.
I had, you know, those three deaths.
Plus, you know, this was some years ago,
unrelated to the recent events.
I had a really important relationship end,
just like end after a lot of years of really slogging it out
and trying to make it work.
And, you know, failure is not something I'm used to.
In fact, a friend of this woman,
I was at a retreat and we were talking about it
and I was really distraught about the end
of the relationship.
And she said, you're not used to failing, are you?
And I almost said like, yeah.
And I said, you're right, you're right.
I've been successful in career and a relationship
that we were both really invested in
and we just didn't have the skills.
I made my mistakes, she made hers,
but we really, really fought hard and it didn't work out.
And I was like, wow, like, okay.
I had a failure, like a legitimate failure.
And you could say, well, was it really a failure?
But look, there were elements of failure, right?
We had invested a lot of years, a lot of energy,
and there was a lot of love, but, you know.
Why does that make you emotional?
I can see it in your face.
Well, this relates to a lot of these things
and I suppose I feel comfortable enough
to open up about this.
I think that, you know, some people might have
the perception that I'm like extremely self-interested.
I've had things thrown at me like he's a narcissist
or worse, you know.
Like I have had one, I've had many,
but I have one particular major challenge
that I still strive to overcome.
And people can roll their eyes and they can say it's bullshit
but I know this to be absolutely true,
which is that I have a very hard time letting go,
a very hard time letting go.
If somebody dies, like I can handle that.
But my loss and letting go of people I care about
is really hard.
And it's also coupled with this kind of style
that I have of I'm like very present
and then I need to go take care of myself, right?
In healthy ways.
So that can be confusing to people, I realize that.
But there's this thing where like the idea
of things ending is super hard.
And as a consequence, I've stayed in relationships
far too long.
I mean, you know, I sometimes joke, but it's not funny.
My breakup protocol sucks and it really needs work
because everyone close to me who knows me really well
and who I trust says you stay in relationships
way too long that we're either fated to fail
or that we're clearly going to fail.
At some point you just kept slogging away.
Now, sometimes I slogged away in the wrong ways
and they did too.
But somehow I've really struggled to move on from things.
And as a consequence, I've stayed in things far too long
that never had a chance that were really unhealthy.
And in particular, I've taken on things
that were just far too difficult from the beginning.
And so that relationship was a beautiful relationship.
I'm fortunate that I'm still friends with that person,
although we have to keep a certain amount of distance
just at healthy boundaries.
And, you know, I get emotional because like, damn it,
like we fought so hard, like so hard.
And it was all out of love.
But I think it, I know that it failed
because we just didn't have the skills.
The timing wasn't right.
And I'm certainly not talking about
this most recent relationship, you know,
this year's hard stuff.
This was some years back, like we fought so hard
and like I would have done anything
and she would have done anything to make it work.
And I'm just like, I'm not a quitter.
I'm far from perfect, believe me, but I'm not a quitter.
And as a consequence, I think after that,
for a while it just really changed the way
that I interacted with things.
I just didn't quite recover.
And one could argue that the emotion
that's coming up for me now means that I didn't recover.
But I know I just, I just refused to call time of death.
I just refused to call time of death
even when it's long since dead.
And that's a mistake and it's something
I'm really working on now because it hurt me.
It's not good for other people.
And it dovetails with a bunch
of other unhealthy ways of being.
But what I know for sure is that it's not selfishness.
It's not that I'm trying to avoid pain for myself.
It's related to my failure to be able to just
tolerate pain in other people and myself simultaneously.
There's something about empathy gone wrong
in those circumstances.
Does that link to your childhood parents,
the parental separation in them?
Yeah, so people I pay a lot of money to tell me
that it no doubt does.
But what's weird is I never lament
the separation of my parents.
I don't sit back and go, I wish they had stayed together.
They were both wonderful people.
They both have wonderful partners.
I've had a magnificent life.
I've had a great life.
Everything I've sought to do has happened.
And there's still things I want.
But I think that, I was talking to Martha Beck
about this recently.
There's this feeling with a dog where I love the dog
and they love you back, particularly my dog Costello.
I loved him and he loves me back.
And so it's like empathy, but then its return
is like a perfect circle.
It's like the energy is like,
the more I love, the more love I feel, the more love.
And I think with people, it's not like that, right?
People are gonna disappoint us, et cetera,
but they can also delight us.
But I think that there's been this problem
where my empathy goes too far.
And I'm sure as I'm saying this, people are like,
oh God, he's trying to mask this in empathy.
No, I can wholeheartedly say,
didn't always lead to the best choices
and I own those choices.
But meaning I'll take responsibility for my part.
I won't take responsibility for other people's part, right?
It's always a two-way street.
But when we have a sense of empathy
and that other person isn't right for us
and we continue to try and like feed the relationship,
it's not about trying to avoid getting them upset,
but somehow we get into these unhealthy dynamics
and then it can really bring out the worst,
but some really like unhealthy parts of people.
I think probably the hardest thing in life
is romantic relationships.
Some people might say it's work,
but I think it's the hardest thing in life.
And people say, well, when it's right, it's easy.
I don't know.
I think it depends on how complicated a person you are.
You know?
I think it depends on how complicated a person you are
and the extent to which the other person
is willing to do the work.
I've really seen this.
I've also had wonderful relationships
whereby we're each willing to do the work
on self-care and communication.
Paul Conti said this, not on my podcast,
but I think he was telling Whitney Cummings on a podcast.
If you were to list out the 100 most important things
in romantic relationship,
you would just say self-care and communication 50 times.
And I think that's absolutely true
because we need safety, we need acceptance.
Yes, those are foundational, non-negotiables,
necessary, but not sufficient.
But I think we need communication and self-care
and those are hard.
And I'm still learning and trying to build those skills.
I absolutely want a family,
so this is super important to me.
And I'm putting a ton of work and effort into it.
So I didn't realize we were gonna go into this territory,
but I will say for people
who are struggling with relationships,
just know that you can have amazing friendships
and still struggle with romantic relationships
or vice versa.
Again, friendships, and I have male friends
and female friends, mostly male friends,
but a few female friends that I'm very close with.
Like, it's just been amazing.
I have a great relationship with my sister.
I think I have a very good relationship with my parents,
with my uncles and aunts, like with my coworkers,
my ability to pick business partners and coworkers.
Just, I only hit bull's eyes.
Like I love my team and we get along great
and little things get worked out quickly.
But I think everyone has one or two areas of life
where it's a bit harder and just try and learn the skills
and I'm working on it.
Like, you and me both though, it didn't come naturally
to me, my parents, although they never separated,
I was willing them to because I was,
they were just, they hate, hate's a strong word.
It appeared that they hated each other.
Watching my mother's scream at my father
for seven hours a day, my mother's Nigerian,
my dad's English, it was a traumatic experience.
And the thing it left me with is this clear notion
which I left the household with at 18,
it was that a relationship is prison.
And I was, it was so hard wired into me
because I thought my father was in prison.
So every time someone was interested in me growing up,
I would self reject, I would reject them.
So I'd pursue them.
And then when they turned to me
and said, okay, let's be in a relationship,
I would persuade them out of it.
I would tell them why this was a terrible idea
because I was getting the feeling
that I vicariously learned through my father.
I was like, I'm about to basically lock myself
in a prison where this person's gonna screw,
gonna be able to control me and my freedom.
So I rejected relationships up until about 27 years old.
So, and then even that relationship wasn't a straight line
because two years in, she turns around
and says she doesn't like having sex with me.
Turns out she's got her own traumas around sex.
So we have a year where she's on the other side
of the planet.
I didn't have the tools, as you say,
to understand how to navigate such a conversation.
So for me, I'm emasculated.
I'm going, maybe there's something wrong with me.
She doesn't wanna have sex with me, dump her.
And then, but she was the right person.
And what the TLDR of that story is,
a year later, I ended up flying to the other side
of the world, apologizing to this person
for my lack of tools, my lack of communication skills,
because it was the right person at the wrong time.
And we did the work.
And that was long and it was hard and it's still hard,
but it's in an amazing place at the moment.
Oh, you're back together.
Yeah, we lived together.
She's flown back from Bali two years ago.
We lived together.
The best, the right person for me, but it's hard work.
Good for you, you like hard work.
It's a wonderful story.
I mean, it's a happy story,
regardless of ultimately how it turns out,
because one can sense like the real central cord of love
there and the desire to make it work.
I mean, it's so interesting, this notion of make it work.
Again, just as being a functional adult means saying,
yep, you're right about this, but no.
I'm gonna stand my ground.
In relationships, people say relationships take work.
Of course they do.
And then the question is how much work relative
to how much ease and it's highly individual
and there's no handbook for this.
There's no handbook for it.
And the reward on offer,
because I was convinced
that she was the most amazing person I'd ever met.
It just so happened that she turns around to me one day
and says she doesn't like having sex with me.
Yeah, that's rough.
That's rough, right?
Especially for a young woman,
you have no concept of what that might be.
You think maybe you're bad in bed or something,
but as she did the work on herself
and I did the work on myself,
she unlocked a bunch of traumas around sex
and how she'd been treated with sex as she grew up,
which she resolved.
And she's been very public about this,
this is why I can share it.
And I did a bunch of work on myself
and how to deal with how I communicate
when someone says, brings me such a thing.
And after a year of her working on that
and a year of me working on myself,
we found ourselves in a place
where it turns out she loves sex.
Now, she's arguably even more sexual than I am
in many respects.
Completely different individual, but it just required,
and I have to give the ending there
because people are gonna be wondering,
but it required a lot of work on me and myself
and where I've come from and the situation of my family
and her and the experience she's been through.
And we found ourselves together now in a great place.
When that still requires work, but in a great place.
So, you know, everyone's struggling with some shit.
You know, my family's not great.
We're not that close.
I'm not that close to certain members of my family.
I've struggled with romantic relationships,
made all the mistakes.
I struggle with platonic relationships with my friends.
I'm not the guy that's able to check in.
I like being alone.
You know, it is what it is.
We're all uniquely challenged in some way.
So I've got a great amount of empathy for what you shared,
and I really appreciate you for sharing it
because there's so many people that can relate
in various ways.
I'm one of them.
And I think it's important
because we don't talk about it enough.
Well, thank you for sharing your experience
and for giving me the opportunity to share a bit.
You know, the conversation started around hard circumstances
and, you know, it's about taking stock
of where we trust ourselves
to make the right decisions, where we need work.
And yeah, relationships are hard,
but I do think that, well, certainly now
I'm feeling more ease, you know, more seamlessness
with them, certainly with friendships, as I mentioned,
you know, we all have these areas of proficiency
where we are, you know, where we find
that things are kind of easier or even easy for us.
They just kind of happen, direct relationship
between effort and outcome, right?
And then these other areas where we feel
like we're rolling a boulder uphill,
keeps going back and crushing us and we keep doing it.
And I think that, you know, there's no simple
or universal answer, but, you know,
I think the rewards that come from a relationship
where there's been a lot of hard work
and things get resolved, even in one little domain,
are so tremendous.
You know, I think that's really related to this sense
that like when things end, it just feels so devastating.
I really believe that things can be talked through.
I really do.
I think that, you know, resent and anger,
that they don't serve anyone.
They really don't.
And people are probably hearing this and saying,
well, that's a self-serving narrative,
but really I'm talking about in myself too.
I don't carry any resent and any anger.
You know, I sometimes wish people had made different choices,
but ultimately, like we can't control
what anyone else is going to do or say or think.
And that's terrifying, right?
People can really hurt us, right?
They can really hurt us.
And we would love to create a world
in which we're completely safe.
But I think that a lot of the work I've been doing lately
is really around, you know, kind of like touching back
into maybe a younger version of myself
that wasn't so walled up,
wasn't so focused on what's going to happen
in two or three iterations of something,
just really being as present as possible,
really focusing as it's probably become clear today
a few times.
I'm like the amazing gifts that I have in my life right now
that pursuing goals is great and wanting things is great.
Certainly there are things I want and want to build,
mostly in the domain of relationships and family,
but also just like really savoring,
like having one's health or having the opportunity
to sit down and have a conversation like this,
like what an extraordinary life we each have
if we really pay attention to some of these gifts.
I used to think that if we paid attention to those gifts
and focused too much on gratitude,
that it would make us complacent.
But all the data, of course, and my own experience
as I do this more and more really emphasize
how all it does is give us more energy,
more anticipation of what's possible
and the great things to come.
And it can all start to sound a little cliche,
like just be happy with what you've got.
There's no just in that statement.
I'm saying be happy with the things you've got.
And from that state, new things emerge,
more energy comes and you can start to really navigate
forward, not just sit complacently and like stop there.
I think it's our essence as biological beings
and psychological beings and, if you will,
spiritual beings, if that's your leaning to,
to want more.
I think that's normal,
but we have to savor what we have also.
And I think once we savor what we have,
we have more energy to want more.
And that's the perfect circle that just is,
I guess it's more of an upward spiral.
And here I'm sounding very abstract,
but I could easily and exhaustively put everyone to sleep
with long mechanistic descriptions
of how research on motivation or dopamine
or any number of different neural systems
or physiological systems support all of that.
I think the most important thing is that
people are honest with themselves
about what they can reasonably work on right now.
And to be, you know, gentle with themselves enough
to like coax themselves forward,
but occasionally scruff yourself and be like, it's time.
You know, it's time.
And it's certainly been an interesting life thus far.
I'm still navigating, you know,
and I certainly don't have all the answers,
but as I learn, I try and share what I do learn.
What has helped you on that journey?
That journey to really kind of,
because the way I heard it is
you're someone that's orientated towards pursuing your goals
and you're very, very driven in that regard,
but you're kind of having to kind of,
maybe this is not the right word,
but kind of unlearn a natural disposition
and shift more towards another state.
You talked about therapy there.
What has helped?
Well, I think, you know,
I was forced into therapy as a way to get out of lockup.
I had to stay in high school.
I had to go routinely.
And so I did.
I think it can be very helpful
provided there's good rapport, support,
and the person offers insight
that lends itself to action, right?
It's not just about finding someone to support and listen.
Someone has to inspire action
that makes you a better person, okay?
And that's really important.
So not just talking about playing with your problems,
you know, as story fondling as it's sometimes called.
I think one has to understand
that there's a relationship between physiology and emotion.
So if I'm waking up and I don't feel well,
because I didn't sleep enough,
yeah, I'll do NSDR, I'll get some sunlight
and I'll go exercise.
And generally I feel better,
but I also have learned to not mask real feelings
by simply trying to shift my physiology,
just as people are starting to learn,
hey, yes, there are useful medications
for dealing with mental health issues,
but you still have to do the work.
You still have to focus on building career,
building relationships, doing the work.
I think one of the most useful things that I've learned,
again, I'm a big fan of Martha Beck.
She's triple degreed from Harvard,
but she also has this mystical spiritual side
that it really brings together a lot.
I asked her recently, I said, you know,
what do you do when the thinking mind is like
trying to analyze something, predict things,
and then you also have all this feeling,
which one do you rely on?
And she says, ah, the way to do this is you imagine
you have your feelings in one hand
and your thoughts in the other,
and they're kind of like in this battle.
It's like, okay, what's gonna happen next?
Where are they gonna do this?
How are they gonna do that?
And then you go back and forth.
Typically people are texting and calling
and looking and drinking and doing whatever it is
to try and resolve this battle.
The solution is to see that battle
and to sit back into this third position
that she calls the compassionate observer,
where you're like, okay,
this is both happening.
These are both happening.
And to sit in this third position where you realize
trying to reconcile just with your thoughts
or just with your emotions or settle down your emotions
or settle down your thoughts is futile.
To get in this third position
where the acceptance of that suffering shows up
and you're able to just like sit with the suffering.
And the moment she said sit with the suffering,
I was like, no, you know, I don't want that answer.
But then she explained from that place of suffering,
you start to drop into what are the thoughts
that make you feel a little bit looser
and more relaxed in your body?
What are the thoughts that make you feel
kind of more constricted?
And you just start to use that as a bit of a navigator
and start asking questions like, you know,
do I wanna do this thing?
Like, do I wanna drink this coffee or not?
Am I just doing it compulsively?
Do I wanna exercise?
And it sounds very abstract, extremely woo,
but the brilliance of what she does
and the brilliance of that scenario
is that it brings together all the neuroscience that we know.
We have a thinking analytic part of the brain
that does what I call DPOs, duration path outcome analysis.
We also have emotional states of the brain,
the limbic system, it's sometimes called,
but it's a bunch of other areas too.
And it doesn't know the clock or the calendar
as Paul Conti, brilliant psychiatrist says.
Feelings don't know that it's today in July, 2024,
it thinks you're eight years old,
that the limbic system, your emotions,
they don't know the clock or the calendar,
it doesn't know how old you are,
it just knows you and circumstances and feeling.
So being able to step back from all of that
is really what being a healthy human being is about.
And then realizing you're suffering,
like in that battle, you're suffering.
And when you relax that a little bit and you go,
okay, I'm not gonna force myself to suffer as much.
Now what feels right?
What feels right right now for like the next five minutes?
Well, then you can navigate the next five minutes.
Maybe it's take a nap, maybe it's have a meal,
maybe it's do a little bit of work,
maybe it's you don't know and you just sit there.
But then five minutes later,
you're able to pick the next best choice
and the next best choice,
and pretty soon you're off and on your way.
Because so often we get avalanche by our feelings
or our thoughts or we can't sleep,
and it's just like, and people are losing their minds
and they're online looking for a solution
or they use distraction, alcohol, mindless scrolling.
By the way, I love social media,
I teach on social media and I learn on social media
from your podcast and Joe's podcast,
Lex's podcast and Tim's podcast and on and on.
So I'm not demonizing it,
but mindless consumption, inebriation, numbing ourselves,
or forcing ourselves to do things
that are not in service to our wellbeing,
none of that is good.
What's good is being able to sit with it.
And in doing that, I've started to realize
that you get back to what she calls,
and again, the language sounds woo, but who cares?
She's the one with three degrees from Harvard,
so call her whatever you want, you know?
Is the, what she calls essential self,
which I think refers to our own unique wiring,
what really feels right to us,
trusting in our own goodness,
trusting that if we just navigate forward
from that compassionate observer place,
that we are going to be, in some cases,
we need to be fierce, we need to be a warrior,
in other cases, we need to be soft and compassionate,
and then we can be all of those things,
depending on what the situation calls for.
And then we can just like sit back and move forward,
and that we're gonna be okay.
In fact, we're going to be better than okay.
And that when we bring that stance,
that like calm, energetic stance to things and other people,
we also have a ton to give, we can be in so much service.
This is one of the reasons I think people love Rick.
And I think about Rick a lot.
Rick Rubin's a close friend, and I'm very blessed.
And it's not because he's Rick Rubin, the famous musician.
In fact, I know zero minus one about hip hop.
Oh yeah, and just don't, it wasn't a genre I followed.
I like some of it, but one thing is that when Rick shows up,
he's just like there, he's super present.
He's not there to give you anything, but he gives.
And he's not there to take anything, he's just there.
And I think that's why people love him.
I think that's why people love him.
Yes, he's been super successful
in all these different domains.
And when people try and poke at Rick,
that's something that really pisses me off.
You wanna really get me worked up,
try and pick on one of my close friends.
Like that's a place where I am like,
come at me, attack me all day, and people do.
But if you're trying to attack people I know
in their true goodness, Lex or Rick,
or any number of my different friends, famous or not,
like that's when a side of me comes out
that frankly I'm proud of.
Like I'm gonna hit you and I'm gonna hit you hard.
I'm gonna be fair, but like you can't do that
because these are really good people
trying to do the best they can in the world.
And this is true, me protecting my sister.
I'll also be the first if a friend is out of line
to say something, but the people I'm referring to here,
they show up with like all their goodness.
Joe's the same way.
And people talk shit about Joe.
And I'm like, people have tried to get me
to talk shit about him.
Reporters have called me to try and set me up
like a trap, a snare trap to say things about him.
No chance.
He's done things that I've seen
that had nothing to do with me
in service to others that are completely quiet,
that no one will ever hear about,
that absolutely tell me that he is a huge hearted person
who cares about the world
and takes care of people close to him and far away from him
without the expectation of anything in return.
And I'm not saying this so that he likes me more.
I'm saying this because it's true.
And I think that, you know,
Martha Beck's another one,
or people that like, they just want to give.
And so when I see people attacking people
and I can sense this about you,
we're getting to know one another here.
Like the fact that you're trying to attack someone
whose fundamental goal is to try and serve the world,
build things to serve,
like, and there are a few things
that get my adrenaline going like that,
but that's not okay.
It's not okay.
And I think it's really important that we stand up
for people who are not known either.
We stand up for them and that we say, that's not okay.
You can't take cheap shots like that.
And so-
I think times are changing there.
Times are changing, you know,
the, I don't have anything against traditional media.
I see the way they capitalize on things.
They'll put different names in URLs
and trying to bring clicks and stuff.
Look, they're just trying to make an income.
And I think some of them, presumably, are good people
just trying to do their thing.
What I love about podcasters,
what I love about the early, you know,
the skateboarders I knew from the skateboard era,
some I still touch with now, punk rockers,
the people in creative areas,
artists and musicians and poets, it's like,
they didn't get into it because they thought people
would like them or they'd make a lot of money.
And a lot of times they take ridicule.
They got into it because it's who they are.
It's their essence.
They're just being them.
And I think we can really tell
when somebody's just being themselves.
It's like their real essence just brought forward
and they're taking fire and they're taking shrapnel
and they do it anyway.
You know, I know he's very popular now,
even though he's dead,
but I've always loved Jean-Michel Basquiat's work.
And if you watch that movie,
I don't know if you've seen the movie Basquiat,
not the documentary, but amazing movie.
It's got Dennis Hopper, Parker Posey,
David Bowie plays Andy Warhol.
It's an amazing cast, Willem Dafoe.
It's just an amazing cast.
And there's this incredible scene
where Jean-Michel and Benicio del Toro,
who I believe was playing Jean-Michel's friend,
who was Vincent Gallo, Jean-Michel says to him,
he goes, hey, Benny, how long do you think it takes
to get famous?
And the answer that Benicio del Toro gives him is amazing.
He talks about how fame ultimately
just brings a lot of attack
and how that can really collapse the artist.
And it's a beautiful two minute riff on YouTube
that everyone should go watch.
And if anyone out there thinks they want to be famous,
I'll tell you, you do not want to be famous.
Famous takes away your freedom.
People say they want to be famous.
You absolutely don't.
What you want is you want a friend
or friends that you love and that love you.
You want to have enough resources,
plus a bit more so that you feel safe, right?
Anyone that says you only need $70,000 a year
in order to be happy, because some study said that,
bullshit, you need enough money so that you feel safe
about your present and your future.
That number differs for different people, okay?
So that's a study, I don't care what the data say,
like look at the real world.
And usually it's a rich person saying
you only need that amount of money, by the way.
You need some sense of passion or connection to the world,
and you need a sense of freedom that you can be you
and that you won't get attacked for it.
And we know this throughout history,
this has been proven over and over again.
So fame is bullshit, like fame takes away your freedom.
The rest of it, social connection, some resources,
a connection to some passionate exploration, curiosity,
even if it's very private and no one ever sees it,
like those things are really what make life rich.
It really, really does.
And I have fantasies about just disappearing,
taking a small group off to some hidden village
and we do our thing, but I know myself too well.
I'd want to connect with the world more,
and it's just in my nature to want to do that.
So I suppose I'm kind of hosed,
and I suppose the world's kind of stuck with me
until they aren't.
But no, I have those fantasies as well,
and I arrive at the same conclusion
that I'd eventually do something in the village
which would bring me back to society
and then bring me back to probably sitting in this chair.
And I've thought about getting some people together
and we should do this, we could get a property,
put a bunch of houses, put a gym, a sauna,
get up a podcast to you, but guess what?
They'd call it a cult.
They'd be like, they started a cult, right?
They'd find something, they'd be like, they started a cult.
Because I think to people that are not passionate creators,
and again, I'm not just talking about podcasters,
but that aren't passionate creators.
They don't understand, like they don't understand
that certain people just need to create.
And God bless them because we need somebody
to write articles from a perspective
that they don't understand to get other people
to think things that aren't true.
Because that's what they need to do.
Like they serve an important role.
Like in the aquarium of life, on the coral reef of life,
you need the little like horseshoe crabs working there
when you say like, well, what's the purpose?
It's part of an ecosystem.
It somehow indirectly serves the rest.
Although sometimes it's kind of hard to tell.
And as we head into this election,
as we head into like really uncertain times,
I think we tend to go the media or the podcasters
or the, look, everyone's doing the best they can
with what they've got.
It's just some people are working a little bit harder
to be kind and benevolent and giving
and acknowledging we're all human
and others are like pointing fingers, so.
Of all the protocols you've shared,
it seems like maybe the most important is friendship.
Send that morning text.
Find somebody that you can communicate with,
that will communicate with you, that you trust.
You don't have to share a ton.
I don't want to give the impression
that I sit there with my friends
and like share all the inner workings of my mind
and what's going on.
You know, I mean, that's why I have this notebook.
So I don't have to do that.
It's like, I got stuff in here I never want anyone to see.
You know, but yeah, find a friend.
Like friendship is huge.
And it's the start of all great things, right?
It's the reflection of all great things inside of us, right?
It's not the complete picture.
Romantic relationship for many, for most
is really important.
Get a dog, get a fish, get a plant, sure.
But I think friendship really is like the most important
thing that all of us can really focus on right now,
aside from partnership and children,
because of course children need us
and they need our attention and our support.
But friendship is super powerful.
And rather than talk about the isolation crisis,
the loneliness crisis,
I'd rather talk about some solutions.
And I think friendship, maybe even just a morning text,
back and forth, good morning, good morning.
How'd you sleep?
Pretty good, not well.
Okay, bye.
Next day, it's there.
Being able to rely on that like clockwork,
like the sun rising and setting each day,
you can count on that.
This just brings a lot of peace.
It'll make you a better version of yourself.
Do your friends know what you mean to them?
Having gone through those difficult moments,
did you, were you able to articulate to them
how much you appreciated them for that?
I'll get emotional again.
I don't think they could know.
You know, it's like, there's one friend in particular.
There's a guy who's actually very prominent
in the skateboarding community.
He's quiet in that community.
I'll say his name because he's so humble, you know?
He'll never say it for himself.
His name is Jim Thebo.
And when I was 14 years old,
Jim, who now runs a big company called Deluxe,
which is a bunch of companies,
and he's kind of the mayor of the whole sport.
Back then, I remember I was 14.
This was after I got out of this place.
And he rolled up to me at Embarcadero,
and he sat next to me.
He was like, sat next to me.
Gave me a coffee and some stickers.
And he was like, what's up, man?
And he's probably about 10 years older than I am.
And we started talking, and he gave me one of his books.
Sorry, Jim, I'm gonna embarrass him.
He had these poetry books.
Great book, I still have it.
It was a loose change.
And he had another one called Do the Distance.
And he goes, you should write.
Okay.
And I started writing.
I started keeping a journal.
And that one interaction carried me
through so many hard times.
Now years later, I had a really hard circumstance.
Things were going well in my life.
I was making progress on a certain front
that I've been challenged with for some time.
And then one day, just brack,
everything came crashing down.
And like magic, Jim showed up.
I'm not saying he got a call from the universe.
Somebody called him, and he showed up.
And he just sat with me.
Now I'm an adult at this point.
He just like sat with me.
And I hear from him every morning.
And I still text him every morning, texting me today.
He's here in LA today.
We won't see each other.
So he's busy.
I'm busy.
We got work.
I would love to see him, but he's busy.
And I respect that he's busy.
And he respects that I'm busy.
And it's like, wow, 14, and then 40 some years,
and he's there again.
And I like to think I've been there for him too.
And when I was that kid, at some point he knew,
in some way he knew exactly what I needed.
I needed those books.
I needed something.
And even when I tell him now about that,
he goes, oh, no, that poetry is so bad.
He's embarrassed about that.
And I'm thinking, no, man,
he saved my life with that stuff.
And I kept them.
I still have them.
And so I think he must have sensed
that I was a really feeling person.
And I was really in a trench.
And we've seen a lot of our friends go,
dead or in jail and in trouble.
We've seen a lot of people do extremely well.
Jim's an amazing guy because he's the one
who calls the decisions on a lot of things
in the kind of social milieu of skateboarding.
He's taken a lot of shit.
I don't want to get into the details,
but he's helped evolve skateboarding in some ways
that it was very resistant to evolving.
You can largely credit the true diversity in that sport.
You know, people talk about diversity,
but look at that sport.
Look at the number of different races.
Look at the fact that you've got straight kids,
gay kids, trans kids.
You've got room for the kids who have parents
and the parent involvement.
You've got kids that don't have any parents.
You've got people trying to help each other get sober
and stay sober.
You've got people, like Jim has taken so much shit
publicly on the chin,
maintaining complete silence about his rationale,
except with one mission in mind,
which is keep the sport going
in the healthiest way possible
that's most inclusive for the most number of people,
because he knows the importance of having a place
where kids that don't fit in in other sports can come,
but also the importance of having it be an Olympic sport,
which skateboarders shit on too.
And so this isn't about skateboarding.
I want to make very clear.
It's about Jim and the fact that he understands
his sense of purpose, his sense of duty.
He knew well enough that even though
he was a professional skateboarder,
that he would better serve the community
by doing something else, which is to be a leader.
He leads quietly.
Like I think about him all the time.
So do they know how much I appreciate them?
There's no way.
I could go on for hours about him,
the things he's done for me.
Anyone that knows that sport or knows Jim
knows exactly what I'm talking about.
He'll never have a podcast.
He'll never go on a podcast.
Maybe he'll bless us with coming on my podcast.
But some people like him, like I hope they,
but people like him in my life,
and I hope they know, but there's no card you can send
that can capture all that.
I think it's just like checking in on him every morning
and just giving him a big hug when I see him.
And I saw a tweet recently, it was like normalizing,
or no, it was the dude with sign guy who's super funny.
I think it said normalizing,
telling your friends you love them.
I don't think that was for women.
Hopefully they're doing that too.
I think it's for men.
Like I'm not shy about that.
I tell my friends, I love you.
I've also had the experience of not doing that,
and then I never see that friend again.
So I'm not trying to be overly sentimental, right?
It's really about just like living your life
with as much heart forward as is safe and appropriate, right?
So anyway, that's one example.
There's no way they could know.
He just sat with me.
I find this to be very interesting words
because we think about the role of a friend
in that situation of fixing things,
diving in there, figuring out the problem
and presenting the solution.
But you said he just sat with me.
Oh man, when Barbara Chapman, my graduate advisor died,
I was devastated and she had two small girls
and I knew her when she was pregnant with each one of them.
And I was close with their family.
And I went to the house of flowers in San Francisco
and her daughter's get up.
One I think was probably about 12, the older one,
the younger one, by the way, became a neuroscientist.
That time was probably about nine.
And these two girls that I've known
since they were essentially in the womb
are there talking about their dead mother.
Now I broke down.
During my eulogy, like I just lost it.
I was crying in front of my colleagues.
I was so embarrassed and at the same time,
like I just couldn't hold it back.
These two young girls get up there
to talk about their dead mom.
And I'm thinking to myself, oh my God,
everyone's just bracing themselves.
And they just said, they're so strong.
They said, the best part about our mom
is that she spent a lot of unstructured time with us.
And that was it.
And they sat down and I remember thinking, holy shit.
Like that was it.
Of all the things they did, the baseball games they went to,
the things they did, I'm sure they have so many memories.
And the thing they remember is most important
is the fact that their mom spent
a lot of unstructured time with them.
Just hung out with them.
Like just hung out with them.
And I think at some level, like, yeah,
we need people to show up when things are hard.
We need people to support us, celebrate with us.
But like, in some ways, like a really good friend
is just somebody who just kind of hangs out with us.
Simon Sinek said that to me.
He said, in those moments,
what you need is someone just to sit in the mud with you.
You don't need them to do anything.
They just need to be sat there in the mud with you.
And that in part is the medicinal effect,
just knowing that there's someone else in the mud with you.
Yeah, you know, I, again,
I don't want to focus on names people recognize
because I don't want it to seem like it's unique to them.
But I mentioned names, like specific names,
because they may resonate with your audience, you know?
That's why I mentioned Rick or whatever.
Like a guy like Lane Norton, I'm getting to know better.
Like Lane on social media is a pretty, you know,
serrated edge guy, right?
But he's a sweetheart.
He's a kind person and he's got a ferociousness to him.
Which is something I can relate to.
You know, and I see his loyalty to his kids
and I see, you know, how like his fingernails
will be painted and people will tease him.
But he does it because his daughter loves it.
And he also is the guy that's going to deadlift twice
as much as anyone else.
And he's got this forward center of mass on things.
And then I also just see like, he's just such a loving person.
He loves what he does.
And I hope people will start to look at people's personas,
certainly online, but in real life.
And just start to like take them in a little bit.
Like, what are they trying to tell you
when they're being a little bit annoying?
Or what are they trying to tell you
when they're frustrated by politics?
Like looking a layer deeper and trying to like see the person
and feel the person as an experience of them
is like another way I think to be a really good friend.
Because when people say like, I see you,
I don't think they're like, I see you.
Like you need to do some eye gazing or something.
I think what it is, I mean, eye contact's important,
of course, but I don't think it's related
to like taking them in visually
as much as just like really appreciating
that they have all these different sides,
all these different facets.
Earlier you were talking about your relationship.
I mean, what you described to me is like real intimacy.
Like, sure, things proceed along great.
Then there's this challenge.
It's a big one.
There's some shame associated with it.
There's confusion.
And then people go into their different domains,
do their work, come together and like share and then grow.
I mean, that's intimacy.
It takes risk.
It takes a certain amount of healthy risk.
And I think we can do this in all relationships.
And I'm no psychologist and I'm still learning.
And Lord knows I have a lot of work to do,
but I'll be damned if I'm gonna quit.
I'm gonna keep trying.
Andrew, we have a closing tradition on this podcast
where the last guest leaves a question
for the next guest not knowing
who they're gonna be leaving it for.
And the question left here for you is,
what is the true meaning of your life
why do you exist?
Goodness, that's a tough one.
Meaning it's hard to distill that down.
But I'll pause for a second
in an effort to keep it uncharacteristically brief.
Now, as I mentioned earlier,
all I have is my experience,
the knowledge that I gained from that experience
and my words.
And for me, the purpose of my life is
to make the best possible choices
that I'm capable of making at the time
in terms of what to seek out,
what to learn and what to share.
And I think the real meaning of my life
is to try and provide useful information and tools
so that people can be a better version of themselves
for themselves and other people.
And I know it sounds lofty
and kind of empty and cliche on the one hand,
but I mean it.
I wake up in the morning and I think,
what can I learn?
What am I excited to learn?
And then when I come across gems,
I just compulsively have to tell people about it.
But not because I need to do it for me,
it's because I feel like people need to know about this.
This can really help.
This can really help.
This can potentially really, really, really, really help.
So I think that's the meaning of life for me.
Right now.
Right now.
And at some point it may be just to provide care
for little hubramans.
At some point it may be something entirely different.
I've learned to not anticipate
what the next steps will be for me more than five years out.
I've seen some ridiculous speculation
that I'm going to go into politics.
Probably related to the fact
that I kind of alluded to it once or twice.
I'm not going into politics.
I'll tell you right now,
there's no chance I'm going into politics.
It runs counter current to my nature.
And even if politics changed entirely, it's not for me.
What is for me is learning and adventure
and sharing what I learn.
And that's the only way I know how to be.
Andrew, thank you.
I didn't know you before today.
I obviously knew of you
because everyone knows you on the internet
for all the work that you've done
and all the things that you shared.
But I didn't know the man
and the hours we've spent together today
have really illuminated the man that you are.
And it's really, most importantly,
illuminated your intentions,
which are so incredibly pure and wonderful.
And it's because of you that much of my podcast exists
because I learn from your show.
It inspires me and that calls me to bring guests on,
oftentimes guests that you've had on your show
that have changed my life in some way.
So you've been a tremendous driver
of both my development as an individual,
but also of this show inadvertently.
And also that's the case of all of my team
because the 30, 40 people that work with me here,
they're all massive fans of yours,
but most importantly,
they've had their lives improved because you exist.
And because you've taken very complex things
and distilled them down and shared them with all of us
in a way that we wouldn't usually have access to.
So that's such a tremendous gift that you've given
and continue to give.
So thank you on behalf of myself
and all of my team and everybody else
that were so excited, all my friends
that were so excited that I'd be speaking to you today.
I'm tremendously excited about your book.
I hear that there's a book coming out called Protocols,
an operating manual for the human body,
which comes out next year in the 22nd of April, 2025.
If there was ever a book,
I don't get excited by many books,
but having been such a fan of your work,
it is a book that I consider to be essential.
We were talking about it yesterday.
We see it as almost like waiting for the Bible
on this subject matter.
So I'm gonna link it below
because I know it's currently available
for pre-order or pre-sale.
And I highly recommend if people find what you do to be
of any value, then this is the book to read.
I've been doing everything I can to just get snippets of it
from people around you.
And the excitement and anticipation is palpable.
So thank you for taking the time to write that book
because you don't have to.
You've got a big enough audience as it is.
You don't have to sit down
and really distill it down for people.
And more than anything, just thank you.
I really, really appreciate that what you do
and the fact that you exist and all that you've done for me
and all my friends and people that matter to me.
So thank you on behalf of all of us.
And I really, really mean that from the bottom of my heart.
So thank you.
Thank you. I'll take that in.
And I'm very grateful for the opportunity
to sit down with you today.
I'm a huge fan and admirer of what you've done
and what you're doing.
And right back at you in the sense that
you have many, many areas of success.
You don't need to do a podcast,
but the fact that you do bring so much benefit to the world,
it's been just marvelous to see your ascent,
which is just like pointed at the sun.
You guys are doing such incredible work and continue to.
And I have to say, I came here today
expecting we were gonna get into some science
and to some protocols.
And I knew we were going to cover a lot of areas,
but I didn't anticipate the depth of the conversation
that we were going to have.
And I can say it's entirely the consequence
of your realness and the genuine compassion
that you bring to these kinds of conversations.
That's felt.
I also really appreciate the way you shared
some of your own experience.
I can tell you're somebody who really cares about people
and that your success is in no small part
the consequence of that.
So thank you for having me here
and to your team for having me here
and for doing what you do.
It's clear you're all in in every endeavor
and your nature is an incredible one.
The fact that you can take on so many things
and that you've embraced your nature
to not wanna go the traditional path.
I think that's an incredible
and incredibly important example for people.
So I can also say that I think
that we're gonna be friends.
And so you should pass me your number.
We'll check in in the morning
and we should grab a meal or a workout or whatever.
Maybe we just hang out.
So I'd like to think that we've sparked a friendship.
We certainly have.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
