Andrew Huberman on Focus, Energy, and Performing at Your Best

If you take yourself and your work really seriously, you need to organize your day that way. If you had to recommend three things to people to live a healthier life, what would those be? Morning bright light, ideally from sunlight. Do the weight training protocol I talked about earlier. It will completely change your life. And then the last one would be figure out some way to make the sleep you can get the highest quality sleep. Did you take any supplements or medications yesterday? Loads. What's something you recommend to others but are not that good at following yourself? I think the social media thing might be the biggest one. I recently moved X and Instagram to a separate phone and then I keep that phone in a lock box. You can't actually code out of it. We have a lot of founders who listen to our podcast. If you had to narrow it down to three pieces of evidence-based habits for cognitive performance, what would those things be? If Andrew Huberman could recommend only three things for better health, they'd be morning light, resistance training, and better sleep. In this episode, Daisy sits down with Andrew to find out what his own routine actually looks like from the moment he wakes up through exercise, food, supplements, work, and sleep. They also talk about where he struggles, including putting his social media phone in a lock box and why health protocols should support your life rather than take it over. And for founders, Andrew explains why knowing and protecting the hours when your brain does its best work may be one of the most important things you can do. Dr. Huberman, welcome to The A16Z Show. Thank you. Delighted to be here. Your podcast launched in January of 21 and has changed the way millions of people live their lives. This morning, I got my son. Great. I delayed my caffeine a little bit, probably not as much as you would like. You famously got our firm's founder, Marc Andreessen, to stop drinking alcohol. I'm not there yet. But I'm wondering if looking back, you remember a moment where you were like, holy cow, people aren't just listening to me, they're like changing their daily habits because of what I say. Well, it's been a wild ride. I didn't anticipate any of it, but I'm delighted that people are doing things for their health. And I don't know whether or not to accept by saying thank you or apologize that Marc stopped drinking. I know he enjoyed the occasional drink. He's grumpy about it. Yeah. Well, I want to be very clear. The data say zero is better than any. Two per week is probably the upper limit for an adult non-alcoholic. And I don't think Marc is alcohol. He could, in theory, have two drinks. But when I suggested that, he goes, no. He kind of did what many people do, which is sometimes none is easier to stick to than some. And I do think that alcohol can be enjoyed. And if one wants to do that, just to think about doing some of the other things that can be beneficial. But to directly answer your question, I didn't anticipate any of it. As I said, I'm delighted people are taking measures for their health. And at some point, I realized, whoa, people are starting to do things. And I couldn't tell whether or not it was because of the science that we were presenting or because the protocols I know work extremely well. The nice thing is I don't take credit for the actual protocols because in most cases, with rare exception, like some things related to stress mitigation, in most cases, the protocols come from other people's science. So in looking at the fields of science and health education, most people who've been out there have been talking about their own science. So doing it this way affords me a certain amount of freedom. I have to be careful, too, because I'm talking about other people's science often. But I love to learn and I love to teach. So for me, nothing makes me happier than reading papers and sharing what I think is interesting information and trying things out and seeing what works. And the people that have been close to me will tell you that for my whole life, when I've learned something I thought was cool, I'm out there teaching about it, whether people want to listen or not. So they just kind of stuck a microphone in front of me and here I am. Amazing. You've been very transparent about your daily protocols. Like I mentioned, sun in your eyes, delaying caffeine, but also rotating exercise by day, cold punch and sauna, doing yoga nidra, taking a variety of supplements. But maybe you can just walk us through like yesterday. I'm curious. What did you eat? What exercise did you do? What supplements did you take? What of your advice did you follow and what did you not? A single day. So I wake up, I use the bathroom like everybody else. You get on your phone while you're in bed? No. Okay. Very disappointing. I can't sleep. If I didn't love, love, love my eight sleep so much, I would figure out a way to have no Wi-Fi on in the house at all at night. Interesting. So I woke up, I'm groggy like everybody else. My mind starts going places, you know, it's discombobulated on waking. I don't think I've ever woken up and just done a big yawn and been like, life is so good. I wake up and I think, okay, I have this to do, I have that to do. So the first thing that I do is get up, use the restroom and then I go do, these days, I do a five minute meditation. I set my phone for five minutes and I do a standard meditation of just breathing. This I think is an extremely important practice that I haven't talked a lot about. If for no other reason, then it gets you very aware of what the inputs to your brain are about to be. And it also makes you very aware of how chaotic it can be in our minds. And after talking to a number of people who worked on the science of meditation, in particular folks out at University of Wisconsin who've done a bunch of the brain imaging, it's very clear that the real benefits of meditation come from not quieting the mind, but from being able to just observe how chaotic it is and see that as something slightly separate from the quote unquote observer. And we have circuits that we think underlie the observer versus all the monkey mind stuff as they call it. But I always thought that meditation was about achieving a really peaceful state. Turns out it's about observing the chaos. And so the best way I can describe this practice in terms of its utility is just as with exercise, if you get a burn in your legs or the final repetitions of lifting weights, that's what triggers the adaptation. With meditation in terms of consciousness and focus and awareness, I think the lactate of the mind as it was described to me, so I didn't come up with that phrase, the lactate of the mind is to be able to experience that chaos, observe it, and not do anything with it. That's what allows you to move into your day with, I think, more awareness of what is a meaningful thought or reaction and what isn't. Okay, so I do that five minutes. These days I find the buzzer goes off without me, when is this over, when is this over? And then I get sunlight in my eyes. I'm absolutely religious about that. Sometimes I go up on my roof. Sometimes I go for a walk. Were you home yesterday? I was, yeah. Yeah, I take some water with me usually, drink some water, get some sunlight in my eyes. Yesterday I woke up in a hotel, I was facing east in the morning, so it was great, got to actually see the sunrise, but cloudy day, overcast day, I'm getting sunlight in my eyes first thing. If I wake up long before the sun is out, I have a 10,000 lux artificial light, and I'll get in front of that thing just as I make coffee in the morning or do my thing. I then, if I'm going to exercise, I drink caffeine right away. I think this is something that I've tried to be clear about, but it hasn't always been clear. If I'm going to exercise, I need caffeine, so I'm not waiting even 30 minutes. I'm going to drink caffeine, so I drink yerba mate, which is my preferred source of caffeine, for a long time now, and then I exercise. My exercise routine is very simple, and I might just share it because I've found that it's been very beneficial, not just for me, but for women I've trained with, men, people of all ages. I've followed it for 35 years, and I think it's the most time efficient and effective exercise program, and it's really straightforward. Three days a week lifting weights, two to three days a week doing some sort of, quote unquote, cardio. The cardio, I'll just explain first, something where you get your heart rate way, way up, safely. Could be the rower, could be the airdyne bike, the one with the push-pull with the arms while you're pedaling, could be running. Pick something that you can go close to max effort without hurting yourself. This is a really big deal, especially now that I'm 50. I feel quite proud of the fact that I've never had a major injury, and I feel great at 50. Mostly because of what I didn't do. A lot of people are talking about all the things they did do. It's all the things I didn't do. I never hopped on someone else's workout just because I was challenged. That's how you hurt yourself. And I picked things that felt right to me. Cycling doesn't feel good to me, running and the airdyne bike do. So warm up for a minute, pedal easy in my case, then go 20 seconds all-out effort, 10 seconds rest, repeat that eight times, you're done. That's one cardio workout. You're getting max heart rate, close to max heart rate. This is VO2 max type stuff, and it's so fast. Okay. So yesterday was Sunday. What is Sunday? So day one, this could fall on a Sunday or a Monday for someone, doesn't matter. But the first day of the week I train my legs with resistance training. Takes about an hour. That's the hardest work of the week. And if I were to only do one workout per week for the rest of my life, it would be that. For lots of reasons, largest musculature, systemic effects on hormones and metabolism, et cetera, et cetera. After leg day, I typically take the day completely off. I'll try to do some sauna cold alternation on those days for recovery. We can talk details there. Then depending on how well I've recovered, it might be just one day off, it might be two days off. Then I do some sort of push pull thing for the torso. So some chest presses, some shoulder presses, a pull up or pull down type thing. If someone can't do pull ups or pull downs and some sort of row. Maybe some stuff for the neck. If somebody has bad posture, oftentimes men will, their shoulders will start getting wider and they're not training their neck. First of all, it looks kind of disproportionate, but then they'll start getting rotator cuff stuff. Training the neck is very important for stability of the entire shoulder girdle. And then I'll take a day off and then I'll do some arms, calves, abs type smaller body parts. So those are three separate weight training days. All of them follow the same approach. And this is where I think people go badly wrong, but the data and what you're hearing online is starting to finally catch up. You could warm up for a couple of minutes on the bike or some jumping jacks if you wanted, but I recommend doing one light set. So 10 or 12 repetitions, very light just to get blood flowing for the first movement. Then the second exercise or the second set, excuse me, is a moderate set. So a set that you probably could do 10 repetitions, you do three. You're just preparing the nervous system for the heavier load. Then you do two work sets, maybe three minutes, four minutes rest in between, which is long. But those work sets are all out work sets in perfect form taken to momentary muscular failure. Two sets only. So this might be a leg extension for the quads and then you would move to something else, some sort of movement you can do safely, a squat, a front squat, a leg press. I mean, there's so many variations, right? Some compound movement and then the same thing for the hamstrings. The point here is that it's light set, medium set, many fewer reps than you could do even with the medium set, then hard work for two sets. Write down what you did and either increase weight or increase repetitions every single workout. And I do this for every single thing I just described, regardless of body part. It ends up being two exercises per body part, maybe three. So the total volume of work is very low. You leave these workouts, even leg day, feeling not completely rejuvenated, but you're not crushed. Your recovery is very fast. Your nervous system isn't as taxed and you make progress at an amazing rate. A woman that I suggested this to who was a D1 athlete who played soccer for years came to me the other day and she's like, I can't believe this works so well. It's a third of the volume I was doing before. You can just put more into these individual sets. So I could go on and on about this, but then somewhere in the week, I find a way to do what turns out to be about six minutes of the 20 seconds all out, 10 second rest. And I find another day to do some sort of long hike. It used to be a jog. Nowadays, I like to throw on a weight vest or just a backpack and hike where my heart rates up and I'm breathing a bit. And if I'm really ambitious and I'm getting enough sleep every night, I might do also a 20 to 30 minute run in the middle of the week. But those three weight workouts will get most people what they want in terms of body recomposition, strength, and not just offsetting muscle loss and strength with age, but feeling much better posturally, mobility wise. And of course you can always stretch, but you can do that while you watch TV in the evening or something. So that's the kind of framework of that. I've been doing that for 35 years. Everyone I've given it to is positively shocked by the brevity, the results, most importantly, and the fact that it's fun when you are looking forward to just a really 45 to 60 minutes of hard work. It's fun. It actually starts to become a pleasure to do. Okay. Yesterday was leg day. Yeah. What happened after legs? All right. After legs, I ingested some starches and fruit. After you weight train, if you train hard the way I described, you need to replenish glycogen. People say, well, you didn't deplete all your glycogen. Eating some starches after you train is a good idea. What starch did you have? I trained really hard, and I love to eat. So I had banana, blueberry, I had a couple of scoops of whey protein, I had some oatmeal, and I had some sourdough toast with butter and salt on it, because if something has butter on it, you got to salt it too, is my opinion. And then a few hours later, maybe three hours later, I had a sort of standard meal, which would be my normal lunch, which would be some piece of meat, either beef or chicken. I'm not a big fan of fish, unless it's like an ahi tuna, and that's kind of hard to come by most days. And some vegetable. I'm a big believer in fiber, but I want to make a point that I think doesn't get discussed enough, which is that many people get gastric distress from certain fibrous foods. It's very important, I think, that people find foods that are good for them, but that they feel good eating and after they eat. So for instance, you're not going to see me eating broccoli. It makes me feel kind of not well. It doesn't digest well, no matter how much I chew it, this and that. So I'm not alone in this. There's some foods like onions that generate histamines, and so some people just don't feel good after eating certain foods. You have to experiment and see what works for you, and the only way to do that, really, is for a short while. to start experimenting with single ingredient foods. Right, just having some broccoli. You can put some olive oil or butter on it, right? Just seeing what works. People are constantly eating sandwiches and stews and pizzas and souffles and lasagnas. You don't know what works for you and what doesn't. So a lot of developing really healthy eating habits with foods that you love and having a lot of choices is to figure out what you can eat and feel really good eating after you eat as well. Okay, so what protein did you have for lunch? I had beef. Beef, okay. I had just some grilled steak. I had, in my case, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes and I had some rice as well. Any dessert? Well, and I'm a big fan of olive oil, so I had some olive oil. No, I don't tend to like sweets that much. If I have sweets, it's generally 100% chocolate, which is really boring and kind of nerdy, but you develop a taste for it. I sort of lost my appetite for sweets. I have not lost my appetite for fats. So to me, a treat is like a chunk of really, really good Parmesan cheese. What's the most indulgent thing you've had recently? Gosh, it's gonna sound so healthy, but I had an amazing ribeye the other day. Because I don't like sweets and I don't drink alcohol, indulgent for me would be like. Pizza? Pizza I love. Pizza I love, but I'm very particular about pizza. So on the East Coast, in New York, I'll get a slice at just any kind of walk-in place or two. On the West Coast, Aaron Ellie's Pizza in the East Bay is pretty much the only thing that meets my threshold for East Coast enough like pizza. So yeah, I do that. If I were gonna have ice cream, it would be chocolate chip ice cream. And I'm trying to think if I have any kind of indulgences. I should be very clear. Not because I'm quote-unquote addicted to feeling good and those things make me feel bad. I do think there's a compound effect of doing things right in terms of exercise and sleep, et cetera. But I will say this. If I've ever eaten really clean for a while, I actually am less strong, less happy. I make less progress in general. And so every once in a while, spiking my nutrition with a couple of slices of pepperoni pizzas seems just like a really good thing. Croissants, that's the other thing. Anything buttery. Love a croissant. But the combination of fat and starch is really what does it for me. I wasn't gonna trust you if you said you didn't like a croissant, so. Croissants are amazing. So that was what I ate. Okay, afternoon, dinner, sleep. Yeah, so if I've slept really well, I don't take a nap or do any kind of yoga nidra. But typically, I don't get enough sleep. I think people are shocked to hear this. Like, aren't you the sleep guy? I, like many humans, struggle with getting to sleep early enough. Okay, so I do a 10 to 30 minute non-sleep deep rest yoga nidra in the afternoon. I think it's a wonderful thing to restore mental and physical vigor without generating sleep inertia. Actually, your very own Marc Andreessen, who likes to take swipes at me online. It's kind of funny. On X, people think that we're enemies, but I recognize it as friendly. And I invite it. But I once said, you know, yoga nidra, where you lie still, you deeply relax your body and you intentionally keep your mind awake. I said, it's not a nap. It doesn't induce sleep inertia. It's better than a nap. It teaches you to fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night. And Marc, of course, wrote, it's a nap. So it's not a nap, Marc. But I appreciate the joke. It's very different. And in fact, there's some emerging evidence that during these non-sleep deep rest states that pockets of the brain are experiencing deep sleep and maybe even growth hormone release, which is pretty interesting. So I'm very interested in these so-called hypnagogic or kind of liminal states between sleep and awake. It's also just kind of an interesting exploration of the mind. Usually, I come out of that having some clarity about what I wanna do. Now, I should mention, after I trained legs, I read papers and I worked. I should, I ate. Even on a Sunday. And then in the later afternoon, I make it a point to get a walk before the sun goes down. Or if I don't have time and I'm on a phone call, I'll just step outside and watch the sun go down, if I can, or just look in the direction of the sun in the overcast sky. I actually learned this practice from the sleep lab at Stanford, down the road from here, when I worked there during a summer in college. This was before the discovery of the neurons in the eye that register ambient light and signal to the brain's circadian clock. So this is in the mid-90s. Those cells weren't discovered till the early 2000s. And what's interesting is, all the staff of the sleep laboratory would go outside from the basement and would look at the sunset. And I was like, why are we doing this? And they said, oh, this sets your circadian rhythm. It's well-known. Ideally, you do it in the morning as well. And that's when I started the practice. And so these are serious scientists with Howard Hughes Investigators, members of the National Academy. Now we understand all the mechanisms. But I point that out because I think a number of people think that you need all the mechanistic science worked out first. There are certain practices that are so very clearly good for us where the mechanistic data come later. So I try and do that in the afternoon. Sometimes I'll stand outside with a cup of tea or something. I do stop drinking caffeine about 2 p.m. That's about the latest. Otherwise, I do have trouble falling asleep. And then, usually it's a bit more work when I go inside. And then in the evening, I eat some sort of dinner. And for dinner, I have to say, if it's a day when I resistance train, generally I'm pretty hungry for dinner. And I'll do something kind of like lunch, but not exactly the same. And if it's a day when I didn't exercise, it tends to be a kind of smaller meal. And usually not as much protein for that last meal. And so my last bite of food is somewhere around, typically around 7.30, 8 o'clock. But I'm not nuts about that because I tend to go to sleep somewhere around 11 p.m. And the last hour before sleep, I'm just dimming the lights. I'm just kind of trying to transition my day down. I do put away the phone because I find it's very easy to get into text conversations late at night. And I do like to be on the computer until fairly late. And sometimes I'll get some entertainment in of watching something, but these days I mostly just read. Do you do like the blue light glasses or anything? I do. I have the Red Lens glasses. We designed some of those with Rokud. I think, here's an important thing also born out of a conversation between Elon and Mark online where, I think, oh no, it was Lex and Mark, and Elon jumped in that Mark said, I stopped drinking because of Huberman, but I'm not gonna do any of that blue light shit. That's what he said. So, his words. There is huge variation in terms of people's sensitivity to blue light at night. And I think a lot of people think the lights have to appear blue, but bright lights, white lights, yellow lights have short wavelength light. So, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about blue. Some people are very sensitive to it. It spikes their cortisol, it disrupts their sleep, even as little as 100 lux, which is very dim through closed eyelids. Other people are less sensitive to it. We don't know how that works. It doesn't seem to be related to how light or dark somebody's eyes are. My eyes are just very sensitive to light, so that at night, if I get a lot of bright overhead light, I have trouble falling asleep, or I fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night. So, if I dim the lights or I wind down glasses, I feel much better. So, I think there is kind of a split. We don't really know what the underlying reasons are, but in any case. I was upsold on blue light blocking contact lenses the last time I got my contacts prescribed. And my husband says it makes my eyes look freaky, but I was like, I'm not going back to the ophthalmologist. You need some short wavelength light during the day on your skin and in your eyes to generate vitamin D, for instance. I mean, UV light is not across the board bad. I should mention that when the sun is low in the sky, the UV index is very low. I mean, one of the reasons that you can look at the rising sun or the setting sun and it doesn't hurt your eyes is because there's this phenomenon of atmospheric Rayleigh scattering where the short wavelengths, like UV, are filtered out. When the sun is overhead, it's extremely bright. It's painful to look at. That's because you're getting a lot more of the shorter wavelength light reaching your eyes. So, if people are concerned about UV exposure, morning and evening or late afternoon light exposure is very low UV, or you can just look at the UV index. It's, you know, with a Google search or something. Did you take any supplements or medications yesterday? Loads. Quickly tick them off. Sure, right. So, this is not a promotional. I wanna be very clear. This is what I've done and what I've actually been doing most of these things since 2012. So, I do take AG1 twice a day. I do that in the morning, usually right before my first meal of the day and in the evening. People say, okay, that's because they're a sponsor of the podcast. I use it just as I describe it as a covered nutritional basis where if I didn't eat enough fruits and vegetables or something, I can cover any gaps. I like it. So, I've been doing that for a very long time, long before I knew what a podcast was. I take fish oil. I'm a big believer in high doses of EPA, omega-3s. You know, there's this whole debate about, you know, omega-6 to omega-3 ratios. These days, I find the most efficient way to get above a gram of EPA per day, not just above a gram of fish oil, is to take Levaza, which is a prescription omega-3. It also, all the heavy metals have been extracted, so you don't have to worry about that. And there are generic versions of it, so it's pretty inexpensive now. So, I think people might wanna take Levaza. They might not, but I take Levaza. I take some vitamin D. I take three to, you know, 5,000 units of vitamin D3. And my morning supplement ingestion includes, I actually believe in some of the herbal supplements that are just based on my blood work. I take 400 milligrams of something called Tonga Ali, which is an Indonesian. There are a couple different versions, but I take Tonga Ali, which it's known to help the unbinding of something called sex hormone-binding globulin from testosterone, so it frees up testosterone a bit. Men and women can take this. I don't have any financial relationship to the companies that sell it, so I take the Solarae version. It's also the least expensive. So, and I do that. I take something called P5P, which is a vitamin B6 derivative. I take 50 milligrams of that. I take that to slightly reduce prolactin. I don't have high prolactin, but I do that. In the morning, you sort of want to amplify the cortisol and so-called catecholamines, so dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, kind of milieu, and it can assist with that a bit. And let's see. What else? Oh, I take N-acetylcysteine, 600 milligrams a day. It's a glutathione precursor. N-acetylcysteine, there's a really nice study showing that N-acetylcysteine, 600 to 900 milligrams taken three times per day can reduce the likelihood that you will catch flu. And they did this study by exposing people to other people with flu virus. I only take it if I feel like I'm getting sick. Great, it can make your nose run a little bit. It's a mucolytic. It's actually used in other contexts and dosages for cystic fibrosis, which is the buildup of fluid in the lungs. So it's a pretty powerful tool. I take it once per day, and if I'm feeling run down or if I'm traveling or if I'm around somebody who's sick, I'll take three times a day. It can also perhaps help shorten the course of a colder flu. But I learned this trick from an ER doc who was working through the pandemic and needed to stay healthy. But the data in that paper, and I can provide you a link if you want a pretty interesting, the sort of transmission of flu in this case was, I think it was in the mid 70 percentage points of people who took the placebo got the flu by being exposed to clearly flu virus. And I think that number reduced to the high 20s in the group that took N-acetylcysteine. You'll have to double check on those numbers. So pretty impressive. I figured safe, increasing glutathione's safe, so why not? No financial relationship to any company that sells it, but they're all pretty much equivalent. And then with lunch, I take a multivitamin. I take two digestive enzymes. I definitely think that can help. If somebody gets itchy after food or thinks they have food allergies, before you run off and do some expensive food allergy analysis or something like that, or treatment, I recommend there's a enzyme that you can take before you eat any histaminergic foods. Completely transformed my relationship to food because I can eat pretty much anything now. This was a tool that was actually suggested to me by a colleague at Stanford, which doesn't necessarily mean it's a clinical study, but it makes sense. If you're not making enough of the enzyme to process histaminergic foods, you can imagine you might get some uncomfortable symptoms. And I'm a very allergic person. I feel like I need to know that. This is great. I mean, and it, I used to get sleepy after eating certain foods. I'm like, what is this? It was often dairy foods that would make me, and I thought, oh, it's tryptophan. That turns out to be nonsense. There's not enough tryptophan in dairy or turkey relative to other things. I see it, it's kind of like itchy around my eyebrows and people who are kind of prone to autoimmune conditions, like people who have, like for me, people have a little bit of psoriasis or something like that. Oftentimes, they'll find that these foods are kind of irritating to them, so I do that. Also, what I'm describing here, it probably costs less than a penny a day for this enzyme. So it's a trivial, a trivial cost. So let's see, and then in that meal is when I take the Lavazza multivitamin. I do take, I do take a desiccated liver. People have to be careful about increasing iron load because it's high in heme iron, but I don't want to eat liver. I have no interest in eating liver. It doesn't appeal to me, but I take it for some of the nutrients that are there. And then in the evening, again, not a promotional, but the sleep supplement that's been far and away the best thing for me is just to take AGZ, which is a cocktail of things that I help them create. So it's got magnesium 3-NA, it's got CNA, it's got the tart cherry, it's got all the extracts and things combined. I take that in my sleep. It actually allowed me to stop carrying around, you know, a bunch of different pills. I also, I've experimented with peptides and I have been open about my experimentation with some other things in kind of the hormone and peptide area. Maybe we separate that conversation because what I just described, I want to be very clear, is basically what I did between age, gosh, 20, you know, plus or minus, I mean, AG didn't exist and some things like that, but, and 45. At 45, I started to experiment with a few other things, but that's that. I have, I will say, if you want to have a conversation about some of the tools, especially here in Silicon Valley that people are experimenting with for focus and some of the stimulant and non-stimulant approaches to focus, I spent a lot of time researching that and I've spent some time experimenting with that too. Is it something you recommend to others, but are not that good at following yourself or what do you do that you know is bad for you? I think the social media thing might be the biggest one. I recently moved X and Instagram to a separate phone so that if people send me things, I can't open it. And then I keep that phone in a lockbox so that I say, okay, for an hour I'm going on there. And then it goes back into, and this is a supermax prison lock spot. You can't actually code out of it. That's a little bit embarrassing for me because I can control my behavior, but I did find that time would pass. You're human. You're just like us. Well, the algorithms have gotten so good. They've gotten so good and it's so entertaining and it's also a little different because I'm on there. So I'm interacting with it in a pretty active way. And I mean, it's also just a weird experience to go online and see people saying stuff about you and then you're trying to explain things and trying to figure out if they're in good faith or not. And it can really suck a lot of time. So I think that that's probably the biggest one. And it's the one that, yeah, it carries a little bit of shame, right? We should all be able to control our behavior. So why should I need a lockbox for my phone? On the other hand, I feel like when it's in the lockbox and data support this, that if the phone is out of the room or completely inaccessible, there's cognitive resources that become available to you that are not, if it's even in your bag, turned off under your chair. This was a study that was done. People can focus just as well, but they need to use additional cognitive resources to have that level of focus. This was looked at in a pretty clever way in this study. So I try and keep the phone in another room and I find that having it in the lockbox is a whole other level of inaccessibility that I think serves me. That totally checks out to me. Okay, you distill health research for a living and it's resulted in a lot of recommendations and protocols. If you had to say, if you had to recommend three things to people ranked no more than three to live a healthier life, what would those three things be? Great. Morning, bright light, ideally from sunlight, so that would be in the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. If you can't get it from sunlight, get a 10,000 lux artificial light, then get some sunlight if and when you can. So that's number one. Next would be do the weight training protocol I talked about earlier. It will completely change your life. If women are concerned about being too bulky, it's not going to do that. In terms of body recomposition, mood, brain health, you're not going to find a more potent stimulus. Then the last one would be to figure out some way to make the sleep you can get the highest quality sleep. I sometimes get appropriately attacked for, hey, I've got kids, I've got a busy job, the neighbors are always making noise, what do I do? Find a two-bed time to shoot for most nights that allows you to get the most deep sleep. Don't miss that window. I hear I'm lumping in a fourth, but really learn to get to sleep and fall back asleep. I'm not going to say get perfect sleep because you'd have to organize your whole life around that. But really do long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. Learn how to close your eyes, and this sounds so kooky, but it's grounded in what we understand about the underlying circuitry. Moving your eyes back and forth and up and down and so forth when you're having a hard time falling asleep because your mind is racing will greatly help you fall asleep. It's not mysterious why. It's because in order to fall asleep, you need to forget about your body position, and this confuses the vestibular system. In fact, if I may, one of the technologies that I'm most excited about, and I'm hoping A16G will make this, but I don't have a company related to this, are sleep masks that induce sleep by controlling eye movements in certain ways. How cool would that be? And measure rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep. I think that's the next wave of technology that we all desperately need. But the three things are, as I said, the morning bright light, the resistance training, still do cardio if you want, but the resistance training is the really sharp blade of health improvement, and find a way in your current circumstances each night to get the highest quality whatever, five hours, six hours, ideally it's eight hours, but find, know the things that you can do in the context of the hotel room, the airplane that you happen to be on. Figure those things out, and then you'll start to experience the flexibility that comes from not fearing that you didn't get the perfect night's sleep. I'm fine on six hours, because I know how to regulate my energy during the day if I just got six, and I would love to get eight, but I can't tell you the last time I got eight solid hours without getting up once or twice. This just doesn't happen. We have a lot of founders listen to our podcast. If you had to also kind of narrow it down to three pieces of evidence-based habits for cognitive performance for founders or anyone, what would those things be? First one is know when your windows of high cognitive capacity are. This is different for everybody. For me, I can feel 11 a.m. come around. Gosh, I wish it was 7 a.m. when this happened, and I get up pretty early. I should say I tend to get up between 6 and 7 a.m. Sometimes if I go to sleep at 9, I wake up at 5. If I go to sleep at 10 or 11, I tend to wake up at 7. I wake up in the middle of the night, like I think most normal human beings, I use the restroom and get back into bed 90% of the nights in my life. I know that in the morning, I tend to have a lot of sleep inertia. I need to do these things. I'll do the exercise, et cetera, but part of the reason I do that is I know if I exercise before 9 a.m., I have a lot more energy and focus for the rest of the day. If I exercise at 11 a.m., which is kind of peak of my morning energy, at 3 in the afternoon, I'm exhausted. This is just me, but other people might be different. Some people find that that peak for work lies at a certain time of the day. For me, there's two times. It's really between the hours of 9.30 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. That window is crucial. I have to be very careful that I'm not exercising in that window because I, like most founders, don't get paid to exercise. This is very important. If you're going to do things for your health, they have to support the other areas of your life in a way that feed back onto something where your company succeeds, and then you actually have the resources to maybe change your schedule someday. But otherwise, if people are trying to just pack all these protocols in, they're just going to deplete themselves. For me, it's 9.30 to 12.30. That's one key window. Then I tend to have a little bit of dip in focusing cognition, and then for me, somewhere in the late afternoon, right around 4.35 p.m., I start to get another window that lasts until about 7.00 p.m. or so, right before dinner. I have to capture that, and I've learned that my mind is better at certain things in those two windows. Again, this is highly individual. For some people, it might be the middle of the night. I think knowing yourself, and this might change across stages of life or life circumstances, but knowing yourself and really capturing those two and protecting those times as if they were the most important times of the day. Maybe only your family members and coworkers can access you with emergencies during that time or those times. For most people, it's going to be about twice a day. You might say, that's not enough time. That's three hours of focused work, and then maybe three hours again in the afternoon or two or three. I don't know many people that are completely focused for eight or nine hours a day without the next day being completely shot, especially if you use pharmacology, and we could talk about pharmacology. Caffeine, I sip on throughout the day, as I said, until the afternoon. If I exercise in the morning, I tend to not need as much caffeine in the afternoon. I just hydrate electrolytes. A lot of people will find that just hydrating better will increase their alertness. That's number one. Figure out when you can exercise so that it gives you more energy and protect those. I call them workabouts. I literally think of real work as a fight. My friend Rick Rubin likes to wake up rather, I wouldn't say slowly, but move into the day with a lot of peace and calmness, and then his work block generally is in the afternoon. I know this because I've spent a lot of time with Rick. That's when his mind is sharpest, and then he tapers off in the evening, but he's working extremely hard in those hours, and he knows when those fall. I'm a little different. Mine come in two bouts, but they are like bouts. You should think of them as a fight, and here's the real danger. If you're in one of those windows and you allow your attention to be captured by something that's not worthwhile towards your company build, you're not just losing that three or four hours because the productivity that comes in those three or four hours is exponentially greater than the productivity that comes from doing that work at some point later, or the catch-up work. It also prevents you from having a healthy personal life. You have to protect that time as if it were the most important thing, with the exception of family emergencies. That's number one. The other one is, it used to be in the Valley, I grew up down here, that everyone said, no successful founder is a non-meditator or something, or they all meditate. Can that really be true? Are they all just meditators? I think that what that's really about is that you need to be pretty good at being in the whole stimulus response mode of living life. You have tasks, you're handling tasks, you're organized, but I do think that once a day it's very valuable, even if it's for just a few minutes, to just get out of stimulus response and going inward and checking with yourself whether or not you're allocating your energy properly. Some people are more prone to getting pulled into conversations and dramas and what they see. Sometimes people will see things online that has a long tail in their nervous system, and there's data on this showing that your thoughts in two hours are seeded by what you saw in previous hours. Some people are more like square waves when they compartmentalize better. Other people like myself, if I have a conversation earlier that's of interest to me, it sort of lingers and it will impact the next thing that I do. I think these moments where you just check in and separate yourself from all the inputs allows you to pivot more effectively. We don't really have formal protocols for task switching, but this is extremely important for company founders and employees across the board. You have to be able to cognitively task switch. We need more data on how that's done, but it certainly involves returning to some state where there aren't any inputs. I think this is very important. In fact, Rick and I have been kicking around some tools that are not meditations. We've been trying to build some tools that are not meditations. They're not yoga nidra, but that would allow you to program your mind for what comes next. If you think about it, it's 2026. Why in the world are we sitting down to do work and just going, okay, now I'm going to be focused and now I'm going to be creative. We should have ways to control neural activity that would allow us to access those circuits more quickly and more deeply. I've been pitched on a headband that reduces ADHD and helps focus by sending waves through your brain. Yeah. I think it's going to be in part by controlling activity, so it'd be general brain state oscillations and things like that. I like the idea that it will be personalized. I like the idea that you hear your own voice in your head, maybe through headphones, telling you that knows you, knows where you're weak and knows where you're strong, and is your own AI built coach that's telling you how to create some blinders around certain things and organize your focus, or maybe to decompress from the day and just completely relax. I'm very excited about these technologies, but mostly in the domain of sleep and waking up because right now we don't have the ideal tools. Maybe this company does, but if you think about a sleep mask that could put you to sleep by controlling your eye movements, it's very easy to do with a little bit of electrical stimulation behind the ear. Yes, I've heard about that. I'll tell you that I've tried. What's that, vagus nerve or something? Well, you have branches of the vagus around the ear. There's some other vestibular nerves that because they innervate the inner ear that run superficially enough that you can do this, and the extraocular muscles. So I've actually had the chance to try one of these sleep masks, and for me it was six minutes, I'm out. It can also wake you up, which is really interesting. Maybe it would deliver the proper lighting, these kinds of things. So the transitions into and out of sleep I think are going to be the first place where the neurotechnologies really conquer the challenge because we know exactly what you need. You need to be asleep. You need to be awake. You need to be alert. When it comes to, okay, now we're going to sit down and do this type of task, we're still not clear what the patterns of brain activity that you want really are. Like for focus, you want to be alert, but not too alert, right? It's the inverted U-shaped function. Over that hump, you're highly distracted. Right to sleep you're highly distracted what's that sweet spot. So i think that that's a really exciting area of neurotechnology and again it'll happen first with sleep and also with a i will be able to calibrate say oh you know we need to make that i i deflections broader in order to induce when you're in this particular state. I'm super excited by this so you asked what tools for founders i think that. Right i think that organizing your day in a way that is. Tailor to what's most important to you right so setting personal life differences aside you need to get your best work done twice a day you need to treat yourself like an athlete you know it occurred to me when i was. Running a lab but also when i was a postdoc like if i get to bed earlier at a conference i'm gonna be sharper the next day at the conference conferences were really important to me then likewise with doing experiments i can get twice as many experiments and is everybody else. Not just by working really hard one day but i'm getting an extra hour of work done course i was also the person i'd sometimes bring my experiments to seminars i was like this is crazy i need to run some chemistry why wouldn't i. Bring it to the seminar i heard someone else did i was like i'm gonna just bring my trades and transfer so you know if everyone started doing that be problematic but the point is that. If you take yourself and your work really seriously you need to organize your day that way i do think that having one day per week where you just come. Completely disengage from things can be very beneficial for your ability to re engage you know my dad's a scientist and it's been involved in what is your part for a long time and now he's. Do another things but long ago you said you know you you have to be. Long distance runner like this is this is an endurance event so the best advice i ever got and this will be the last piece on this is there was a neurologist out at uc berkeley and ucsf. Bob night some years ago very talented and i asked him for advice so starting graduate school and he said figure out. The maximum amount of real work that you can do every day consistently and then figure out some non destructive way to reset yourself every single week. Okay and for me at that time i can work very very long hours i said how do you reset he said he likes fishing. I'm okay with fishing but i'm not into i know what i like to hike like to get into nature and spend time with people while i do it. So i figured out i could work x number of hours per day five days a week sometimes a little trough in the middle of the week and i just stuck to it for you know twenty five years. If you people who take a ton of stimulants and just blitz blitz blitz blitz blitz these are the same people that crash and disappear so you have to figure out and build your capacity. And i think we don't talk about that enough because people really differ in this regard but yes you have to work extremely hard you have to be extremely focused but you also have to figure out how long you can keep this up. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and i'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only. It should not be taken as legal business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures. Thank you.