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

Key Takeaway

Bookend your day to support energy, focus, and sleep: within 30 minutes of waking, get bright outdoor light, hydrate, and add caffeine or exercise if useful; in the final hour before bed, dim overhead and screen light and shift toward calm. This simple cortisol rhythm helps reduce brain fog, improves stress resilience, and makes good sleep more likely. Don’t aim for a perfect routine—understand the principle, then use the best available option today.

Episode Overview

Dr. Andrew Huberman shares the core principles behind his book, Protocols, covering daily cortisol timing, focus and learning, stress regulation, presence, mobility, and long-term fitness. He and Chris Williamson also discuss building top-down control through small acts of discipline, structured approaches to processing difficult experiences, and avoiding the fragility of overly rigid self-optimization.

Full Transcript

Transcript of “This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

People of the uk and ireland if you are coming to see me on tour this october i want to hear from you i want to hear the problems you're dealing with your most unhinged stories i'll be bringing some of you up on stage to talk about them so if you're coming to see me live go to chris williamson dot live stories and submit what you want me to talk about on stage. You might actually get to come and see me and look at everyone while we unpack what you've done with your life.

Chris williamson dot live stories lots of people deal with brain fog and low energy throughout the day what's your advice for combating that. I mean it's funny i probably end up saying this twenty times in today's conversation but if i were to really. If i had two minutes with somebody and they said what's the thing i can do for my health i'd say make the first hour of your day high cortisol in the last hour hour of your day low cortisol high cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated.

Mood focus and alertness all day long allows you to buffer stress better and it make sure that your night time cortisol is going to be low if you don't. You know spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day you have a high flat cortisol curve not good. Makes you less resilient to stress brain fog less amenable to learning and on and on so you just say what can you do and we make this very simple bright light especially from sunlight or ten thousand lux artificial light and especially in the first thirty minutes after waking hydration.

Caffeine if you like caffeine exercise in the first three hours of your day if you can write some people can't. And then roll into your day at night in that final hour you do everything you can to reverse that you dim the lights especially overhead lights dim your screen you could do the red light thing or the candle light thing you know. Limit caffeine obviously exercise in the final hour before sleep only if that's the only time you can do it some people that's the only time.

And actually eating in the first three hours of your day even though i'm a fan of i personally fast in the first three hours of the day but that actually can. Also spike cortisol to say why would eating spike cortisol well i mean basically anything that you do that's a pro arousal that's about activity is gonna spike cortisol so. Bookending your day with things that spike your cortisol at the beginning and lower your cortisol at the end is really. It really is the if there is a cheat code to life no i don't say to life i mean is it gonna make you completely stress resilient no is it gonna make you able to learn anything you want with ease no but what it does is it sets you up.

For the best possible sleep which makes you more alert the next day of course it also. It anchors this process that i haven't talked about before on any podcast and frankly that i didn't touch on directly in the book which is. So much of life is about balancing what we call bottom up and top down influences bottom up influences would be. You know you want the cookie you're gonna just eat the cookie you you know you shouldn't be scrolling as much as you're scrolling you just keep scrolling that's those are bottom up influences these are.

Impulses that are driven by hypothalamic and other deep brain structures then we have. Thankfully we have top down influences this is your prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses okay this is the two marshmallow testing kids which by the way a lot of people say was debunked the debunk was debunked by the way yeah so. The ability to suppress actions what i taught my bulldog. Mix strummer the day i brought him home and it's the basis of everything you put a piece of food in front of him he of course wants to take it right his prefrontal cortex isn't even online yet and you take it away until he learns and he learns the first day and never forgets that.

He has to wait until i say okay what are you doing there it's actually not about making wait for a treat it's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse and that that works out to every type of waiting so you say wait. We're like see you later i'm going to work and then you come back and he's not freaking out he can just know he doesn't have to actively suppress the whole time but the ability to suppress impulse. So much of life the ability to learn and lean into just enough stress that you trigger learning the ability to listen when you want to react the ability to force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing that you don't want to do.

So much of that is top-down influences and basically being an effective human is about building up those circuits of top-down now do you have to do them in everything this is a matter of debate i think that. People like andy stump tremendous respect for it's just awesome i've learned so much from him actually made some late late stage additions to the book based on a conversation i had with him so he actually made. You know very late in the game i was like i need to my editors like you can't do this anymore like enough is enough and i'm like.

I want it back girls i'm not signing off on the final draft to put in this you know it and he has a number of tools that are that are really useful but you know he has this philosophy that he shares which is. Throughout your day when given the option between the easier thing in the harder thing. Do the harder thing that there's tremendous value in that it's the make your bed thing it's the place to put toilet paper rolls example he gives in his book drown proof which is an awesome book i highly recommend it.

I don't pay me to say this is just an awesome book i recommend it to everybody but these little things like there's that. Piece of trash on the floor that's this big do i pick it up why would you know does is it about the trash does it really make that much of a difference in your life. No but the action of going against that bottom up influence of just ignoring the harder thing and going toward ease more pleasure less pain even just avoiding subtle pain.

Though there two ways to build up the circuits one is by forcing yourself to go like. As we say would like writers always say like asked to chair like you know just you just gonna like sweat blood until you get those eight hundred words a day out. The advantages to that we're doing the hard work out that you do not want to do. There's also a building up of the same circuits those top down suppression of impulse through the little things all day long you probably need to do both but i think that.

Many of us nowadays who are exercising and doing health protocols we absorb a lot of energy in order to get ourselves to those some people more some people less and i started doing these you know. Stump type smaller things throughout the day he does the big things to obviously but. Those little things what you find what i find is that they make it much easier to overcome the friction that comes from anything so there's a really just like getting the reps in like it doesn't what it proves is that it's the circuit it's not what you're doing you're getting the reps into the circuit.

It's gonna pop a sock to win the strength guys like the grease the groove thing okay do to pull up every time you pass through through the door and does that mean that you can do two hundred pull ups in a single set no but it actually turns out to be more effective than doing like three sets of ten twice a week. Okay then people say what's not true if you had with perhaps not but it's maybe it's just two different roads to the same place but.

The top down bottom up tension this dynamic tension between those two is so much about what being on reactive is about is about what not procrastinating is about it's what morality is about it's about being calm under pressure it's about being. Making appropriate decisions in the face of stress is not all about not feeling stress it's about making adaptive decisions is there anything else you would advise people to do for training willpower. I think what andy talks about in his book and obviously is not the first person to talk about this but you know that that philosophy like how you do one thing is how you do anything that's a little bit vague for me i like the way he describes it which is.

These little micro socks all day long like like it happened to me the other day andy to call it micro sucks yet is on with a helicopter that jumped out of a plane like fifty thousand he holds two world records at wing suiting. I think it flew thirty six thousand feet or something that i mean. Yeah and i mean there are a lot of bad asses in the world and in the tier one operators fear i know a number of those guys that there are a lot of bad asses obviously what's impressive to me is somebody who has the intelligence in the communication skills to be able to share the things that are relevant to everybody in a way that's relevant to everybody is also from santa cruz which is a cool towns right over the hill from where i grew up and like the fact that.

Somebody like that came from santa cruz is kind of a hometown joke which is a pretty you there's only two reasons to go to santa cruz if you're a guy in your teens or twenties or thirties you go to the boardwalk to meet girls. Or you got a fight people in santa cruz it was like that you always see fights in your so i was thought of santa cruz is people there is a hippie town i was thought of it is kind of a. Kind of a there's a rougher side of santa cruz and then i hear about you and he's from santa cruz i'm like that makes no sense whatsoever but you can talk all of that kind of local environment sounds like he had a good upbringing he talks fondly about his parents which is cool and put it to something really impressive feet and can communicate what what the exports from that those experiences are so.

You know i mean how many of us in our daily life need to like shoot moving communicate you know like the macronutrients of you know operators and some people yes but most of us know so to me. That's one way the other way is obviously to do your workouts and you know i'm a big believer in asking yourself what am i genuinely curious about learning and where's the fear point for me what is kind of. Why am i shying away from learning about something because it for fear of like poor performance and then that's the thing you should lean into you have to be curious about something unless you're in school where you have to learn a subject so that's another way like pushing yourself to learn cognitively and then.

To me i think a big other part of this top down training is just the way that we approach life like you know i think there are two reasons to do hard things. Rogan and i were talking about this yesterday one reason is because it makes you better at doing hard things the other reason is it allows you to access. More awareness of the beautiful things in life i mean there's so much. Dog shit floating around on the internet and anger and we you and i talk about there's so many barbed wire drama things i mean if i went around.

Posting every opinion that i reflexively have about some of the like nonsense antics that i see online or the crazy documentaries that are coming out and like when and. You get to a certain point in life and you tend to be one to six degrees of separation from pretty much anything you see online as much as you would like to not think oh i know someone who knows that person i met that person once in a party got a year feeling i won't say who that's about that was a real experience.

You know you can go down that rabbit hole so much of being effective is going nonsense nonsense nonsense and i always just take myself back to high school there only really three or four. Reasons to actually be in high school to learn right from teachers and from your peers and in class that's a legitimate reason to go to school. You know there were social reasons there were all sorts of. Observations that i had like one that was still salient for me i'll share in a moment you can learn a lot about people in life i have a friend who's a professor at stanford says he unfortunately calls me andy it's really annoying and he's you don't like andy.

No no no no guys just persist yeah i was what happened when i lost a coin flip to another andrew like in the third grade. He gets to be and still pisses me off you know so anyway i eventually took back andrew and you know and this the other reasons a lot there certain observations that i had in high school that taught me a lot about human nature that are still true across. Men women of all ages all demographics is really really helpful i shall just share right now so.

As some people may know in round fourteen i got really into the skateboarding thing prior to that it was like school swimming soccer every kid in my town did those. Really excited about skateboarding skateboarding was small then it wasn't this big thing no x games nothing i wasn't very good skateboarder decent enough to get picked up probably just out of sheer sympathy by one sponsor. If you want to check me on this because we were trying to name my team manager was steve ruggie i wrote for spitfire it was out of sympathy steve i love you thank you for putting me on i appreciate you also tell me i never be one of the big guys boom done.

But i remember there was this phase of skateboarding in the early nineties and it wasn't a good phase but we're like the clothes got baggy the shorts got baggy there was some sag and at that time no one did that no one. Not in hip hop nowhere it wasn't really like really extreme sag it was just like the shorts went from like mid five to like right above the knee maybe a little longer. Alright so that's what we did we're skateboarding care what anyone else did came to school and just ridiculed ridiculed by the jocks by the.

Why everybody didn't matter the kids were like black white male or female like next can you run all that we were like cheese relentless everyone knew that andy was uncool teased relentlessly but we knew we liked it it was a little extreme like a time we liked it with the point back then was to be different not the same. Okay summer happens that summer something happened in the world of hip hop where somebody start sagging their their pants next year everybody. And i just realized in that moment i was like okay this i was like they actually don't know what they like they really don't they're just falling it wasn't following a trend they actually haven't formed taste.

And i was like what i love about skateboarding what i loved about certain forms of music what i love about certain podcasters and what i love about certain scientists i can name certain scientists who just have the best taste. Yeah in particular this guy jonathan horton at neuro ophthalmologist like his papers are beautiful they're articulate the images are beautiful the discoveries are clear and he's just a he's a phenom. And but for a lot of years you know his papers kind of existed in good journals but didn't really pop to the biggest ones then they popped and what i realized was like.

Whether it's in high school or as adults people actually most people don't develop a sense of taste correct they confuse what they like and don't like. With what feel socially acceptable and what feels so different that it's uncomfortable to them now i don't believe in doing things just to be different that's not taste that's doing things just to be different. I start realizing i was like there's certain people in life that have an exquisite sense of taste don't think rick rubens one of them my friend david show is one of them i believe you have taste you think about how you know that people don't let the.

velvet British accent fool you. Sometimes the British accent can confuse people into thinking, especially Americans into thinking that somebody's smarter than they are. I'm not trying to, where the kids say, I'm not trying to like puff you up here. They have all sorts of names for this now, but, but really like, I'm not just trying to flatter you, but if it flatters you, fine. Like you're my friend, but also you think right at the boundaries between conflicting opinions. And then you form a third new opinion usually that highlights something both beneficial and deficient about both.

That is a skill. It's a super skill that most people don't possess. Most academics don't possess it, frankly, because careers are sort of built on like planting your flag and protecting it until you absolutely get battered. And then you have to like, like relent, you know, and then pivot to something new. I have a beautiful story about that actually. The, but I, I realized that taste is something that many people never develop. Right. And the worst thing is when people who have taste think that their taste isn't taste, that it's a misdirection internally or something, and they don't cultivate that.

And I think that, you know, so high school taught me a heck of a lot. It's true. The baggies got too baggy, the sag went way too far and we just sort of laughed as it took off. We were like, this is hilarious actually, but it happened in skateboarding too. There were years later where, uh, this kid that I grew up with, I'm friendly with now, but Danny way who jumped the great wall of China. Amazing jumped out of a helicopter. He has all these world records, but he was an agro kid.

He built the first mega ramps. I mean, he's gnarly. He was always just so aggressive skateboarder, incredible, incredible athlete. I remember, you know, years later when he broke his neck surfing at Newport, he started working out with Paul check. He started and he built like a strong physique. And I remember skateboarders being like, that's for jocks. Skateboarders working out now, if you look, not all of them, but a lot of skateboarders are into like lifting weights, taking care of their body. Chris Jocelyn Trey flipped the, you know, El Toro stairs this year.

This was like a heroic feat. It was like breaking the four minute mile, more or less ish, uh, for skateboarding. I mean, that dude clearly works out, he takes care of himself. So the things within a subculture and community that make that such a special community, what eventually happens is the community defies its own principles. That, you know, the punks turn against, they go, that's not punk. Well, you know, they did that to people like Joe Strummer who brought hip hop acts as openers. They've done that to friends of mine who are in the, uh, like high-level band punk rock where they go, they sold out actually, no, actually they're doing great.

And you're caught up in the eighth grade is what happened, but it's not regressive. It's that taste is the hardest thing for people to understand because it forces them to really put a mirror in front of themselves and go, what do I actually like and dislike? It's a countervailing force against both what's popular and the fickleness of blowing in the wind. Like people confuse something that's popular for something that's tasteful. And you can also confuse something which is, uh, very tasteful, not popular as something that's bad.

Like you said before the difference between liking something and not liking something, you can like something which is untasteful. And I think the difference between taste and popularity and liking is taste is the ability to discern between good and not good. Like, is this thing good in and of itself? And this is one of the problems. If you run it up, because everyone's looking for performance, if you run enough split tests, you will end up with a porn website. That's what happens. You run it all.

Can you explain this? Cause I, you and I have talked about this. It all regresses to porn. Eventually everything is like, if you basically, if you want to get the most eyes and clicks on something, you keep going more, more extreme, more salacious. Correct. And you end up in the dumpster heap of online content. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Going back to the brain, what's your best advice for improving memory and focus? People understand brain fog's a thing. I'm struggling with that. I have lulls with energy throughout the day.

And now you want me to actually answer the question? Yeah, that'd be great. Whenever you want. Okay. So brain fog is not a specific thing. It's an inability to focus. Let's get a couple of core principles down. People with severe clinical grade ADHD can focus if they're doing something they really like. Tells you something. It means the dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, we call these the catecholamine systems of the brain and body that are involved in many things, but focus among them are there. They're functional, but the threshold to access them is too high.

Okay. What does that mean? What it means is that people can learn to focus and they can get assistance in doing that by pushing on one of two ends or both. One is to ramp up the level of those chemicals. That's what things like Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin and so on do. A study this last year out of Washington University in St. Louis, sort of the Harvard of the Midwest, if you will, although I think that's unfair to the Midwest and maybe we call Harvard the Wash U of the East, showed that when you compare the attention improving effects of Ritalin to a great night's sleep, they're effectively equal.

Some of these stimulants, we know blunt stunt growth, excuse me, they stunt growth. We know this. Okay. They limit ultimate height. They reduce sleep. So they're circumventing a problem. So there's a new idea, which is that maybe lower dosages of these medicines combined with better sleep would be as effective a treatment. A lot of parents are erring that way. A lot of adults are erring that way too. That said, some of these medications can be useful in extreme cases. If somebody wants to learn, let's just say, if you want to learn, you want to focus and get rid of brain fog, you want to learn.

Here are the key steps. I review some more of this in the book, but during today's conversation and always, I'm going to try and reference the book only if people want more information. I'm just going to try and give people the information. If people want the book, they can get it, but I don't want to cloak the information. Everyone needs to go and buy the book. Thanks for your support of the book. I did. There is a lot of- You've learned a bled for this thing, dude.

I watched you. I watched you basically- Eight years. You glanced off the bottom of insanity in order to be able to put this. Then the original word count was 120,000, and then you were forced to chop it down. It's basically seven short books with a long intro, which is some story and context. I promise you can just navigate to a particular point in the book and understand what's going on, get the tool and go. You can learn the science or not, get the science. You can take the story and read it or not read it, but I figure leave it all on the mat.

Look, I'm 51 later this month. I don't know if I'll make it to 52. I feel great. My biomarkers say I'm great, but who knows? I'm not living this life to try and soft pedal anything. I'm just going all in. Here are the steps to learning. You need to focus, obviously, to learn. To focus, you need to be alert. To get alert, there are many things you can do. I talk about all of them in the book. There are foundational things like sleep. That's going to help you get alert and focused, but there are also things like exercise.

We all hear that exercise makes our brain better. It makes us better at learning. Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons. One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. In the four to six hours after exercise, you are more alert and you can focus better, unless you exercise to exhaustion. If you have leg day for 10 sets of 10 on the squats, followed by a bunch of hamstring work and et cetera, your brain's not going to be so good at focusing. 45 to 75 minutes of hard training, not taken to extreme, a bit like what we did this morning.

That was a little bit on the lighter side, not just because we didn't have a whole lot of time, but you're going to come out of that more alert because you have more adrenaline in your body, more norepinephrine being released in your brain, and more dopamine being released in your brain. Dopamine is a critical component for learning. Focus then becomes easier to access. In your focus, what are you focusing on? You need to focus on making errors through genuine attempts to do something, something physical, maybe a tennis serve or you're learning billiards, something cognitive, you're trying to learn a language.

The error between what you currently do and what you're trying to do, the error is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells need to change. It runs through a circuit involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close. If you can do something, there's no reason for your brain to change. And the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively. And those tag, literally chemically tag the synapses.

I mean, there's some additional steps, but they tag those synapses so that then at night when you sleep, the synapses rearrange and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve. That's how it works. A curiosity and willingness to learn gets you to the gate of learning. The making of errors through genuine attempts puts the key in and turns the key. The agitation is walking through that gate and then getting some sleep or maybe even a day or two later, even if you don't sleep quite as well as you would like, just some time for the synapses to rearrange.

That's the last piece. There's an additional piece that can reinforce it all, which is self-testing. If you want to get good at something and stay good at it and continue to get better at it, you need to self-test. Mental self-testing is the best way to consolidate learning and learn faster. What do I mean by that? I don't mean visualization. I mean asking yourself, like for me, if I want to make my memory better, generally speaking, I might think, okay, so that was September 11th, 2001. Where was I exactly?

What were some of the details now? That might be something I might not want to think about, but if I were to say, okay, I'm going to go back to my year one neuroscience graduate school training. Of course, I know what a synapse is. I know what neurons are. I know what astrocytes are. I know all this stuff. It's embedded so deeply in me, I can almost do it in my sleep. Then I think, yeah, that's right. What is the role of astrocytes? That's stuff that's relevant to me.

When you hit the point where you can't remember something, you go and look it up. Boom, you've now closed that gap again and it reinforces those synapses that were weakening. If you're trying to learn something new or you want to maintain information from way back when, you need to retest. This is why we used to make people retake their driver's tests. Physicians need to- Really? Yeah. It used to be you had to retake your driver's test, not always behind the wheel, but you didn't used to just give people a license and turn them loose.

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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I suppose one of the advantages, at least with regards to driving practically, is that people are re-triggering that on a multiple-times-per-day basis. Yeah, or you get a ticket or you get into an accident. I feel like I'm quoting my dad a lot lately. That's a good sign. As my dad always says, the thing about speeding tickets is they're expensive and money hurts. Speeding tickets were $20. For most people, that's not trivial, but it's not enough money to really dent your heavy foot on the pedal.

If you give someone a $300 ticket plus your insurance goes up, people speed less. You're going to remember that. People speed less. I'm not saying it. We could argue about speeding laws, but money hurts. That's how you learn. You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation. I wish I had learned that in the third grade. I wish they had told me that. Many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things. They're getting their sets and reps in. They push past failure. They love their video games.

They love perhaps mathematics, but not literature. The things that we are not facile in that don't come easy to us, there are two reasons to do some of that learning at every stage of life. One is it enriches us. We often find that the things that are hardest to learn that we then learn are the most satisfying. This is the effort that precedes dopamine. It's far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in. You could say, well, scrolling, there's no effort involved, and that seems very reinforcing.

That's more of a compulsive behavior after a certain point. That's going to get passed into reflex. Talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, everything was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame that big thing. That was really the thing that taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things. We don't really like success stories. We like underdog often to success story. Pitfall come out of that. The hero's journey is something that we resonate with, in part because it's so true, but in part because for so many people, it's not true.

We know it's there, but most people don't embark on those things. I think it's because we set too lofty an idea of what the hero's journey is. For a lot of people, it's about learning to do less. I know a lot of hard-driving people. It's about learning how to achieve more peace. It's about exploring ideas around spirituality or fiction if they only read nonfiction. We all have to ask ourselves, how much should we push ourselves to do things that we're not just naturally inclined to do?

I think a mixture of what we love to do and some of the things that we've just avoided because they just seem too hard. I think there's real value in doing those things. All the data on maintaining cognitive ability say, will exercise make you smarter? No. It's necessary but not sufficient to make you smarter. You still have to go learn. Without completely I mean, this is evidenced by many guys that spend hours upon hours in the gym, and they're not brilliant people, so they're exercising plenty.

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

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

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

Unconsciously, your brain is responding to that all the time. The vagus nerve also has a portion of it that goes from the brain to the heart and other organs. And there's one particular pathway that contacts and communicates with the sinoatrial node of your heart. And it slows your heart rate down when you exhale. The reason is as you inhale and exhale, the space available for your heart changes. So when you, at some point your heart is a little bit smaller, right? During your breathing and the volume of blood that's in there moves more quickly.

So your brain sends a signal through this vagus nerve pathway to slow your heart rate down. So when you exhale deliberately, this is the key deliberately, I don't think I've ever described it this way. You slow your heart rate down significantly. You offload carbon dioxide and your level of autonomic arousal, meaning sympathetic alert versus parasympathetic calm balances. It tips more towards parasympathetic calm immediately. It's the fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. Better if you can do two big inhales first and then exhale all the way to lungs empty.

That's the so-called physiological sigh discovered in the 1930s, not by shamans, not by breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set of neurons in the parafacial nucleus of your brainstem that capture the activity of this vagal pathway and slow your heart rate down. But the beauty of this mechanism is it also increases what's called HRV. Most people know I want higher HRV. How do I do that? Well, I train VO2 max. I do some high intensity interval training. Great. I do some long distance endurance training, lower intensity.

Great. You have higher VO2 max. That is higher HRV. Heart rate variability reflects the number of times throughout the day and night that this pathway, this pathway in the vagus signals your sinoatrial node to slow your heart rate down. In fact, you can increase your HRV pretty significantly if you just do 10 deliberate exhales throughout your day. And then at night, look at your HRV. It will be significantly elevated. This is why I spoke about this last time. This is why I need to get you one of those om.health lamp things for resonance breathing.

We talked about this previously. It's an algorithm. It's a stone on the top of this lamp. I think they're about to launch this month, this om.health. You stone on the top of the lamp. It vibrates. You breathe in time with the stone. It's got a 100 hertz sensor in it, so it's detecting your HRV all the time. And as it vibrates up and down, you breathe in time with it, and it modulates to maximize that arrhythmia. And if you were to see it, you would be swinging from 61 to 72, to 62 to 70.

So like 60 to 60 to 72. And it is so fucking cool. And the sensation of doing that, if no one's ever done resonance breathing before, it is like, after about three minutes, it almost feels like you've had a drink. It almost feels like you're a little bit drunk. It's very, very, when you get it, and the guy, Jay Wiles, who's the main science dude behind it, he talks about precision with this, because you can get a resonance breathing that's not doing biofeedback. The problem with that is everyone's resonance pattern is a little bit different.

Everyone's resonance pattern. You might be 4.9 out, 4.9 in and like eight out, and I might be 4.1 in and seven out. And that difference to him, he says, makes a big difference. One final thing on that, he said to go from state change to trait change, with regards to the resonance breathing, you need to do over 12 minutes. He says over 20, it doesn't start to- It's a lot like meditation, it sounds like. Very similar. Very, very similar. And what's cool about this, what I love about this particular thing is you can grab it and you can hold it while watching a movie.

So if you're just doing something else, it's silent. Even if you're with someone, you've got the lamp next to the couch or you've got the lamp next to the bed, you can't sleep at night, you grab it, it vibrates. It's pretty much silent and you can just breathe in time, but you can be doing, watching something else. I haven't been able to read whilst doing it. That's a bit too cognitively demanding, but you can breathe whilst watching the TV. I've racked up hundreds of hours in the last year doing resonance breathing because I've grabbed that.

All right, I'm going to go buy one of these. Don't give me one, and I don't want Ohm to gift me one. It's funny, I still love finding new technologies, trying new things. New interventions are the best. They're just harder and harder to find new ones that people don't know about, which is why when I find one, I like chirp on about it for ages because I think that it's cool. I do the same. It's funny, throughout the book, several times I mentioned, because I talk about behavioral tools, I would say 80% of behavioral tools.

And then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements, about the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on. But multiple times I mentioned some of the devices that Sauna Space, a company I'm not affiliated with at all. Sauna Space makes these indoor red light saunas that are incandescent. They heat up right away. But I also, I travel with one of their red lights. It fills the whole room. I love those things. Raw Optics has these incredible non-flicker short wavelength illuminated that, well, the actually same bulbs go from daylight to, you can get candlelight at night with no flicker and it's LED because incandescents aren't very energy efficient.

And I have no relationship to Raw Optics or to Sauna Space. I know the people there now because I've mentioned them enough times, they've reached out, but I just enjoy sharing things that I find useful. Physiological size or these particular lights. I just like sharing what I think might be useful to people. And some people have more disposable income than others. I think that nowadays it seems like the, are we over-optimizing becomes a big question. Are we over-optimizing? I did a huge essay about it not long ago.

No, I listened and I think it's an important question. I mean, to me, optimization is just taking the, what do you got today? What's on your plate today? How do you feel best and do best in that context? And this brings me back to something that I failed to say earlier, which is that top down versus bottom up dynamic tension. Pretty much everything that's in the book, morning quarters all high, nighttime quarters all low, physiological size, et cetera. All of those things put you in the best position, put these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive, less reactive, it's not meant to rhyme, more adaptive, less reactive life, right?

To be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS that you have no control over this kind of thing, to be less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you, the people that you love and doing the right things in accordance with that. We all know that a bad night's sleep cripples this circuit such that the bottom up influences take over. We know this, right? People sleep less, they're more prone to, they have less impulse control across the board and they become slightly psychotic also, especially if they don't sleep well for three or four nights in a row.

But when you have these top down mechanisms really reinforced by high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, great sleep, you're buffering stress well, you do a learning bout or two, and I do refer to them as bouts because it should feel like a bout. That's when your life is actually headed in the direction you want, but it doesn't matter where you're starting from. That's when your life starts really heading in the direction that you want consistently. And these things don't take a lot of time. In fact, they save time because they position you to be at your best, show up as your best.

That's not a marketing ploy, it's just true. And some people, now I'm skipping around a bit, but I want to make sure I close a few hatches. Some people might say, how alert and focused do you need to be to learn? We rarely talk about this. Like one thing I really emphasize in the book is like people talk about be present. I give a tool that explains exactly how to be present. Okay. So we'll talk about that. But how alert do you need to be in order to focus and learn?

What's the state of mind? Alert and calm. What is that? Because that might mean something different to you than it means to me. How do you stay there? Okay. Have you ever played that game, Hot Hands, where I put my hands on top of yours? Wouldn't that be nice? I put my hands on top of yours. That's what we did all morning. That's literally, we didn't go to the gym. I put my hands on top of yours, and we play a game where you're going to flip your hands over and you try and smack my hands.

Okay. And I'm going to try and pull them out of your way. And you're younger than I am. So you think you have faster reflexes, but you don't. No, I'm just kidding. You probably do. You're the person whose hands are on top. So let's say my hands are on top and you're ready to flip your hands over and tag me. You're the person with hands on top and you're in that ready anticipation of what's going to happen next. That's the state of mind for optimal learning.

That's the state of mind you want to be in. So when you sit down to read something and you're like, I read that whole page and I didn't learn anything. Of course you didn't because your brain was, you're running four or five different circuits at once. In order to really turn on focus, you need to turn off a bunch of other circuits that are, or you need to lower the activity in those other circuits. You can't be thinking about at the same time, okay, what's the, how do my feet feel?

How's, what's my heartbeat? What's going on online? What's my girlfriend thinking? What is she? No, you need to be focused. What is focus? Focus is obviously in a tunnel, but then how much alertness, I don't think anyone's ever described it before, but when you look at levels of arousal in a game like hot hands and believe it or not, there are some equivalent data on this or data on the equivalent sort of thing when you're waiting for a time trial and you're waiting for something to happen and you have to react quickly.

That's the state of mind you want to be in to learn something that's hard for you, but beneficial for you, period, end of story. So hopefully that'll help people kind of find that mental groove. And then as you learn, if you find you're getting too stressed, that doesn't allow, that brings down reaction time. It actually, you, you start making false positive. You start moving your hands away before the person even does anything. Okay. So hopefully that will help people understand the level of attention and why it's so tiring after about 90 minutes and you're like, Oh, okay, I need to take a break somewhere along the way.

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That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What about presents? How can people be more present? So this one really surprised me. So the final chapter of the book is about personal development. Okay. Um, I was going to do a chapter about relationships, but for various reasons, I felt like that wasn't appropriate. Then I thought about relationship to self. I thought, well, that's kind of weird because what is relationship to self? It's too squishy a theme that like personal development, step back and start asking questions about first acknowledge, step back and acknowledge.

There's a lot out there about how to get through trauma. So what are the unifying themes? And can I put a structure on those themes that helps people navigate all of that? What's the business of having a great life? So we talk about that. We hear be present. There's this massive study out of Harvard a few years ago that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. I'm sure you're familiar with the data. You ping people throughout the day. You ask them what they're doing and how present they are to it.

Turns out happiness is really about being present, having your attention. What's called present tethered awareness. Your focus on what's happening now, even if it's unpleasant, people report that as being much happier on average than if their mind is someplace else. Daydreaming has its place, but daydreaming is usually mind wandering to bad things, things of past, things of future. We're just not present. Distraction is literally unhappiness. Yes. Yes. And the converse is also true that focusing on what you're doing is a great way to build up your mental health.

So then I started asking, cause I'm a biologist, not a psychologist. What the hell is presence? Does it mean I'm anchoring my visual attention? How do I be present? Cause otherwise it's just a bumper sticker. And otherwise I look, I love psychologists say these beautiful studies that discover phenomena. But then it's like, if you're going to say like fall asleep, what is falling asleep? And we can talk about that. What is being present? Okay. So be here now. I think Ram Dass said that great. Be here now.

How? Turns out that if we step back and we just say, okay. What does the brain do? Don't worry, this won't turn into a whole lecture. What does the brain do? The brain takes physical phenomenon in our environment, photons of light, sound waves, mechanical pressure, chemicals through the nose and mouth, translates those from sensation to perception. Cool, then we also can remember things, predict things, it's basically what the brain does, and it can change itself. So that's neuroscience in a nutshell. How do we move our brain from thinking about the future and the past to what's happening now?

Okay, so that means perceptions about what's only in our immediate physical environment. It means not thinking, not doing, not planning, but asking questions about the immediate physical environment. So we can do this just right now, and you can do this anytime you want to be more present. And I wanna just preface this by saying, what I'm about to describe is not the end point, it's the way to get into the present. But what you do next is critically important too. So first, you ask trivial questions about your immediate environment that can only be answered accurately by focusing on the present.

So for instance, what does it smell like in here right now? Like, like I'm not getting much for me, but, okay, what is, like how many cans are on this table? One, two, three, there's a couple other vessels, four cans, okay. All right, answering two or three trivial questions, seemingly trivial questions about your present environment. How many people are in line in front of me? How loud are the kids screaming in the backseat? Is it louder or softer than last time? Things like that bring our mind toward obviously perception of the present, duh, there's nothing profound about that, but it's what they take our mind away from that's critically important.

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

That's how your brain works. The more that you see the thought, the more that you see the perception, the more that brain circuits are devoted to things related to that thought or perception. So when you want to be present, something that we know from excellent data, I have this large study at Harvard, but subsequent studies as well, is so critical for happiness. The way to practice that is to learn from taking your mind from thinking and doing and remembering about things of past and future to just anchoring your perception to the present.

It doesn't require meditating. Meditation is one form of that. What are we doing when we meditate? We close our eyes, we focus on our breathing, that's here now. And we focus on the quote, unquote, third eye center or whatever. But that's actually interoception. It's focusing on our internal bodily state, which is not that great, frankly, if you look at the data for being present in a happy way. Most people who are overly focused on their internal state in the present are like, my heart rate is increasing.

My heart rate's too low. I'm sweating, I'm uncomfortable. You start thinking about the fact that your boxers are like pulled up on one leg. That's not the way to get present and calm and aware. The way to get present, calm, and aware and be able to move forward from that in the best way is to ask questions about your immediate physical environment. Once you do that, remember, that's just the first step. The second step is to use that heightened level of awareness to ask yourself, what do I actually want to do next?

What do I wanna say next? What do I wanna think about next? This is the way that you take control of your thoughts. And I won't go into all the detail now, but thoughts have this way they seed each other. So I think we've done this thing about the cat, right? I think we did that previously. We say like, you know, think of a cat. Okay, you know, tell me about it. People say, well, it has soft, it's this color, it's this, that. You're starting to recruit more and more neural machinery toward the thought about this trivial thing that we call a seed idea, which is the cat.

But if you just let your brain run like through the tributaries of its own choices, you end up in a pretty unhappy place. So the key to being a high agency, happy person, it turns out, is being able to control your thinking and bring it back to the present, but then you don't just stay there thinking about your breathing. That's like kind of sociopathic, right? It's weird. It's like, it's just weird. You ask questions about your immediate environment, and then you pivot into the person that you want to be in terms of action and thinking and speaking, or maybe silence is called for.

And so none of this is psychology. This is all 100% neuroscience. I get into the underlying mechanisms, and it fully supports. Everything that I just described, I should say, is fully supported by the work that shows that people who have heightened levels of activity in the so-called default mode network, this is the network of activity that just takes place when you're doing essentially nothing, are more depressed. Too much activity in the default mode network, yes, some is associated with creativity, but usually elevated levels of activity in the default mode network are what you find in depressed people because their brain is just kind of all over the place, and they feel discombobulated.

Unless we're in sleep, we need to organize our internal landscape. The problem is most people here, you need to organize your internal landscape, and they think, oh, you have to get up in the morning, do 10 breaths of meditation, get your light, and they think about it as rigidity. I'm talking about now, and throughout the book, it's all about the things that set you up to lean into life so that you're reflexively more effective. You're reflexively happy. You're reflexively more adaptive. You're reflexively more present. And I think this is where the over-optimization conversation is relevant.

None of these practices are an end in and of themselves. I mean, I think nowadays, because people go to the gym and they get the aesthetic effect they want, they think like, oh, you go to the gym to do that. I go to the gym so that I can sprint for the plane, open the pickle jar, move all the boxes on moving day, up and down the stairs, and feel great, tired, but great at the end of the day. And I like being strong for life.

I like having endurance so I can go hiking in Yosemite. If we go, let's go tomorrow, we're going and carrying 80-pound packs. We do it tomorrow, and yeah, it hurts a little bit, but in a good way. And you can sprint for the plane and not cough up a lung. There's a section on mobility, which is four trivial mobility exercises. You'll get your knee behind your glutes once a day, squat down, do kind of bend and look up at the ceiling, like to a right angle, and be able to look up on both sides, identify any kind of mismatches on either side, and work through those.

And so I can like lean down and grab things and move. And so I can reach and grab things. You threw me the protein drink out there. I just, for the record, I caught it. You did catch it. I'm not so proud of that. I'm just pissed at your camera guy. We'll probably wait until I drop it and then film that one. So for the record, they're running a diabolical scheme here at Modern Wisdom where they wait for you to F up and then they film it.

But when you get it right, no, I'm just kidding. No one's eye capturing it. I'm just kidding. Actually, I don't care about, I'm not, obviously my hand-eye coordination is not something I'm like really concerned about, but nor do I boast about. But the point being that it's all about being able to move through life with confidence and agency and awareness and sensitivity to what you need to be sensitive to and saying pfft to the things that you need to say pfft. That's a really good life.

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

And the difference being, you can make yourself fragile if your entire performance and your whole life is predicated on this kind of rain dance ritual that you're only able to do the stuff if you have had this like weird two hours of foreplay beforehand. I understand why that's the case. Two hours of foreplay, yeah, that's a lot. I knew that that would be. Yeah, I mean, what's that? So, nothing. I mean, some people might argue it's not enough. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That is true. I guess it depends on how much time you got.

That's true, it could be a Sunday. But I think, at least from my experience, periodizing your life is one of the best ways to think about this. And a lot of people, especially toward the end of their 20s, especially a lot of guys go through this manopause. They go through this period where they realize that all of the strategies, tools, habits, routines, modes of getting recognition and success from the people around them, they've stopped working. And they want to become something better. It's kind of like a second adolescence.

It's actually a more important adolescence, I think, than the one from 13 to kind of like 17. And they're, okay, what sort of person, what sort of man do I want to become in this world? I don't know, maybe women go through it too. But I know that I see it in a lot of guys, especially dudes that are a little bit more deep thinkers. And maybe they played the game in their 20s. They were successful, perhaps, maybe at playing the game. Which game are you referring to?

Like the social norms game. I'm going to like contort myself or like chameleon a little bit. I'm not going to bring up quite what I think or what I mean or my unique interests. Well, that can be adaptive too. I mean, especially in the age of camera phones. I mean, when I grew up, you see something outrageous at a party, just like, you know, not offensive, but just outrageous. And it may land, it might not land, but you don't worry that it's going to land everywhere.

It's not concretized on the internet for the rest of time. Yeah, I mean, and this is not just for public facing people. I mean, I feel like you're probably a great dancer, but, you know, I think like a lot of people are not, right? A lot of men in particular are not. And, you know, you'd like to be able to like go to a wedding and dance and have fun and not think about how that's going to show up. Yeah, is someone going to mock me for this video?

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

Like I will go toe to toe with pretty much anyone for degenerate behavior in my twenties, right? I ran more parties, did more of the things that you're not supposed to do in my twenties than almost anyone else. I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs. I attended a thousand parties, right? Thousand parties. That's how many we ran. We had a million. My twenties were very different. We had a million lifetime entries. I had a great time, but very different venues. So I'm like, I've served my time.

And then I needed to, I wanted to become somebody that was a little bit more well-rounded, that understood himself, that had a great connection, all of those things. And I was like, okay. So if you look at me from 28 to 32, 33 in isolation, it actually looks like probably quite a fragile, highly strung life where I've got this elaborate morning routine that's going on for a couple of hours. And I'm like getting up and getting sunlight in my eyes before it's cool and doing the lateral flow eye movement as you're ambulating through the thing.

Like you putting salt, Redmond salt in water that I had to import from America because I once read in some random blog post that it might work. Like all of this shit before it was kind of popularized and then journaling and breathwork and meditation and reading a book and doing space repetition with Anki flashcards and all of this shit. Why? Because I wanted to like discover what worked for me and I wanted to like rip myself out of this hole that I dug myself into. And my thing around the optimization, like guilt that a lot of people feel or fear that they have this kind of pushback against the fragility that definitely comes along with it.

Like there is such a thing as like the fear of, or the worry that you have of trying to be optimal, killing you more quickly than your suboptimal behaviors. Like you're so stressed about this. But there is also a period I think that you can really use it to like get the momentum moving. Okay, I've got a training practice. I understand how to meditate. I've stopped going to bed late. I've started getting up on time. I've started, you know, those are things that then carry you forward.

And you can either try and slowly ingrain them over a long period of time, or you can maybe seal hell week it and bundle it together. And that's what I did. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not makes a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1.

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So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. Right now, you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. I came on this podcast because I was excited to talk to you. And yes, I'm out on the book thing, but I like learning from you.

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

Okay, so you have so much within you. If you do the right things, you can access these things. Okay, if you do all these things, you're actually a weaker version of yourself because if you don't do those, not doing the hard thing now becomes the hard thing. Okay, I mean, hell week is a week for a reason. It's not hell year. Although talking to people who are instructors and SEAL training and this kind of, I mean, I do think they are identifying people that have something different in them, as opposed to building that up.

I think they build it up in those people, but I think that filter is really unique. I think for the rest of us, the real question, I think, is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions that are out there and put a structure on them? Forgive me for going slow here, but for once, I'm speaking slow enough. Years ago, when I was a graduate student, a guy who is really a luminary in the field of neuroendocrinology said to me, he said, it's rarely the people who make the key discoveries that go on to be associated with the great findings of a field.

I go, how can that possibly be? He said, it's almost always people that are in that field or educate themselves on that field that put a structure on it. He said, this is why it's important to publish research papers, but also regularly publish reviews. I always made it a point for about every three research papers I published to publish one high quality review, not some yellow ribbon journal review, because you can publish a review anywhere, but real compendiums of where the knowledge is now. I took those very, very seriously, like annual reviews and so forth, very seriously.

Why? Because they help you organize your mind around what's happening and they help other people do that too, because most people aren't going to take the time to do it. In the health and optimization space now, there's so many tools, right? What we need and what I try and highlight in the book are principles. High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol, means high nighttime melatonin, means great sleep, means better days, and so on and so forth. You're essentially got the gears of the system linking together with that.

Then yes, it's true, bright light is the best way to spike your morning cortisol, but exercise is pretty effective too. Sometimes you don't have access to either. Sometimes you have access to both. Sometimes you're on a plane, but you can start doing other things to nudge the system or keep the system online when you have 30 seconds. You also understand that if you miss a day or two, you're okay, because you set up the system through good behaviors going into it. You don't have to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears because you're on a plane and they don't have any caffeinated coffee and you can't do your air squats and like, I mean, come on.

No one wants to be that guy. Fragility. Exactly. So once you understand a bit of the principles that organize the mechanisms, you're in a great position to be truly strong of mind and body because you can organize information. The same thing is true, like in chapter seven of the book on personal development, I took a step back and I said, what are the unifying features of all the trauma therapies? What are the unifying features of how to have a great life? Let's just start with how to have a great life.

James Hollis came on my podcast, 84 years old, surprised the shit out of me when he said, here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are shut up. That's the first one. I go, shut up. And he goes, yeah, someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you got something to be grateful for. Like, well, I didn't really expect that from him. He's like this 85-year-old Jungian analyst.

He talks about the unconscious mind. He goes, shut up. Your day should start with, Huberman, shut up. Whatever's got you bothered, shut up. You got it better than somebody. It's interesting. I wish someone had said that to you earlier, but that's okay. Thank you. Second, you can keep this in. Next, he said, Chris Williamson, go fuck yourself. Yeah, that's true. Sorry. First is shut up. Second is suit up. What is suit up? Suit up is you have a role to fulfill each day for other people and for yourself and for the world.

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

You have to be in service. Now, some people might think, well, I want to make as much money in the world as possible. That's not me, but a lot of people feel that way. Great. To do what? Go fulfill that role. So get dressed properly. Do those things. It sounds so basic, right? So shut up is about gratitude. Shut up is about prepare and practice. Don't show up. For me, I delayed the publication of the book three times. Why? Because I want the book to be something I'm truly proud of and that people will feel that they were honored as smart people who deserve quality information, period, end of story.

I was willing to tell the publisher and everyone else, look, I'm so, so sorry, but I'm going back in again and again and again, eat the shame because ultimately I had a higher value, which was that the book be of good to extreme value to anyone that read it or even just looked at a chapter for instance. And then that last one of show up is actually go do the work like chop wood, carry water. Like no one gives a shit that you don't want to do it today.

Just do it. Great confidence comes from those. But then he said the fourth thing, the pitfall is that when we get too much into role playing these roles and doing these things, we don't often enough, or excuse me, many people end up down a road that they don't really want to be on. And everyone fears that. So he said that solution to this is very simple. Once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus response. You either meditate or just breathe. You draw, you listen to music.

You don't look at your phone. You don't think about your role in the world. And all you do is you try and listen to, and it sounds real squishy, but when it's next to shut up, suit up, show up, I feel comfortable saying it, which is you ask yourself like what is my deeper wish? My heart's desire. What do I need to be focusing on now? Maybe I have enough career, enough money, enough, enough whatever, you know, colleague respect, et cetera. Maybe now it's time to focus more on relationships.

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

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

But then also what about unlearning all of getting over bad stuff is four steps. The process is four steps. The first thing you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore. You can't suppress it. What are you suppressing? You need to acknowledge this happened. This sucks to the second step is you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this, their entire books and workshops written around breathing into psychedelic, into talking, into hugging, into shaking, into feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened or things, but that's not where it stops.

People often just end there. The next piece is feeling calmer, even slightly, and more peaceful around the accurate detailed memory of the thing. You're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing. You can't just live in the feel your feelings. We have an entire generation of people and collection of people online who are only there and they wonder why they're still there at the mercy of their feelings, but also they're not effective in the world. They're not affecting change. They think they are, but they're not affecting change.

This is actually why I think they hate one of the many reasons why successful people are often hated because they're moving along. I feel like sometimes online I look and I'm like, you remind me of those kids when I would go home because I went to college then came back and that scared the shit out of me because I was like, oh my God, you guys could write a textbook on how to become like a world-class loser and some of them weren't like drugging out or anything.

I was just like, you guys are still talking about stuff that, well, today I talked about stuff that happened in high school that was helpful for me, but you guys are like stuck. It's like these people that hang out in the parking lot of bars for years and years talking about this thing. I mean, it's the saddest thing in the world and men do it one way, women do it another way. It's this fixation on the things that happen that we feel wronged about and we all have them, right?

And granted, some people were genuinely wrong. That's not the point here. It's not whether they were wronged or not, it's that they're stuck there. The third piece is about the uncoupling and then the fourth piece is what we kind of think of as the magic of life where people take the hard thing and the experience and their journey of moving through it and they transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world. These are the people that go and talk at bereavement workshops, talk to people who've lost a child, talk to people who have experienced horrible things, talk to maybe they even just plant a flower and put it in the windowsill and every morning they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience and the beauty that they're representing, a small detail, right?

A small detail in their life, they've transmuted the pain. But you can't just go, oh, you know what? You had this horrible thing happen, you know, plant a flower, put it in the windowsill and think about how beautiful it is. You can't take somebody who's struggling in number one or two or three and put them there. So for me- Go back through those four for me. What's that? Go back through those four. Acknowledge the thing. Yep. Straight on exactly what happened or how many things, you know, what is the thing that sucks, that hurts so much?

Two, you have to in a safe environment. This is why there's an interest in clinical trials on MDMA because it's this empathogen makes people feel, you know, love and safe, but you need, that's not the only way. I mean, there's therapy, there's journaling. I talk about this and talk about all the different approaches to each of these steps. That's the second step. You have to feel the feelings completely of the horrible thing that happened. The third thing is once you've done that enough, and we talk about what enough is, you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing that happened with less emotional load.

The emotional load starts to peel back and it's a hard step to get to, but once you get there, it's a process. It's not like you go in and you go, okay, today I'm going to remember everything, but it's not going to bother me at all. Little by little, you start to uncouple. It's like memory exposure therapy. Some people do EMDR. Yep. That's one way. Some people do hypnosis. Some people do talk therapy. Pennebaker has people journal four times for 15 minutes each about the horrible thing that happened.

This takes them through steps two and three, 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next day, no more, no less. By the fourth day, tens of thousands of data points now, not just individuals, but many, many papers, even if, you know, manuscripts, scientific manuscripts, but even if you tear up the writing afterward, even if you delete the file, you find that people move through steps two and three to a significant degree. Then the fourth step is not just letting it hover there as this thing that you got through, but finding some way or ways, it can be many, of transmuting that entire experience, the thing that happened and the way you move through it into some point of beauty or contribution to your own wellbeing and to others' wellbeing.

Could be you're a dog and the dog represents every bit of your ability to love unconditionally and their ability to love unconditionally that represents the unconditional love you didn't get. Someone who has suffered a horrible trauma is helping people who've suffered similar traumas or maybe it's some just symbol, right? I mean, you know, in a very Jungian way, it can just be a symbol of like, maybe you have this paperweight and that symbol is the weight of your certainty that you made it through and you just, you know, the human mind can assign symbols to experiences very easily, good or bad.

So those are the four steps. For me and thinking about personal development, it was like, how do I look out on the entire landscape of all these books and all these podcasts and science and think, what's the best way to move through? You acknowledge that process. Neuroplasticity is alert, focus, agitation through genuine errors to get things right, reinforce through sleep and self-testing. Those are the steps. There's not a fifth step or a sixth step. There's not jump to step three and avoid steps one and two.

So these days, a lot of my role in my public life is to educate about processes. And this all comes from my training in neuroscience. You don't teach people, neurons fire action potentials. That's the first thing you teach them. Then you tell them how that happens. And once they understand how that happens and you get the action potential, they have embedded in their mind and understanding of when a neuron fires, they're not thinking about all the steps, but it's all there. That's what we call true understanding.

You have a nuanced, multi-level understanding of something. And I think that all too often in the optimization space, we say, hey, this red light is going to give you better skin. It's going to improve your mitochondria. And people, of course, just want those effects. But if people are feeling overwhelmed, they should think, well, what's better, red light or GHK copper? I would say, well, what's the best source of red light? It's the sun minus UV. When does that happen? When the sun is low in the sky, boom, you got the best red light therapy that you could ever get minus UV for zero cost.

Congratulations. You want a red light too? Cool. Be my guest. I own one. You might want one too. but just we're talking about long wavelength light minus uv end of story so it's not complicated and i think the same is true in resistance training andy galpin talks about this or exercise they're only like five or six different adaptations better speed better power better you know i mean you've added a seventh of like like you know forearms but for the rest of us they're only six and you can get that through crossfit you can get that through sets to failure you can get more volume with near failure like once you understand something you're in a position to make much better choices around it and so my i'm actually wondering when to retire right now i'm kind of thinking what's next and i have some ideas about where that's going but i think we in 2026 right heading into 2027 i think we pretty well understand the principles of great mental health physical health and performance there'll be more peptides there'll be more devices i think devices and pharmacology are really going to change the game ai is going to change the game but i think we're there the fundamental the physics of the system pranayama breathing or wim hof breathing hmm how do you want to feel more alert inhale emphasized breathing passive exhales you want to feel calm how should you do that exhale emphasized breathing passive inhales longer exhale relative to inhale more calm why we know all the mechanisms so the naming this and this probably scares some of my you know health colleagues hopefully not because no longer can people name things after themselves or give something a name that cloaks what you're trying to achieve the reason i went yoga nidra non-sleep deep rest and i i have great respect for the yoga culture that developed this thousands of years ago is non-sleep deep rest is the goal what does involve exhale emphasize breathing is slow the heart rate down shifting the mind from thinking doing and and planning to pure sensation great how do you do that present tethered awareness long exhales eyes closed that gets you into a pseudo sleep that recovers some of your lost sleep makes you better at sleeping at night lowers cortisol puts the brain into microstates of sleep enhances learning that's non-sleep deep rest in a nutshell now why the book has to be so long given i can just kind of cut it down to a nutshell that's a different story but principles are what allow a field to say you know what we got it yep doesn't mean the stuff isn't important means we got it we're moving on we understand the action potential we understand plasticity we understand getting over trauma the tools still need work but we understand how to get to sleep we understand how to be focused we and so people i think i'm hoping will appreciate that we are here now i didn't podcast and do all this for the last six seven years so that i could be in the exact same place and regurgitate the same things i'm like here you go this is my thesis is my graduate thesis like you know some people say there's a little bit of like pigeon chesting but i didn't publish like two papers in some you know red red ribbon journal we publish close to eight first author papers in awesome journals some in apex journals i could have graduated way earlier i did it because i wanted to close a story in a field we didn't get everything but i wanted to get to the point where that field didn't make sense to work on anymore it was like we're done we did it like like what are we doing like what i don't want to stay in high school i want to graduate so it's now time this is my thesis i'm done i think it's i believe it's of real value i'm on to the next thing and if people want to quibble about the details i'm all ears i'm happy to talk about it um or even the big things but it's not like i'm done it's not important it's like we got it let's move to the next level and i want you to do this too i talked to lex the other day on the phone you know everyone's like where's lex having her lexus building up the next big move i can't talk about it but it's awesome and i'm like he's so brave and i'm like yes you're always on the next thing you know rick's always on the next thing you know and it's so cool like it's like we gotta keep going we can't stay back there that's what happened in the 1960s and 70s these people got went down the rabbit holes they took too many psychedelics thinking psychedelics were the answer and a lot of them lost their minds or they did too much somatic therapy and they forgot that the mind that actually you don't store emotions in the body i'm sorry folks you store them in your brain and the body represents them turns out we've now moved on body and brain are important so i think it's time we move to the next step tell me if this sounds familiar you train regularly you eat reasonably well you feel fine but you're just kind of going off vibes most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body and that is why i partnered with function function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones heart health kidney function and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer to put that in perspective your typical annual physical might test 20 markers function runs over 160 it's huge best of all you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard so you track trends over time make sure you're moving in the right direction and this level of testing would usually cost thousands but with function it is 365 dollars per year just one dollar a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body and right now you can get 25 off bring it down to 340 bucks get the exact same blood panels that i use and save 25 dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom that's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom is there a good test for microplastics and what is the best detox protocol that you're aware of at the moment for microplastics detox as opposed to limiting the ones coming in um because we know where they are right they're pretty much everywhere um but glass better than plastic and so on um the data on sweating are decent right they're not going to purge them completely but they're but they're pretty decent um so sauna living in texas running outside i mean heat is heat right so you know i was kind of joking this morning on a press call you know if you're standing outside in texas in the middle of the day like you're getting some deliberate heat exposure or non deliberate heat exposure it's the same heat is heat um so that definitely helps you know there's this idea that a sulforaphane which is in cruciferous vegetables might be able to bind some of it and you can purge some of it that uh arterial soul is that what it's called i think it's sulforaphane um you can take concentrated sulforaphane you know ronda patrick broccoli ronda is very bullish on this i um i don't take sulforaphane um i do try and sauna because it has other benefits a few times a week um and i just think more and more companies that can their beverages are going to start you know looking a lot of canned beverages do and a lot of canned beverages don't ronda put me in touch with a company for new tonic who have a different wrapper on the inside because all of these cans it's not the plastic yes yeah but there's a an organic biodegradable uh liner that you can get so we're looking into that it's going to take forever yeah i mean the stuff is everywhere there's um the particulate from tires there's the clothing thing in europe dryer whether your dryer is venting inside you can buy a better trap for some of the microfibers i'll be honest i don't i don't do those things um i'm conscious of trying to not put heated food in plastic whenever i order this is limiting input though right we're just limiting input to the extent that it's getting things out that we don't know i mean i think also like anything some people are going to be more susceptible to this i mean if people are doing a bunch of other things to disrupt their endocrine environment right they're not sleeping well they you know they're not doing all the right things um or they're doing some things badly wrong especially if you're getting a lot of environmental exposure to toxins because you you know a lot of people work jobs where they work with paints and solvents you know laboratories it's kind of wild you know laboratories you find all sorts of things that can what we call intercalate into dna that's how you you run gels and things of dna and i mean without getting into the details of looking at proteins and different types of blots or rna or dna in order to break up proteins or break up dna in order to you know basically run them out on these gels you have to put chemicals in them that break the bonds right that's not good right you don't want that happening to you it's good for the experiment it's not good people are dermally disrupting their own dna people who work in laboratories are exposed to you know paraformaldehyde constantly and um if you work if you have a neuroscience lab that we're perfusing brains you're fixing brains to cut them up you're worried with paraformaldehyde and other fixatives all the time you're working with um things that are mutagens uh sometimes radioactivity i mean viruses i mean my lab for years i'm not running a lab anymore last i think last paper came out in 2023-24 um now just teaching but the the the lab had adenoviruses, synbis viruses, modified rabies viruses i mean we some stuff you don't we worked with we had yeah you we did we had sedatives that are you know federally controlled you had to keep them in a locker account for every microliter i mean laboratories are full full of dangerous things unless it's a computational laboratory in which case we call those carpet labs where they have carpet and computers um no when that's real science it's just different science when it comes to the microplastics thing i learned some interesting insights around the fact that the like micron size of microplastics and the size of your sweat glands can get some out but not all because microplastics range in size this is a conversation that ben greenfield was bringing up another interesting one we're talking on 9-11 um a friend told me a story about this particular firefighter who had gone into the towers and had been out of the towers and that was exposed to all of the you know the most particulars probably in history apart from volcanic eruptions and um he developed a like a parkinsonian tremor and he did niacin flush with charcoal uh and had a towel wrapped around him when you do that so you get your heart rate up doing exercise you get into the sauna you take the niacin then you take the charcoal nice thing to flush everything out and then charcoal to bind it so it doesn't get reabsorbed again and apparently the towel that this guy had wrapped around him was like verdigris it was at all colors of blue and pink and green those firefighters i mean they absorbed so much mental and physical um damage in those days i mean one thing we should say before i want to talk about 9-11 and that particular thing um i i do but before we do that i just want to mention one thing i think is important because the message got out based on one publication that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in us already been there okay so it turns out there's a second publication that went to the same data and basically found that the the tool they used in that first study to measure the number of particles was not a very good tool um and it turns out we have far less than that in us you saw the stuff about the gloves right uh not about the gloves but that oh but but what's interesting about this study is i think that some people say we have a marble sized uh amount of plastic in your brain at this moment maybe distributed maybe but that i looked at both the the data analyzed two different ways in those papers and unfortunately the more um the more catchy thing you have a credit card and it was worth of plastic in you or your brain that's sort of you know it kind of did the telephone game of the internet the second paper didn't um didn't get as much air time yep and so retraction versus the accusation right it was a separate group it wasn't a total retraction but having spent a lot of years in my lab where you try and count cells and you're trying to decide on a computer screen what's a cell seems trivial to you mean that's a cell sometimes it's very easy sometimes you see two clumps like this is that one cell or two cells so where you set your threshold for what you define as a cell is very important and in this study so this was sorry for interrupting no no i think this was this was what i saw so uh basically when people were using nitrile and latex gloves to do the microplastic thing the way that nitrile gloves actually bend is because tiny fragments of plastic peel off basically at least just came out this last year people measuring microplastics wore gloves that got plastic on the plastic detector that's what happened so this is like yeah one of the biggest look i mean if you talk to notice a wild microplastics goose chase based on the glove like so we might be overestimating the amount of these things which would be great or let's you know if we to be more worried and actually be safer is better than to be less worried and actually in danger think about this though if it's the case that microplastics are less prevalent by a factor of a lot some of the studies i've seen around this it's like a hundred less a hundred times less or maybe even a thousand times less than we've got if that's the case what that suggests is the x factor which is disrupting endocrine impacting testosterone stuff like that is even greater because people have been able to lay at the feet of microplastics like it's kind of the microplastics of the gaps of what's going on with endocrines why is sperm count going down etc etc if we say oh actually we've been over measuring that the x factor begins to need to fill more of the hole yeah we don't know how to match you know number of particles to biological relevance i mean in a you know one parallel example would be for many years you know there were new antibodies coming on becoming available for the study of the brain and you could label up like where is the richest concentration of serotonergic neurons in the brain and a group identified this massive serotonin input to the brain circadian clock massive i mean it counts for you know basically half of the input to the clock you know what happens if you disrupt that input to the clock nothing functionally it means nothing does that mean it's doing nothing excuse me functionally it means far less than the anatomy would suggest in the brain big strong synapses mean a lot more than number of synapses number matters but big and strong matters way more and so we don't really know how to correlate x number of particles with this much dysfunction also you know it's not a study that i um think about very often but my colleague mike eisenberg who you've had on a podcast right um i mean it does seem that sperm counts are going down generation to generation um but it's they have data that do you know about this that penis size is going up right and not no pun intended um but then you start asking you know how is this measured and it's self it's either self-report and then you get into these details that i really don't want to discuss this too early in the day um you know like why are they measuring from like the top or the bottom like are they are they uh is it flaccid or is it erect like all these different things and you'll talk to mike and say you know they try and standardize these studies but it's one of these things where the headline is so catchy right one or the other headline but then you get to no pun intended but then you get to the the nuance of how these studies are done and the answer almost always is Well, let's just stick to microplastics.

We need more data. I think that the other… We need more penises. Some people on the planet would argue we need fewer, but that's a different podcast. But 9-11, I'd been on the East Coast. So I'm 51 years old. So I remember this very clearly. I'd been on the East Coast at an amazing place on the North Shore Long Island called Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. This is sort of summer camp for scientists where they go to learn molecular biology. You take courses. And it actually operates all year long as one of the premier laboratories in the world.

Are you telling me there's something on my face? No, no, no. I'm just grinning about this fucking summer camp. It's all right. Oh, it was a great time. So I was a student there at Cold Spring Harbor. I was a TA. I was an educator, and I was a course director for many years. And then I passed the course off onto people who are better equipped to do that at that time. But we had gone to this course and then flown back. A number of us had flown back, and some people were still in the process of going back.

So I remember that day very well. I also remember two years later, because the course was every other year, going back to this course in Long Island. And there's this day off where half of the students would just recover from their hangovers. There was a lot of drinking back then. Not so much of these courses anymore. But you took the Long Island Railroad into the city and went to the 9-11 site. So it was a memorial slash site, because they were still excavating the site. What day was this?

What day? Date. Oh, this would have been a summer of... Okay, so two years after 9-11. So it'd be 2003. And they still hadn't finished? Oh, no, no. I mean, this was a giant... I mean, I think it's hard for people to conceive. You see the towers in the photos, and they're so huge. But the footprint of these towers was just enormous. Multiple city blocks long. And all there was was a wooden gate. You could walk around the site. There were pictures everywhere, obviously, and a lot of inscribings and some photos and things of that sort.

And there were people working the site, construction workers. Many of them, no masks. And then you've got all these tourists. We were essentially tourists reading the stuff on the wall, walking around. No doubt, everyone was inhaling tons of whatever was in their jet fuel, particulate, etc. But the people that got there first? I mean, I can't even imagine what the firefighters and others were exposed to. I did hear an interesting story that one of the companies that was housed in those buildings was led by somebody who had some former military training.

Do you know about this? Who had been there for the first bombing of the World Trade Center and had run drills for his entire company, insisted on drills going into it. And all but I think 11 of the people in that company got out. So they would run these drills about how to single or double file out of the stairways. I don't know the particulars of this. But it turns out there were people who were very concerned about this going in for a number of years and that increased survival.

Now, I don't know where they were, which level, etc. But I mean, that was a huge game changer. And yes, there were videos online at that time. So different because there wasn't social media of people at some places in the world, quote unquote, celebrating. But I would say the vast majority of media that you saw, the vast majority of what was online was just people either in shock or in anger and just in surprise. A lot of people in the United States at that time didn't know where Afghanistan was.

They didn't know what Afghanistan was. They didn't know where Pakistan was. They didn't understand that. I mean, they knew these places in the world exist. They probably heard the names before, but there wasn't a lot of awareness of that side of the world. It was like, oh yeah, a bombing in Yemen, people would hear these things. But that and the Challenger explosion were, in my lifetime, were the two where you just went, oh shit, this is a line in the sand. Things are very, very different now.

You mentioned nicotine earlier on. I'm seeing pouches everywhere. What's your opinion on nicotine and pouches? Look, I consume caffeine every day. I love caffeine. Nicotine is sort of similar, although caffeine is safer, obviously. It can even improve health. Nicotine will definitely make you feel alert and calm, unlike other stimulants, which is a very unique state that's great for learning. It sets you up for learning, doesn't let you learn. Excuse me, it doesn't make you learn, but it lets you learn. Raises blood pressure, highly addictive. And here's the thing people don't realize.

If you take three to six milligram pouches multiple times per day, it's not going to have a cognitive enhancing effect. It's just rescuing the deficit from nicotine withdrawal. If you don't drink caffeine for two days, you're not going to feel good. You drink caffeine, you'll feel good. It's bringing you back to baseline. If you want nicotine to be a performance aid, you use it occasionally, meaning three to six milligrams, once or twice total, twice per week maximum. But how many people do you know that- To not develop a dependency.

Or just not do it very often. And then it does something. I mean, that's how I feel about a lot of energy drinks. I love them, but I'll take them when I really want to dial in, really want to... Like I slept last night, but not quite as much as I would have liked. I'm a time shifted and so on. So this morning I drank one of yours and one of Derek's. And that's a lot. The old twin turbo. Yeah, very good. The twin turbo and that's a lot, but I thought we had a pretty good workout.

Yeah, you performed well. The previous mode of delivery was smoking and then we moved on to vaping pretty quickly and vaping became massive. Talking about the history of this, humans have found a way to get their nicotine. Smoking causes cancer. Okay. Not good. Dipping, snuffing. Not good. Cancers. Okay. Oral nicotine. Oh, vaping. Turns out it's not good for us. Really not good. The chemicals associated with it, probably a bit safer than smoking, but this is really wild. The behavioral data say because you can do it anywhere, pretty much, people are doing far more of it.

They're taking in far more nicotine and they're coming now having issues, lung issues and issues related to nicotine. So smoking was less healthy and maybe more dangerous per puff, but because the number of puffs that you're consuming from vaping, because you can do it in more places and it's more tasty and there's less fatigue from it, means that maybe the healthier delivery mechanism of vaping versus smoking is more than offset to the point where it's more dangerous. Right. Wow. In the same way that cannabis, you don't say is good or bad.

Yes, it nukes REM sleep, but that's very, very bad. It can cause psychosis and certain males have a predisposition to psychosis, but you'd say smoking cannabis, people are able to put themselves into a plane of high that is not freaking them out. They can take one toke. When I was in college, everyone was just like, did bong reps. But you knew if you could do half a one or one or you wouldn't go like four and then wait and see what happens. Some people did that.

That didn't work out so well. But with an edible, the problem is people can ingest 100, 150 milligrams of THC like that. And then they're freaking out. And in some cases it can trigger a psychotic episode that lasts a long time or doesn't reverse. And so it's the ease of ingestion. So that's the vaping thing. The oral nicotines, they're here to stay. Humans have, since the discovery of nicotine, have found a way to get their nicotine. Same with caffeine. They've just found a way to, they're not going to quit.

But a lot of young people using nicotine, they should just be aware of how addictive it is and the fact that it raises blood pressure. And I think that usually you can scare guys out of it a little bit by just saying, oh, it's vasoconstriction. And that can have some sexual side effects. But nowadays people are using pharmacology to combat pharmacology. And thanks to Mike Eisenberg and other people, like I've said, the low dose Tadalafil for prostate health, but then people go, well, if you take a little bit more, then it's like a sex drug and that kind of thing.

Anyway, it was developed as a prostate drug, but it's a vasodilator. Does that combat the vasoconstriction of nicotine? Yeah, in theory, but now you're doing sort of a push-pull. Bad language. You're now doing a push-pull between one set of effects and another set of effects. And I would say, this is just by observation, people in their teens, 20s, 30s, even early 40s, you really want to get away with it using as little pharmacology as necessary. This is why, during my manopause, monk mode era, I did a thousand- Your what?

Manopause, I went monk mode, which is- You were in manopause? You're too young for manopause. Manopause. No, manopause is the end of 20s. Listen, I told you- We got to return to that. Manopause is- Manopause. Your androgens dropped at the end of your 20s? It's a colloquial bro science term that I use to describe when guys stopped behaving the way that they did in their adult infant 20s. I have so many thoughts about that hat and none of them good. Please take that off. So a lot of the time, when I was doing my period of personal development, becoming a proper human, I did a thousand days without alcohol and 500 days without caffeine because I wanted to prove to myself I don't need to use any of these things.

I don't need to buttress my life with this. I wanted to have that in the back of my mind if there was ever a period, because I knew for the rest of my life that I was going to be around parties. I was going to be around caffeine. Now I have a company that does it. Something that's kind of interesting. So we've been doing these, which are these pouches. Those, I think by the end of next year, we could do more volume in pouches, more revenue in pouches than in cans because of how many people want to dial back their nicotine.

So many people feel like I'm not in control of my nicotine usage and the delivery mechanism has been locked in. And it's easy to take and we'll talk about the canister. By the way, if you write a 600 page book, what happens is you stare at things up close, your eyeball lengthens and you become myopic. You've worsened your eyesight because you wrote the book. You literally damaged your eye. But at the end of this year, right after this book promotion tour is done, I'm going to spend a lot of time staring at horizons and hiking in the mountains and I might even go hunting this year.

So yeah, that's why I'm wearing these. I mean, look at it. This is crazy, this prescription. You're making me put them on and you're blind. They're like tall bottle glasses. So yeah, when you stare at things too close, you become nearsighted. So kids, adults- Be careful. Get some long view vision each day. My vision at a distance is great, but up close is lousy. So the other thing about this and these canisters is it's interesting. I'm not trying to diverge topics here, but we'll get to peptides, I'm sure.

But the pens that the GLPs use, pen with needle, has basically gotten people over their needle phobia. It turns out it was the plunger people were afraid of. I don't like needles. Do I have to inject myself? Turns out if you put the needle at the end of something, it looks like a pen. Everyone's pinning themselves, men, women, people are just pinning themselves. These canisters are interesting because they have like a tactile feel. It's a little bit like chips at the casino. But when I was a kid, there was a jerky.

Do you remember this? There was a beef jerky that came in a canister that looked like tobacco. And kids, oh, this stuff was horrible. You would take a pinch of beef jerky and you'd put it in your lip. We were like nine years old, 10 years old. And then you'd eat the beef jerky eventually. You were just cosplaying as your dad. My dad didn't chew. He did occasionally smoke a cigar or pipe. My grandfather smoked a pipe. For the people that did. Yeah. So we were like little kids.

We were little kids walking around lipping beef jerky. Beef jerky, not licking, lipping beef jerky. And it was, they clearly figured out that like candy cigarettes. And so there is something about the pout, the canister. Oh, there it is. There it is. Jerky stuff. No, no, it's called jerky stuff. That looks so gross. Oh my God. It looks like the fluff that you find in your pocket. It's called jerky stuff. Look at this. Ready? There you go. Jerky stuff. And you would stuff your cheek or you'd stuff your lip.

Yeah. This was a thing. So it was- It was kind of like jerky flavoured sawdust. It was. And also barely any, it was probably like four grams of protein per In the intake. And you would pay more for it. And it was because it was a good way to take in something. So these canisters are also very reinforced. Yeah. It's really tactile. It's nice. And also like your back pocket. Guys love carrying something in their back pocket. Nobody wants to carry the man purse. I might've brought like a small zip thing to the gym today.

I did see that. Yeah. You didn't ask what was in it, but I'm not going to tell you. What are the spiciest protocols that you weren't able to put in the book? What was the stuff that you wish that you could have got clearance on? Right. So the book is everything I'm certain about, that we understand the mechanisms for and that I know work. Not just because I experienced that, but because many, many people have, and we have great data to support it. Like everything's substantiated.

There's only one protocol that's a little bit out there. And I said, this is kind of out there. We have a little bit of data, not a, not a ton, but here's, here's why I'm including it. And I think you might want to try this because it can really help you fall asleep when you talk about this. But we know why it ought to work. I don't talk about psychedelics, although I do fit them into a framework along plasticity and learning. And so they make sense of when they might, might be the appropriate tool.

I don't talk about hormone therapies and I don't talk about peptides in part because the data are still coming. And also because they'll likely be a second book. Although, you know, if you write a book like this long with, you know, thousands of references and, you know, it can damage relationships in your life. People have been super understanding. This book basically acted as a filter in my, in my own life for like, who really loves me. Right. So, but look, it's big, but it also operates as a doorstop, a weapon.

Yeah. I was going to say, if you're feeling not quite tall enough at the table, you can sit on it at Thanksgiving. And, and as I joke, if nothing else, it'll cure insomnia. Very nice. Okay. What are some protocols that you fully believe in, but you can't scientifically prove? Oh, that's really good. Okay. Yeah. Let's just be blunt here. But these would be things that are aren't in the, in the book. Right. Okay. Cause it, everything there is substantiated by mechanism and description. I've had some wild experiences with a couple of peptides that some people have heard about.

I don't have shoulder pain. I've never had shoulder pain, but about three, four months ago, I made the decision. I was like, I should start doing some heavy pressing again. I do my dips. I do my overhead presses. I don't like flat benching, so I do some low incline pressing. After about three months, two, three months, I started getting some shoulder pains. I started doing some external rotation work. I'm like, this thing isn't going away. What is this? Maybe I need to back off. It's like, you know what?

It's pretty bad. I'm going to just put two injections of BPC in there. Two injections of maybe 100 or 200 micrograms, tiny amounts, right? Gone. History. Can't find the pain. It's gone. Now, is it placebo? I don't know. Maybe it is. I mean, I knew what I was injecting. A better experiment would have been somebody traded out saline, and I go, oh, that didn't happen. That's pretty incredible. The animal data are really impressive. I know a number of people with pets, dogs in particular, who've been injecting their animals with BPC because their dogs are getting older.

I don't want to name names here because I haven't cleared it with them, but they have dogs that either had spinal strokes or just aged and were limping and not doing well, and they asked, does this stuff work in animals? I'm like, all the data are on animals. Mouse and rat owners, your mice and rats will- If you rupture the antenna, they'll kill you. Exactly, because there's a lot of data on that. I know a lot of people now injecting their dogs, aged dogs, and saying, oh my goodness, this is crazy.

They're more mobile, et cetera. It's hard to give the placebo argument there. I mean, you could say that the owners are doing other things, like they're also massaging it with more care. They didn't do the saline control, but kind of hard to explain it away. The other one is pineelon. Pineelon, ironically, is a peptide that doesn't come from the pineal. It comes from brain tissue. Epitalin comes from the pineal. Who names this stuff? It's insane, but I've experimented with pineelon every third or fourth night, taking about a tenth of an IU.

Those nights, I get anywhere from two and a half to three hours of REM sleep. That's a lot of REM sleep inside of six to seven hours. Inside of six hours, you're kind of cheating the system. Normally, I'd have to get into my last third of sleep, which for me is seven or eight hours in total, in order to get that REM enriched phase, which always comes at the end of the night. What's so wild is that on the subsequent nights, I also experienced this massive REM increase.

I've cut that back to doing it once a week or once every 10 days and still getting the same effect. The only downside for me is that the next day, I can feel not foggy, but I feel like it's harder to become fully alert. I can still focus. A little bit of sleep inertia, maybe. I know people who are taking it in the daytime because they like being in this kind of shallow plane of sleep-wake for cognitive work. That's not me, but there's talk about people at tech companies who are like, yeah, if you're going to do something for 12 hours that's really laborious, maybe this is good.

I don't know. That's been interesting. I think there's a lot of excitement nowadays about growth hormone secretagogues, things like Tessamorella and Upramorella and CJC. I'm not a fan. They've always nuked my REM sleep. They've always spiked my PSA. For me, they don't tend to work. I am curious about, but I don't think I'm old enough yet to really embark on a somatotrope growth hormone experiment, but the clinical trial by exploring low-dose growth hormone for people- That would be exogenous, right? That would be exogenous, yeah. That's intriguing to me, but there are data, right?

There are data, but I feel like at 51, I'm still in this place where I feel good. There's no real science there. The other, sorry, aside from the growth hormone thing, the other stuff is there's animal data, not human data, but my experience has been pretty impressive. Now, of course, maybe I gave myself a tumor by injecting the BBC. I have to acknowledge that, but a whole body MRI tells me no. The things that, well, I've talked about this openly, so I'm happy to talk about it.

You'll find clinical trials on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. You'll find clinical trial, beautiful clinical trial data, in my opinion, on psilocybin for depression and PTSD. You won't find a lot of data combining them. I've experimented in a clinical setting with combining them, right? This is done in a legal clinical setting, so that means therapy going in, therapy during therapy coming out. You have to be very thoughtful about where you do this and who you do it with. All the adequate supports have to be there. For me, that was incredible.

I have to say that psilocybin alone was helpful, but didn't really feel like it resolved certain things for me. MDMA was helpful in feeling feelings, etc., that first and second bin, acknowledging the thing and really feeling the feelings. But the moving through part was really, for me, was uncoupling the negative feelings from the negative thing, but also replacing the negative feelings with positive feelings. That really came about through that combination therapy, and you won't find a lot of data on that. Unfortunately, the data on polypharmacology of different psychedelics isn't there yet, but then again, the FDA approval for the first single ingredient approaches aren't there yet, and so that's why people have to go out of country to do this or else it's illegal.

I think that the data on Ibogaine are really intriguing. We've had conversations with people that are very open about the fact that they did it and it's helped them. I don't know if people are trying to get us to go down to Mexico. Are we going to go? On a daily basis, I feel like I'm being peppered by somebody else to go, hey man, just come down and turn your life upside down for a week in fucking Mexico. I have a friend that's there right now, and I told him not to go, honestly.

I'm sorry, but he doesn't have a substance abuse issue. Maybe he has PTSD, but I think there's this idea also with peptides that we can just up-level ourselves. People say, should I use peptides? What effect are you looking for? Better. It's sort of like, should I invest in blank? It's like, what effect are you looking for? They're like, more. They want more money. It's understandable. People want to feel better. If you feel 7 out of 10, could you feel 10 out of 10? If you feel 10 out of 10, could you change what 10 means and be 8 out of a new 10 that's way better than your current 10 out of 10?

That's an intriguing idea, but I'm not so afraid of the Ibogaine, to be honest, done in the proper clinic with heart rate monitoring. The thing I'm afraid of is the DMT. Yeah, because they have to hit you with that the day after and then pretty much straight after as well. I also know a number of people who've done DMT and they're... I mean, I know plenty that have done DMT and they're okay. I know a lot who've done DMT and they're genuinely weird now. Not all of them, but some of them are legit weird.

They were not that weird before. Some are perfectly fine. The other thing is a guy like DJ, he's talked about this. I love that podcast that you guys did, by the way. DJ is a solid mind. Also, he's starting from a very low baseline. If you're sad watching the sunset with a gun in your mouth, you're already... What's going to be worse? You've already considered taking your own life. Okay. You go smoke the thing, take the drugs, see how you feel. Yeah. I mean, it seems to have really helped him and Marcus and some of these other guys.

Well, I mean, it's helped him enough that he's trying to be a maitre d' for me and you, but a maitre d' that sits down at the table and eats along with you. What if we go to sleep one night? Not near each other, of course. Although, actually, given where we live, actually quite fucking near each other. What's so funny is I got a place that turned out to be really close to Chris. Spitting distance. It's going to be like the podcaster neighborhood if we're not careful.

It's cool, man. We ended up being neighbors. Good taste. Good taste in neighborhoods. But what if you go to sleep in your house and I go to sleep in my house, and then we wake up in Mexico in this clinic? Because DJ's done a Maduro on us. Because someone did a Maduro. I got fucking Maduro'd by DJ Shipley. Exactly. I've had similar things happen in totally different contexts years ago, where I was supposed to get dropped off after working with some friends that have this awesome band.

They were supposed to drop me off back at my lab in my car, and I woke up in Utah. They drove to Utah in the middle of the night. I woke up. I was like, where are we? Utah is like, you're one of us now. This is my good friend, Elvis Cortez. He's actually the one that found me, Costello. I love Elvis. He's great. But yeah, technically they kidnapped me, but it was a lot of fun. That was many years ago. I don't know. We'll see.

There are other things that are perhaps a little less of the Mount Everest of that stuff. Yeah. Lower risk. But you seem to be in a really good place now. That's true. But still, there's always the ability to show up versus how much of the four steps have you done in terms of being able to get over something. How do you respond when people say, they go, oh my goodness, here you are looking for this next thing or the thing you can do, and they just say, Chris, what you really need to do is just get married and have a couple of kids, and that will be the psychedelic experience.

I agree. I say, yes, plus two golden retrievers. I agree. And I say, yes. And they're not preaching to the choir. You said two girls and retrievers? Golden retrievers. Golden retrievers. I mean, that's a Freudian slip from you. No, it's a Freudian slip from you. I said fucking golden retriever. People can rewind the tape. I completely agree. I completely agree on that. I've said this before. I'm the most ardent guy without kids supporter and ambassador for guys just starting a fucking family. And it's not for me to say, hey, I want you to stop your ambition, and the same for women too.

Stop your socioeconomic climb and doing all this stuff. So many of the things that I see people doing, young people and people that are getting into more middle age, like surrogate families. It's like the business that you're building, the fervor with which you're going after this political party or this new sort of social campaign or this like obsessive hobby that you've got or trying to become wealthy or whatever. A lot of that to me looks and feels like this is the energy that you would be putting into a family, especially the existential energy that you've got.

And I'm like, I think a lot of your, I don't really know what my purpose is. I don't feel like I'm contributing more largely to the world. All of these questions that people have, like, why am I here? It's like, well, a lot of this I think has kind of been solved throughout time, which is like you do the golden retriever thing and the family thing. Like golden retrievers do come first. That is an important caveat for me. Interesting choice of breed. I just want an animal that can't, there is no danger of it competing with me cognitively.

So I want something that's both cuddly and stupid. Golden retrievers are not all stupid. I'm going to try and find a breed of golden retriever, which is particularly fluffy and stupid. Just find a dog with a really flat head. On a single digit IQ, golden retriever. I mean, if you think about the Mastiff breeds, they're all very sweet and they have flat heads and they look at you like, you know, so the Mastiffs, the Bulldogs, the, you know, the Boxers, they're smart about certain things, but they're kind of like dog with a flat head.

Okay. You know. Are you doing phrenology for dogs? I mean, I went to the- This is fucking phrenology for dogs. I went to the meet the breeds in New York and met hundreds of breeds. Second time I've done this, and walk through and met all the different breeds. And I can tell you a couple of things. First of all, people look like they're dogs. Okay. So the otter- You do look a lot like Strummer. You know, thank you. The otter hounds, like these otter hounds, the owners look like otter hounds.

It's crazy. The Bulldogs are kind of like the demeanor of the people and you just, and it's wild. You have to go. It's so much fun. It's at the Javits Center each year. It's awesome. You meet all the breeds. I walked out of there and I was like, you know, I turned to my girlfriend and go, getting a Bulldog breed. I'm getting a mutt. Because I've been around enough dogs. I've experienced them all. And the mudded bullies, not the pure bullies, but the mudded bullies, they're kind.

They're vigorous. They've got a little bit of goofiness. They're very emotional in a good way. But then they also like get over it. They're just like a little hedonist sometimes. And they'll back you. Like they will fight to the death for you. But if your life's not on the line, like they're not doing shit at all. They're not reactive. I mean, are you kidding me? So yeah. Well, listen, I hope you get a dog and the dogs can hang out in the neighborhood. And I do think that, no, I mean, family is awesome.

I mean, family is amazing. So what, so what's the, what's the delay? You, you're. Well, it's very difficult. First off, I need to get the dog thing. I always felt guilty because my mom and dad had been so good with dogs. Like they would, they walked them all the time. They gave them a great life. And I would feel I've seen what a good life for a dog looks like. And I would feel incredibly guilty not being able to, and I can pay someone. I'm sure.

Or is somebody I can bring, bring them to the office, bring them on the trip or whatever. I'm like, I don't want to have a dog that's flying once a week or, you know, that I'm having to travel that much. I did what? Like a hundred thousand miles and maybe 80 flights last year. I've done like a new, I don't want to do that. Also for kids, you want to be present for your kids. Of course. And that, but that is another thing that I think is, it's kind of beautiful if you frame it this way, and at least maybe this is just cope from me, uh, that if you take the, oh my God, maybe I have just been surrogate family building with this business or with this hobby or with this body or with.

Whatever this finances, investing, whatever it is that you've been doing with your time, skill building. But on the flip side of that, I think if you've really closed a lot of the different loops of like, I really feel like I like put it all out there on the table, I do get the sense that there is an additional level of presence that's afforded to you because materially, hopefully you're, you're, you're pretty well set. I can tell you, I mean, I don't want to get into details of my personal life, but 100%, I'll also tell you as a hard driving, like in pursuit of knowledge, skills and resources person, which you are, which I am and which our teams are.

Also. I mean, very, very few things feel as good as being able to resource the people around you that you love. Like that there's like, yes, your presence, obviously it's not just about earning money and giving them things, but being able to relieve suffering. However, minor or major being able to resource people to be in their full expression of what they want to do. I, I think very few things will feel as satisfying as, as that, especially if you, and I say that based on knowing you, but also your prior statement, the fact that you don't want a dog yet, because you want the dog to be thoroughly resourced by your, by the, the love that you're going to provide tells you everything you need to know.

David Perel, who does how I write and write a passage was when I first moved to Austin and he's about a similar age to me and he said, we're having coffee. He turned to me one day and he said, uh, you know what, man, I realized that most of my twenties and thirties were just spent becoming the dad that I want my future kids to have. And I wasn't even bothered about having kids and all of the accumulation of skills of habits of, you know, closing the loops of desires that he wanted to pursue, it's an adventure and all of this stuff, he'd got rid of that.

And he said, oh, you know, I sort of, I feel like I'm here is a way that you could say it. It's like, I actually feel like I'm fucking here. And I think a lot of guys, and you see this with a lot of dads and moms too, I've got these unrequited dreams and children sort of imposed on them and there's this, you know, low key, perhaps resentment of, oh, you know, I'm doing this thing, but you don't know what I sacrificed for you and then there's the shame or, oh my God, what sort of a monster am I to blame my kids that I chose to have because I didn't fulfill my dreams beforehand.

Yeah, it does really messy. Yeah. I mean, I want to be thoughtful with my words here. Cause again, I, I do like to maintain some sense of privacy in my life, but I will say that, um, it does check off as sort of a, a deep, um, must, what must be a primitive circuit of like, of, of satisfaction. Like having kids is a really good feeling. Like it just feels like, like you fulfilled something of duty, you know, um, that feels really, really good. And at the same time, it comes with all sorts of challenges and complications, you know?

Um, but yeah, I think that, um, you know, it's become this, uh, kind of ongoing debate, you know, between me and Lex or like, you know, as a, you know, like a, uh, like, you know, but I think that, look, it sounds like there are going to be a lot of kids to wrestle and play. I can't wait. It is a competition between me, you and him for who will have kids last, but we'll, we'll, we'll see who's, who's the holder. I think I, well, I'm going to keep my mouth shut.

Um, but in, um, cause we all, nevermind. Um, wait, I take this back. Take this back. Okay. Um, so, um, I've been asking you questions. This feels good. I didn't tell you that the last page of the book is where I do therapy on you. No, I'm just kidding. No, but can I, can I read my acknowledgement to you? Absolutely. Cause I didn't even, I didn't even get to that bit. Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to do this. I acknowledge you, uh, here. Um, here we go.

So it's brief because the acknowledgments are five pages long. I think there's eight pages long, but I figure if you're going to do something, you just do it. So I just put a bunch of names. Um, I put you, uh, Chris Williamson for your friendship and for breathing so much life into the podcast. And what I refer to as the everyone sphere, because I don't think you're about the manosphere. I think you're about the human sphere, but human sphere sounded weird. So I said, everyone's sphere.

So, uh, I, I mean it, you breathe so much life into this thing. Like I remember first seeing you online and then you on Rogan and us, you know, and I'm not a skeptic, I always want the best. And I thought, well, who is this guy with this British accent? And like, so, you know, and why are the women in my life asking me if he's single? Um, and, um, and I go, well, this guy is really smart. He's really nuanced. And he seems like a really cool guy and you totally exceeded expectations on all those things.

And it's awesome to just see what you're doing. And also day or night you're available for an emergency or, or an adventure call. That is, you'll get to the gym early on jet lag. You'll, um, and you've been super honest and vulnerable in your online and in our, in that career and relationship with your audience, but also just one-on-one. I, you know, there, um, for anyone that wonders, Chris is who he appears to be on the internet, which is really better off or worse. No, for better, man, for better, for better.

Like it's a, it's an honor to have you as a friend. You're a great, great friend. And I feel very, it is, it is really cool. You know, I think one of the almost inarguable great parts of life is becoming respected and admired by people that you respect and admire. Like it's one of the coolest things that you can do. And my back is also hurting. So I'm trying to self massage at the same time. We did neck training. We did a few face pulls. Yeah, that's true.

This is sounding terrible. We, Jeff Cavalier has an exercise called face pulls, but we did some neck training because, uh, as we both know, having a, the wrong head place, like a, if a neck is too narrow with wide shoulders, it looks, what do you call the coat hanger? Yeah. You look like a coat hanger. Yeah. That's a terrifying kid. But, um, you don't look like a coat hanger. Thank you. Uh, yeah, becoming admired and respected by people that you admire and respect is just one of the fucking coolest things.

It really is like, I like that person. I think they've got good taste. I think they're noble. I don't think that they're spiritually chinless and they. Spiritually chinless. If ever there was a Chris Williamsonism spiritually chinless, I'm going to borrow that, but I'll give you attributes. Uh, it's Adam Mastroianni originally, originally, originally. So, um, looking around. Wait, you didn't make that up? No. Spiritually chinless is from Adam Mastroianni. Oh, well, you know that song breaking rocks in the hot sun. I fought the law and the lucky.

That's a cover of a cover. Okay. But everyone assumes the clash did it. It's fine. You're at the end of the human centipede of spiritually chinless. Now you're the guy at the very, very end. I'm going to just give it to you. They gave that song to, to the client. I'll take it. Spiritual channels. So, um, you know, you see these people and you go, wow, they're, they're, they're cool. I respect them in a way that I think is really, really sort of noble and aligned.

And then if you manage to do something in that industry or a different industry and they turn to you and they say, Hey, like, I like what you do. Think, Holy fuck. Like, that's really cool. And can people take it to an extreme? Yeah, of course. You can basically construct your entire life, trying to reverse engineer, being liked by people that you like, and that's the like charlatan social climber that doesn't have anything below them. But assuming the people that you respect are discerning, and one of the reasons that you respect them is that they are discerning, you shouldn't be able to finesse or Fugazi them for moose them into believing something they don't believe, or you being a person that you want.

So yeah, man, like, I really hope that everybody that's listening to this gets to experience what it's like to sit opposite someone that they were a fan of and then became a friend of like, it's the fucking coolest thing in the world, it's really, really cool. Well, that statement includes my experience of you, you know, fan of, and then became friends of, uh, you've got an awesome life energy. I mean, we don't want to spiral into a whole other conversation, but maybe for a future time.

But I think a lot about energy these days, not just mitochondria, but like some people genuinely have. I'm going to offend some people with this. Some people just have more life energy in them. And I think. I like to think that if you're thoughtful, which you are, and I tried to be that you want to allocates their life energy toward career and pursuits and health and resolve and the, and then pivots that energy, but doesn't decide, you know, I'm going to shift all my chips to this and then all my chips to that.

You have a lot of energy to go around. You know, Rob on my team, my producer of the podcast is such an engine of productivity and running. He's got a family now and it's like, you always hear these things like people have kids and then they like, like he's picked up speed. We're just like, Whoa. And you know, I think some people just have that extra gear. Some people don't, and they need to take their, whatever they've been allocated and do maximize with that. And some people just have a tremendous amount of life energy.

And I think the goal is to not die at 27. If you have a lot of that energy, right. You think about the 27 club. It's almost like took all the energy of a life and crammed it into this early existence. Usually it's drugs and alcohol. And then, you know, so, but you also don't want to like a low, slow arc in life that you never figure out what your peaks are, put your fucking foot on the gas. Yeah, I'm in the third quarter now. So I figure I'm, you know, so speaking of engine, I texted you about this last week.

What is happening with the VO two max versus zone two debate? Because when I was thinking more deeply about like, I'm getting a little bit older, I should pay attention to my cardio respiratory fitness and stuff like that, low and slow was like everything that you sent me that Jeffrey Dahmer video, it wasn't a fucking Jeffrey, he sent me a video of a guy talking about this. It was very good video. And my first thought was the guy looks like Jeffrey Dahmer, which is making it a little hard to listen to watch.

So I could have just listened to the set. That would have been good. What's happening with VO two max versus zone two debate at the moment in your opinion, because for a long time it was focused exclusively on low and slow. Now it seems like the VO two more high intensity Norwegian four by four is increasingly important. I think the word to delete there is exclusively. I think my read of the data is you need some volume of cardio training, uh, to get that quote unquote aerobic base.

That can be very beneficial. I mean, the, the sorts of adaptations that come from doing 45 to 60 minutes of, of long and slow, we're not talking walking, but zone two, three ish. I don't ever think it was about zone two. I think about upper zone two zone three around there where you just barely can continue without, you know, you could, if you tried to speak, you would, you would have to pause a few times as opposed to just super easy. I mean, you are getting built up a more capillary networks, um, you know, which has a lot of positive downstream consequences, you're getting all sorts of enrichment of the mitochondrial system and the genuine enrichment of the cardiovascular system.

But I think doing that once a week, so I make it a point to do a long, slow jog, so 45 to 60 minutes or so once a week, or a rock for usually if I hike, I'm going for longer than an hour, um, with some weight or something like that. It's often social with somebody. Um, and then once a week I'll do the. I feel like I'm going to die hit workout, which for me is the Airdyne bike 20 on 10 off eight rounds. And by the seventh round, you're just like cursing everybody in yourself.

And you get off that thing. You feel so good. You probably cough a few times. Cause you're just like breathing that hard. And I actually just, I do the crude measurement of heart rate, like two 20 minus my age, and then figure out like what my heart rate is. A percent, a percentage of that max heart rate. Right. So you would get max. So hit like 85, 90% of, are you wearing a chest strap for some? I don't. So I talk about this. You're not fucking fingering your heart rate.

Are you. To your choice of language, man. Um, you with your, your, your British isms. Look, I get it. You want two wives and a golden retriever. You said that, and you're fingering your heart rate. I just put my fingers on my neck and record my pulse, or I just, and I'm looking at a stopwatch so absurdly low and I do that for 30 seconds and then I double it. And I'm probably off by, you know, plus or minus, you know, five beats, but I'm, you know, in the ballpark.

And you're like fucking Schrodinger's podcaster. You're someone who is both very forward thinking, like technologically prepared, excited about AI, and also using like a fucking sundial and your fingers to work out. What's so funny? I, I, my girlfriend had birthday recently and she, we, we, I got her this like compass sundial, which is so cool. I love primitive and very advanced tools. And I looked at you. I do think thank you. I bookend. Thank you. And not a lot in the middle. You're the barbell. You are the barbell of a human.

Thank you. Actually, I, I, I'll take that. I, there's a, a, a great song called streetwise professor that I love. Um, it was referring to somebody else. Um, but, uh, um, yeah, sort of like a barbarian, um, uh, intellectual something like that refined. Um, so the, once a week, get your heart rate up near maximum for six to 10 minutes, maybe do a mild, mild trial, or, you know, for most people that'll be somewhere between six and 10, unless you're really, really fast. In which case it'll be less or slow.

In which case it'll be longer. Um, so jog, two laps. I talked about this in the book and then do a mild time once every two or three weeks, two or three months. Um, you do Norwegian four by four. You can do the air. The nice thing about the Airdyne bike, like 20 on 10 off can stop it. It's like, yeah. And after six to eight rounds of that, you're smoked. You hop in the shower and you go, but you, it takes so little time. It takes so little time.

But you're also using the reason the Airdyne is so great or an assault bike, you know, echo bike pick your like handles and handles and feet bike of choice, the reason that that for me is a superior form for what we're trying to do, which is get heart rate as high as possible is that you're getting to use your arms as well. Yeah. If you try and do that on a bike, which is a fucking awesome piece of equipment. If you could give me any piece of cardio equipment, I'd choose a bike.

I'll get super comfy. You can speed up. Then your calves won't fit in the room. That's true. Your calves, but not mine. You're only using your legs, which means that your, your legs are going to be burning like hell. Okay. If I can get a little bit more, I mean, if I was a better rower or a ski ergo, I imagine you can probably get to a, even higher, higher heart. Yes. And no, I mean the rower, I mean, it's not a super skill. It's not brain surgery, but getting the row form proper is not.

As easy at the Airdyne. As long as you set the seat height, right. You, you can't really screw it up. So go as hard as you can to get your heart rate elevated for six to eight rounds, but do it in a way that you're not going to hurt yourself. Like the skier thing, like, you know, it's not, you're going to hurt yourself, but like you said, it's hard to get the heart rate way, way up. So that once a week, the longer thing once a week.

And then in the middle of the week, I just do a, a 30 minute run that's somewhere in between, or a 30 minute swim that's somewhere in between. So. minutes of warmup, perhaps, you know, just like jogging. And then you do a 25 to 30 minute run where you're in your zone four, right? You're, you're breathing hard and you know, you could go faster, but you don't. Yeah. Because then you got that hit workout later. And, you know, two days later or a day later, and I talk, and then I'm just interspersing three days of working out with weights in one day, legs somewhere in the week, one day torso today, we did a push.

So it's chest, shoulders, neck. And then another day of the week, you're doing, you know, biceps, triceps, calves, maybe neck again. Definitely. I I'm big on abdominal work these days. Core work, not just abdominal. What are your favorite exercises? Pikes. What the fuck is that? You hang from a bar. Okay. You're working on grip strength too. You do knee ups to 90 degrees slow without swinging back and forth. You do five of those drop down. Then you see if you can do knee up legs out.

So L-sit, can you go back? Do five of those. If you can do five and you just build this up. If you can't do the L-sit, you just do what I'll do five sets of five of the, of the knee ups. Next time I come back and try and do at least one or two L-sits. So then you're doing five, if you can do five L-sits. So you're just bringing your knees up and straighten, straightening your legs. You're still holding, right? You're also getting the grip strength work.

Then you lower slowly. If you can do five of those, then you start, you can do the one knee at a time. Kick out, kick out, kick out, drop one, bring down one leg at a time. And then over time, what you're trying to do is bring your, your feet up to your hands on the bar without just swinging back and forth. Using your lower abs, five sets of five, or even three sets of five on the pikes. And especially if you're hanging from a thick bar, so you're really working your, your grip.

That's a great ab work. And I do back hyperextensions. And so keeps your core really, really strong. Why are you bothered about torso work so much? You want strong abs. You want strong midsection and you want strong lower back muscles. I mean, I, I noticed that basically all injuries for me, nagging injuries completely disappear. Even if I'm sitting a lot, I don't have any pain. If I'm doing, I make sure I get a hundred reps of hyperextensions per week. So I don't care when I put them in.

Sometimes I'll put always at the end of a workout, but I'll put them at the end of arm day or leg day or back day. I'll just mix them up. I just, I have a commitment to a hundred reps and I started getting strong enough that I can do them with one leg. So on the 45 degree, you just, you sort of like take up one leg, like you're a horse getting your, your shoe clean. The GHD, that would have been insane. No, not on the GHD.

I don't do those on the GHD. And then I just go slow and controlled. You don't want to be tilting from one side to the next. So you really discover any imbalances that are there. You're bracing yourself and you just, I'll do five, five reps, switch to the other leg back and forth, back and forth. And now I'm at the place where I can hold some weight or use a band. And I'll tell you that having those strong spinal erector muscles, like my default posture has suffered in writing this book, even with a standing desk, cause you're just looking down so much.

Eye sight and posture. Exactly. But yeah, there's some recovery that needs happening, but I did buy an inversion table. Those are fun. I love hanging. I've tried. I've tried those. Yeah. You have to be careful if you have eye pressure issues like glaucoma, you can blow a gasket. You can make glaucoma worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eye pressure upside down. Not good. Um, I don't have glaucoma, so I'm knocking wood, but having a strong lower back, I noticed leg days are so much stronger, pressing, pulling, everything just gets stronger and you don't want any weak links in the chain.

And I think Jeff Cavaliere really nails it when he says you want to do the small things like face pulls, back hyper extensions, the glute medius work to stabilize the pelvis. Those little things allow you to do the big things for much longer. People will say, all that stuff is like Namby Pamby stuff. You need to do just your squats and deadlifts and split squats. And yeah, the way you do those things into your fifties, like me with this little shoulder thing, but no biggie, um, is and continue to get stronger is by doing the little things.

And if you do the little things, you stay strong and healthy. If you don't, you are the person who's complaining about your back who can't deadlift, or you're using a deadlift bar with like elevated handles from plates. You know, you're, you know, it's not, not good. It's, it's, it's just, you're becoming weaker through negligence, which is, it's excusable, but it takes three minutes to do some hyper extensions. For most educated people as well that are into that training, they know that what they're doing is trading short-term gain for long-term fragility because they've got five minutes left at the end of their session.

And they're going to go and do another set of bicep curls instead of going to go and do some hyper extensions or whatever, right? Like it's, it's always a trade-off and there's a level of ignorance where you're allowed to not do the thing that you didn't know you were supposed to do totally. But for most people that listen to you and listen to me, like my brother, you know, that you should be doing lower back work. You know, that you should be doing some mobility work.

You know, that you should be getting your heart rate above 170. You know, that you should be going low and slow. You know, you need to be walking after meals, the 10 minute walk postprandial thing. Like, you know, these things, it's the ignorance is no longer an excuse for you. Oh, it's all out there. I mean, especially since, and I talked about mobility in the book, it's basically get your knee behind your, each knee behind your glutes at least once per day. Like a couch stretch?

Well, yeah, like a couch stretch, like Kelly Starrett talks about, or just a lunge where you're stretching your hip flexors out. Cause sitting, walking every, almost everything is like knee in front of the glutes, right? You could skip like Stu McMillan, but then you have to have the confidence to be a skipper. Are you sitting and holding? Is this more like a yin yoga type position? Yeah, you could do it. I talk about just getting your knee behind your glutes or your foot up on a chair or stool and stretching that out if you're at the airport or something.

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

But what are you doing here? You're getting stretching through neck, thoracic spine, shoulder. It's not, look, they're great mobility programs, but most people don't make the time or have the time. These are the minimum, right? You do the squatting things. You do a couple of those. Then I talk about doing reverse, what gymnasts would call like, kids would call like the crab pose where you're in a reverse tabletop, you know, you can push up for shoulder extension. I don't have like excessively good shoulder extension, but I can get my shoulders behind me.

No problem. You know, you have horrible shoulder extension. Okay. So working on that a little bit gradually. And then there's something in there that I didn't develop, which is called, which I, which is really cool called the founder's pose. And I describe it there. It's from, it looks a little bit like a chair sit in yoga, but it's actually for the posterior chain. And I talk about that. And that's described there at someone else's creation. I want to be clear and I credit him. It was really, really cool.

And those four things take five minutes to do maximum. You can do anywhere. You can do them watching Netflix. You can do them at your desk. You can do them spread throughout the day to maintain some level of mobility. The other thing is use a full range of motion in your resistance training sets. Strength is gained through the range. It's trained. Oh, that's good. I like that. Full range of motion and holding tension on the stretched position. Not, you know, indefinitely, right. Don't turn it into an isometric, but you know, really like on your hamstring curls, making sure that you're setting the machine such that on your seated or lying leg curls, you really holding tension in the stretch, not passively stretching.

And I find like my range of motions pretty darn good. It's not amazing. You know, I was real stiff for a bit in my mid back and I did some work to get over that. You just move better. You'll feel better. You'll be more comfortable. So yes, I think that what you're pointing out that there's really no excuse for people once they have the knowledge gets to a deeper psychology. I don't want to parse this, you know, infinitum, but there are two things that I think are worth stating out loud.

One is that if you're somebody who's in pursuit of taking care of yourself and doing well, there are going to be people that say, like, you're doing all this stuff all the time. You're doing all this stuff all the time. Like, what is this? These are the people that when I would go to scientific meetings would give me shit for not drinking on the first night. I had a rule. I don't go out the first night, but you find me on night three of a five day meeting and all day I'm rocking and like I'm engaged.

I'm learning. I'm not at a meeting is socialized, but I do some of it, but I'm learning. I'm getting techniques. I'm there to work. Okay. And they're talking about their hangover. They look like garbage. And over the years that accumulates for them and it accumulates for me in a positive way. So people will give you a hard time for exercise and they'll give you a hard time for taking good care of yourself. And I do think that the other thing is there is a certain loneliness that comes with being the person who's really diligent.

It's a different community of people that I can call at 7 a.m. and go, you want to work out? And it's like, you might say, hey, listen, I was up way too late. Or you might say, yeah, let's go. Your friend group changes. I mean, I have a friend who used to work with people from like really troubled backgrounds and he would say like somebody would occasionally make it out of that world and just leave completely. But many times they would get themselves into all sorts of financial and social messes because they would continue to like kind of revert to this world they grew up in.

You've heard me talk about this lonely chapter thing, right? Like this is the whole idea behind that, that there is a period where you are so developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed that you built your new one and you keep looking back and you're tempted. I think Martha Beck calls this the empty elevator. Oh, interesting. You're just, you know, between floors. Between floors. That's yeah. The empty elevator. And then you get there and you realize, well, there are other people who also felt lonely who are now in this place who are doing cool things.

And it takes a strength of character to say, no, I'm not going to do that. And yes, I'm going to do this. And to also not be defiant and also still be able to go to Thanksgiving and still, yeah, you don't- I'm better than you. Exactly. It's not about better or worse. It's just different. And that I think that people fear being lonely and I understand, like I get it, you know, you're drinking buddies or you're eating lousy food buddies. The first night we land in a city, my team always likes to go out to dinner.

I'm always in the hotel taking care of myself because I want to have the full week of vigor and they do great, but they're younger than I am. We'll see. We'll see that because we're going to be in New York together next week. Last time that we spoke, you were telling me that you were teaching an octopus to use an iPad. Yeah, she died. But she died because- Was she electrocuted? No, she died because she laid eggs and they die after they lay eggs. So they live about two years.

Well, they lay eggs and then the eggs get fertilized by a male and then they die. This is the life cycle of the octopus. So I didn't know how old she was when I got her. They don't tell you. It's hard to know. And you have some sense, but yeah, she was in her second year. So she was really cool. Yeah. I thought it was a male, but that was pure projection. And then I named him Van Gogh because he was a starry night octopus. Didn't you replace with a new one?

That one died too. Maybe you shouldn't have kids. No, no. Fucking strummers looking around all the time, just waiting. Both of these octopuses were old. They were old. Okay. Yeah, they were in the- Have you given up on the octopus thing for now? No, heck no. I have a new tropical tank. I got the dog. I got the other freshwater tank. Hell no. But I need to get a younger octopus. Okay. Like a purebred newborn on a puppy octopus. I need either a male octopus or I need a younger octopus.

I can't believe that you weren't able to discern whether or not you bought a male or a female. Who the fuck are you getting this from? Some bloke on Venice beach. I swear. No, I get them legally, but let's just put it this way. Their fate would have been far worse if they hadn't come to me. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Salvaging octopus. So I have not done that yet, but I will say that Van Gogh was spectacularly smart and would sit down in front of the coral and mimic the coral.

It was awesome. It was so cool. They're a little bit sadistic, which is a little bit troubling. I think we should probably talk about this so I can get over it. We're in that second phase of the trauma thing. In all seriousness, the weird thing about octopuses, they're a little bit of drama queens because they play with you. I would hand feed Van Gogh and she would take the fish and sometimes she would just eat the fish and give it to her on a forceps. Other times she would take it and she'd stuff it against the glass of the aquarium and slowly eat the fish, then take a nap halfway through.

I was like, oh my God, these octopuses are pretty brutal. Kind of ruthless. Yeah. Then sometimes she would just play with it. That's rough. A dog is a benevolent creature. They're going to eat their food. That's it. A cat will play with its prey. Cephalopods are motherfuckers. I like cephalopods. I like cuttlefish. I had those for years. Kept those alive for a long time, by the way. Congratulations. Thank you. It was a little disturbing to see the octopus sadistically play with and partially eat its food.

We don't like to think about the animal kingdom that way, but if you look at nature as metal, that account- Yeah. That'll teach you some stuff pretty quick. You got to get on a plane, my brother. I do? I love you to bits. Do you get on a plane? Are you coming to work? Yeah, you got to get on a plane. No, I'm seeing you on Tuesday. I'm going to be in New York. You'll be there. We'll try and get Rick and a couple of other people.

Great. We can do a wrap up. I should just properly say, I should say thank you for hosting me. Grateful for your friendship. Thanks for supporting me through this book, for taking my calls at odd hours, my sanity. Thanks for supporting my, restoring my sanity. And I'm so glad we're neighbors. Me too. And fun to work out with you this morning. Yeah. You're the best. Where should people go to get the book? Protocolsbook.com. We'll put links to all the places you can buy books and different, the books in different languages.

The audio book is read by me in my voice. It's 19 hours long, but you can hop to a particular section, learn what you want to learn, and then put it away. come back to it anytime question question i like to ask authors what is an insight from the book either an intervention or an area or something that you think most people are going to skip over but you wish that they didn't the wacky eye movement thing to fall back asleep oh we talked about that last time that we were together yeah i think people think it's too crazy but it's but it costs nothing and it works and it will get you back to sleep because it confuses your body awareness system you need to forget where your limbs are it is really fucking like dizzying when you do it it you need to forget about your body position in order to fall asleep that's a prerequisite to falling asleep so that will help i think the one that people will skip over frankly is the personal development thing around how to finally let go of the difficult things that are you're still carrying forward you know i can say 15 minutes of journaling on the hard thing one day and then subsequently on three more days the data from pennebaker and others show conclusively it's a super powerful technique but people just don't do it and we should ask ourselves why don't they do it and i think because the thing is hard and also nowadays getting people to write for 15 minutes is tough i learned a lot about focus overcoming procrastination and scruffing oneself into doing hard things and writing this book and i thought i was pretty good at doing when i when i have to write someone a card but if it's someone's birthday or whatever i realize i haven't done this in sort of physically writing a thing i haven't done this in so long i've basically forgotten how to do it but uh peterson before he did 12 rules and then 12 more there's 24 there the original um answer the original place that that was born out of was a list of 44 rules on quora you remember that place is a website where people can answer questions yeah and somebody asked jordan uh what are your rules for a good life or something like that and he just listed 40 that include like pet a cat when you see it on the street don't bother children when they're skateboarding don't let your children do anything that let that means that you don't like them etc etc and one of his that i remember from that was um uh if memory still upset you false comma write them down full stop and it's like so much of this stuff is pointing in the same direction dude you're awesome books fantastic i'm glad that you're not insane but you are a little bit short-sighted now um i'll see you in new york next week thanks so much chris you're a gentleman a scholar and a beast uh big love goodbye my beauties dude thank you when you shop pick up at baker's you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries selected just for you our associates are committed to getting every detail right carefully hand picking your items checking for quality and freshness and packing your order with care because bringing you fresh quality groceries is what we do best and right now enjoy twenty dollars off your first online order of 75 or more restrictions apply see site for details baker's fresh for everyone