Transcript for:
Insights from Andrew Huberman's Journey

I'll tear up if I talk about it because things were going well in my life and then one day just rack everything came crashing down and um and I've learned that friendship is super powerful I had people descending on my home to be with me you know one day I just like look up and Lex is in the room and they sat with me picked me up and they reminded me who I am and um you know I have just such immense gratitude for that Dr Andrew huberman is a world-renowned neuroscientist Stanford professor and podcaster revolutionizing how we understand the brain and how we can adopt change break bad habits and Achieve Peak Performance growing up I was scared depressed and Confused my parents split up I was getting in multiple fights found myself locked up in this residential treatment program and I realized that I need to take control of my life I'm so intrigued by that because so many people feel stuck in their lives so how does someone even make those life-changing decisions well there are so many zeroc cost tools that can change your brain we can go through all of them so I want to talk about dopamine in this graph the dopamine is kind of like a wave pool in every domain of life whether or not it's food exercise for some people it's work or sex if you push things to the max you're going to feel depleted and UND stimulated afterwards and you need so much more energy to get the same output and when you're in that dopamine depleted State typically what people do is they try and access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry and all it does is drive them further and further into that trough so how do you fix that so it's hard to exit but start with this is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the dire of a CEO that work to put this together so from all of us thank you so much um we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers and you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it so every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes including meetings with me invites to our events and ,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the Dy there's now more than 7 million of you so if you make the decision to subscribe today you can be one of those lucky people thank you from the bottom of my heart let's get to the [Music] conversation Andrew at the very heart of what you do at the very very heart if I if I looked at all that you've produced and I had to encapsulate it into just one or two sentences that encapsulates your mission statement what would that be I want to share the beauty and utility of biology I want people to understand how incredible the human body and brain are and how even a small understanding of the underlying mechanisms about how we interact with light or temperature exercise thoughts emotions Etc how that can impact our health in really powerful ways you have become a cultural phenomenon because of the information that you've shared in your view why and how has that happened I guess maybe most importantly why has that happened what is it that you've kind of catered to that was absent in people's understanding of themselves well I think people are intensely curious about themselves meaning our species why we feel the way we feel why other people feel and act the way they do and I think most everybody I like to think is deeply interested in how to be the best version of themselves and I think what I've done is I've provided a lens into all of that that through biology through Neuroscience in particular but also I'm a practitioner so since I was pretty young I've been actively involved in sports and psychology and interested in what one can do in some cases take things to avoid in order to be the best version of oneself and so um I'm an academic right I have a laboratory and I'm a tenured faculty member at Stanford although I should mention that I've shrunk my laboratory considerably in the last year or so but you I've done experiments on animal models on humans and human clinical trials so I have the understanding and expertise of a of a research scientist and at the same time I think very deeply about how to translate the information in these peer-reviewed papers how to translate the information in the fields of science and medicine into actionable what we call protocols and and I do my best to um distill things down into uh you know actionable things um but I'm not a big believer in dumbing things down I decided to go the opposite way rather than give little Snippets um 90c videos we include those but rather I decided to go for full one to three hour maybe even four hour lectures on a topic because I believe and I'm not the first to say it that people have um near infinite ability to learn if they are told things in a way that's clear so believe that people want to understand they can understand and it doesn't require decorating things in a lot of complicated language sometimes we need to include some complicated language just because that's the way science and medicine are and that people are willing to learn that and carry that along and once they understand how they work a little bit better you arm them with a little bit of knowledge then really they're just Off to the Races and the the rest takes care of itself I may a couple of times today just ask you to explain something to me in more simpler terms because I don't have any fundamental understanding of of science so um much of my objective is just to if if is just to be completely honest if I don't understand something because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that also probably don't understand something one of the things that was most surprising to me about you was your background and I think the interesting thing about your background and where you came from and the the struggles you faced and in contrast to the man that sits in front of me today is it I think it speaks to one of the fundamental points of curiosity that I have about your work which is it's all well and good knowing protocols but there's something else required to be able to pursue them now people say that this is discipline or motivation or whatever it might be but when I looked at your background and where you've come from it wasn't a straight line there's no there's an element of transformation that's gone on there there's there's almost the early Andrew huberman who I never would have guessed would have been the man that is is almost unrecognizable from the man sat in front of me today and then there's the man sat in front of me today and the reason I'm so fascinated by that is because if I can understand how you went from that hat and hubman to this one it gives me it liberates me from the excuses that I won't be able to pursue your protocols now yeah well certainly uh there's been a lot of Adventure and transformation certainly some hardship listen I I'll be the first to say you know my life has been easier than it has been for others and harder than it has been for others right so I'm not trying to plant a flag as having had the hardest or the easiest life I only know um what's my experience right so all I've got is my experience my knowledge and my words uh to convey that but yeah it was not a linear path I would say the kind of key Milestones along the way and the the the relevant pieces are for as long as I can remember I've always had an intense curiosity and an intense desire for adventure um so I want to learn and I want to learn firsthand I also suppose I've always had an intensity like I I've um been told since I was a young kid you know I I sort of like forward leaning a little bit uh you know forward Center of mass so to speak um but yeah my childhood on the one hand was very conventional and and very sweet in the sense that you know I had two parents my dad's actually a scientist he's a theoretical physicist by training he's Argentine uh but then did his graduate training in the United States my mother's uh a writer and she was a teacher she didn't work a whole lot when we were kids she was mostly focused on raising us and my childhood to my memory was marked by you know dinners together at the table I was very very interested in all things biology in particular fish so all things Aquaria Birds anything you know tropical birds I I would learn all about them learn about fish I would then lecture about these things in class on Monday as a way to try the teachers to try and get me to not talk to students around me because I'd be telling them about it otherwise so I've been giving little lectures since I was a kid and and then I suppose as I matured um so to speak um you know around adolescence my parents split up it was a very high conflict divorce um and that sent me uh in the direction of more kind of a Wilder foraging let's call it that I was a bit feral um just the the circumstance led to situation where I was seeking out Sports and friends for which there wasn't any parental involvement so for me me the immediate attraction was to skateboarding and punk rock culture and so I was very fortunate that I was drawn into skateboarding and punkrock culture in the ear late 80s early 90s I'm 49 now or almost 49 and at that time that was a very nent culture there was no X Games there were no major sponsors that sort of thing and so there were all these not parentless but rather feral kids some were parentless and I got to be exposed to some incredible skateboarding and I was not a particularly good skateboarder but certainly had the drive to try and do it I kept hurting myself so that was actually an important event I kept you know hurting my body trying to push myself to get really good friends of mine were getting sponsored close friend of mine got picked up as a pro while we were in high school we were traveling going to contest what you probably may have noticed is there wasn't a lot of attending school so I don't recommend this to young people stay in school at least at the early stage get that basic education while your brain is still hyper plastic but you know I was exposed to and fortunately did not partake in a lot of drugs and violence but I saw that I also saw a lot of incredible skateboarding some of these people went on to um start huge companies and do incredible things in the realm of action sports so like DC um I know the guys that started that Danny Way call McKay you know like I knew at that time um I knew of I wasn't close with but you know Tony Hawk watched his Ascent right he was a few years ahead of me um but I would attend contest skate and contest so I was in this world where it was all DIY it was all self-created now at some point I got a girlfriend and um got into other things um and kind of left skateboarding um thought I might be a firefighter for a little while I was always very physical what age is this um so I was 16 when I got my first girlfriend and um I wasn't doing well in skateboarding I kept breaking my foot um people were moving on without me that was just the nature of it I was in love with her wanted to spend time with her and so I thought well I'm not really doing well in school I'm not really attending school and I'll need to work and take care of us you know I was really thinking kind of like an adult at that point terms of what I would do and so I thought I'd get into the fire service so I started trying to strengthen my body I started doing resistance training keep in mind back then the only people that lifted weights were you know preseason American football players people going to the military and bodybuilders and I wasn't interested in any of those three things but I started doing resist resistance training um and realiz realized wow like this is a really powerful tool I can make my body stronger through work I could I couldn't do a single pull-up when I started I was always pretty skinny I you know shot up uh a full foot in height but was very very skinny you know at that point and um within you know a summer I could do pull-ups I could do these things I thought wow like there's this remarkable relationship between doing physical effort and kind of ability or outcome and then I also started running a lot for whatever reason I ran cross country my senior year of high school school and also there I felt like there was a direct relationship between effort and outcome if I ran further then the next time I could run even further if my lungs burned on a hill run well then the next time I could do that hill without my lungs burning whereas in skateboarding no matter how hard I seem to try I just couldn't match the level of effort with the outcome so it was from that point forward that you know 16 years old forward that I made running and resistance training just part of my regular weekly schedule um what ended up happening was she went off to college I ended up just basically living in my car or her dorm room while she was off at college she was a year ahead of me and I realized I wanted to be near her so I eventually I applied to college and somehow got in by the end of my freshman year I had been getting in multiple fights so I still had that kind of wildness from the world I was previously in I was getting into physical altercations I was never into drugs or alcohol that was for forunate I don't have a propensity to be addicted to those things but my life really wasn't in order and it was really it was actually nearly 30 years ago to the day it was July 4th 1994 I went to a barbecue I got into an altercation with a bunch of people that were robbing the house that we were at um and and by the way there's sort of a little tangent Side Story one of my um friends in college we weren't super close but my girlfriend at the time had lived with the now wife of Jack Johnson the musician so Jack recalls that party we have other friends from that party that was kind of a a meaningful day for me because I got into this altercation everything turned out okay um in the sense that you know we got our belongings back no one was badly hurt but I remember going back to the place where I was staying at that time and thinking to myself okay this is bad right um you know like 19 years old or I guess it was just shy of of of 18 I am not doing well in school my freshman year was a disaster where I went to college I don't think I flunked out but it it just wasn't really attending class I wasn't doing well I'm getting in physical altercations I'm working at this little bagel shop delivering bagels and there's nothing wrong with that but it's not much of a future in it for me um I didn't end up going to the fire service I didn't end up a professional athlete I thought like what am I going to do with like what am I going to do right because the story of whatever happened to me prior to that was kind of meaningless unless I made something of myself so that day I actually wrote myself and my parents a letter saying that I was going to turn my life around and I actually still have this letter my mother still has this letter and what I decided to do was to take a leave of absence from University I didn't drop out a leave of absence allows you the option to go back I moved home and I worked so I was a bus boy at a little restaurant in town where I grew up and I still continue to run and do resistance training you know three times a week each or so and I went to Community College which is um typically where kids who can't afford to go to university or get to that just stay back for whatever reason it's a wonderful aspect of the the um educational system in California still and I made learning and filling my mind with formal rigorous course work-based knowledge my absolute Mission now I didn't care if I liked it I just it's like I'm going to trust my ability to learn because I could tell you a lot about tropical fish skateboarding punk rock music a fair amount about physical training at that point I sought out the right people this has always been something I've been good at is seeking out the right people with knowledge so I got great Knowledge from the late Mike mener who had trained Darian Yates um I was reading every book I could on physical fitness and Rehabilitation trying to get my body strong um never wanted to be big you know I was always interested in being strong and being able to run far and fast that was always a goal like a capability I I've not been one of the um people to like really care about like hypertrophy that wasn't something that mattered to me if some came along as a consequence of training great but it was more about a a capability to do things so at that point I just became a voracious learner I took every bit of energy that I had applied to these other areas and put them into learning math science art history English literature whatever you know coursework was thrown at me and then after a year of that went back to University lived alone in a studio apartment and basically for the remaining portion of University all I did was study work out hang out with my girlfriend run listen to at that time like early 90s punk rock music which is still a wonderful genre so mainly like rancid Operation Ivy Bob Dylan Always Love Bob Dylan classical music when I study and that was it I didn't do anything else and at that point I started getting straight A people didn't recognize me they're like aren't you the guy from freshman year that was getting in all these fights I will admit that I wasn't um completely devoid of of uh the typical College um phenotype once a month I would allow myself to go out to a party and I'd party once a month but stayed away from drugs was never never my thing and um so drank which you know eventually I realized wasn't my thing either but I was just completely committed so I graduated University with honors I went to graduate school did a master's up at uh UC Berkeley um then did my PhD did my postto at Stanford and then eventually got a Laboratory um first at UC San Diego excellent Neuroscience program eventually was recruited to Stanford uh with tenure and all along maintaining physical fitness in the background focusing very heavily on doing primary research meaning making discoveries in neuroscience and Publishing papers and then in 2019 I decided to start posting science on Instagram just really nerdy stuff um no protocols just telling people about sunlight and the relationship to the eye dopamine and ex I just enjoyed talking about it just like I did when I was a little kid telling people about tropical fish and in 2020 my plan was to release a book so I got a I a PR guy his name is Rob Moore he's now a close friend of mine and we were talking about how we would I don't know maybe go on podcast or do something of that sort when the book came out and then the pandemic hit and I said you know what let's pause the book and he said well just maybe go on podcast so that year 2020 I went on I think somewhere between 20 and 30 podcasts no book no website no nothing just like talking science and delighted in that and then January 2021 I got a little place um in a little uh kind of Canyon region of Los Angeles a little sabatical like uh Retreat and um set up some cameras my Bulldog Costello there Rob Moore became my podcast producer and on January 1st more or less we launched the hubman Lab podcast where now I still just blab about stuff that I find interesting and that I think can be useful to people so that's the kind of that's the arc and as I tell all this I also just want to make sure that people know that it sounds like this magnificent Arc but along the way there were absolutely times when I thought oh my like what am I going to do like this is working but this isn't working and my life at times became very lopsided I focused mainly on work and research um you know I'm 49 years old now I've had some wonderful relationships across my life but I opted to delay on marriage and family as a way to uh well it wasn't the intention but as a way to really just continue to pour my energy into the things that I was most passionate about so there's always sacrifice there were you know sadly I've lost a lot of friends along the way to some to drugs and alcohol suicide depression and so on um others to just unfortunate consequences or age but the um I think the major themes have been I just simply can't pull myself off a desire to learn and Adventure through a particular space and then once I learn things and as I learn things I can't seem to help but just tell everybody about it you know provided there's somebody there to listen then I'm eager to share what what I learn it's funny in life how some of the most traumatic things that happened to us and Trauma is such a subjective thing so what's trauma for me is not for Francis enanu who I've heard his story and you know walking out of Africa and jumping over Bob wire and walking across the Sahara Desert is an amazing I just can't you know it's like I hear he's a very nice guy as well he's exceptionally nice he's a wonderful individual but I'm I'm really interested in how our traumatic experiences end up um dragging us in whatever shape in life dragging us or making us driven that it's almost two sides of the same coin sometimes but I just wanted to zoom back in on when you were younger um because I was reading about at sort of 14 15 years old you were put into a residential treatment program I was so one day in school and by the way I wasn't in school much and if I was there I was the kid with the hoodie on it his head on the table you know just kind of like sleeping or drawing or um I was not tuned into to what I should have been tuned into um I was looking back I think I was depressed I was sad I was confused by the fracture of my family and listen um divorce and family reorganization can take place without all that unfortunately this was a very complicated situation um and maybe it was also puberty combined with General confusion about life um those things um combined to you know put me a state that I think looking back I was I was scared depressed and Confused like a lot of young people happen to be at that age so a number of things happened um I was getting into trouble uh I wasn't attending school I was Trent a lot um and yeah one day they came to like get me they basically called me into the office office I was sitting there um talking to the school counselor it wasn't my first time doing that and then some other people showed up there and I started to realize like uh oh I think I know what this is um which was they were going to take me away um now the exact stimulus for all this whether or not a friend I think I know who it was had been concerned about me and had intervened or whether or not it was purely from the parent side isn't clear to me still I have my theories they have theirs um but in any event I soon after found myself in a residential treatment program and um it was interesting because it was the first time that I had ever had my freedom taken away from me you know that was an experience like doors go locked and you're like whoa you know like what is it my freedom taken away well you're locked you're locked in a treatment program basically you know these were all kids that were delinquent or had problems of various sorts so you're on a hallway with a bunch of other kids um you know you're staying there at night you're not leaving you're not free to walk to leave and they make you do group therapy you have to do one-on-one therapy um you have an hour to exercise outside you're not leaving the the grounds yeah this is a like a combination of like if you were to just sort of merge in your mind like Youth detention and Hospital right that's kind of the the the the unity of these now kids there and they and we were kids right um and there was a there was a unit of much younger kids and there was a unit of people much older than us and I'll never forget what they said one of the counselors there said to us listen the kids over there the younger ones and the adults over there they're crazy you guys you're not crazy you just have problems and I'll never forget one of the kids that was in there with me goes yeah but that's exactly what they're telling the people in the other two in the other two units so pretty quickly I realized like this place is is problematic and I was scared I won't forget like my my roommate who turned out to be a very kind person but he looked like Richard Ramirez the nightstalker and he had a cutting problem and he was like a scary looking guy but as I got to know him I realized that he um was just a a kid with a lot of problems different than mine but a lot of problems so you're in there with kids with severe drug issues with um some were suicidal some weren't some had aggression issues um it was a co-ed unit during during the day obviously you're you're housed you know it was boys with boys girls with girls um and after about 2 3 days I realized okay the only way out of here is to do the work so it did the work I sat down and I started for the first time really talking about what was going on for me and listening you can learn a lot in those places by listening to what's going on for other people and I realized that a lot of what was going on internally for me had to do with the fact that you know know you know I mean what do we need we we basically need safety and acceptance at some level you know from from parents we also need guard rails and at that time I was lacking all three um and I think you know my inherent intensity and I'm a pretty um I'm not an emotional person in the sense that I don't emote easily um but I'm a very feeling person I feel a lot I don't know how other people perceive me but I feel a lot and um I think what was happening in my family unit at that time felt devastating and um I missed my sister she was off off in college she had gone off to college I've always been really close with my sister and and really because this was like late well this was late 80s early 90s I also didn't know many people from homes without you know a mom and dad this kind of thing and I had been exposed to a lot already you know that one of the beautiful things about skateboarding at least back then it's different now is that it was completely self-organized so whenever I could I would get a ride with a friend or take the bus up to San Francisco there was this now famous SL Infamous scene the embarked arrow Plaza called EMB was this kind of self-organized place you have these in major cities elsewhere there was love park in Philadelphia you Washington Square Park in New York and back then I learned a lot from the older it was mostly guys then now there's more women in skateboarding girls and women in skateboarding and they rip they're so good but um back then it was mostly guys and so I learned all sorts of things there some of which you know was far too young to learn I got basically a street education um from kids that weren't going to school and who were just like living this Wild free life and I do want to be clear that even though there were let's call them untour elements there was also a an incredible beauty and like you know my friend Jake Rosenberg started going up there as well he had his own challenges that I only learned about later um and he brought a video camera High eight video he started filming the now like just like truly iconic videos of Mike Caroll these names will mean things to Henry Sanchez like Mark Gonzalez like so he just started filming all this and then he made the first Plan B videos and he made the waiting for lightning documentary about Danny Way like jumping the Great Wall of China and our friend Mike blach who's the photographer for the huberman Lab podcast of all things who became one of the most iconic Action Sports portrait photographers was a kid who basically drove out from Michigan I don't even know if he graduated high school something he probably did and then he slept in the clothing Stacks at the Gap Store hung out in barad Arrow and took photos and those photos and those videos that Mike and Jacob and other people took are now iconic in skateboarding and so I was also exposed to this incredible world of DIY like like take your passion take your circumstance and pick a craft and just document stuff and so in many ways like what happened at in barad Era what happened in skateboarding and I always love punk rock music and going to shows I have no musical talent and I I didn't suck at skateboarding but I wasn't going to go anywhere with it but the what I saw was if you love something and you want to learn as much as possible about it and you love the culture around it you do have to learn how to sort out the unored elements don't get yourself into trouble but you take that energy and I just took it to academics I remember realizing when I got to graduate school I found a wonderful lab to work in with a wonderful woman named Barbara Chapman unfortunately she passed away and at the time she said listen I'm going to have a couple kids but we have grants you can so she said I'm going to have a couple kids so I'm going to be very busy but we have grants and here's the lab she said don't burn the lab down don't hurt yourself but just do experiments have fun and I realized I was like this is the best and I had so much energy and I thought I never have to go home so I lived there a lot of the time brush my teeth in the sink there work out at the gym gun shower come back and I remember people saying you're going to burn out what are you doing and I'm like what are you talking about and I would work 80 sometimes 100 hours a week I was so happy and I realized like this is the exact same feeling I'm just taking my interest and I'm just pouring myself into I did that when I was a graduate student I did it when I was a postto and actually when I was a postto I started writing some music um articles for Thrasher magazine I've always kept some little tie to the skateboarding industry that way just to make some extra cash and then when I was a junior Professor I had to really pour myself just into the laboratory but it still worked out and I guess the point is that you know earlier you and I were talking about if you have and I'm borrowing in this phrase from one of my heroes Martha Beck um who's a wonderful person and teacher as such wisdom and she calls it a um interest based attention system some people might call it ADHD but have you ever noticed that even people and we know this from the scientific literature people kids adults with ADHD when they're so-called ADHD when they are doing something they really love they're like a laser they're not going to peel off that their attention is like level 11 out of 10 so I took that energy that I've always had in me for fish for tropical birds skateboarding punk rock music eventually it was biology and I just went okay here are my chips I'm all in all in but the goal has always been and remains to take what I learn and share it because the real joy in doing anything for me anyway is the ability to share in that knowledge or in that experience and so um those early years were really choppy and really dangerous you know frankly but then when I started a laboratory and decided hey I'm going to study human stress let's go get VR of stressful circumstances and my friend Michael Mueller who's a very accomplished portrait photographer in Hollywood and also takes photos of great white sharks out of cages he said to me oh you know your VR stimulus in your lab um here's what he told me he he's like it sucks he said it sucks it doesn't look real it's all CGI it's not scary at all how about we you know go film some great white sharks down in Guadalupe Island and we leave the cage and you know the the young Andrew was like okay so got dive certified went and did it one year stayed in the cage went the next year exited the cage I'm not recommending people live this way I'm not because I had an air failure at depth the second year while I was in the cage I bailed out I made it I lived but it was super scary and it was not an experience I want to repeat and I realized you know that's the line like I you know the great Oliver Sachs Another Hero Of Mine British train neurologist and and author he wrote uh was basically what became the script for Awakenings and things like that um there's a quote about him that resonates a lot and the quote I think is I you know uh an early teacher of his said Oliver will go far provided he does not go too far and so you know you have to be careful right these Adventures leaving school doing you can't be halfhazard about it so if you look at the broad Arc it's highly nonlinear but there's a Common Thread through all of it which is this desire to learn curiosity Des to share intensity and when I'm involved in any one thing and I recommend that if people are involved in any one thing if it's podcasting or sport or video games or math or AI or program whatever it is skateboarding whatever it is that you can't be halfhazard in that world because forward progress even if you change things over time is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness that we each have and whatever level of intensity we have and making sure that you you know do take steps forward and there are what I've learned is as a child as an adolescent and as an adult there are all these traps along the way they're all these shoots down to failure and destruction and you have to be very very thoughtful and so you can't be Reckless I'm really compelled as well by the letter you sent to your parents yeah they they must have been very surprised that letter was written in a house on a little Street in the little town called IA Vista on pado street where I'd essentially been squatting for the summer with my feret that was the I tell you that because that was the picture I had a ferret her name was Iris that my first girlfriend who had left me by then because she was smart because I had nothing going on um we were me and Iris were living together I didn't even have a bed in the place I thought well why pay rent you know like no one in like where I grown up with all these like like Riff Raff kids now the town to be clear the town I grew up in pal Alto now is known as like one of the wealthiest places that time it was like kind of upper middle class but when I say like Riff Raff kids I mean like the people that congregated around skateboarding in the late 80s early 90s were the kind of like parentless fer feral types so I learned a lot I learned I can sleep mummy style anywhere in a car in a van in a corner so like why pay rent that summer I'd have more money to keep and save if I just like got a pillow and a couple blankets and a sleeping bag and this little place I was living there with my feret and I came back from that fight on July 4th and I thought okay like this is it and I think it was by the end of the weekend I had written out this letter that said essentially the following it said look I don't know why you guys decided to just fracture everything I understood why my parents didn't want to be together they were incompatible by the way they're both happily married now to wonderful people for many years so there there's a happy ending there but at the time I was very confused it wasn't that that I needed them to be together but the level of friction in their separation was just like it I felt like a lot of it fell on me and and there are reasons for that but I basically forgave them I basically said listen I forgive you um I realized that I need to take control of my life I was 18 so I'm a fall baby so it was like I was almost 19 I'm you know 18 years old old 19 years old and I need to do something with my life and the only way I'm going to do that is by getting super focused and super organized so I somehow had the the idea to externalize this and then I wrote essentially the same letter to myself and then I just as my girlfriend who eventually got back together with me that was interesting as soon as I started working hard in school I'll never forget what she said we're still friendly she's married with her own family and they have a a beautiful family but every once in a while I'll hear from her and I will never forget what she said to me about a year later when I was just absolutely rabid about learning she said um you know you've become a monster and I was like a monster and she's like yeah a monster of learning and class and getting up early and you tuck your shirt in like I got into this whole thing of like dressing the opposite of everyone else that lived in that little town it's a little beach toown everyone wore flip-flops rode beach cruisers at that time it was like baggy shorts long t-shirts and I start tucking in my shirt a belt I would get like all like you know like cleaned up and i' and I'd go to class and people like what is wrong with this guy I just wanted to go completely Against the Grain and just be as disciplined and organized as possible and I basically was parenting myself and I think that this is something that I learned how to do early on I love my parents but I learned how to mother and father myself and that was powerful it was like I was a young guy um but let's face it you know at 19 you're young but you're not that young in the sense that if you screw up you know if you you know I don't know I had friends who got into drunk driving stuff a friend of ours was killed in a drunk driving accident um I wasn't real close with him but I knew him real well this guy Phil sha great skateboarder was killed because someone drove drunk he wasn't driving drunk dead bunch of people dead are in jail so you know when you're 18 or older like the consequences go super super linear you know shift um where small mistakes can lead to really bad outcomes so yeah I just kind of scruffed myself and was like let's do this and you know here I am I'm so intrigued by that because in that moment you have I think a moment in which a lot of people are searching for in their lives where you have a you have a decision to do it differently and I've always wondered what it takes for someone to get there and is it something that you can accelerate towards like is there if I'm laying on the couch right now and I'm feeling that is there something I can do to get me there or do I need more pain feel year for you I'll tell you super scary being like almost 19 years old girlfriend left me I'm not good at anything I wasn't good at anything not skateboarding couldn't play an instrument everyone in that town surfed um family family I mean I didn't yeah I could have gone to the fire service and that's a wonderful career path um yeah I didn't I didn't have any like Market skills I couldn't really do anything except I knew my capacity to learn I've always had a very good memory and I've always enjoyed learning so I thought okay School seems like a good option they tell you what you need to know in fact at one point I realized and I think it was Ryan Holliday that said that you know the people who should absolutely not drop out of college are the people who are not doing well because the real world is a lot harder in many ways it's a lot harder than College in college they tell they tell you what to do I remember taking a class in Greek mythology you go there if you sit near the front you pay attention you try not to pay attention to anyone else you sit down they tell you what you need to know now sometimes it's complicated you can't keep up but then they have these things called office hours where you can ask they have teaching assistance I mean the whole thing is set up so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps whereas with skateboarding it's like I was always getting broke off as they say you know I was always rolling my left foot snapped again uh nothing nothing couldn't do it um there's so much uncertainty in other things at least with a college education for me it was like okay I can I can learn this stuff and then what I found is when there's a desire to learn and then you learn and then you do well and I started doing very well um and but there's that one class that I got a B plus in that I'm still pissed off about you know my first year was a disaster then it was all LA and then there's this one class in neural development from Ben Reese and I got a B+ and as a consequence when I went to graduate school I studied neural development you know it's the thing that you don't get the the place where you make an error that you forever carry that signal I need to get better at that so I think a lot of it is just having the the knowledge of self right what did the Oracle say know thyself the knowledge of self to really think okay like what are my strengths do I like to learn if I'm interested in something do I have a voracious appetite maybe if you're a person with less energy um maybe uh you're more reflective or you like to journal or you need more time to process I think turning what often appear as weaknesses into strengths is really possible and then I do think that we are all each endowed with some unique gift I really believe in this um it's not mystical for me I think that we all have some wiring of our brains that's very similar and we all have some unique WI iring based on our genetics and our experience and I just thought I'm going to keep paying attention to what fills my body with energy one of the most inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity because if you're if the brain can physiologically change based on what I'm doing then it means that who I am now my identity that 60 that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing with the ferret isn't who I always have to be I can literally change um we've spoken a little bit around like what causes the motivation to actually change but knowing that there's a my brain will actually change those two things are really inspiring for me because it means that whatever rut I'm stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one now you said that the motivation to change comes from Fear well in my case it took a a fear circumstance fear of becoming a permanent failure yeah to motivate immense change and um uh that was that circumstance I I do believe however that the best work our most creative and best work comes from a love of craft but sometimes in order to find what you truly love you have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it and um yeah and and and that goes for relationships too sometimes to find the right relationship um or relationships it could be friendships romantic relationships Etc one has to be like deathly afraid of having to remain in the the relationship that you're in enough to leave so neuroplasticity is absolutely real um it actually worked out that my scientific great-grandparents two guys David huil and Torsten weasel won the Nobel Prize for no for neuroplasticity now they weren't the people who discovered it it had actually been described for centuries people understood that young kids can learn more easily than adults can but David and tor won the Nobel Prize for essentially formalizing the and discovering the principles of neuroplasticity how it works and then some years later mainly one guy by the name of Mike merenik but there were others that worked with him discovered that neuroplasticity is actually a feature of the nervous system the brain throughout our entire lifespan the rules change a little bit in terms of how you rewire your brain but if the question is can a person change can you learn new thing can you unlearn certain patterns can you overcome traumas at any age the answer is absolutely categorically yes how well it's very clear that as a child until about age 25 more or less just passive experience will shape the brain for better or worse after about age 25 and again these are not strict cutoffs we can change our brain but what's required is a market shift in the neuro chemical environment under which something happens so one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered although by the way you can remove some of the emotional load of that trauma does not have to be traumatic forever is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature there is the release of certain what we call neuromodulators things like epinephrine adrenaline and other neuromodulators that cause a St shift in our body and brain and the nervous system recognizes this as unusual and as a consequence in the subsequent days there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again this is why we have what's called one trial learning you go to a certain location something terrible happens there you will forever associate that location with something terrible but there are tools therapy and other tools that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm no fear whatsoever the good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment this is why when we are very interested and focused on something two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity we have to be alert and we have to be focused we can't learn passively as adults we can't just play um you know a a lecture about Ai and large language models or neuroscience in the room and then it just the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis but if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention what we call the catac colomines it's three molecules dopamine epinephrine and norepinephrine all which cause an increase in alertness all which cause an increase in focus a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field so like cones of attention is one way to think about it and then it sets in motion a bunch of biolog iCal processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night maybe the next night as well there's reordering of neural connection so that that knowledge that new experience is Consolidated in your brain you are forever changed as a consequence of that experience so when we hear that the brain is constantly changing everything that we encounter changes our brain that's not true why would the brain change unless it needed to right as a child the brain is basically a template for change it's it's trying to understand the environment and make predictions and so that's true neuroplasticity is is a cardinal feature of of childhood and Adolescence and the teen years just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen no other music will ever have as much significance and that's because as a teen your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators that the amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense that song meant so much and it's because of the neurochemical meu it creates in you you but as an adult it takes a stronger stimulus as we say and if you were to fall in love as an adult or see something a painting that just strikes you as just so unbelievable yes then you are forever changed but just going to see a bunch of paintings at the Met doesn't mean that every single one of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain the the nervous system is very um efficient in that way it doesn't change unless it has to and it always Chang es if it needs to in order to keep you safe this is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to um just interest in terms of what will shift our brain but it's nice to know that love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimula for changing the brain and um you know I can kind of draw to mind conversations I've had with my good friend Rick Rubin I'll get accused of name dropping but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick and Rick always talks about you know how when you just see and experience something and you just have this love for it it changes the brain he's not a neuroscientist but in many ways he's a neuroscientist so in any case you absolutely can change your brain but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain you have to be alert while you do that and then you absolutely have to go get some rest because it's during sleep and during meditative States and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs there's a phrase that you can't teach an old dog new tricks and I think as we get older and older we become stubborn in part because we're very comfortable with the way things are and routine and whatever but also I think we start to believe in this idea that we can't change and that in in and of itself makes it harder to change are you telling me that you can teach an old dog new tricks yeah I'm so glad you brought this up um let's just destroy that myth now you abs absolutely can teach an old dog or human New Tricks we know this in fact there's studies incredible studies that were done down at the sulk Institute in San Diego showing that even in people who are very old right these are people in their 80s and 90s you know the human lifespan probably maximum human lifespan as we understand it is probably about 120 years more or less but most people don't make it to 100 but so 80 or 90 is pretty old mhm there's still addition of new neurons occurring these people who were unfortunately dying of terminal cancer I believe but other causes agreed to take a a die that actually gets incorporated into new neurons and then after they died their brains were um you know looked at under the microscope and there was the addition of new neurons even at late age now I want to be very clear that most of learning is not the addition of new neurons at least not in humans but from everything we know about neuroscience it's clear that doesn't matter if you're 90 years old 70 years old 50 years old if you want to learn you can learn and that learning occurs through neuroplasticity which is the reordering of neural connections strengthening of certain connections weakening of others and in some rare cases the addition of new neurons but Brain Change is absolutely real at every stage of life I also wonder about habit formation so you said there that some of the more sort of startling stimuluses like fear are great ways and and obsessive sort of deep focus are great ways to start forming these new Behavior patterns but if I want to break a habit because there's habits I've got in my life that I've kind of just told myself are who I am and accordingly I've just kind of accepted them well you've been very successful so yeah but even we' all there's all thing thank you but there's many things I'd still I've just accepted it's part of who I am some of those come from my childhood so one of them is that I grew up in a very disorganized home where like the doors inside my house had holes in them and our house there was like some rooms that looked like a hoarder lived there just piles and piles of stuff to the roof um house de demolished in many respects like the back of the garden was six foot high it was it was mess so I've grown up with mess and I'm therefore still pretty messy today and it's something I've always wanted to defeat but I just sometimes I tell myself well it you know it was hard wide into me when I was a kid and it it is just who I am and a lot of people go around saying that they've just kind of identified with and accepted a certain bad habit is part of who they are well I will say that some of the most brilliant people I know had terribly messy offices and they were very internally organized people was kind of interesting they were like a laser beam in their ability to kind of sort through mess they didn't see the mess in fact my postto adviser who also sadly passed away an incredible Human by the name of Ben Baris used to walk into his office and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere and I'd say Ben I I think we should clean your office and he'd say don't touch anything because if you move anything I won't know where it is and I said how could you possibly know where anything is right now and he say I know where everything is and so I think some people also by growing up in or being in that environment also maintain an uncanny ability to find things whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work until everything is cleared away and so um I see myself as on the weaker side of this ability um but to your question I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous stories are the way that humans organize knowledge by and large right we don't tend to organize things into lists we have these narratives that we call stories because from a young age we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them but they are compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning a middle in an end sometimes they have a uh kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation just think about a childhood song of learning like the ABCs they don't teach you the ABCs A B CDE E F G H I J right they don't do that what do they do they give you a song which is a story musicians will understand this inherently again I'm not one but when I started researching Neuroscience of Music in the brain came to understand so it's a b c d e f g right the change in the inflection as one does the alphabet as a young kid is the story of the alphabet now people might say okay what is he talking about what's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas so that something has a beginning a middle and an end so if you think okay I grew up in this house and it was really messy and now I have too much mess and in order to undo that there's this kind of like hardwired right dangerous words hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really really hard undo and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person or you I'm a tidier person whatever it is that's very dangerous because there's a beginning to that a middle to that and an end to that and it has immense meaning as a consequence one of the most powerful things is to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it what could the component be well there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work which says you know you you take something that you believe as true and you say okay like uh like I'm an untidy person and then you counter it how do I know that well okay I have this experience okay that's the story and then you start running counter narratives you say I'm uh I'm uh actually a tidy person and then people say well this is silly you're just lying to yourself right where they say is it always true that you're a messy person you start challenging this story from different sides now I believe as because I'm a neuroscientist I'm not um in I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world that the Brilliance the kind of unconscious Genius of that approach is actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story you're starting to kind of Infuse different questions into the existing neural network now the brain loves questions like the the brain since we're we're young kids we're asking questions and so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions you're not saying lie to yourself you're not suddenly going to say okay like I'm super tidy you're not because you're not going to believe that but if you start challenging why it's that way or you know you've been able to change so many other things why you wouldn't you be able to change that you say it's just a habit I can't do it you say well what's a habit and you start poking and pushing and pushing what you eventually arrive at is this kind of huh actually there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person except this kind of fluency of a particular story what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story so then when you go to the behavior of you know do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion you start interrupting the Habit the fluency of your typical Behavior so I raised this as a as a way um to kind of shine light on essentially what I do in my podcast career which is you know we I I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer we've got ancient wisdom that goes way back and when you start to look at things through the lens of biology you start to see that all of these things actually have Merit and they're just different paths to the same outcomes so if you want to become a tidy person I would encourage you here would be one let's just say Neuroscience supported approach would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are you'll know that's a lie right and then to look at it and realize that in many ways if you just replac tidy with you know messy at any location it'd probably be the exact same story and so what you're really talking about here is just a def fault that your nervous system is running and if you were to just swap the words would you feel differently or do differently on the one hand you'd say no that's kind of trivial but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of like just going to set something down you be like ah now you have something to kind of disrupt The Habit because so much of habit disruption that you'll look like some people say oh you flick a a you know rubber band on your wrist or something like that there's nothing special about the rubber band there's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or the you put a sticky note we know sticky notes work for about one day why don't sticky notes work why don't reminders on the mirror work because they don't have enough salience they're not new they're not different the nervous system only changes if something is new and different so anyway we could talk a lot about habit formation but fear works but so does disrupting the story how do you disrupt the story you essentially give the opposite story and you think well that's just lying to myself but neurally it makes sense because the nervous system again likes to be very economical likes to do everything with the minimum amount of uh energetic expenditure and to change anything requires attention and attention is expensive attention is expensive and also I would say as I'm kind of rambling all this things are going very well for you so you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space I have PA now and another PA and I have a cleaner so it's do you know what I mean the yeah you Outsource it yeah great well there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not um tidy enough you have two choices you can either start to be tidy now or you can be successful enough that you can hire some assistants and I actually think I say this in with in all seriousness I think that one has to ask like where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted I think about this every day I mean we are living in a war of attention I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer or a Creator if I reach for my phone I'm a consumer if I go to my journal I'm a creator my advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast I mean take your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life does that make sense if you look at successful people they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms yeah so I have to be very careful then I go into the kitchen obviously I talk to people in my home um but if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call it's like is this call really about moving the needle forward or is this just kind of like passive use of of attention we have to be so careful nowadays so so careful it's really challenging on that point of focus and attention and thinking back to when you were 19 years old one of the things people ask me a lot and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self-help world is from a neuroscience perspective is manifestation and this idea of like visualization visualizing who I want to become and you know where I'm going is there any Neuroscience to support that that works there is um and I'm not trying to be negative but I'll start with the negative counter example for which there is evidence and it's less often discussed so there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily baltis who talks about how for goal setting and habit formation fear setting is of often one of the best tools you spend some time maybe five minutes or so thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals nobody likes to do this but guess what it turns out to be pretty darn effective really I know it's really frustrating that this is the case but again you know that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is is wired and and likes to rewire itself now that said it is important to Envision goals visualizing goals in detail um writing them out in some cases talking about them although we can discuss that um why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance and could be very beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine but I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is sometimes we have to break this up into Milestones this is where I think uh Rick Rubin even though he's not a formally trained scientist um has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity which is you know Rick is about largely you know sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much self- judgment or filtering or thinking about how it's going to be received in other words that the metamorphosis that leads to great music great poetry great scientific discovery podcasts finance companies that one is building Etc is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day you know and so we can't always imagine the end or the end product as the outcome this is why I said University is easy compared to other goals because the end is a degree right say you pick up your diploma like whereas in other areas it's far more mysterious often now visualization I think can be very powerful but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do so for instance if I'm going to do some writing and right now I'm working on a book it's largely done but I'm writing some bonus chapters unless I'm hyper motivated to do that when I sit down and hyperfocused I'll spend two three minutes just closing my eyes focusing on my breathing it's meditation of sorts but what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes how in the world am I going to focus on writing for two or three hours that sort of thing the other thing that I want to make sure I don't forget is I mentioned that telling people your goals often times can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear like you have some accountability but we also know that because of the affiliative nature of people in particular people that support us there is this danger uh a friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this he said you know be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book because oftentimes the response will be oh yeah that's great you absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast and people get a sort of reward from telling people about it and then they never actually go do it whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told you're never going to be able to do that you're never going to be able to be successful in that and my goodness those people dig their heels and they show that they can do it now I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time it's a you know it's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome and I sense it is right this kind of grinding against like take that and take that as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft I think about the way I felt about Aquaria and fish as a kid and it's just like pure delight that's the word that comes to mind just Delight I want to learn more about it I want to do it and tell people about it that's the wonderful romantic picture of effort and progress and outcomes but in reality you probably need both you need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition but also Delight in craft you know like Peter Teal's book 0o to one as I recall defines competition as anti- creativity in many ways because through competition You Are by definition changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else and so you're morphing your Creation in order to kind of overcome something something whereas if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate they're none of those barriers but in the worlds that I've been in science to a lesser extent podcasting and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting but certainly in science it is hyperco competitive right two Laboratories working on similar things people are concerned that if one publishes first the other will not be able to publish certainly not in as high quality a journal and jobs are created through these Journal Publications podcasting is actually a wonderful field um because let's say you and I have the same guest on our podcast all it does is raise it in the algorithm it's not like you know and and it's such a and so I think there's a lot of um collegiality and camaraderie in the podcast field that um exists in little pockets in science but um science is a brutally competitive field which doesn't mean it's anti- creative but in a dream world where there's infinite amount of money for scientific research because that would better Humanity in my in my view um and people didn't have to be competitive about Grant dollars or publication I think we would make far more progress as a species so competition Fosters outcomes this is clear in markets it's clear in a lot of domains but pure love and Delight of craft and creativity that's definitely the way to go but in most Endeavors you got to have both if sitting next to someone in class and realizing okay because this was me back when I'm thinking okay I I love this topic but gosh I want that Top Mark I want that top mark on the distribution like that's and and like she and he are really really good and I'm GNA we're going to study together but my god when it comes time for that exam like I'm going for it a little bit of competition can can bring out our our best I think um certainly in sport but when it comes to creative Endeavors that are really about our own unique contribution I mean you could tell me more about this in business because you're you're I don't you know I have a company but I'm not a business person but I I always feel like competition can bring out more energy but not more creativity yeah and I think a big point I was thinking as you were talking was just about how much you let that new energy that comes from competition distract you and this is It's the distraction that can destroy you because if Apple are going this way and they're building this product without the keyboard and without the stylus and that's they've got their Vision then they see Samsung doing over there something over there and if they if they divert from their own mission and their own first principles towards what someone else are doing then that's when it can become destructive but if it means that they see Samsung doing something and they speed up and invest more in their Vision then it's okay I think that's and it is this dichotomy between competition does drive better outcomes for everybody that's competing but at the same time um yeah it can harm you if it distracts you in a fundamental way it's kind of how I think about it even with podcasting like you know um as you were saying there's so many podcast is doing so many amazing things like I I look at your podcast and I learn from it but I know in my cor we all know I'm never going to be Andrew huberman and I'll never be you and I'll never be a Joe R I'll never be a Lex and I admire your podcast very much and Joe's and Lex's I think it's we each have our own unique style that we bring to it Chris Williamson you know um it's been a lot of fun to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up and how similar that is to the world I grew up in in skateboard ing the observations of from the music industry that I saw firsthand or that you know Rick has passed along you know in the end I think any creative Endeavor is really about and here I don't want to sound mysterious or woo it's about the energy that we bring it's about taking our life history and bringing it to that thing in whatever form we don't even need to tell people our life history taking our unique wiring and bringing it to that thing and we can again look at things through the lens of biology and say well what are we talking talking about when we're talking about energy what is this energy thing that people are talking about um and I think it largely boils down to these catac colomines the dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine cocktail that is setting the brain into a mode of attention of motivation we now know dopamine is more about motivation to seek rewards as opposed to feeling of pleasure or reward there's a lot to be said about that and keep in mind that these three neurochemicals dopamine norepinephrine and epinephrine have been the neurochemical cocktail by which humans and other mammals have set and pursued goals for hundreds of thousands of years so we don't have like a unique system a unique neurochemical system for seeking out of mates versus food versus creating shelter versus creating technology and whole societies and it's not just these three neurochemicals certainly there are other things involves acetal choline and you know a bunch of other things neuroplasticity for that matter but it's clearly the case that the currency that the brain has set around getting us into forward Center of mass as I say to like Envision something explore nope not down there this way ah there's a scent here and trade out an actual scent for you know oh there's something interesting here there's someone interesting here and like exploring that no that's a dead path too C theack turn around go oh and then connecting these nodes of progress what's progress ah there's kind of another surge of these catac colam meines which sets us in forward Center of mass you know I don't want to oversimplify the biology but when we talk about energy um for instance taking time to rest at night sleep taking time to maybe meditate a few minutes or do this practice that I'm a huge fan of nonsleep deep rest which is kind of a body scan deep relaxation long exhales it's a practice very similar to an ancient practice called Yoga Nidra which has been practiced for thousands of years it's a kind of pseudo sleep and we know from a really nice study that nsdr non-sleep deep rest AKA Yoga Nidra can increase the Baseline levels of dopamine in a brain area called the basil ganglia which is for Action generation and also withholding action by about 60% from Baseline just a a short period of doing this practice can re kind of re dopamine levels to a considerable extent it's a remarkable study and there others like it so what does that mean well it means that in rest we build up this capacity to be forward Center of mass when we emerge from rest that's why I think we have to sleep every 24 hours this is why practices where we deliberately calm ourselves and still ourselves allow us to be more forward Center of mass mentally and physically afterwards it's kind of a duh when we hear it we kind of go oh duh of course rest action rest action but there's a lot more to it if you start exploring the layers you start realizing that excitement for things um versus burnout what's burnout it's just trying to be forward Center of mass for too long it's you know misuse of our dopamine circuitry it's you know ignoring the fact that these catamin and dopamine in particular they are not infinite in their availability right there's a reservoir of them that can be depleted but it can be rep replenished as well and one of the best analogies for this um was actually explained to me by a guy named Dr Kyle Gillette he does some online work as a as a um public facing physician Endocrinology in particular and he said but dopamine it's kind of like a wave pool you have this Reservoir that can allow you to pursue things or scroll the internet or build businesses whatever it is if you are really forward Center of mass very intensely you start generating these waves and if you get big waves of dopamine and they crash out of the pool you start depleting the reservoir so when I think about drugs of abuse Like Cocaine which leads to huge surges in dopamine or um amphetamines huge surges and dopamine what do we know about huge surges and dopamine well after those huge surges you drop below your initial Baseline to a state in which the same thing doesn't feel as good anymore you need so much more energy to get the same output that's what this is right that's what this is so I'll put this on the screen for anyone yeah so my colleague at Stanford Dr an ly who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic and wrote the wonderful book dopamine Nation described this best you know it's sort of like a seesaw but what whereby you get a big peak in dopamine let's say from a drug of abuse Like Cocaine people on cocaine it's all about ideas and what's next they're not like hey let's just kick back it's all about what's they in fact they have a million ideas per second most of them are terrible ideas but they're very forward Center of mass motivated and then when the drug wears off they feel very low and very depressed the dopamine is actually depleted below Baseline people that work excessively right we all have different abilities to work out but people that work excessively and abuse stimulants in order to do that achieve these Peaks is that like so what would be the an everyday example of that working excessively do you mean like a pre-workout or something what you mean yeah I'm not anti- pre-workout listen I love to be well rested hydrated have a nice pre-workout drink maybe even a little shot of espresso listen to some music and have an incredible leg day workout it's an amazing feeling right but if you do that every single time you start stacking all these catac colomine release inducing drugs okay so you're getting adrenaline you're getting epinephrine which is adrenaline excuse me you're getting adrenaline you're getting noradrenaline also called norepinephrine you're getting dopamine release you're highly motivated you're in that state that everyone is seeking and you try and do that seven days a week you're not going to do it and then you wonder why the afternoon you're just completely cooked and you can't do any cognitive work well your dopamine and other things have crashed below Baseline so I think it's important to understand that being as I'm calling it Forward Center of mass like really kind of motivated and pursuing goals is great but most of the time we're probably best off just coming off the gas pedal just a little bit to maintain that ability to continue to be forward Center of mass the same thing is true for stress we hear stress is bad well stress is bad but it also sharpens your ability to learn it creates energy it actually boosts your immune system in the short term I say tolerate as much stress as you can provided you still behave like a kind person right don't say or do things that are unkind and make sure that you still get great sleep at night most people stress stress stress stress stress run around and then they can't sleep at night and then the next day they're depleted but a little bit of stress is healthy life is stressed things are stressful but again you're going to be in your best state of mind if you're calm and alert alert and calm is the is the magic recipe and the ability to sleep at night if you want to take a bunch of pre-workout and you want to listen to some loud music and have a great crushit workout great but you should probably also be able to train without all of that if you're somebody who loves new goals and you you know you're very excited about travel and this and that great but do you have to layer in 50 things and then you're sitting around at home and you're wondering why you're so bored when you're back home and why life is so depressing and you need more travel more stimulation in every domain of life we see whether or not it's food or exercise or stimulants or sex or media if you push things to the max you're going to feel depleted and UND stimulated afterwards and this trough below Baseline as Anna lmy taught us with dopamine nation that trough is a state that can last a long time and it's how long it's proportional to how high that Peak and dopamine was not how long but how high that Peak and dopamine was and when you're in that trough that dopamine depleted State typically what people do is they try and go out or access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry and all it does is drive them further and further and longer and longer into that trough what's needed is a period of waiting of nonindulgent in any of these excesses that allows them to return to Baseline we know this from drugs of abuse it takes more and more drug to try and get what turns out to be less and less of a high most all addiction most all compulsive Behavior can be cured essentially through a period of abstinence lasting somewhere between 30 and 60 days which to somebody who's highly motivated to seek that thing or do that thing sounds like an absolute horror but that is highly effective so for some people it's work and stimulants you know and number of people taking Aderall and work work work work work I hear from these people all the time typically they are from the tech and finance world they're like why am I burnt out well you've been blasting these catac colomine regulated circuits for years you need to just except you're going to feel a little low for a week then you're going to feel a little less low then you're going to come back to Baseline and then and only then can you really get back into like full forward Center of mass but at that point you can introduce you know I I do think there is a clinical use case for certain ADHD meds which are amphetamine there are certain people that need those meds other people have driven themselves into this dopamine trough and so they're seeking out anything and everything to get them out of that trough when really what they need to do is stay away from all that stuff and just wait just wait go on holiday or something go on holiday try and find reward in smaller things um you know this is why dogs are wonderful in simpler things and if that sounds heavy and dull to you chances are you're a bit in the dopamine uh loop um I've been in these Loops before they're hard to exit but once you exit them you look back on them you go what was I thinking well you were in a different state you're kind of a different animal when you're in Pursuit I think this is so unbelievably important because it really helps people to understand why they do what they do and before doing the research on you coming here today and before understanding some of this stuff I thought dopamine was I don't know it was this thing that came in these hits maybe and if I did something I got ahead of it then I returned to Baseline if I did something again stimulating I got ahead of it then I returned to Baseline but what actually is happening is I'm doing something that's stimulating in some way I'm getting this huge Peak then I'm crashing below Baseline for a while and when I'm below Baseline I'm that's when I'm most likely to want to do something that's going to give me a hit again that's right and when I saw that it reminded me of the CGI monitor the continuous glucose monitor that I wore because it was a very similar pattern if I had a lot of sugar had a big peak then I crashed below my Baseline right that's a great observation it's the Perfect Analogy Perfect Analogy because these regulatory systems are all about trying to Reg maintain homeostasis we all hear about we learn about homeostasis like the desire for balance the the the human body and human physiology is actually geared more towards something called allostasis which involves kind of stress modulation but without getting into too many details you know these are Dynamic systems meaning brain systems that are designed to allow us to overcome challenges if need be right this is why I always push back on the idea that you know stress crashes your immune system you know what crashes your immune system being very very stressed working a lot a lot caretaking for someone else and then stopping you always get sick when you stop yeah why because actually stress activates the immune system makes sense that it would do that evolutionarily right and then when we rest boom our immune system kind of relaxes a little bit and then we succumb to that that you know the bacteria or virus so what does it mean it means that we should probably learn to modulate it's like driving a car anytime we feel that we're headed toward or in a peak State we should probably kind of like lean back off that state just a tiny bit just a tiny bit especially if that Peak state is coming by way of pharmacology or some extreme circumstance just back off a little bit maybe a lot okay so when we do that we learn to master the transition States between these what I'm referring to as forward Cent of mass flat-footed or back on my heels it's a term I learned from a former Navy SEAL operator he said with anything in life you can either be back on your heels like really challenged flat-footed kind of like calm and and forward or forward Center of mass like Full Tilt I think most people would do very well to learn to master the transition States between waking and going to sleep right many people can't fall asleep many people just kind of can't turn it off you can learn how to do that by doing things like non-sleep deep rest some long exhale breathing simple self-directed zeroc cost tools that help adjust your autonomic nervous system to be more what we call parasympathetic more rest and digest just long exhales might not work the first time but over time these become very effective tools to self-direct the shift from forward Center of Mass to Flat footage just kind of laying back back on your heels and there you go you're off to sleep when you wake up in the morning some people are just depleted maybe you didn't sleep enough but learning to get forward Center of mass shouldn't require you know excess caffeine and stimulants and super loud music and uh you know a shocking text or email ideally you can transition pretty quickly into being forward Center of mass but not Full Tilt forward Center of mass and why do I say this I think for anyone who seeks to be successful in any domain academics business creative Endeavors whatever if you want to have a long Arc life and a long Arc career you really strive to control these transition States and when I say control all it really takes is paying attention to them and paying attention to the fact that yes some people just have inherently more energy they can do every single workout at Max output then shower they're talking in the gym then they're off to the some people are like that some people like myself if I give a 100% to Something in the morning by the afternoon I'm a little bit depleted so I require a 10 or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest or a nap or just some quiet long exhale breathing maybe a little bit of caffeine which I'm drinking now I mean there's nothing wrong with healthy stimulants provided they're consumed moderation maybe an energy drink those can be great too for some people and then you know really going like Full Tilt focusing one's attention and then afterwards taking a few moments just moments to downshift I think we hear so much about the power of meditation or non-sleep deep bre or ice baths what do what do cold plunges and cold showers do they stimulate the release of what the catacol amines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine long duration release that's why it's useful in my opinion for all the debate about delate cold exposure does it increase metabolism does it not the answer seems to be probably not much but it's absolutely clear that it causes a huge increase in Adrenaline dopamine and norepinephrine that are very longlasting and that makes you feel great especially when you get out of the cold and I think that's the value of it it also saves you on your heating bill like you don't have to have a cold plunge you take a cold shower nobody likes it but the point is you get out and you feel different it's a state shift so that's great but you don't want to do it to excess because then you know for instance people always say how long should I go in the cold plung or cold shower and I say do it the minimum amount so that you get the effect that you're seeking which is to be more alert and motivated I have a friend he did 30 minutes for some reason naked he said I did 30 minutes naked in the coal plunge and then I got sick and I'm feeling really low and I'm like because you did 30 minutes I mean I don't know about the naked part what that had to do with it you had to throw that in there he's kind of an extreme guy and I said how about 1 minute how about 30 seconds how about don't even pay attention to the time just get in and stay in as long as until you want to get out and then push through that barrier and then get out that might be a minute might be three minutes you know protect yourself be safe but just learn to overcome some Challenge and then get out you know we have this fixation that more is better and more is not better you want the minimal effective dose maybe a little bit more because we don't know where minimal is people say how many sets in the gym is it you know now it's like all about the volume hypertrophy or like I've always fairly low recovery quotient so for me I like to do a couple warm-ups a few hard sets two or three hard sets another exercise two or three hard sets that's it for that muscle group move on people always say well volume is where it's okay great but when I do 16 to 20 sets per week per muscle group I'll tell you I I'm depleted it doesn't work for me and I sort of um well just be honest I kind of chuckle at the exercise scientists who say well this is the way it is in this study great that's not how it works for me and even though I'm a scientist and I trust data I also trust my own experience and no one's going to tell me that it's Placebo because it's what's worked for me so I think that you have to find what your capabilities are and I do think if you look at dog breeds of which I'm obsessed by if you go to a dog show which everyone should go to a dog show once but don't watch the show go behind the show where you see all the different dog breeds what you'll see is what I saw the first time I did that you have dogs where wagging their tail all the time they're super excited they're alert you can see their eyes right they're just brigh eyed you can see the Great Danes they're super still and then my favorite breed and the reason I own them is the Bulldog the essence of economy of effort they don't even lift their head off the ground you walk over you pet them they'll like look up at you they might wink very still animals very powerful but very still animals now I'm not wired like that as you're probably getting the impression I have a little bit more spontaneous movement Etc so I need a lot of mental and physical stimulation in order to be happy in order to feel fulfilled so for me there was a lot of work and I still do a lot of work in order to learn how to downshift take it down become a good sleeper become a good resetter reset myself during the middle of the day with things like non-sleep deep rest which for me has been one of the most powerful tools or long exhale breathing to just bring myself down other people they tend to have a little bit less energy than life demands of them so they need to do a bit more cold shower a little bit more caffeine but then those people probably need a little bit more rest they're like the Bulldogs of life I think even though we're all the same species just like dogs there's a lot of variation there so you have to know thyself as the Oracle said understanding a little bit about the catac colam mees understanding that certain things like exercise deliberate cold exposure stimulants like caffeine and prescription drugs like Aderall Etc powerfully caused the release of these catacol amines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine leading to Big increases in energy and focus but then always always always there's a cost a trough that follows accept that relax through it then return to Baseline and then go forward or avoid those things altogether I'm not telling people what to do obviously the prescription drug thing in particular can be you know problematic for some people even addictive and certainly I'm not a fan of drugs of abuse Like Cocaine amphetamine absolutely categorically never done them never will and then other people who tend to Veer toward you know being hyperactivated a lot of spontaneous movement these people tend to be a little bit thinner a little bit leaner or just have a ton of Natural Energy um these people should really learn to incorporate more kind of what I would call calming and relaxing practices maybe a bit more sauna than C plunge maybe don't crank the sauna to 220 you know I find myself doing that I'm like just relax like enjoy the sauna and so I think the key to a good life and a productive life is again to learn to master the TR transition States understand some of the biology and to really know yourself not just your natural tendency more Bulldog like versus you know uh I don't know pit bulls always have their tail going a lot of spontaneous movement uh there other breeds as well but also know that on any given day you may be more or less rested you might be more or less depleted from life experience and kind of recognize where you're at and figure out what's optimal for that day in fact I forget who the guy is he's on Instagram and there are a lot of self-help account then there are a lot of self-help accounts out there but one of the best things that um I've heard recently and I try and incorporate in uh into my life in fact it's in my notebook is when I wake up in the morning I sort of take stock of where I am in terms of how rested I am I certainly take stock of what I need to do that day and then I ask what's something that I can do to make my life that day and the life of others better sometimes that means rest a little bit more sometimes that means push a little bit more sometimes that means call a relative that you haven't spoken to but thinking about how to make things better on the time scale of a day for oneself and for others I think is what's manageable and it's what's realistic and it takes this whole concept of protocols and biohacking and prescription drugs and supplements and workouts and it and it brings a real world perspective to it so I think we're living in the um in the time of kind of um almost avatars of these different things like I think about David gogins who I know well well at from the perspective of cooworker Right Where I consider him a friend but we've never hung out outside of the work context but I first met David back in 2016 and I'll tell you he's always that way at least when I've interacted with him he's always been you know forward Center of mass it was late in the day on a work this was a thing in Silicon Valley was down in San Jose um Santa claro San Jose area in I believe it was 2016 and we had been working all day in this part of this consult for this company and in the afternoon you know there was like do we take a break or do we push he's like no we push we're going to do this and I thought whoa like this guy's intense and he was changing because he was going to run to the airport but not run to the airport in an Uber or drive to the airport he meant run to the airport and he did so you know he's forward Center Mass he clearly has the energy or he's found the energy can you train that can you raise your sort of Baseline dopamine level um or are they two separate questions it's a great question I don't know that we have the answer I think you can if you become more economical about whatever dopamine or other neurochemicals you happen to Harbor inside we know there's a lot of genetic and individual variation to these things you know there's a joke among parents right like how they come out is how they stay like the the Mellow kid the Mellow baby that didn't cry much the happy baby Remains the happy person you know there are circumstances that can alter that versus the fussy baby that's always fussy as even as an adult you know parents talk this way but parents say all sorts of things um but you know I know people for instance like Rick Rubin for for instance who is very high energy but very calm it's part of Rick's magic he knows how to regulate and control his energy he has this uncanny capacity to get near things in particular um art music and to experience them really feel them but not get absorbed by it not feel at least to my my knowledge depleted by it some people get kind of absorbed by things and then depleted is this like the introvert extrovert conversation as well because two people can be in the same room and I I mean I'm I consider myself to be a bit of an extrovert sorry introvert where if I stand in a room for two to three hours doing small talk I I the way I describe it it's like my brain feels fried mhm whereas my assistant Sophie it's like you've poured fuel into her yeah I I similar to you and um I have an ex-girlfriend Who Loved parties she would just get so much energy from parties and I like certain parties but I like the the small conversation I might have at a party is um so that resonates with me I think we can shift well to answer the introvert extrovert question I do think that some people get energy from social interactions other people less so but I know people who are quite quiet who like social interactions they're just more an observer in those interactions as opposed to a participant the introvert extrovert thing also at least my understanding of the science is that it depends a bit on how quickly you fill up with social engagement like I I like a good party but after a couple hours I'm like done you know and other people they can just go go go go go go they get more energy from it I think you know we think of goggin as kind of an iconic example because he is of somebody who is capable of pushing himself regardless of what the internal narratives might might be that's my sense having spoken to him about it on my podcast and observed him on social media and other podcasts some people like jao willink embody the don't even think about it you do it because it's 4:30 in the morning and at 4:30 in the morning you work out like don't think do um whereas when I think of David I think of many things but in particular about overcoming the voice in the mind that's trying to pull you down and defeating that in fact having multiple representations of Self in the brain which is a fascinating thing unto itself and then when I think about Rick I think you know Rick is I iconic in my mind for his sense of creativity his ability to sense what is truly new and unique he has incredible taste right to really be able to sense like this is new and different and exciting and he seems to understand without trying to seek what people are going to like what people inevitably love so that's his one of his many superpowers and everyone has their superpower those are just so extremes I think of Lex Friedman as somebody who is so thoughtful and I mean I don't think people really understand just how hard Lex thinks about the tragedies of the world the darkness in the world but also the love that's in the world I mean he really like hyper affiliates with what's happening in his mind and he's able to really like absorb himself in that and you can feel like his his like he gets right up next to the fire like right up next to these things and I think he represents the kind of iconic example of an explorer who will look anywhere even if people are going to give him a hard time for it but I think mostly people celebrate him for it you know so I think you know different people have different lens lenses on life and different capacities I think if one wants to increase their Baseline level of dopamine I think it's important to regulate those Peaks and troughs I'm not a believer in like never having Peaks and dopamine a great wedding party like I've been to some weddings where we just like partied all night or great concerts I'm actually a huge fan it's kind of a a genre of music I don't know much about but I've always loved that band James do you know the band we are James oh it's so good okay I'm gonna lose Punk points for saying this but best live shows ever just the best live shows I've ever seen and I know there are and I and I know there are a lot of different ideas about best live shows based on genres of music I just it's like the best party you've ever been to and I get a lift in energy that lasts two three days from that I don't consume any substances at those shows they happen very seldom but when I've gone for two or three days I feel like a changed person it's a marked shift in neurochemical state and I don't feel a trough afterwards so I want to be very clear there's certain things like celebrations con they seem to give us these big surges in neurochemicals but they don't leave us depleted and I'm very intrigued by these experiences because when I look to some examples I have some friends who've been very successful in the tech sector and finance sector they make a lot of money and I always worry about them afterwards inevitably they end up depressed not knowing what they want to do so I always encourage them to keep working in fact the happiest people in Tech and finance are the ones that keep working even after they get rich so the people I see who are very happy are the people who take stock of their natural levels of energy curiosity motivation you know we could say dopamine but that's kind of a surrogate for a bunch of other things and it's incomplete right there are other chemicals involved but for sake of conversation we could say dopamine catamin epinephrine and they sort of know what they're capable of on a consistent basis I think one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was from a neurologist by the name of bob Knight when I was a graduate student he said figure out how much work you can do over the course of the next four to five years on a consistent basis because it's going to change as you get older might not even go down so for instance I know that I can work a good solid 12 hours a day that's me 12 hours a day five maybe six days a week but I like one full day off per week I I just like that typically it's Sunday for me I'll do some exercise and some other things but if I try and go 15 hours a day or 12 hours a day seven days a week I'm going to run a ground for other people they need to work less and now some people will say okay but do you have kids and this and that I'm not saying what work means it could be career it could be family or both but I'm not somebody who has an infinite amount of energy but I have a lot of energy if you have less energy you can do things like try and get great sleep try and eat as well as you possibly can you may have to do more to get more energy but sort of have to accept your own um kind of basic line State and I think I certainly know many people who are like mellower calmer have quote unquote less energy they're just more efficient with that energy they place it correctly they're not wasting their energy I know people that can scroll Instagram all the time talk about what's going on on Twitter watch three podcasts program and do a million things and like they're fine so I think we have to know where our groove is and that we can deviate from that about 15 to 20% but anything more stream than that we're going to end up in trouble I think a lot of the reason why people are curious about dopamine is because ultimately they want to be more productive or effective at some goal they have in their life so it might be building a business it could be some it could be a podcast whatever so taking everything you know about dopamine and how it works if you were giving me advice on how I could be a better entrepreneur podcaster whatever um the first thing I got from you was really about this idea of transitioning between states and also allowing time for my reserves to replenish after a high dopamine activity MH um is there anything else that I should be thinking about yeah so we could um operationalize this in a very clear way get enough sleep for you for some people it's six hours for some people it's eight hours I'd like to dispel the myth even though my friend Matt Walker will probably get upset at me for saying this not everyone needs eight or nine hours of sleep okay I got six last night okay I actually went to bed at midnight last night oh excuse me I got 6 hours and 45 minutes last night I went to bed at midnight which is kind of late for me woke up at 6:45 but get enough sleep if you wake up in the morning and you can't get more sleep for whatever reason can't fall back asleep or you have to get out of bed if you do not feel rested I recommend doing a 10 or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest or yoga NRA protocol they are available zero cost on YouTube you could put nsdr my name if you want to listen to me do one you could put nsdr Kelly boy does wonderful yoga nras she has a very pleasant voice if you prefer a female voice there's some wonderful yoga nras by a woman named commy Desai anyway these are all zeroc cost scripts that are available on YouTube what is that so um so non-sleep deep bre simar you did one today I did one today on the way here okay yeah here's what we know it does replenishes Baseline levels of dopamine in the basil ganglia prepares you for Action both mental and physical action can indeed help offset some of the sleep that maybe you didn't get but you needed we know that the brain goes into a kind of pseudo sleep in this state and there's also some evidence that Yoga Nidra and similar practices can improve rates of learning okay so that's sort of the the benefits what is it it involves what most people will call meditation but it's different than meditation you lie down you could do it SE seated as well but you lie down eyes closed and you do long exhale breathing when we exhale we actually slow our heart rate down I could talk about how this is this is through respiratory sinus arhythmia this is a relationship between the vagus nerve and the beating of the heart but in any case when we inhale our heart actually speeds up its beats slightly and when we exhale it slows down its beats slightly so it involves a lot of long exhale breathing it involves a body scan where you deliberately relax different aspects of your body so first your feet then your legs then your hands it's sort of a body scan of sorts with long exhale breathing and it takes you into a state that's pseudo sleep you're somewhere between sleep and awake now the beauty of nsdr and Yoga Nidra is that part of the instruction at the beginning is to stay awake now if you fall asleep it's okay just make sure you set an alarm if you have to go to work or do something else but by staying awake while being very relaxed it seems that the nervous system can continue to stay in a sleep-like state enough that you replenish some of these neurochemicals that prepare you for cognitive and physical action now there are 10-minute ndrs there are 20- minute ndrs there are even hourlong yoga nras and things of that sort so it depends on how much time you have before you need to get up so if you sleep well the night before you wake up after 6 eight hours and you're ready to go boom go but if you're not I highly recommend doing a 10 20 or 30 minute nstr practice you will find that you will be far more rested you will feel far more mentally and physically vigorous when you emerge from that it's remarkable and Matt Walker's laboratory and I are gearing up to do some studies on this to figure out exactly what's happening is the brain really going into sleep or is it something you know entirely different we don't quite know yet in any event it most certainly works and soon we'll know the exact mechanism in the brain but this dopamine re but this reupping of dopamine is very very clear from the existing studies so what are you doing there you're essentially filling the reservoir for the day of activities okay then I recommend hydration which has a profound effect on energy levels so 16 to 32 ounces of water people debate drink out of plastic or don't drink out of plastic do you have to purify your water Etc you know listen it depends on budget and interest and level of paranoia I drink a filtered water I tend to drink out of ceramic or glass but I am somebody who will occasionally drink out of a plastic water bottle I'm I'm not neurotic about that sort of thing but look if you are fine and we could all do well to limit the amount of plastic was in the oceans so there you go hydrate then some people like myself do very well to get some exercise and sunlight ideally simultaneously but certainly get some sunlight and exercise prior to caffeine some people do some people don't okay I also understand and totally support people who just want their coffee or tea first thing in the morning there's no rule that says that you can't do that but for me what I would do is I'd get up use the restroom if you need to hydrate and then get some bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning why well there's a whole story about circadian biology here that I could tell you but I've done that many times before suffice to say that getting bright light ideally from sunlight in your eyes even through cloud cover so if you're in the UK even through cloud cover increases the amount of cortisol release in your brain and body markedly that is a good healthy increase in cortisol that is associ iated with the transition to waking up so we know that bright light in the morning especially from sunlight increases daytime mood focus and alertness and it will improve your sleep later that night can I ask then because I woke up in a hotel this morning and because of you I now think about sunlight a lot so I woke up and I have a balcony in the hotel but I can't see the sun because the sun is on the other side of the hotel right so you're west facing in the morning and it's coming up in the East so here's the ideal circumstance you go outside you take your sunglasses off eyeglasses in contact are fine even if they have UV protection you face East it's a clear morning the sun is there maybe it's even Rising across the Horizon and you watch it for 5 10 minutes and then you go back inside and carry about your day here's the realistic situation you wake up you're in a hotel or an apartment you've got things to do your phone is on Etc what do you do get out onto the balcony get some natural light the ambient light as we say is still far brighter outside even on an overcast day than it would be indoors with the brightest possible overhead lights now there are Seasonal effective disorder lights so-called sad lights that are designed to generate 10,000 lucks or more and simulate sunlight there is really no simulation for sunlight but those special lights are a special circumstance here's what I know for sure and everyone will agree that it's much brighter outside even on an overcast morning than it is at night okay you can see even on an overcast day typically without a flashlight that tells you there's a lot of photons a lot of light energy outside so the best thing to do is just get outside especially on overcast days and get some ambient light in your eyes when I say view morning sunlight as soon as possible after waking up two questions always emerge first is what happens if I wake up before the sun comes out well listen unless you have powers that I'm not aware of you're going to have to wait for the sun to come out okay I just don't have any way to make it rise any faster for you so and if you do please like email me and let me know how that's done but the point here is that on an overcast day or even if you're not looking in the direction that the sun happens to be rising you're still getting sunlight the photon energy is what arrives at your eyes eventually triggers activation of cells in the neural retina this pie crust like tissue that lines the back of your eyes and signals to your brain it's time to wake up so when I say view morning sunlight a lot of people think they need to see the sunrise across the sunset I don't mean you need to see the Sun as an object you need to see the light emitting from the Sun and even on overcast days that there now on a densely overcast day in the thick of winter in the UK or Scandinavia it can be quite dark even in the morning and throughout the day in that case you'll really want to strive to get some bright artificial light exposure in the morning and throughout the day as well but this business of getting sunlight we can put light in capital letters not necessarily seeing the Sun as an object but getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day increases that cortisol Peak and its duration this is great for your immune system it great for alertness and when we hear cortisol normally people think bad oh cortisol is bad no cortisol is terrific you need cortisol trust me people who have deficits in cortisol production or regulation have all sorts of problems we're talking about getting a healthy big increase in cortisol early in the day that carries your energy until the evening and then the cortisol drops off what about shift workers shift workers God bless them they're essential for so much of what we do and consume and need so we have to be grateful to them they un fortunately are in a very compromised Health State often they have digestive issues mood issues it's a real problem and it's very dependent on the particular shift the worst case scenario for them is the swing shift where they're working days then they're working nights on the order of you know three days on three days off Etc it's terrible we know that Health outcomes for shift workers are so much worse we know that a few things can help for instance regular meal and exercise times okay we know that red light and here I'm not talking about red light therapy I'm talking about working under lights that are a bit more um red shifted long wavelength shifted as we say as opposed to bright fluorescent lights can help reduce some of the cortisol release associated with shift work that occurs at the wrong times this is a pretty nuanced topic um that again depends on the shift um ideally one doesn't work shifts their entire life if you absolutely have to do shift work go to your boss tell them I said this try and stay on the same schedule even if it's a nocturnal schedule which is the most unhealthy schedule try and stay on the same schedule for at least two weeks before shifting back to another schedule if you're somebody who's required to stay up until 3: in the morning and then sleep until 11:00 a.m. does that mean that viewing morning sunlight your morning at 11:30 a.m. is not useful no it's still useful try and keep things as regular as possible that's my advice but for people who are on a typical what we call dial daytime active as opposed to nocturnal nighttime active schedule this business of hydration sunlight movement even if it's skipping rope for five minutes or jogging in place or just swinging one's arms or getting a little walk in in the morning immensely beneficial if you can do a full workout first thing in the morning great if you don't have time for that until later in the day I'll be the first to say exercise when you can do it consistently so if you know don't think that if you don't work out in the morning that you shouldn't do it later we know everybody for sake of longevity and immediate I guess what we call Health span and lifespan and well-being for that matter should be doing at least two or three days per week of resistance training of some sort is true for men women and cardiovascular training in order to ensure healthy neuromuscular connections brain health heart health this is just very very clear if you do that early in the day fine if you do that on your lunch hour fine if you do that in the evening fine just make sure whatever you do in order to get that P workout whatever caffeine or pre-workout that you're taking doesn't inhibit your ability to get a great night's sleep because sleep is the ultimate restorative it's what really is the foundation of mental health and physical health and I can say if you want to be because this question started off what can you do to be you know have the best dopamine system the best energy the best creativity As you move through your day notice your energy levels eat well certainly I believe that people should eat mostly nonprocessed or minimally processed foods that's very clear regardless of whether or not you're vegan vegetarian omnivore or carnivore and eat amounts and foods that allow you to have sufficient mental energy so for me that largely means high quality protein and fibrous vegetables and fruit throughout the day what's your Vice any carbohydrate with melted parmesan cheese so thin crust pizza pasta with with Parmesan cheese especially if there's like a Diet Coke nearby or oh goodness I can just consume consume consume it just very hard for me to hit my threshold with those things this is a slight tangent but I will return to this dopamine conversation it's it's it's related but when you have that thin crust pizza or that whatever food that spikes your dopamine for me I got a bit of a sweet tooth so that's my advice carrot cake or something like that oh yeah carrot cake is good especially if the ratio of Theo of the frosting to the Cake part is set right it's too much Frost or too much cake yeah exactly um no go but if it's just the right ratio so if I I had that carrot cake yesterday which no one knows about I kept it to myself but does that mean that I'm more likely with the understanding of dopamine to want carrot cake again tomorrow the day after because I've got into a bit of a carrot cake cycle because I think everybody when they think about their relationship with sugar understands that if they just laid off sugar for like three or four weeks the craving seemed to die down yeah it's an interesting question I don't think we have the exact cancer some would argue that we should have more of a kind of balanced relationship with food whereby if we really crave something that we should allow ourselves it provided it's not some addictive substance or something you don't addicts relapsing um here we're talking about food we're not talking about drugs of abuse Etc um but is food not addictive in the same way well food can be very compulsive I think some people are addicted to food um I you know I Define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure we could probably attach to that you know the classic definition of addiction is where continued consumption or um engagement in a given activity is actually maladapted for your life right I mean if you have four pieces of carrot cake this week I doubt given you the shape that you're in it's going to shorten your life you might not feel great but it's not going to shorten your life you're certainly not going to like lose your income um like somebody who's a gambling addict would um this kind of thing you're not going to throw your life away or go rob somebody in order to get that carrot cake although but but is it doing that that and I'm pointing now at the dopamine wave thing am I having a dopamine crash you are and Anna lmy describes this best um and you can do this experiment it's kind of a fun experiment for you chocolate lovers abstain from chocolate for say a week and then pick your favorite chocolate and take a little piece of that chocolate and put it in your mouth and taste it and of course it will taste delicious it'll taste wonderful but if you notice very quickly your brain shifts to a sense of wanting more not so much savoring the chocolate that you're eating but wanting more and you're thinking about well how much am I going to take I'm going take this Square oh that other Square next to it broke off a little bit guess I got to eat that one too so that's the dopamine system in action and then what happens is you eat half the chocolate thing and you go oh I don't feel that good about it but I kind of want more anyway why well you're in that dopamine trough the same amount of something is giving you diminishing returns what's the way to make that chocolate take taste absolutely fantastic again abstain now there's also an interesting phenomenon and this is why I said I can't be exactly sure how to answer your question accurately that is I have several friends just by way of example who reached their 40s quite overweight 50s quite overweight 30 to 60 pounds overweight and they'd come to me and they'd say I want to lose weight every single one of them has been highly successful in rapidly losing that weight and keeping it off the following way and I'm not a nutritionist I say you can eat meat fish eggs chicken fruit and vegetables and that's it and drink water and caffeine and don't consume calories and Beverages and every single one of them lost 30 60 pounds and has kept it off now Lane Norton and I who are friends and colleagues in the health space he'll say well they created a caloric deficit and so they lost weight I'd say absolutely I would also say and I think Lane would probably agree although there's no randomized control trial to prove this that in eating that way mostly whole unprocessed or minimally processed foods they did several things as well one is you start to learn the relationship between how something tastes its caloric value its micronutrient and macronutrient value what do I mean when you eat a steak like let's say a 12 ounce ribey if that's in your nutrition plan meaning you allow yourself red meat let's say you eat that you taste it it's very Savory hopefully it tastes really good if it's cooked properly it's a great cut and your brain learns the relationship between steak and calories and nutrients and amino acids there's this whole amino acid forging hypothesis of nutrition then you eat fruit you taste the fruit you actually taste it now this is Far and Away different than if you're consuming hogy sandwiches and hamburgers and cheeseburgers there's something about removing the bread there's something about removing removing the pasta there's something about removing those foods that I believe has nothing to do with those Foods being bad in fact I love bread and pasta high quality bread and pasta and I do consume those but I'm not trying to lose weight nor gain weight when people eat that way meat fish eggs chicken fruits and vegetables and nothing else for a couple of months what every single one of them says is well then we had this party and you know the kids were having birthday cake so I decided to allow myself a slice of cake they ate it and it tastes did disgusting to them or they in some cases threw up or they just felt like it was gross whatever positive Association they had with it before it no longer exists and then they get right back on their let's call it diet and they continue along their way and they're very relieved to learn that they actually enjoy healthy foods I think that we can rewire in fact we know that you can rewire your association between nutritive value Taste of food calories and micronutrients and so when I hear about these highly restrictive elimination diets where people do only meat which frankly does not seem healthy to me I think some Fiber from other sources is good although I'm sure Paul saladino will come after me probably with a drumstick or something Jord or Jord whatever Jordan's doing seems to be working for Jordan so I'm not goingon to argue people should do as they will but you know um I'm an omnivore and enjoy that but I think when people do elimination type diets the more important thing is that they're learning this association between taste and calories that seems to really work for them and the pleasure of eating certain foods and really dropping into the the quality and the taste of that food When We crave a food and it's kind of an Indulgence food like chocolate or carrot cake or something it's more along this dopamine uh transition from Peak to trough now when I I love steak my dad's Argentine I'm half Argentine so I love a great beef chizo or like a you know like I love red meat but I don't eat two ribe eyes I eat one and I'm good and so I think that there's something very sading about high nutritive quality food that includes fruits and vegetables and the vegans have their choices and the vegetarians have their choices and so so much of what we think about when we think about dopamine and food is yes highly processed foods candy packaged Goods cookies chips they drive this craving for more but people don't actually enjoy them that much they just require them or at least they think they require them so I encourage anyone who feels addicted to those foods to take a you know healthy approach you know consume enough calories don't go on a crash diet but try eating really high quality unprocessed or minimally processed foods for just a couple of weeks at first it's murder they just can't do it and then inevitably they call me and they say I feel so much better and I don't even want that stuff anymore it's interesting how that then correlates with your own motivation and I it's we fly out here to do this podcast and we come out sometimes for two weeks three weeks sometimes even four weeks weeks and we all eat the same thing pretty much throughout the day for those four weeks so it's almost a dietary intervention for me because when we finish recording my food is going to be there and I know what it's going to be it's going to be basically a salad with meat in it certain vegetables Etc and so it becomes this like intervention going to La is this dietary intervention what happens is when I come here and have that salad every day with various different meats and various different vegetables every day is my motivation to go to the gym for some reason improves MH my sleep end up improving and it's like my that one sort of dietary intervention has this really Downstream impact on everything else I get in the I get in the best shape of my life I'm motivated I feel good I drive along it might also be the sunshine out here but and I just I I think people don't realize that even as you say a week or two having that dietary intervention intervention cutting out the crap can have such a big reframing on your perception of food how you experience it and now I'm excited about the bloody salad yeah it's wild how healthy foods become more attractive us the more we consume them and the more we avoid unhealthy Foods I think also a lot of people don't know how great you can feel getting some morning sunlike great sleep eating nutritious food and once they do once they experience that lift and energy and mood it's kind of addictive in its own right now I also think it's important to not be too restrictive right you know around the holidays or something I I mean I love a great slice of pie like I do these things I think if one gets enough movement then you're fine um you know if nothing else this whole um kind of trend toward the use of these glp1 glucagonlike peptide Agonist like OIC and monjaro if it's taught us anything it's that people are obese because they consume too many calories they just ingest too much relative to their activity levels and here in particular in the United States people are walking and moving far less most people get no regular exercise and they consume about 3,500 calories per day on average so they're just on a steady weight increase for most of their life more activity less food intake is fairly easy to accomplish if you do just a few subtle things so there are these levers these major levers like eating better as you said meat and salads I mean it's one of the most satiating meals you can have I also find that if I consume fewer carbohydrates during the day this is just me it runs countercurrent to most everything you'll read out there but I like to fast essentially until about 11 or noon just cuz I'm not hungry I like to exercise in the morning but then I'll have a lunch that is some meat some salad maybe starch like a bowl of oatmeal or rice but not a whole lot and then toward evening my final meal you know dinner which is around 7 or 8:00 p.m. generally includes a few more starches and a little less protein and I sleep best that way some people it's the opposite they like a big bowl of oatmeal and just a couple of eggs in the morning and you know and some nuts in the afternoon and then they like a big steak for dinner you know I think everybody's slightly different some people are just naturally have more energy I think about Joo willink I mean the guy has so much energy and I think it's not a coincidence that he works out at 4:30 in the morning I think that if you work out early in the day you often have more energy throughout the day I find if I get my workout done before 9:00 a.m. I have more energy all day long however if I work out midm morning late morning pretty sleepy in the afternoon everybody's different is there like a physiological rationale for that there probably is you know as our body temperature rises in the morning we are waking up so when we exercise we accelerate that transition toward being more alert now in the afternoon when our body temperature typically Peaks after that is usually when we get a bit sleepy typically after lunch people get sleepy sometimes because of the volume of food they they've eaten most often it's because they've hit that temperature peak in the early afternoon and we know that as body temperature drops 1 to 3 degrees in the evening and night time that's when we fall asleep in fact in order to fall asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° this is why you know sticking a foot out of the you know the comforter or if you have a cooling mattress which some people require because they run hot or keeping the room cool facilitates falling asleep although it's not completely the case so I should mention the best scenario would be cool room with warm blankets to fall asleep and then toward morning sort of a warmer environment we actually get a little bit more rapid eye movement sleep dream sleep elaborate dream sleep toward morning so you can get really nuanced in this stuff all the biohackers know this but you know basically if you work out early in the day you know before 8 or 9:00 a.m. it's going to accelerate that increase in body temperature and you'll feel more alert there's also this beautiful phenomenon in circadian biology called entrainment whereby let's say you're not a morning person you hate mornings if you force yourself to get up and exercise at say 6:00 a.m. for three days in a row by the fourth day you'll naturally start waking up around that time because the circadian clock of the brain we call the supermatic nucleus the main inputs that drive when you're alert and when you want to be asleep are sunlight exposure to the eyes this is the whole basis for that morning sunlight exposure physical activity when you eat and social engagement and there could be a whole discussion about this but suffice to say that if you start getting some Morning Light some exercise maybe even before the sun comes out some caffeine hydration and then a meal in the early part of the day your body will start to anticipate all of those activities and even if you're a so-called Night Owl you'll start to shift your clock toward being an early riser and lo and behold around 10 or 11: p.m. you'll start to notice you're getting sleepy and you just have to have the discipline to turn off the phone put in the other room and go to sleep I I wonder that I do wonder if I'm a night hour because of bad habits or because of some kind of biology typically people fall into one of three categories and it is genetically determined of you can be a morning person a more typical would be somebody who goes to sleep somewhere between 10:30 and midnight wakes up between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and then the night owls who like to stay up till 1:00 or 2 in the morning wake up around you know 10: or 11:00 a.m. it changes with age I'm a bit of a weirdo in the sense that I like to do most of my mental and physical work between 6:00 a.m. and noon then I'm not super effective in the afternoon my brain doesn't work so well I can take care of some little things unless I offset that and then between 6:00 p.m and midnight I'm alert again I don't know maybe it's my Argentine Roots who knows so so given it's the afternoon now and I knew that we were going to be podcasting what I did is I did indeed get up at 6:45 a.m. I did a bunch of work this morning for the podcast some other things and then on the way here I did a non-sleep deep rest I listened to that for about 10 minutes I kind of sensed I was somewhere in sleep I don't quite recall and then when we arrived I'm a little bit groggy a little bit of hydration a little bit of caffeine and I feel completely alert so you can learn to offset these troughs and energy I think that at every stage of life meaning for every 5-year block of life you can kind of predict what the best schedule for you would be so when you're a baby you slept all the time that's your best schedule when you were an adolescent it was different I have a niece she's 17 and I went and stayed with my sister recently and it was unbelievable she went to bed at 10:30 at night probably fell asleep at midnight because she was on her iPad with her friends she would wake up the next day at noon it's summertime get up say hello get a glass of water go back to sleep and sleep for another hour and that's exactly what she should be doing why because she's growing right she's a she's youth in youth in your 30s it might be a different schedule in your 40s a different schedule and then of course kids come along and they force the schedule so I would say whatever stage of life you're in you probably know what the best schedule is for you and you just have to work with the realities of life but if you can adhere to that knowing okay you have a peak in energy in focus at this hour or peeking energy in focus at that hour by all means do it I mean Rick Ruben shared um when he came on my podcast that his best day is to transition slowly into the day take a walk outside in the sun in the morning slowly into the day and then he does his work really his main focused work in the afternoon and in the evening some people are more night shifted some people are more morning shifted I tend to get my best ideas I think right before I go to sleep which is annoying because there's this temptation to go to my laptop and begin writing and begin working do you write them down yes yeah I write down little cues and then team will know because it's useful when I'm on this time frame because my team in the UK are getting my my memos at 7 a.m. there right but they don't know that I'm it's like midnight or 1: a.m. here I'm so glad you mentioned this I think for people who are interested in having a great life a great career it's very important to have a mode of capture so for me um it's this notebook and it's not just blank pages in front of me I promise these are just like little little things that come to mind um it doesn't matter what's here um and I place them into the notebook and then at the end of each week or so or if I'm on a plane I'll start to look back and see you know what are the ideas that feel sticky like oh there's something there there's like a concept there I'm actually thinking about doing a a a drawing book to teach neuroscience at some point I'm also very interested in animals so I was listing out this is very um embarrassing but the different animals that I feel I embodied at different stages of my life and where I'm at now because of the different energies and is very personal right like the sense that it's not going to mean much in the kind of classic Neuroscience sense but I think having a mode of capture for these thoughts that spontaneously arise out of our unconscious mind I mean that's what's happening when you're falling asleep your conscious mind which is involved in thinking and planning and organizing knowledge is starting to Tire those prefrontal cortex circuits are starting to tire and your unconscious mind which is the main driver of all your ideas and so much of what you you are about as an individual are starting to geyser to the surface this is why in dreams even though it occurs in symbols we are playing with different ideas and ordering of different ideas this is not Freudian okay this is not just yungi and psychology we had an expert in this you know Dr Paul kti did a mental health series on our podcast and he said you know the bulk of your brain activity besides the stuff that's just regulating breathing and heart rate and digestion Etc is really devoted to this unconscious processing it's taking events from your childhood plans that you have that you don't even know yet that aren't aware of yet experiences that are happening today and and looking at those from different perspectives and offering those to you in in what in dreams what are dreams in stories in narratives that are really disrupted in space and time A lot can happen in a short period of time then you're in a different room dreams are very distorted in terms of their representation but when you're falling asleep you're in that pseudo awake state obviously where you're thinking planning and action parts of your brain your logical mind is turned off and these ideas are geysering to the surface and this is why sometimes people have their best ideas in the shower while walking when they're not trying to have ideas and you can seeed this by writing down a few things before you go to sleep you can think you know like wondering what to do next year don't know okay maybe it's that vague does that mean you'll have a dream that solves it that night maybe probably not but chances are if you pay attention to you know during the day you'll be walking along or for some reason this always happens to me when I'm um uh urinating I don't know why I don't know why like I go like I don't know maybe it's because I'm relaxed like I go especially if I'm in nature and I'm hiking I'll go like take a take a pee behind a tree and I I be like oh I have an idea I don't know why it is I think it's because I'm not thinking about doing anything except you know I'm taking a leak behind a tree I guess this is very forthcoming for me to admit this but you know some people stay in the shower other people while they're running one thing that I think is really use useful for coming up with ideas I seem to be mentioning Rick a lot today but um one thing I observed when I spent time with Rick is he has a kind of a practice although he's never said this formally where he'll be very still with his eyes closed and I thought maybe he's meditating maybe he's um sleeping and it turns out he told me that his mind is very active in that time even though his body is very still now that sparked something in me because I have a guest or had a guest on my podcast by the name of Carl diero he's one of The Luminaries in the field of Neuroscience and one of the best bioengineers in the world he's also a psychiatrist a brilliant guy and when he came on my podcast he said that he has a practice every night after he puts his five kids to sleep he's one of these hyperproductive people where he sits down and He makes himself stay as completely still as possible and forces himself to think in complete sentences and I thought this is interesting because it was also reported or purported that Einstein would take walks and then occasionally just stop and let his mind continue in thinking while he stopped his body and when you start looking back through history of Science History of Music Etc you'll find that there are these hyper creative hyperproductive people that have a practice of making their body completely still and their mind very active not meditation where you're trying to just focus on your breathing but they're actually actively thinking while keeping their body very still now I find that fascinating I also find it fascinating that some people for instance myself if I take a long run which I do every Sunday I make it a point to run for 60 to 90 minutes every Sunday not fast but I just go go go go go inevitably during those runs I come up with some of my best ideas it's a it puts my brain into a state where I can things geyser up from my unconscious mind and so that state of mind is one in which the body is very active and I'm not trying to think about anything so you have these two inverse States one is body still mind active the other is body active mind kind of freerunning kind of just like spooling out when I'm running I'm not thinking about anything and then ideas spring to the surface in the Neuroscience of creativity we know that there's a meditation practice that's been studied called open monitoring meditation most typical meditation is you sit or lie down close your eyes maybe Lotus position maybe not and you concentrate on your breathing you bring your attention constantly back to your third eye center work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at NYU has shown just 10 to 13 minutes of that practice every day can improve memory in particular working memory which is your ability to keep thoughts online lower stress and other benefits there's a different form of meditation which is open monitoring meditation where you sit or lie down close your eyes and you actually are paying attention to everything around you you focus your attention there in the room there in the room there in the room or you just let it all all just kind of sift over you you're not actually focusing on your breathing and that practice of open monitoring meditation is associated with improved creative capacity now improved creative capacity in air quotes is something that's measured in a laboratory so synthesis of new ideas Creative Solutions to a puzzle Etc we're not talking about writing great works of music but in a laboratory you only have so many things that you can sample or measure typically in undergraduate students so I I'm kind of just you know talk ing all of this out there as a means for people you who are interested in improving their creativity or exploring creativity to not just wait not just wait have a mode of capture write things down or maybe jot them into your phone or voice memos maybe do open monitoring meditation maybe sit and force yourself to think in complete sentences with your body still maybe go for a long run or walk where you're bored you're not listening to anything and see what comes up I think everyone does this differently but if you're able to access the state of mind it can be immens powerful because great ideas come to you so movement was the last one in the dopamine we were doing this nice dopamine like tree of things sleep we did the um nsdr nonsleep deep breast we did the hydration exercise sunlight if I'm trying to use what I understand now about dopamine to be productive in my relationships but also in my professional life is there anything else I need to be think we also did food and you can spike your dopamine and epinephrine nor epinephrine the so-call catacol amines with a cold shower or cold plunge it is a state shifting tool that's really what it is I like to do sauna and cold at least once a week most people don't have access to a sauna if you don't have access to a sauna no big deal you could take a hot bath just don't scald yourself and if you're a male saers now because of the um someone told me that it might fry my sperm oh yeah let's have a very Frank discussion about that it it won't fry them but it will definitely um deplete the number of viable sperms so if you are interested in conceiving just understand that the cycle for Genesis of sperm spermatogenesis takes place over the course of somewhere between 60 and 90 days depending on exactly what part of the cycle you're referring to heat is not good for sperm this is why testicles exist outside the body why the scrotum can both contract and and sort of relax and if you go into a sauna or a hot tub or a hot bath you will lower the number a viable sperm that you produce in over the course of the next 60 to 90 days so if you're trying to conceive you probably want to avoid those circumstances unless of course you go into a sauna and you take a cold pack with some insulation please and you put it in your groin um that's a straightforward way to maintain coolness of the testicles and maintain sperm while in the SAA it's not going to permanently deplete your sperm but it will dramatically lower sperm viable sperm count forward motile sperm we know this also from people that sit too much or people that have larger legs I mean these Studies have actually been done if you look at the correlation between amount of time seated especially driving or on a hot car seat and sperm count and viability there's kind of an inverse relationship there does that mean that you should actively cool your testicles well there's a whole culture of this on the internet there are products that people can buy I think they're what are they called snowballs it's like a um I think they're called um you know which is like cold uh underwear or something I think that's getting a little bit um excessive um however there's a kind of basic understanding that heat isn't good excessive heat isn't good for sperm and the whole rationale be behind coal plunges for sake of testosterone and sperm probably can only be substantiated by the fact that if you get into a cold bath or cold shower and then you warm up you vasoconstrict so you reduce the blood flow to the area and then you're going to allow much more blood flow into that area after they warm up again but again heat is bad for the testicles so if you're not trying to conceive no big deal or you could bring an ice pack in there I will also say and this is a very important Public Service Announcement don't think that you can use hot tub or hot bath or sauna as contraception I don't know that it's that effective and um I can assure you without having looked at the data that uh many uh child has been conceived despite the fact that people were in a hot tub or bath or sauna whether or not they were actually conceived in the bathtub hot tub or sauna is obviously none of my business perfect Ted has quite frankly taken the nation by storm a small green energy drink that you've probably seen popping up through a Tesco or to waitrose they've grown by almost 10,000% in a very short period of time because people are sick and tired of the typical unhealthy energy drinks and they've been looking for an alternative perfect Ted is the drink that I drink as I'm sat here during the podcast because it gives me increased focus it doesn't give me crashes which sometimes might happen if I'm having a 3 four five six hour conversation with someone on the podcast and it tastes amazing it's exactly what I've been looking for in terms of energy that's why I'm an investor and that's why they sponsor this podcast and for a limited time perfect Ted have given Diary of CEO listeners only a huge 40% off if you use the code diary for 40 at checkout don't tell anybody about this and you can only get this online for a limited time so make sure you don't miss out the other thing that I I'm curious about as it relates to dopamine is pornography I think pornography has become more readly available now than ever before certain I can go on any social media platform especially X and I scroll down for long enough I will be exposed to pornography whether I chose to go and seek it out or not yeah it'll find you it'll find you on pretty much every application um so I especially concerning for young people who are in that those formative years but what is your view on the on pornography dopamine and the overall social harm of pornography yeah so this is a controversial topic because obviously people have different opinions on limiting personal freedom right um both expression and consumption of of uh pornography right um but moving that aside and just focusing on things through the lens of biology and the dopamine system we know that the more stimulating the more intense an experience the greater the increase in dopamine I mean it's very clear based on neuroimaging studies that you know more amphetamine causes bigger increases in dopamine than less amphetamine more cocaine causes bigger increases in dopamine than less cocaine caffeine can cause an increase in dopamine but it's not nearly the kind of increase the peak that is that you observe with amphetamine or cocaine all right so we can't just say stimulants and we can't just say sex we can't just say pornography we have to ask within the domain of pornography because we know that sexual activity and in particular anticipation of sexual activity okay this is important anticipation of sexual activity raises dopamine levels then the question is what is the range of things and the range of dopamine increase now while there hasn't been a very systematic exploration of this we know that you know a lot of pornography is Extreme right it involves more than two people it can involve all sorts of dynamics that for some people are going to be hyper stimulatory okay so this is very different than I guess what people would call soft pornography quote unquote right and here these are subjective labels so let's just pick a hypothetical scenario a person is viewing a lot of let's say high intensity High dopamine for them releasing pornography okay for some people that might be pornography of genre a for other people it might be pornography of genre B for somebody who never looks at pornography maybe it's quite mild but for them it's actually quite intense in terms of the amount of dopamine it releases now what do we know based on dopamine Dynamics remember dopamine is the universal currency of motivation seeking and reward it's not like there's dopamine unique to pornography versus dopamine unique to food it's just a matter of levels and duration if somebody is consuming let's call it very intense AKA High dopamine releasing pornography on a regular basis what do we know that peak in dopamine will start to lessen it'll be lower and lower and the trough in dopamine after they view that pornography will be deeper trough and longer trough meaning they are very likely we don't know for sure but very likely to seek out more and more intense experiences to try and just get them back to Baseline pretty soon the pornography that at one time was very stimulating for them is no longer stimulating now the concern here is that and let's just be frank we're not just talking about viewing pornography we also have to ask ourselves what are people doing as they view this pornography this is a conversation that should be had but I have to do it in a way where I'm not imparting moral judgment on any of it I'm not saying people should masturbate or not masturbate that's none of my business frankly This is highly individual it relates to all sorts of things in terms of values Etc the point is however that we know that orgasm is a dopamine related event and postorgasm there's a increase in a molecule called prolactin in the brain prolactin actually in part sets the refractory period in which there can't be further erection in males and orgasm in males okay and in females it really depends I mean there's this whole world I mean Dr Reena mik is um far more skilled to discuss this than I am about you know different types of orgasms in women Etc the extent to which multiple orgasms can occur in some individuals not others I think the general belief is that it's possible in most anybody um including males and females right but that it's more typical in females than in males this sort of thing here's the point dopamine and prolactin generally are in a kind of a push pull or seesaw relationship where by very stimulatory high dopamine releasing activities and pornography and things like that increased dopamine but repeated exposure to that regardless of the activities occurring during that time lead to big long troughs in dopamine such that more stimulation is required just to get any sense of arousal we also know that prolactin when that is increased tends to create a kind of subdued lack of dopamine I'm using these terms broadly um kind of amotivated non-motivated state there are reasons for this biologically right after ejaculation the idea is that animals won't then or humans won't then copulate again and again and again at least not for some period of time the duration of the refractory period is highly individual it's determined by age by species there's the so-called coolage effect are you familiar with the coolage effect I'm familiar with post nut Clarity okay um slightly different there's an anecdote that um at least to my understanding is true at least the coolage effect is a known thing in neuroendocrinology whereby President Calvin kulage reportedly was visiting a chicken farm with his wife they were touring the farm and there were a lot of hens and a lot of chickens generally and the dosent who was showing them around said you know this rooster here pointed to a rooster copulates more than 300 times per day it's remarkable and miss kulage turns to president kulage and says you hear that 300 times per day she's obviously quite impressed and letting him know that and coolage that is President coolage says Ah but let me ask you a question same hen or different hens and the dosent says different hens now here's the phenomenon the coolage effect it exists in rodents it exists in chickens it exists in dogs people can speculate whether or not it exists in humans whereby if an animal copulates then the male is in a refractory period lasting anywhere from minutes to hours to days depending on age species Etc during that refractory period they can't achieve erection and or ejaculate again but if you replace the mate with a novel mate the refractory period is shortened substantially why the answer is very clear based on actual measurements of brain dopamine why because dopamine is also associated with novelty now the refractory period probably serves an important evolutionary role whereby it improves pair bonding so that post post ejaculation postorgasm okay here I'm interchangeably talking about these for males and females you know anytime you hear ejaculation then people think males Etc postorgasm postcoidal Bliss pair bonding the sharing of phermones the sharing of stories you know the sharing of affection Right the sharing of a bed to sleep in these things are intimately involved in pair bonding so I'm not saying that the refractory period is a bad thing what I'm saying is that dopamine can overcome the refractory period but the refractory period itself is largely due to an increase in prolactin that suppresses dopamine so let's go back all the way to this question about pornography what's the typical scenario while this is not something I choose to think about a lot you're talking about some individual in their apartment or home watching intense dopamine stimulating pornography in which they presumably are aroused or not aroused they do or don't do whatever they choose to do but that over time has less and less of an effect in getting them aroused and keep in mind that none of this necessarily translates to real world human safe interactions between individuals right pornography is very very different than real world sexual interactions so there is a phenomenon that is starting to surface on the internet what I mean by that I mean there are a lot of questions posed in podcast forums in meaning in the comment section on YouTube about is pornography dangerous is it bad Etc I think the thing that we can say for sure is that any Behavior any substance that stimulates a lot of dopamine and that is easily accessed without effort is potentially problematic again big increases in dopamine that are not preceded by effort are potentially problematic let's think about methamphetamine huge increase in dopamine was the brain designed to release dopamine in response to amphetamine no the brain was designed to Dole out dopamine give out dopamine at a level and duration that is commensurate with the pursuit of some evolutionarily adaptive goal methamphetamine bypasses that gives you a huge surge in dopamine which is why people feel miserable afterwards they crave more just to get back to a lower level of dopamine same can be said of gambling in particular in people that are very prone to gambling addiction certainly can be said for food for certain people that are very prone to food addiction certainly can be true for anything but when it comes to pornography because of the as you pointed out the ready availability of pornography in particular let's just call it intense pornography or that includes a lot of different other stimulatory elements multiple people high you know a lot of scenarios that um can be accessed on the internet right certainly not things I'm suggesting people go look at but that is potentially problematic because it raises the threshold of the person that's viewing this as what is arousing to the point where pretty soon they need those hyper stimulatory environments or stimula in the form of pornography in order to get aroused and again none of that translates into the ability to have conversation with Partners or the ability to you know have discussion in real world circumstances and of course everything we're talking about could also be translated to real world circumstances but the data really point to the fact that younger people in particular are consuming more pornography so we're talking about bigger dopamine increases with less when I say effort what I mean is kind of the the more traditional thing was at least when I was growing up was you'd go out on a date or you'd meet somebody and You' you know there's a series of events that would happen prior to a physical interactions right so this is potentially serious and problematic there 's a lot of judgment and understandably so because people arrive to this sort of discussion with a lot of different backgrounds in terms of religious backgrounds and what they think is okay or not okay what I can tell you for sure is that I hear from a lot of young males about their challenges with porn addiction and they want to know how to get over porn addiction and the answer there is difficult but very simple which is abstinence it's abstinence it's taking a period of abstinence from pornography maybe forever maybe reducing the amount this is where it gets very tricky very subjective and it's almost impossible to kind of have the discussion without getting into some murky territory yeah um but it's a real issue and I know it's a real issue because I hear from thousands over the last few years of the podcast I've heard from thousands of males that are like they were addicted to porn how do they feel it sounds to me as if they feel very dejected and some of them actually have said they felt very um kind of misled like almost like this thing this natural stimulus for them was dangled in front of them and they just gravitated towards it the same way that any biological organism would gravitate towards something that was triggering its dopamine system and now they feel depleted and kind of stuck and they don't know what to do and I don't necessarily think I'm the person to remedy all of this I certainly am not but I think there needs to be a conversation much in the same way that Jonathan height has done an amazing job with anxious generation of talking about some of the severe detriment to overuse of social media and social dynamics on social media in particular in young girls and how we're now finally realizing that we're in a mental health crisis at least in part because of some of that and we need to pay attention to it I think there needs to be a discussion around pornography and some of the challenges it can potentially present in particular for young males which is not to say that girls and women aren't also looking pornography because we know they are the data tell us that but it does seem to be more of a problem that's being vocalized by young males and this of course dovet tales with the whole discussion about dating behavior and how that's changed and dating apps and you know how the ready availability of kind of the possibility or anticipation of a partner is there but actual dating behavior and real world sexual behavior is reduced I mean there's a lot that needs to be discussed and you know ideally we would have a psych iatrist a psychologist and um a kind of panel of experts to talk about this and maybe we do this together you know as a service to the world because I hear about this a lot you for instance just by way of contrast I'm not getting a ton of YouTube comments and emails from people saying hey you know I really struggle with uh you know with ribeye steak addiction or with coffee addiction or energy drink addiction maybe a little bit with energy drinks but it's not crashing lives it's not causing people to feel depressed miserable about themselves it's not causing people to have sex ual dysfunction issues and real world interactions I mean this is also the concern right that young people are getting so attuned to certain dopamine Dynamics related to pornography that they don't either get aroused or know how to handle real world intimate interactions erectile dysfunction all those kinds of things for instance I do I have to be honest and this is I just have to be honest because nothing else is useful but I remember the first time I saw a pornographic image when I was young and it was just just a picture of like someone with like a nipple out and it was the most arousing thing in the world and obviously as I've aged I'm now 31 it would take a lot for me to see for me to feel aroused I certainly wouldn't get aroused at seeing like the thing that aroused me when I was 16 or whatever that I found for example and it that as you were saying I was thinking gosh even my arousal cycle as I've gotten you know over the last 10 years has changed because of the availability of pornography but also just sex as a in real life has is become more Extreme as it tries to keep up with the expectations that pornography sets and then I thought about a lot what you said about people messaging you thousands of them about pornography and the unfortunate thing about the the abstinence advice is it leaves them with many of them with What alternative I mean one would hope um depending on you know the circumstances that they would seek out healthy relationships and then this goes to the social elements you described which is it's really difficult and we I've had multiple people sit here saying to me that it's really the top 10% of men that're having most of the sex and this bottom percent 50% of men haven't had sex for a year I go so you're you're going to we got to tell a 19-year-old horny young man that he's got to abstain from masturbation and pornography and we might not be able to offer him an alternative for a year well I'm not telling anyone it's not you but I'm right or maybe um throt throttle back throttle back his behavior or think about ways in which things he could do could lead to healthy romantic and sexual interactions you know assuming that you know he's of an age and you know the circumstances are are like for that I think that it's you know as you can tell as I'm kind of stumbling here I'm not trying to be careful I'm trying to be as accurate as possible while also not stating things that I don't believe are true like you know can pornography be consumed by certain people in a healthy way well probably yes um do a lot of people get carried away with it and it starts to become a detriment in their lives maybe even an addiction maybe even impede other aspects of romantic and workplace Behavior yes we hear this all the time do you know where I am now I at I'm arriving at the position that I think pornography is bad because you know again I get lots of DMS and messages and The more I've understood about the brain and the body and the and dopamine Etc I just can't find a net positive pornography I can't find one especially as it relates to my relationship with my partner I've been with her for 5 years now and I do I think that me watching pornography especially if I'm watching it frequently it's going to help my performance in the bedroom absolutely not absolutely not yeah it's sort of um what's that old saying you want to get good at push-ups do push-ups you know exactly probably the best place to get um good at intimate conversation and behavior is in the context of like you said like a a great relationship um with great communication that sort of thing I I do hear about this concern from people a lot I think that it's hard to imagine more benefits than kind of concerns or risks when it comes to pornography especially for young males I too grew up in an era where you know someone would have knowledge of like a Playboy magazine or something typically it was stashed someplace in town and then people would go visit it you know um it it was like a library or it was it was sort of a like an urban Library type environment where you know people would know oh yeah behind the it was always like a dumpster or something terrible be like behind the dumpster behind this building like there's a there's a stack of playboys and like then people would go there right um but it wasn't a big part of my childhood it wasn't a big part of my life you know I never found any pornography in my home like you know some kids will stumble across their dad's magazine so I never had that experience um I think that a lot can be said about the requirements and importance of creating healthy dating behavior and that's a real world experience kind of thing and you know this is a bigger discussion that deserves a lot of time um I'm not sure we have time for it now but you know we're growing up in a world where so much of the input arrives through the internet again a low effort threshold High dopamine scenario right some somebody wants to find something on the Internet they just Google for it they can find it um you know I think you want particular food that's extremely tasty you can order it to your door um this is not potentially problematic this is problematic what it requires ultimately however I believe is self-regulatory mechanisms there is no way that legislature is going to prevent us from having access to things it's it's just not because people have always found a way you know I mean you think about um prescription drugs that deliver dopamine without much effort you know even if people don't have a prescription I think the data are something like 80% of college students have taken prescription stimulants without a prescription I mean when I went to college nobody did that nobody we drank coffee occasionally someone would take a no doze like a caffeine pill or something and that was considered extreme and I still don't recommend it now you know there's all this consumption of pharmacology there consumption of porn and I think that successful individuals will learn and understand this relationship about dopamine especially their own and they will learn to regulate and they will be very careful about anything that spikes dopamine really high without much preceding effort and that has the capacity for addiction so I worry far less about the energy drink the loud music and the workout far far less maybe not at all than I do high-intensity pornography consumed on a regular basis people taking prescription stimulants who don't need them I mean that's a recipe for Burnout depression or Worse how does this kind of dovetail into having meaning in your life because I'm thinking now about those young men and in that sort of stereotype they're maybe sat in their bedroom alone probably don't have a romantic partner maybe don't have a lot to be aiming at in their lives and the group of people that fall into those gambling addiction behaviors or that pornography Behavior often times not always but often are also lacking in some kind of meaning is there like a correlation between the two are they Associated um and does one help the other if I if I go out and start pursuing some great goal in my life start a company am I less likely to then be engaging in the DOP mean inducing pornography addiction so to answer the second question first I absolutely believe that when we are in pursuit of healthy goals meaning goals that are building our life forward that are going to improve our social relationships sure your income although you know it's risky to just be in pursuit of money right there the another great way to encapsulate the dopamine conversation is I think it's in that movie Wall Street where the guy says what's your number you know how much money do you want he just says more well that's dopamine that's the essence of dopamine he just wants more it's not really about a number it's about the pursuit and acquisition of money for him it's the verb of acquisition it's not having that money and you see this and people that get a million dollars they want 10 they get 10 they want a 100 they get 100 they want to be a billionaire right and I can tell you knowing many billionaires that some of them are happy and some of them are intensely unhappy people it really depends on how well they've managed their relationship to dopamine because ultimately it's not about money right dopamine is just a currency so healthy relationships are absolutely fundamental here's what we know many many people are struggling nowadays from what we hear of as the isolation crisis but all it takes is one trusting reliable relationship to start to shift that in the right direction I you know I am so adamant about this one of the most powerful things that anyone can do believe it or not is to have someone each morning that they text good morning to I know this is going to sound trivial corny and I'm happy to take the heat on this one find a a friend and in particular men who lack friends completely because there's a greater percentage of those although it's certainly the case that many young women and women are um lonely as well find someone who you can communicate with each morning just a good morning text seriously this is one of the most powerful things you can do to check in with another member of your species each morning you don't have to have conversation you don't have to talk about what you're going to do each day knowing that someone else out there in the world cares about us each morning when we wake up makes us feel incredibly part of the tribe I do this with let's see one two two friends religiously one from time to time and a few others kind of kind fall in and out of the mix it's an extremely powerful thing to do you're part of a community can I ask there are you does it matter what you say because in my group chats we we tend to tell each other to off and stuff and we we roast each other that's fine too even better if it's elaborated with how do you sleep what are you doing today what's your plan for the day and you reach back is it about showing concern and care for them and having that reciprocated or is it just about the communication itself someone cares enough to think about you first thing in the morning you know people are really isolated we move away from our families now and by the way these could be family members that you're communicating with but the idea that someone is thinking of us first thing in the morning even if it's just like a operational thing like okay here we go good morning the idea that there's some regularity some expectation and understanding of a social connection that's reliable is immensely powerful you know we've heard a lot even from the US Surgeon General about the isolation crisis and the need for more connection and certainly that can and should be in the form of walks with people coffee meals Etc yes yes and yes but a great starting place that's very low bar is just a good morning exchange even by text phone would be better each morning I do this as an adult with two friends good morning good morning if I don't hear from either one of them by noon I start to worry a little bit not because they're in any kind of trouble but it's just become such a routine part of my day it allows you to feel part of something bigger than yourself we are not meant to live our lives in complete isolation in complete relationship only with our goals it has to be in relation to other people and our goals this is the importance of going to the workplace this is the importance of having a place where you work if you don't have a place of work going to a cafe or a library seeing faces in the morning now some people don't want want to see any faces in the morning they're not ready to quote unquote face the day that's fine but at some point seeing other people for some period of time even just briefly on the street saying hello vitally important you know we evolved we we are a primate species we are Old World primates we evolved to look other people in the eye and for them to look back at us even if just to say hi as they walk their dog now some people don't have anyone it's really sad but some people don't have anyone to even exchange this basic text with in that case I highly recommend that you adopt an animal a dog can accomplish a tremendous amount not everything but a tremendous amount in terms of making us feel connected we are then a caretaker they're taking care of us there's empathy there there's all sorts of wonderful things if you can't have that you can get a fish seriously some being a plant some living being that we're responsible for and that relies on us and to some extent that we rely on as well is so crucial we have huge amounts of neural real estate devoted to this humans especially you know most of the brain is designed for visual processing for movement and then you start to look at okay like what's kind of the third element well it's language and social connection so find someone that you can exchange a morning text with on a consistent basis ideally every day has this come naturally to you because you don't strike me as an individual that this comes naturally to I'm not also okay you mean I'm I'm a bit of a a loner is that the sense I a loner I I would be perfectly okay and there was a year of my life where I feel like I didn't interact with anyone when I was building my first business in a small room in a rough area of the UK but I'm someone who if left to my own devices probably wouldn't interact with anybody and but you strike me as the same I have my dog as well but yeah a bit I don't have a dog right now I'm getting another one soon I must say I can spend long periods of time alone but I crave social connection and more so as I get older you know I think um most of the challenges in my life have been around trying to resolve the need to get work done that I'm really passionate about and the let's just call it what it is the isolation required for that the discipline the organization that's required for that and the desire to to be socially connected now I've been very fortunate to have a lot of really close friends and I'm in communication with them on a regular basis and I've been closer to some than others there's some that I'm really close with I talk to all the time every day I'm close with my sister I talk to my parents a fair amount you know more than some less than others depends on the family structure um and a few friends are just absolutely Central to my life and well-being I think when you have a romantic partner that you live with or that you're in communication with then becomes more frequent but even there you know I think it's important to still maintain healthy friendships and of course people differ on this spectrum I don't think you need a lot of friends I think you need one really reliable good friend or more depending on you know what your needs are and I think that as I've gotten older I realized that you know the the best things in life success in particular but also hard times are best shared with other people and the best way to make friends really is twofold you know a friend of mine once said this he said you know people with interests are interesting so people so if you're interested in things you know going and interacting with those things even if they're within books Etc have interests genuine interests don't just learn things for learning sake but just have interests and then the other is that if you are not the sort of person for whom like friendships are just pouring over you and people want your time then be of service you know this notion of be the person who sends the good morning text now if somebody never reciprocates well then okay maybe you look elsewhere and and send your your energy elsewhere but be the person who checks up on somebody on a family member or friend on a regular basis be the person of service and um you can volunteer you can help people in any number of ways I mean the great thing about a dog or just taking walks is that you you'll find if you do it continually in the same neighborhood over and over you start to run into the same people and it becomes a hello maybe they become a friend maybe it's just the familiarity maybe it's the Barista that you say hello to each morning you know these things are really what I think we evolved in fact I know we evolv to do and they trigger activation of these circuits that are so fundamental to our sense of of well-being and safety it it largely has to do with with our ability to predict the future I mean right now we're in a political landscape and a you know just a world landscape that's so uncertain and so divisive you know just having some things that are just good let's just call it what it is goodness just good natured humans being good-natured you know being kind to one another and not in any kind of manipulative way just really being kind to one another and then upon that one can layer you know a couple extra hours of work where you're highly motiv at than getting back out take your you know your lunch outside and maybe you don't see anybody you know people who are isolated probably have to do more work to interact with other people but there are ways to do this and you know for people that struggle with addictions like the pornography addictions or alcohol drug addictions and other like behavioral addictions I mean there are zero cost programs essentially in every city around the world that people can access some of the social connection and support for those that again are completely zero cost for people that um are interested in exercise you know there's usually like running groups there's usually a threshold one has to get over I'm not one to join a running group or work out with other people this is not my kind of thing but I do require I found um I need healthy social connection when did you figure that out because there was an age I can tell exactly when I figured it out so I know there must be one for you where you kind of figure it out yeah I mean I grew up in a big pack of boys at the end of my street growing up uh we all played together then skateboarding in that world I was just really surrounded by people all the time when I got serious about school and research there were a lot of days and nights I was alone and at that time I'd listen to books or I'd listen to music um I still had friends but I was less social and I think it wasn't really until my mid-30s that that I started to realize like whoa like okay even though you know I had a girlfriend I was I was lonely and I was starting to accumulate some unhealthy patterns of behavior where I was just seeking Connection in unhealthy ways and as I've built up my friendship group and that also of course requires being a good friend and I suppose there are a few people out there that probably say that I'm an unreliable friend but I think if you were to pull my 10 or 15 closest friends they'll tell you I'm the guy that checks in now I probably upset a few people because I don't check in on everybody but it's true I've got a list I actually have a list it's not in this notebook of about 10 or 15 people it's a list of 30 people total that those are my core people people and I make it a point it's not because I'm regimented or protocoling any of this I make it a point to check in on that person I haven't called that person in a little while but then there's that Core group of people that I make sure to check in with every day at least every week and that like without whom like I don't really want to live it's not that I want to die but life's just so much better with those people in my life but how does someone make that list that 15 names you have it's all feel it's the people that I accept and that accept accept me you know my patterns of communication are a little weird it's gotten me into trouble in life for sure I'll be you know a good friend of mine once said you know that I'm like the little um orbiting uh flying robot in Star Wars I'm like there and then I'm gone and people that know me and by the way he's a very close friend know that I'm gone but I but I'm back and so I tend to give things my full attention I'm like 10 out of 10 attention and then I need my space to reset and that hasn't always been healthy but I've done my best to try and get better at it over time and people that make that list are either the same way a few a few of them are definitely the same way where I'm like I haven't heard from them in a while but then when I sit down with them or we have a phone call it's like they're really there in fact some of these people will say let's talk tomorrow let's talk tomorrow and it never happens and I know they're not flaky I know that they're doing other things and then when they're ready and we get on a call man it's the richest interaction I've ever had it's so deep and so rich I'm like I get so much out of a 10-minute conversation it's like yes we're an hourong conversation and then there are friends that I'll hang out with for a week I'll go visit um go for a hike with but it's the richness of the interaction that matters for me not the frequency not the frequency that's right and then for me I think people who consider me a good friend or people who understand the intensity that I bring to things and you know the love and care that I really have have for them and that if they need me I'm there like I will tell you I've had some hard times some recently and it was amazing I had people descending on my home to be with me you I'll tear up if I talk about it some of them are names people are familiar with in the in the podcast space and I was like oh my goodness like I like I've not had that you know I will get uh emotional you know they came to my home and they sat with me and yeah they picked me up and they reminded me who I am and um you know I I've just such immense gratitude for that um you know I'm a 49y old man um I've done some things correctly I've done some things I regret um I've strived to be the best person I could be at the time doing the best I had with what I had and they know that and I know they know that not just because they told me but like you can feel it and I've been blessed enough not just to know these people but also that when they've been in need that I've had the opportunity to go to them you know and I had to do that several times recently things that had nothing to do with me you just sometimes people will outright ask for help sometimes they'll say they're in danger sometimes you just sense it and it's like that's it I'm driving you know um getting in the car and um and I've learned the best thing the way you build that kind of friendship and network is by showing up when that hard stuff isn't happening and you try and give your full attention and sometimes that requires putting away the phone and sometimes it means you're both on your phones and you're just hanging out and you're watching a game or you know it doesn't mean being like forcing yourself to be somebody you're not but it means paying attention and um yeah and giving giving a significant portion of our elves to try and really like be there for people because ultimately I think that's what we want in social interactions you know we want listening we want shared experience we want all that stuff and that stuff's great but ultimately it's like when you ask who makes the list it's like I'm thinking of these people now it's like I feel like they're always with me you know and um I wouldn't trade any amount of money any amount of anything for that and I think that like a really good life includes some of that so you know forgive me for being emotional um or don't it doesn't really matter to me I just feel like uh that's the real stuff that makes life really worth living and it has nothing to do you know uh with dopamine or U maybe it does or it doesn't matter what the mechanisms are what matters is that we all have that capacity and it starts by just showing up on a regular basis showing somebody that you can care about them enough to think about them each morning and and send them a quick good morning text that's it and if they don't reply okay and if they do okay and once the reciprocation starts and you start to feel of cruded up just a little bit you're like oh wow like there's something I can rely on in this crazy dizzying sometimes exhausting real hard life and then when the good stuff happens you got that many more people to celebrate with and that much more intensely so yeah appreciate you letting me share that it's um it's something that uh at this stage of life I'm like okay like I know a few things there's a lot I still have to learn but that one's for sure you friendship is it's vital you went through a bit of a bit of a storm this year to say the least and I've been through many a storm in my life I've been through many a media storm when the media came for me and wrote things about me and I've and I don't think anyone that's not been through that before understands how it feels because for me when it happens to me there's this real sense of Injustice and there's this desire for me to want to jump out and correct things and scream and shout and correct the world but I also know that I can't and I when I saw again I didn't see anything but I'm from a far looking at you know social media when I saw you going through a similar thing my two things happened the thing one was I wanted to understand the protocols of a man who writes about protocols has a book coming out about protocols I wanted to understand what he does in that situation and if he's any more immune than I am because I'm certainly fragile in that regard but then also I saw this other wonderful thing which I think you've expressed there is I saw your friends show up I I saw them speak out about your character and who you actually are and I saw them literally show up at your location I saw someone like Lex Freedman show up for you it showed up at my home several times he he was just there like literally one day I just like look up and Lex is in the room it's kind of like a dream right like Le like Lex Freedman with the suit and the whole thing and um he was just there to just be there you know um yeah that was a challenge um you know as you pointed out the hardest thing about that and I I realized like most people who aren't public facing um won't experience this but I think everybody experiences something similar at some point in their life especially now with social media where things that are being said about you are just fundamentally not true fundamentally not true and they're being cast in a way in a context that is just wrong and you want to say no that's not how it was or the context is completely wrong or there's a completely other side of the story that you'd love to tell but either because of how that will land and how people misperceive or contort that or simply because you have the etiquette and the respect to not do that because there are sometimes many different parties involved um you refrain and in our case I decided to just mainly focus on the work at hand although I've talked a bit about this on Joo willings podcast be talk about it here the pain comes from being potentially misunderstood and also from the understanding that we didn't always necessarily do everything right in fact we may have made some mistakes and the understanding that the public forum is not the place to work out the details of that that's not how healing comes despite what people might believe that is not how healing comes and I don't care if it's a high school situation or a podcaster or a celebrity or a politician that is just not the way that humans effectively settle their differences there are consequences but it's not how things really get settled and I think we have proof of that given the last few years so in that case and I'm not trying to be diplomatic or you know kind of um slalom through this I think what I'm trying to do is make it effective and hopefully useful for everybody what do you do when you're hearing and seeing things about you or others that you affiliate with that you just fundamentally disagree with well you have three options you can counter The Narrative you can say nothing right or you can agree and here in I think lies the challenge in being an adult a real adult in the realest sense of the word a real adult knows when to say you know what some of the stuff they're saying yeah wish I chosen differently but a real adult also knows to say but some of the stuff they're saying no that is not what happened that's not the context and this is categorically false now those things often are interdigitated okay now at the extremes they're not interdigitated but oftentimes they're interdigitated and what people have to realize is that online in comments in certain forms of media it's just highly skewed you're getting just one perspective in the context of science we'd say this is like cherry picking data looking at one particular portion of the graph or throwing out a bunch of experiments because the data weren't what you wanted which in science is like terrible only second in terms of terrible to actually making up data right okay so I think the challenge is to that to so I know that the challenge in those circumstances is to do what in the end I ended up doing which was to sit down and realize that was the circumstance I was in and then to try and make a really good decision about what to do and that I do believe is best achieved through having really good friends really good co-workers and family members who can be really clear optics for you when you don't always have the clearest Optics meaning they can hear your ideas and you can spitball what might happen in case a b or c but it's not about being tactical it's not about being strategic it's about remaining true to yourself and in my case I just felt that I didn't want to get into the details um and at the same time I acknowledge there's always a learning in these things you asked whether or not knowing protocols can help well certainly sleep was important I managed to sleep there were some days I slept less than others people had theories he looks tired this and that sometimes that was related to earlier recordings that I tended to just push too hard anyway um sometimes it related to you know being kind of troubled about the circumstances so I think that one can use physiological size you can use non-sleep deep rest and I certainly relied on those tools and continue to friendship and social support getting a poll of opinion from people that you really trust you don't want to get too many opinions often you want to get just enough and just a variety of them that you can make the best informed decision I don't really believe believe in polling a 100 people about a circumstance and then you know taking a vote pros and cons that the mind doesn't work that way so in the end you know I I voted my conscience and I voted my heart um by continuing to just put out content so people could learn about science-based tools for mental health physical health and performance I think as time goes on I may elaborate more on some of the circumstances but I think in the end you know people listen to my podcast because they're interested in getting better sleep in exercise protocols and hearing from the best scientists and clinicians so that they can better themselves in their own life and people speculate all sorts of things it's also interesting to see how we presume so much not just about public facing people but about other people in the comment section you know for instance on my Instagram page I have rules it's classroom rules you can call me names if you want you can say most things but I sort of treat it like a classroom what would I tolerate in the classroom and if people start attacking each other you're going to get a warning and if you keep going I'm going to block you just just because first of all it's my page right this whole notion that you're not allowed to block people is crazy right it's your web page it's your classroom yeah you have every right you can say you can do whatever you want I mean where is the rule that says that you won't tolerate or that you need to tolerate whatever you know people swearing at each other very different to me than people swearing so people can swear fine swear at each other well then I'm going to say hey hey hey like stop this do it again you're done at least here go elsewhere and there's so much presumption we think we know these people on the internet and we really don't on the other hand there's certain people like Lex like you I'm really delighted in this conversation like Rick I like to think like me like I am who I am now you're not seeing every dimension of my life but frankly you're not supposed to and I think there's this inherent desire to know everything about everybody m um that we see online in comment sections and on Instagram and and frankly it's inappropriate I grew up in an era where that wasn't right in fact my my father um once told me he again he's from Argentina and he said you know there's this funny thing in the United States you go into somebody's office and they've got all these pictures of their kids facing outward he said you go into somebody's office in certain parts of Europe or in South America and their picture of their family is facing them so on my dad's desk in his office when I was a kid he had a picture of me and my sister and my mom and it faced him because those are for him he wasn't like here are my kids here's my wife here's like my life and I I love that that's and that's kind of how I was raised you know you keep certain things Inward and certain things are outward so I don't know I I that's the model I was raised with and I rather like that this notion that we have to share every aspect of ourselves on social media is crazy and I think it's actually detrimental if I was if I was a fly on the wall when you were going through that what would I have seen and I what cuz I'm want to trying the reason I'm asking this question is super clear because if you were a fly on the wall when I was going through some of my hardest times you would have seen someone that was really struggling okay so I'll say this that was definitely not my hardest time um hardest times for me were the door's locked I'm 14 I'm like behind locked doors I don't know if I'm going to get out when I'm going to get out you know I called the one person I knew would pick up guy named Steve rugie shugi who's my team manager for Thunder and spitfire wheels I called him I said shugie what what am I going to do I'm locked up in this place and his response was bro you're the most normal guy I know what am I supposed to do you know I thought oh my goodness what am I gonna do um yeah that was scary that was like what do I do I'm 14 I have no agency I I don't I don't mean like marketing agency I had no ability like no money no anything no it worked out other hard times that time I talked about July 4th after that fight what am I going to do with my life I'm a complete loser other times you know I've had this weird Karma with mentors I've had three amazing scientific mentors and the relationship between mentors and science mentor and students in science used to be much closer you'd get really close my undergraduate adviser was an amazing person my graduate adviser was like a mother to me was a truly amazing individual ual and my postto adviser also incredible and I was incredibly close with all of them and it was suicide cancer and dead at 50 cancer and dead early 60s like three people I was super close with and when Ben the third guy died I thought well there's only one common denominator that's me I thought I was cursed really yeah I'm like I work for you you die you know and I was like like what is going on here but then I did what I only know how to do which is you trans mute the pain into useful things and I started thinking okay how do I want to spend the rest of my life I want to be of service I want to take what I know in science I want to teach people things that help them and I didn't know exactly how I was going to do that but it birthed the podcast I also had three dead mentors I was a scientific orphan in science there's also a lot of trying to live up to the reputation that they expect of you well mine are all dead so some people say what do your colleagues think of the podcast I would say about a third of them like it they think it's cool and they say that to me about a third probably think it's great that people pay attention to science but are like some of it is more Health oriented and a third probably hate it for whatever reason either jealousy or they don't like the way I present things and I'm good with all of that because guess what my advisers are dead I'm a grown-up you do you I'll do me we're all good and frankly we'll see how it all works out meaning they're the ones who have to live with themselves I'm the one who has to live with me so like I'm not responsible for other people's feelings and they're not responsible for me so so cool so it's symbiotic what I eventually discovered was huh you can reach 40 and have a great career I was tenured at Stamford and had a bunch of things but wow like certain aspects of my life were still challenging I had you know those three deaths plus you know um this was some years ago unrelated to the recent events I you know had a really important relationship and just like end after a lot of years of really slogging it out and trying to make it work and you know failure is not something I'm used to in fact a friend of this woman um I was at a at a retreat and we were talking about it and I was really distraught about the end of the relationship and she said you're not used to failing are you and I almost said like yeah and I said you're right you're right i' I've been successful in career and and a Rel a relationship that I we were both really invested in and we just didn't have the skills I made my mistake she made hers but we really really fought hard and it didn't work out and I was like wow like okay I had a failure like a legitimate failure and you could say well was it really a failure you learn but look there were elements of failure right we had invested a lot of years lot of energy and there was a lot of love but why why does that make you emotional I can see it in your face it's um well this relates to a lot of these things um and I I suppose I I feel comfortable enough to open up about this I think that you know some people might have the perception that I'm like extremely self-interested I've had things thrown at me like he's a narcissist or what or worse you know like I have had one I've had many but I have one particular major challenge that I still strive to overcome and people can roll their eyes and they can say it's but I know this to be absolutely true which is that I have a very hard time letting go a very hard time letting go if somebody dies like I can handle that but like loss and letting go of people I care about is really hard and it's also coupled with this kind of style that I have of I'm like very present and then I need to go take care of myself right um in healthy ways so that can be confusing to people I realize that but there's this thing where like the idea of things ending is super hard and as a consequence I've stayed in relationships far too long I mean you know I sometimes joke but it's not funny it might break up protocol sucks and it really needs work because everyone close to me who knows me really well and who I trust says you stay in relationships way too long that were either faded to fail or that we're clearly going to fail at some point you just kept slogging away now sometimes I slogged away in the wrong ways and they did too but somehow I've um I've really struggled to move on from things and as a consequence I've stayed in things far too long that never had a chance that were really unhealthy and in particular I've taken on things that were just far too difficult from the beginning and so that relationship was a beautiful relationship I'm fortunate that I'm still friends with that person although we have to keep a certain amount of distance just at healthy boundaries and you know I get emotional because like damn it like we fought so hard like so hard and it was all out of love but I think it I know that it failed because we just didn't have the skills the timing wasn't right and I'm certainly not talking about this most recent relationship you know this year is hard stuff this was some years back but like we fought so hard and like I would have done anything and she would have done anything to make it work and I'm just like I'm not a quitter I'm far from perfect believe me but I'm not a quitter and as a consequence I think after that it for a while it just really changed the way that I interacted with things I I just didn't quite recover and one could argue that the emotion that's coming up for me now means that I didn't recover but I know I just I just refuse to call time of death I just refuse to call time of death even when it's long since dead and that's a mistake and it's something I'm really working on now because it hurt me it it's not good for other people and it dovet tales with a bunch of other unhealthy ways of being um but what I know for sure is that it's not selfishness it's not that I'm trying to avoid pain for myself it's related to my failure to be able to just tolerate pain in other people and myself simultaneously there's something about empathy gone wrong in those circumstances does that link to your childhood parents the parental separation and them yeah so people I pay a lot of to tell me that it no doubt does but what's weird is I never lament the separation of my parents I don't sit back and go I wish they had stayed together they were both wonderful people they both have wonderful Partners like I've had a magnificent life I've had a great life like everything I've sought to do has happened and there's still things I want but I think that um I was talking to Martha Beck about this recently there's this feeling with a dog where I love the dog and they love you back particular my dog Costello right I loved him and he loves me back and so it's like empathy but then you it's returned it's like a perfect circle it's like the energy is like the more I love the more love I feel the more love and I think with people it's not like that right you know people are going to disappoint us Etc but they can also Delight us but I think that there's been this problem where my empathy goes too far and I'm sure as I'm saying this people are like oh God he's trying to mask this and empathy no I can wholeheartedly say didn't always lead to the best choices and I own those choices but meaning I'll take responsibility for my part I won't take responsibility for other people's part right it's always a two-way street but when we have a sense of empathy and that other person isn't right for us and we continue to try and like feed the relationship it's not about trying to avoid getting them upset but somehow we get into these unhealthy Dynamics and then you know it can really bring out the worst but some really like unhealthy parts of people you know I think probably the hardest thing in life is is romantic relationships some people might say it's work but I think it's the hardest thing in life and people say Well when it's right it's easy I don't know I think it depends on how complicated a person you are you know um I think it depends on how complicated a person you are and the extent to which the other person is willing to do the work I've really seen this I've also had wonderful relationships whereby we're each willing to do the work on selfcare and communication you know Paul Ki said this not on my podcast but I think he was telling Whitney Cummings on a podcast you know if you were to list out the hundred most important things in romantic relationship you would just say self-care and communication 50 times and I think that's absolutely true because we need safety we need acceptance yes those are foundational non-negotiables necessary but not sufficient but I think we need communication and self-care and those are hard and you know I'm still learning you trying to build those skills I absolutely want a family so this is super important to me um and I'm putting a ton of work and effort into it so I didn't realize we were going to go into this territory but I will say for people who are struggling with relationships just know that you know you can have amazing friendships and still struggle with romantic relationships or vice versa again like friendships and I have male friends and female friends mostly male friends but a few female friends um that I'm very close with like it's just been amazing I'm have a great relationship with my sister I think I have a very good relationship with my parents with my uncles and aunts like like with my co-workers my ability to pick business partners and co-workers just I only hit Bull's eyes like I love my team and we get along great and little things get worked out quickly and um but I think everyone has one or two areas of life where it's a bit harder and just try to learn the skills and I'm working on it like like you and me both though I I it didn't come naturally to me my parents although they never separated I was willing them to because I was they they were just they hate Hate's a strong word it appeared that they hated each other you know watching my mother scream at my my father for seven hours a day every my mother's Nigerian my dad's English was it was a traumatic experience and the thing it left me with is this clear notion which I left the household with at 18 was that a relationship is prison and I was it was so hard wide into me cuz I thought my father was in prison so every time someone was interested in me growing up I would self reject I would reject them so I'd pursue them and then when they turned to me and said okay let's be in a relationship I would persuade them out of it I would tell them why this was a terrible idea because I was getting the feeling that I vicariously learned through my father I was I'm about to basically lock myself in a prison where this person's going to SC going to be able to control me in my freedom so I rejected relationships up until about 27 years old so you know and then even that relationship wasn't a straight line because two years in she turns around and say she doesn't like having sex with me turns out she's got her own traumas around sex so we have a year where she's on the other side of the planet I didn't have the tools as you say to understand what how to navigate such a conversation so for me I'm emasculated I'm going maybe there's something wrong with me she doesn't want to have sex with me dump her and then but she was the right person and what the the tldr of that story is a year later I end up flying to the other side of the world apologizing to this person for my lack of tools my lack of communications skills cuz it was the right person at the wrong time and we did the work and that was long and it was hard and it's still hard but it's in an amazing place at the moment oh you're back together yeah we live together she's flown from back from barley two years ago we live together the best the right person for me but it's hard work good for you you like hard work it's a wonderful Story I mean it's a happy story regardless of ultimately how it turns out because one can sense like the real uh Central cord of Love there and um and the the desire to make it work I mean it's it's so interesting this notion of make it work you know we again just as being a functional adult means saying yep you're right about this but no I'm going to Stand My Ground in relationships people say relationships take work of course they do and then the question is how much work relative to how much ease and it's highly individual and there's no handbook for this there's no handbook for it and and so and the reward on offer cuz I was convinced that she was the most amazing person I'd ever met it just so happened that she turns around to me one day and says she doesn't like having sex with me yeah that's rough that's rough right especially for a young you have no concept of what that might be you think maybe you're bad in bed or something but as she did the work on herself and I did the work on myself she unlocked a bunch of traumas around sex and how she'd been treated with sex as she grew up what she she resolved and she's been very public about this this is why I can share it and I did a bunch of work on myself and how to deal with how I communicate when someone says brings me such a thing and after a year of her working on that and a year of me working on myself we found ourselves in a place where it turns out she loves sex now she's arguably even more sexual than I am in many respects completely different individual but it just require and I I have to give the ending there because people are going to be wondering but it required a lot of work on me and myself and where I've come from and the situation of my my family and her and the experience she's been through and we found ourselves together now in a great place place when that still requires work but in a great place so you know everyone's everyone's struggling with some you know my family's not great we we're not that close I'm not that close to certain members of my family I've struggled with romantic relationships made all the mistakes I struggle with with platonic relationships with my friends I'm not the guy that's able to check in I like being alone you know it is what it is we're all you know uniquely challenged in some way so I've got a great amount of empathy for what you shared and I I really appreciate you for sharing it because there's so many people that can relate in various ways I'm one of them um and I think it's important because we don't talk about it enough well thank you for sharing your experience and for giving me the opportunity to share a bit um you know the conversation started around you know hard circumstances and you know it's about taking stock of where we trust ourselves um to make the right decisions where we need work and yeah relationships are hard but I do think that well certainly now I'm feeling um more ease you know more seamlessness with them certainly with friendships as I mentioned you know we all have these areas of proficiency where we are you know where we find that things are kind of easier or even easy for us they just kind of happen direct relationship between effort and outcome right and then these other areas where we feel like we're rolling a boulder uphill keeps coming back and crushing us and we keep doing it and I think that you know there's no simple or Universal answer um but you know I think the rewards that come from a relationship where there's been a lot of hard work and things get resolved even in one little domain yeah are so tremendous you know I think that's really um related to this sense that like when things end it's just so feels so devastating I I really believe that things can be talked through I really do I think that um you know resent and anger um They don't serve anyone they really don't and people are probably hearing this and say well that's a self-serving narrative but really I'm talking about it in in myself too I I don't carry any resent and any any anger you know I sometimes wish people had made different choices but ultimately like we can't control what anyone else is going to do or say or think and that's terrifying right people can really hurt us right they can really hurt us and we would love to create a world in which we're completely safe but I think that a lot of the work I've been doing lately is really around um you know kind of like touching back into maybe a a younger version of myself that um wasn't so walled up wasn't um so focused on what's going to happen in two or three iterations of something just really being as present as possible really focusing as it's probably become clear today a few times I'm like the amazing gifts that I have in my life right now that pursuing goals is great and wanting things is great certainly there are things I want and want to build mostly in the domain of relationships and family but but also just like really savoring like having one's health or having um the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation like this like like what a what an extraordinary life we each have if we really pay attention to some of these gifts I used to think that if we paid attention to those gifts and focus too much on gratitude that it would make us complacent but all the data of course and my own experience as I do this more and more really emphasize how all it does is give us more energy more anticipation of what's possible and the great things to come and you know it can all start to sound a little cliche like just be happy with what you've got there there's no just in that statement I'm saying be happy with the things you've got and from that state new things emerge more energy comes and you can start to really navigate forward not just sit complacently and like stop there um I think it's our Essence as biological beings and psychological beings and if you will Spiritual Beings if that's your you're leaning to to want um to want more I think that's normal but we have to savor what we have also and I think once we Savor what we have we have more energy to want more and and that's that's the perfect circle that just is I guess it's more of an upward spiral and here I'm sounding very abstract but I could easily and you know exhaustively put everyone to sleep with long mechanistic descriptions of how research on motivation or dopamine or um any number of different neural systems or physiological Systems Support all of that I think the most important thing is that people are honest with themselves about what they can reasonably work on right now and to be you know gentle with themselves enough to like coax themselves forward but occasionally Scruff yourself and be like it's time you know it's time and um I don't know it's certainly been an interesting life th far I'm still navigating you know and um I certainly don't have all the answers but as I learn I try and share what I do learn what has helped you on that Journey that journey to really kind of because the way I heard it is you're someone that's orientated towards pursuing your goals and you're very very driven in that regard but you're you're kind of having to kind of maybe this is not the right word but kind of unlearn a natural disposition and shift more towards another state you talked about therapy there you um what has helped well I think you know I was forced into therapy as a way to get out of lockup I had to to stay in high school I had to go routinely and so I did um I think it can be very helpful provided there's good rapport support and the person offers Insight that lends itself to action right it's not just about finding someone to support and listen someone has to inspire action that makes you a better person okay that and that's really important so not just talking about playing with your problems you know story fondling as it's sometimes called I think one has to understand that there's a relationship between physiology and emotion so if I'm waking up and I don't feel well because I didn't sleep enough yeah I'll do nsdr I'll get some sunlight and I'll go exercise and generally I feel better but I also have learned to not Mask real feelings by simply trying to shift my physiology just as people are starting to learn hey yes there are useful medications for dealing with mental health issues but you still have to do the work you still have to focus on building career building relationships doing the work I think one of the most useful things that I've learned again I'm a big fan of Martha Beck she's triple degreed from Harvard but she also has this mystical spiritual side that it really brings together a lot I asked her recently I said you know what do you do when the thinking mind is like trying to analyze something predict things and then you also have all this feeling which one do you rely on she says Ah the the way to do this is you imagine you have your feelings in one hand and your thoughts in the other and they're kind of like in this battle it's like okay what's going to happen next what are they going to do this how you go back and forth typically people are texting and calling and looking and drinking and doing whatever is to try and resolve this battle the solution is to see that battle and to sit back into this third position that she calls the compassionate Observer you're like okay this is both happening these are both happening and to sit in this third position where you realize trying to reconcile just with your thoughts or just with your emotions or settle down your emotions or settle down your thoughts as futile to get in this third position where the acceptance of that suffering shows up and you're able to just like sit with the suffering and the moment she said sit with the suffering I was like no you know I don't want that answer but then she explained from that place of suffering you start to drop into what are the thoughts that make you feel a little bit looser and more relaxed in your body what are the thoughts that make you feel kind of more constricted and you just start to use that as a bit of a navigator and start asking questions like you know do I want to do this thing like do I want to drink this coffee or not am I just doing it compulsively do I want to exercise and it sounds very abstract extremely woo but the Brilliance of what she does and the Brilliance of that scenario is that it brings together all the Neuroscience that we know we have a thinking analytic part of the brain that does what I call dpos duration path outcome analysis we also have emotional states of the brain the lyic system it's sometimes called but it's a bunch of other areas too and it doesn't know the the calendar as Paul kti brilliant psychiatrist says feelings don't know that it's today in July 2024 it thinks you're eight years old that the lyic system your emotions they don't know the clock of the calendar it doesn't know how old you are it just knows you and circumstances and feeling so being able to step back from all of that is really what being a healthy human being is about and then realizing you're suffering like in that battle you're suffering and when you relax that a little bit and you go okay I'm not going to force myself to suffer as much now what feels right what feels right right now for like the next five minutes well then you can navigate the next five minutes maybe it's take a nap maybe it's have a meal maybe it's do a little bit of work maybe it's you don't know and you just sit there but then five minutes later you're able to pick the next best choice and the next best choice and pretty soon you're off and on your way because so often we get avalanched by our feelings or our thoughts or we can't sleep and it's just like a and people are losing their minds and they're online looking for a solution or they use distraction alcohol mindless scrolling by the way I love social media I teach on social media and I learn on social media from your podcast and Joe's podcast Lex's podcast and Tim's and on and on so I'm not demonizing it but mindless consumption inebriation numbing ourselves or forcing ourselves to do things that are not in service to our well-being none of that is good what's good is being able to sit with it and in doing that I've started to realize that you get back to what she calls and again the language sounds woo but who cares she's the one with 3D re from Harvard so call her whatever you want you know is the what she calls essential self which I think refers to our own unique wiring what really feels right to us trusting in our own goodness trusting that if we just navigate forward from that compassionate Observer place that we are going to be in some cases we need to be fierce we need to be warrior in other cases we need to be soft and compassionate and then we can be all of those things depending on what the the situation calls for and then we can just like sit back and move forward and that we're going to be okay in fact we're going to be better than okay and that when we bring that stance that like calm energetic stance to things and other people we also have a ton to give we can be in so much service this is one of the reasons I think people love Rick I think about Rick a lot Rick Ruben's a close friend and I'm very blessed and it's not because he's Rick Rubin the famous musician in fact I know zero minus one about hip-hop yeah I just don't it wasn't a genre I followed I like some of it but but one thing is that when Rick shows up he's just like there he's super present he's not there to give you anything but he gives and he's not there to take anything you he's just there and I think that's why people love him I think that's why people love him yes he's been super successful in all these different domains and when people try and poke at Rick that's something it really pisses me off you want to really get me worked up try and pick on one of my close friends like I that's a place where I am like you know come at me attack me all day and you people do but if you try and attack people I know in their true goodness Lex or Rick or any number of my different friends famous or not like that's when I'm going to you know that's when a side of me comes out that frankly I I'm proud of like I'm GNA hit hit you and I'm going to hit you hard I'm going to be fair but like you can't do that because these are really good people trying to do the best they can in the world and this is true me protecting my sister you know I'll also be the first if a friend is out of line to say something but the people I'm referring to here they show up with like all their goodness Joe's the same way and people talk about Joe and I'm like people have tried to get me to talk about him reporters have called me to try and set me up like a trap a snake air trap to say things about him no chance he's done things that I've seen that had nothing to do with me in service to others that are completely quiet that no one will ever hear about that absolutely tell me that he is a huge hearted person who cares about the world and takes care of people close to him and far away from him without the expectation of anything in return and I'm not saying this so that he likes me more I'm saying this because it's true and I think that you know Martha Beck's another one or people that like they just want to give and so when I see people attacking people and I can sense us about you we're getting to know one another here like the fact that you try to attack someone whose fundamental goal is to try and serve the world build things to serve like and there are a few things that get my adrenaline going like that but that's not okay it's not okay and I think it's really important that we stand up for people who are not known either we stand up up for them and that we say that's not okay you can't take cheap shots like that and so I think times are changing there times are changing you know the um I don't have anything against traditional media I see the way they capitalize on things they'll put different names and URLs and trying and bring clicks and stuff look they're just trying to make an income um and I think some of them presumably are good people just trying to do their thing what I love about podcasters what I love about the early you know the skateboarders I knew from the skateboard era some I still touch with now um punk rockers the people in Creative areas artists and musicians and Poets is like they didn't get into it because they thought people would like them or they'd make a lot of money and a lot of times they take ridicule they got into it because it's who they are it's their Essence they're just being them and I think we can really tell when somebody's just being themselves it's like their real Essence just brought forward and they're taking fire and they're taking shrapnel and they're and they do it anyway you know I'm I know he's very popular now um even though he's dead um but I've always loved Jean Michelle basia's work and if you watch that movie I don't know if you've seen the movie Basia not the the documentary but amazing movie it's got Dennis Hopper Parker posie um David Bowie plays um Andy Warhol it's an amazing cast William defo it's just an amazing cast and there's this incredible scene where Jean Michelle and benio Del Toro who I believe was playing Jean Michelle's friend who was Vincent Gallow Jean Michelle says to him he goes hey Benny how long do you think it takes to get famous and the answer that bonio Del Toro gives him is amazing he talks about how Fame ultimately just brings a lot of attack and how that can really collapse the artist and it's it's a beautiful two-minute Riff on YouTube that everyone should go watch and if anyone out there thinks they want to be famous I'll tell you you do not want to be famous famous takes away your freedom people say they want to be famous you absolutely don't what you want is you want a friend or friends that you love and that love you you want to have enough resources plus a bit more so that you feel safe right anyone that says you only need $70,000 a year in order to be happy because some study said that you need enough money so that you feel safe about your present in your future that number differs for different people okay so that's a study I don't care what the data say like look at the real world and usually it's a rich person saying you only need that amount of money by the way you need some sense of passion or connection to the world and you need a sense of Freedom that you can be you and that you won't get attacked for it we know this throughout history this has been proven over and over again so Fame is like frame takes away your freedom the rest of it social connection some resources a connection to some passionate exploration curiosity even if it's very private and no one ever sees it like those things are are really what make life Rich it really really does and I have fantasies about just disappearing taking a small group off to some hidden village and we do our thing but but I know myself too well I'd want to um I'd want to connect with the world more it's just in my nature to want to do that so I suppose I'm kind of hosed and I suppose the world's kind of stuck with me until they aren't but no I I have those fantasies as well and I arrive at the same conclusion that I'd eventually do something in the village which would bring me back to society and then bring me back to probably sitting in this chat well and you know I've thought about getting some people together and we should do this we could get a property put a bunch of houses put a gym a sauna could have a podcast St you but guess what they'd call it a cult they'd be like they started a cult right they'd find something be like they started a cult because I think to people that are not passionate creators and again I'm not just talking about podcasters but that aren't passionate creators they don't understand like they don't understand that certain people just need to create yeah and God bless them because we need somebody to write articles from a perspective that they don't understand to get other people to think things that aren't true because that's what they need to do like they serve an important role like in the aquarium of life on the coral reef of life you need the little like horseshoe crabs working there when you say like well what's the purpose it's part of an ecosystem it somehow indirectly serves the rest although sometimes it's kind of hard to tell and as we head into this election as as we head into like really uncertain times I think we tend to go the media or the podcasters or the the look everyone's doing the best they can with what they've got it's just some people are working a little bit harder to be kind and benevolent and giving and acknowledging we're all human and others are like pointing fingers so of all the protocols you've shared it seems like maybe the most important is friendship send that morning text find somebody that you can communicate with that will communicate with you that you trust you don't have to share a ton I don't want to give the impression that I sit there with my friends and like share all the inner workings of my mind and what's going on you know I mean that's why I have this notebook so I don't have to do that it's like I got stuff in here I never want anyone to see you know but yeah find a friend like friendship is huge and and it's the start of all great things right it it's the reflection of all great things inside of us right it's not the complete picture romantic relationship for many for most is really important get a dog get a fish get a plant sure but I think friendship really is like the most important thing that all of us can really focus on right now aside from partnership and children because of course children need us and um they need our our attention and our support but friendship is is super powerful and rather than talk about the isolation crisis the loneliness crisis I'd rather talk about some solutions and I think friendship maybe even just a morning text back and forth good morning good morning how'd you sleep pretty good not well okay bye next day it's there that being able to rely on that like clockwork like the sun rising and setting each day you can count on that it's just brings a lot of Peace it'll make you a better version of yourself do your friends know what you mean to them having gone through those difficult moments did you were you were you able to articulate to them how much you appreciated them for that I'll get emotional again I I don't I don't think they could know you know it's it's like there's one friend in particular um there's a guy who's actually very prominent in the skateboarding Community he he's quiet in that Community I I'll say his name because he's so humble you know he'll never say it for himself his name is Jim Theo and when I was 14 years old Jim who now runs a big company called Deluxe which is a bunch of companies and he he's kind of the he's kind of the mayor of the whole sport he's um back then I remember I was 14 this was after I got out of this place and um he rolled up to me at Embarcadero and he sat next to me he just like sat next to me gave me a coffee and some stickers and he is was like what's up man and he's probably about 10 years older than I am and we started talking and he gave me one of his books sorry Jim I'm G to embarrass him he had of these poetry books great book I still have it a loose change and he had another one called do the distance and he goes you should write okay and I started writing I started keeping a journal and that one interaction carried me through so many hard times now years later I had a really hard circumstance things were going well in my life I was making prog ress on a certain front that I've been challenged with with for some time and then one day just everything came crashing down and like magic Jim showed up I'm not I'm not saying he got a call from the universe somebody called him and he showed up and he just sat with me now I'm an adult at this point he just like sat with me and um and I hear from him every morning you know and I still text him every morning texted me today he's here in LA today we won't see each other so he's busy I'm busy we got work I would love to see him but he's busy and I respect that he's busy and he respects that I'm busy it's like wow you know 14 and then 40 some years and he's there again and I like to think I've been there for him too you know and you know when I was that kid at some point he knew in some way he knew EX exactly what I needed I needed those books I needed something and you know even when I tell him now about that he goes oh no that poetry is so bad you know he's embarrassed about that and I'm think no man you like saved my life with that stuff and I kept them I still have them and so I think he must have like sensed that I was a really like feeling person and I was really in a trench and we've seen a lot of our friends go dead or in jail and in trouble we've seen a lot of people do extremely well Jim's an amazing guy because he's the one who calls the decisions on a lot of things in the kind of social milu of skateboarding he's taken a lot of I don't want to get into the details but he's helped evolve skateboarding in some ways that it was very resistant to evolving you can largely credit the true diversity in that sport you know people talk about diversity but look at that sport look at the number of different races look at the fact that you've got straight kids gay kids trans kids you've got room for the kids who have parents and the parent involvement you've got kids that don't have any parents you've got people trying to help each other get sober and stay sober you've got people like Jim has taken so much publicly on the chin maintaining complete silence about his rationale except with one mission in mind which is keep the sport going in the healthiest way possible that's most inclusive for the most number of people because he knows the importance of having a place where kids that don't fit in in other sports can come but also the importance of having it be an Olympic sport which skateboarders on too and so this isn't about skateboarding I want to make very clear it's about JY and the fact that he understands his sense of purpose his sense of Duty he knew well enough that even though he was a professional skateboarder that he would better serve the community by doing something else which is to be a leader he leads quietly like I think about him all the time so do they know how much I appreciate them there's no way I could go on for hours about him the things he's done for me anyone that knows that qu knows Jim knows exactly what I'm talking about he'll never have a podcast he'll never go on a podcast maybe he'll bless us with coming on my podcast but some people like him like I hope they but people like him in my life and I hope they know but there's no card you can send that can capture all that I think it's just like checking in on on him every morning and just you know giving him a big hug when I see him you know and um I saw a tweet recently it was like normalized or no it was the dude with Sign guy who's super funny I think it said normalizing telling your friends you love them I don't think that was for women hopefully they're doing that too I think it's for men like I'm not shy about that I tell my friends I love you I've also had the experience of not doing that and I never see that friend again so I'm not trying to be overly sentimental right it's really about just like like living your life with as much heart forward as is safe and appropriate right so anyway um that's one example there's there's no way they could know he just sat with me I find this to be very interesting words because we think about the role of a friend in that situation of fixing things diving in there figuring out the problem and presenting the solution but you said he just sat with me oh man when Barbara Chapman my graduate adviser died I was devastated and she had two small girls and I knew her when she was pregnant with each one of them and I was close with their family and I went to the House of Flowers in San Francisco and her daughter get up okay one I think was probably about 12 the older one the younger one who by the way became a neuroscientist at that time was probably about nine and these two girls that I've known since they were essentially in the womb are there talking about their dead mother now I broke down I during my eulogy like I just lost it I was crying in front of my colleagues I was so embarrassed and at the same time like I just couldn't hold it back these two young girls get up there to talk about their dead mom and I'm thinking to myself oh my God everyone's just bracing themselves and they just said they're so strong they said the best part about our mom is that she spent a lot of unstructured time with us and that was it and they sat down and I remember thinking holy like that was it of all the things they did the baseball games they went to the things they did I'm sure they have so many memories and the thing they remember is most important is the fact that their mom spent a lot of unstructured time with them just hung out with them like just hung out with them and I think at some level like yeah we need people to show up when things are hard we need people to support us celebrate with us but like some ways like a really good friend is just somebody who just kind of hangs out with us Simon syic said that to me he said in those moments what you need is someone just to sit in the mud with you you don't need them to do anything they just need to be sat there in the mud with you and that that in part is the medal effect just knowing that there's someone else in the mud with you yeah um yeah you know I I again I don't want to focus on names people recognize because I don't want it to seem like it's Unique to them but I I mention names like specific names because they may resonate with your audience you know that's why I mention Rick or whatever or like a guy like Lane Norton I'm getting to know better like laye on social media is a pretty you know serrated edge guy right but he's he's a sweetheart he a kind person and he's got a ferociousness to him you know which is something I can relate to he you know and um and I see his loyalty to his kids and I see you know how he like his fingernails will be painted and people will tease him and but he does it because his daughter loves it and he also is the guy that's going to deadlift twice as much as anyone else and he's and he's got this forward Center of Mass on things and then I also just see like he's just such a loving person he loves what he does and and I hope people will start to look at people's personas certainly online but in real life and just start to like take them in a little bit like what are they trying to tell you when they're being a little bit annoying or what are they trying to tell you when they're frustrated by politics like like looking a layer deeper and trying to like see the person and feel the person as as an experience of them is like another way I think to be a really good friend because when people say like I see you I don't think they're like I see you like you need to do some eye gazing or something I think what it is I mean eye contact is important of course but I don't think it's it's related to like taking them in visually as much as just like really appreciating that they have all these different sides all these different facets you earlier you were talking about your relationship I mean what you describe to me is like real intimacy like sure things proceed along great then there's this challenge it's a big one there's some shame associated with it there's confusion and then people go into their different domains do their work come together and like share and then grow I mean that's intimacy it takes risk it takes a certain amount of healthy risk and um I think we can do this in all relationships and um you know I'm no psychologist and I'm still learning and Lord knows I have a lot of work to do but um I'll be damned if I'm gonna quit I'm gonna keep trying Andrew we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question to the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question left here for you is what is the true meaning of your life why do you exist goodness that's a tough one meaning it's hard to distill that down but I'll pause for a second in an effort to keep it uncharacteristically brief you know as I mentioned earlier all I have is my experience the knowledge that I gain from that experience and my words and for me the purpose of my life is to make the best possible choices that I'm capable of making at the time in terms of what to seek out what to learn and what to share and I think the real meaning of my life is to try and provide useful information and tools so that people can be a better version of themselves for themselves and other people and I know sounds lofty and kind of empty and cliche on the one hand but I mean it I wake up in the morning and I think what can I learn what am I excited to learn and then when I come across gems I just compulsively have to tell people about it but not because I need to do it for me it's because I feel like people need to know about this this can really help this can really help this can potentially really really really really help so I think that's the meaning of life for me right now right now and um at some point it may be just to provide care for little huberman um um at some point it may be something entirely different I've learned to not anticipate what the next steps will be for me um more than five years out you know I've seen some ridiculous speculation that I'm going to go into politics probably related to the fact that I kind of alluded to it once or twice I'm not going into politics I'll tell you right now there's no chance I'm going into politics it runs countercurrent to my nature and even if politics changed entirely it's not for me um what is for me is learning and adventure and sharing what I learn and that's the only way I know how to be Andrew thank you I did know you before today I obviously knew of you because everyone knows you on on the internet for all the work that you've done and all the things that you shared but I didn't know the man and the hours we've spent together today have really illuminated the man that you are and it's really most importantly illuminated your intentions which are so incredibly pure and wonderful and it's because of you that much of my podcast exists because I learn from your show it inspires me and that calls me to bring guests on oftentimes guests that you've had on your show that I've changed my life in some way so you've been a tremendous driver of both my development as an individual but also of this show inadvertently and also that's the case of all of my team because the 30 40 people that work with me here they're all massive fans of yours but most importantly they've had their lives improved because you exist and because you've taken very complex things and distilled them down and shared them with all of us in a way that we wouldn't usually have access to so that's such a tremendous gift that you've given and continue to give so thank you on behalf of myself and all of my team and everybody else that was so excited all my friends that were so excited that I'd be speaking to you today um I'm tremendously excited about your book I hear that there's a book coming out called protocols uh an operation an operating manual for the human body which comes out next year in the 22nd of April 2025 if there was ever a book I don't get excited by many books but having been such a fan of your work it is a book that I'm I consider to be essential we were talking about it yesterday we see it as we're almost like waiting for the like the Bible on this subject matter matter so I I'm going to link it below cuz I know it's currently available for pre-order pre-sale and I highly recommend if people find what you do to be of any value then this is the book to read um I've been doing everything I can to just get Snippets of it from people around you and the excitement and anticipation is palpable so thank you for taking the time to write that book because you don't have to you've got a big enough audience as it is you don't have to sit down and really distill it down for people um and more than anything just thank you I really really appreciate that what you do and that the fact that you exist and all that you've done for me and and all my my friends and people that matter to me so thank you on behalf of all of us us and I really really mean that from the bottom of my heart so thank you thank you I'll take that in and um I'm very grateful for the opportunity to sit down with you today I'm a huge fan and admirer of what you've done and what you're doing and uh right back at you in the sense that you have many many areas of success you don't need to do a podcast um but the fact that you do bring so much benefit to the world it's been just marvelous to see your Ascent which is just like pointed at the sun you just you guys are are doing such incredible work and continue to and um I have to say I I came here today expecting we were going to get into some science and to some protocols and I knew we were going to cover a lot of areas um but I didn't anticipate uh the depth of the conversation that we were going to have and I can say it's entirely the consequence of of your realness and and the uh that you know the genuine compassion that you bring to these kinds of conversations that's felt I also really appreciate the way you shared some of your own experience I can tell you're somebody who really cares about people and that your success is you know in no small part the consequence of that so thank you for having me here and to your team for having me here and um for for doing what you do it's clear you're Allin in every Endeavor and your nature is is an incredible one the fact that you can take on so many things and that you've embraced your nature to uh not want to go the traditional path I think that's an incredible and incredibly important example for people so I can also say that I think that uh we're going to be friends so you should pass me your number we'll we'll check in in the morning and we should grab a meal or a workout or whatever maybe just hang out so I I'd like to think that uh We've uh sparked a friendship we certainly have thank you Andrew thank you [Music] ah [Music]