#1042 - Dr Andrew Huberman - How to Reclaim Your Brain in 2026

Most people think about cortisol as a bad thing that you won't less of. Is that the right way to think about it? Not at all. Cortisol has been labeled a stress hormone, and it is involved in stress. We have a bout of stress. We have a spike of cortisol, so to speak. Cortisol, like other stored hormones, is bound to things. And there's a free form of cortisol. That's the active one. You don't want your free unbound cortisol to be chronically high. But we need to really think about why it was called a stress hormone in the first place. And the main reason is cortisol's job is to deploy energy sources for your brain and body to be able to react to things, think, and move. So cortisol naturally goes up a bit during stress, and it comes back again. Provided you don't ruminate on that stress too much on the stressor that is. The big eye opener for me was when I actually went into the modern textbooks on cortisol. Not the ones that most medical students learn from, but what the endocrinologists, the specialists really learn from. And what the circadian and sleep biologists now understand, which is the reason you wake up every single morning, even if you have an alarm clock, is because of something called the cortisol awakening response. So if we just step back from a typical healthy 24 hours, it looks something like this. A couple hours before sleep, your cortisol is low, your heart rate is low, your calm. Hopefully it's dim in the room. You go to sleep. Your cortisol is then at its absolute lowest levels for the entire 24 hours. And by the way, this is the same time when melatonin, the sleepy hormone, is at its highest levels. After about four or five hours of sleep, and typically in that first four or five hours of sleep is when you get your most deep sleep, slow wave sleep, non-rem sleep. Many people experience a transition into the sort of last third of their sleep for the night, and they tend to wake up around that time. And often they use the restroom and go back to sleep. Why did they wake up? Well, it turns out that your cortisol is starting to rise about two thirds of the way through the night. It's really creeping up throughout the entire night, but it's gone from this nadir to its starting to climb. And then at some point, let's assume you get back to sleep or you slept through the night. At some point, maybe six a.m. maybe eight a.m. depends on who you are and what your schedule is. You wake up. Maybe your alarm clock goes off. You wake up. You wake up because the cortisol level reached a certain threshold. It is literally the cortisol awakening response. It is healthy. It is good. And if I were to measure your cortisol at that moment and compare it to what people might call like a stress episode in the afternoon, you would say it's much higher than what stress induced. Okay, so then your cortisol continues to rise. And there's this unique opportunity in the first hour, maybe 90 minutes, but in the first hour after waking, where viewing bright light can increase your morning cortisol spike, as I'll refer to it, by up to 50%, bright light can come from sunlight, ideally, or from a bright artificial light, like a 10,000 lux artificial light, or even a very bright indoor artificial LED or incandescent light. Okay, why is this important? Well, we could explore all the biology of cortisol, and we can summarize it by saying you have this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that sets off cortisol, self-regulates, negative feedback loop, et cetera, et cetera. That's the normal regulation of cortisol, which basically can be summarized as, never allows you to have your cortisol too high for too long. It feeds back on itself and shuts it down. However, in the first hour after waking, your brain circadian clock has a unique privileged pathway that is separate from the HPA axis, where it can amplify cortisol only in that first hour. So you say, why would that be? This is nature's evolutionarily hard-wired mechanism for giving you the opportunity to boost your cortisol so that you have energy to lean into the activities of your day. And when I say energy, I'm not saying, you know, that's not like we're having to be in California at the moment, but not energy energy. I'm talking about glucose mobilization. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet, you're going to mobilize other energy sources. Your brain and body wakes up because of cortisol. You have the opportunity to boost that wakefulness even further by viewing bright light. Yes, you could exercise. Yes, you could drink caffeine. Turn it out caffeine if you're a chronic caffeine user, such as me, such as you. It doesn't actually increase cortisol that much. You could jump in a 40 degree Fahrenheit cold plunge. It doesn't actually increase your cortisol. All this nonsense going around the internet about, you know, women shouldn't do a cold plunge and if they do not as cold, okay, maybe, but it's always attributed to increases in cortisol. Cold plunge reduces your cortisol levels. You can look at the data. The data show that it goes down adrenaline goes up dopamine goes up nor epinephrine go up. So cortisol makes you alert. It makes you focus. And here's the key thing, spiking your cortisol in that first hour after waking is so, so important. Because that negative feedback loop mechanism kicks in about three hours after you've been awake. And that's why your cortisol then starts to drop late morning, early afternoon, later afternoon. And in the afternoon, if you have a bout of stress, no problem. You just have a little bit of cortisol bump adrenaline bump and it goes back down. If you don't spike your morning cortisol, what ends up happening is your cortisol system essentially the HPA axis is primed for stress events to give you big lasting increases in cortisol later, which make it hard to fall asleep, which make it hard to stay asleep, which are part of the reason why people have afternoon anxiety, all sorts of things. So you're actually supposed to feel a little stressed first thing in the morning. This is normal. This is healthy. And it sets you up for being more calm in the afternoon. Now, none of this is tied to whether or not you wake up at 8am, 6am, 4am, or 11am. This is not about chronotype. This is simply about the first hour after waking. But after about 90 minutes post waking, that opportunity to spike your cortisol goes away. So if you can't view bright light in the form of sunlight, get it from artificial light. You would do well to compound that with hydration, which by the way, for reasons that still aren't entirely understood, probably has to do with some electrolyte balance, et cetera. First thing in the day will also burst your cortisol. If you can't get in exercise right away, even just some skipping rope, jumping jacks, this kind of thing. Getting the body into a high cortisol state early sets you up for being in a low cortisol state in the afternoon and evening. And any cortisol that you might trigger through a stress event will quickly subside, unless you what's called flatten your cortisol curve by not spiking in the morning. And by the way, the curve that I'm describing high in the morning, lower into the afternoon, low, low, low as you get into the first hours of sleep. This is the healthy cortisol curve for men, women, kids, pregnant women, post mental pauses of women, it tends to flatten out a bit. And then you do additional things to get that spike earlier. So this one I hear all this stuff about, don't cold plunge, it increases core, it doesn't increase cortisol. And also this notion that we're supposed to avoid stress entirely, not true, you and I both generally agree on that, but how you time your stress is important. And the last point I'll make is that if you were to do say a very intense workout in the late afternoon evening, it's been demonstrated that will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels for a few hours. And not a problem, you can take a hot shower afterwards, do some slow breathing and calm down, provided you didn't fill up with caffeine prior, you could probably fall asleep just fine. But because you spiked your cortisol late day, what you find is that the next day cortisol is lower, which is one of the, not the only reason, but one of the reasons why you're a bit more sluggish the next morning. So, and this is why people is if they exercise too late in the day, their rhythm starts to shift. When we talk about your circadian rhythm shifting in response to light, it's the cortisol peak that shifting or flattening, which in turn adjusts your melatonin peak and trough. But cortisol think of it like the thing about this morning cortisol spike as the first domino in establishing essentially all the rhythms that you're interested in if you want daytime mood focus alertness night times. And so, these are things I've talked about for years and that we've talked about for years, but only recently has it become clear exactly why cortisol is that first domino in the chain. And we hear so often about dopamine, epinephrine, epinephrine, all of which are important, all downstream of cortisol. So, chronically high cortisol, cushing this disease, the things that give people moon face that cause memory deficits, all these sorts of things, that's when the cortisol curve is too flat for too long, meaning too high in the afternoon and evening. I won't say there's no upper limit to how high cortisol can be in the morning. There are people who have pathologically high levels of cortisol in the first hours of the day. Most people, even people with cushing's have pathologically low cortisol early in the day pathologically high cortisol late in the day. They've inverted that. That's right. And getting this curve right is so critical. It predicts longevity. It predicts recovery from everything from chemotherapy to pain relief. It's one of the things that I'm, you seem to be doing all the right things, plus these sort of outrageous, outrageously ambitious health protocols as well. Although I will commend you, if you're going to clean anything including your blood, I do suggest doing an austria or Switzerland because those are very clean places. Wonderful place to go in. Well, they're very clean countries. Yeah. What about the relationship between cortisol and burnout? You talked about sustained, chronically elevated cortisol, but I've also heard you talk about burnout is basically being wrongly timed cortisol over time. That's sort of stretched out. Well, what have you come to learn about handling burnout? Somebody feels that sense or I feel like I'm sort of close to that. What's going on and how can they try to intervene in that? So there seem to be two general forms of burnout. One is the, I'm exhausted in the morning and I just can't get into gear and then it's like caffeine, caffeine, caffeine exhausted. And then late day, okay, finally, you know, the caught the wave front and then I'm having trouble sleeping and then the whole thing repeats. Wired, but tired. Wired, but tired. The other form of burnout is where people just, it's like their cortisol is like a square wave function. Just up in the morning and all day long, it's sort of how I would describe my graduate school years, probably undergraduate graduate school years, postdoc. I think I hit a wall during my postdoc years. So that was, you know, that would be, you know, 30 or 35. And then at some point, you realize you just can't keep this going. And I think most entrepreneurs feel that way. At some point, you're just like, I can't do this. I mean, even the David Goggins and the camhains is they do sleep, right? They get sleep eventually. So I think the main way to think about burnout and exhaustion is to ask oneself, okay, if I had total control, when would I naturally wake up, when would I naturally go to sleep? Like, what would be my preferred times to do that? And then whatever your wake up time is to really treat that first three to six hours of your day as go time. And to do the things, bright light, hydration, exercise, caffeine, et cetera, that really push you into the day. But then really essentially doing all the opposite things that you do in the morning in the last, ideally four, but most people won't do that last two hours of your day. Dim the lights, caffeine, forget it. They should have halted that probably eight hours before sleep. Limit your hydration, right? Unless you're dehydrated, limit your hydration. You know, long exhale, breathing, anything that can bring your cortisol levels down and bring your melatonin levels up, which is why we were so bullish about dimming the lights later in the day. And you know, we were talking about the red lens glasses to block out short wavelength light, which by the way, a lot of people have said, well, you know, the study is showing that screen light disrupts sleep very variable between people. People have different levels of retinal sensitivity. So how much screen light will disrupt their sleep? But it's not just about sleep. There's a beautiful study published in Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences that showed that people who sleep in a room with an overhead light of a hundred locks, which is extremely dim. Show abnormally elevated morning glucose levels makes perfect sense cortisol mobilizes glucose. And this is through closed eyelids. Okay, so you have to get the light down to maybe one to three locks and you say one to three locks. It's basically dark, dark, dark, a candle light very is very low. A bright full moon where you say, oh, it's so bright out is actually only about one to five locks. So we think of these sources as very bright, but nature set us up to have bright mornings and dim dark nights. And some people will say, well, there's no light where I live. You know, listen, you don't need to see the sun as a as a delineated object. If you compare how bright it is, let's just say even in the dead of winter in the UK at nine a.m. Walking in a place with no artificial lighting outside, no street lamps versus midnight the night before in the same location. You'd say you can navigate in the one case without any artificial lighting without a what we call flashlight. You call a torch, but in any case, the the idea is that there's a lot of photons coming through and you want all of that early in the day. And you just want to do the inverse in the last part of the day. So I think to avoid overwhelming people because people have so much to do and think about get the first hour of your day right. Get the last hour of your day right and you'll greatly improve this morning cortisol peak late day cortisol reduction, which is what you want. And you'll get your natural clearing out of any melatonin that happens to be in your system because bright light quashes melatonin through a different pathway. But that also originates with the eyes goes through the supercars magnucleus and a couple other relays to your pineal shuts down melatonin production. And then late in the day, you just make it dimmer darker darker darker and you bring up your melatonin, you bring down your cortisol. But if you think about what's happened with screens, that it's stimulating. I think late last night I made the mistake of I watched a extended 60 minutes interview. I actually fell asleep to it. Is it the patriotic alone? No, it was the Trump one. Okay. I was curious. I hadn't heard an interview with him for a long time. And it was sort of combative, but it was an interesting one. And I was curious to see how that would go. And I fell asleep in about the last 15 minutes, but that I wouldn't recommend doing that. Normally it would be screens off in the last hour. I just, you know, I got a little loose with my protocols. Yeah, we've been, I've seen you talking about daylight savings, time changes and stuff like that. This has been nearly a decade now since Matthew Walker was first on Rogan. Almost 10 years ago, and I was still a club promoter at the time. And up until then, I just assumed that sleep was, it's just like this thing that got in the way of me working. It was just this bullshit. 20 is that's kind of true. You made a rubber and magic, dude, you know what I mean? Caffeine and big dreams and salatope and cable ties, you're just fucking like strung together with this stuff. Anyway, he came on and basically did the scare them straight equivalent. Do you ever have that in school? Scared them straight? So they bring a prison officer in and he tells you about how horrible life is in prison. And all of the horror stories that. What, how old are you? Like 12, 13. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he's saying, you know, they put boiling water into a cup and mix loads of sugar in it and it's syrup. And they throw it on people and then they have batteries and they put them in socks. And I remember he hit this sock filled with batteries down on the table and it made me jump. I was like, fuck, like I really don't want to go to. Honestly, it worked. For me, my particular psychological makeup, that thing, absolutely nothing else. The sort of person that was probably going to go to jail anyway. But yeah, I learn sleep is, okay, really, really important. You've been talking about daylight savings. The more that I learn about it, the effects of sleep deprivation are just terrifying. It's just everything gets broken. Yeah, I mean, sleep is the ultimate reset. We could talk about some of the newer data that point to exactly why. I will say just, you know, for people's peace of mind, if you don't spike your quarters all for a couple days in a row, you get one poor night sleep for a couple days in a row. You're going to be fine. The human body and brain evolved under conditions that were extreme. Right? New parents will tell you how difficult sleep can be. I mean, you can pull it off. The thing that we call chronic stress is, frankly, when that cortisol curve gets disrupted in any number of ways. But typically, it's late-day cortisol spikes that don't come back down afterwards. For three, four or five days in a row. Your hippocampus, this memory center in the brain, is chalk a block full of cortisol receptors. And cortisol, unlike adrenaline, can pass through the blood brain barrier. So it has a number of docking sites that allow it to engage the memory system. You know, what stress will engage your memory system. But that over time, we'll start to deteriorate these structures. So if somebody hasn't been sleeping well, you know, I'm not just saying this to make them feel better. You don't want to send them into a panic. And all of these systems can be recovered. But, you know, when Matt went on Rogan, I think it was an important, like truly important. I'll say it was seminal. Like he has saved that one episode, has probably saved thousands of years. If not hundreds of thousands of years of combined human life. Yeah, oh, I agree. I mean, I think that the challenge, and I think that Matt would say this, I'm sort of borrowing his words, is that he sufficiently scared everybody. There were fewer things to offer to do to promote good sleep at that time. And there were more of a lot of like, here's what happens if you don't sleep. Yeah, the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. That like, you optimize or obsess a thing. And you want to give people a sense of real agency. Right. Yeah, dimming the lights if you're light sensitive in particular and, you know, limiting caffeine. I mean, all the things that are sort of obvious to us now. The morning sunlight thing, I think most people don't tether to their sleep. Because it's not obvious how doing something in the first hour of your day to be more alert and spike cortisol creates a situation, you know, 14 hours later, where you are a better sleeper. So, you know, over time, I mean, Matt started to adopt that. I mean, I think he also pointed out the detriment of alcohol and cannabis on sleep, which I, you know, which I echo. I think also, if you think just back even six years, seven years, seven years, we weren't aware of the number of over-the-counter compounds that can be helpful for sleep. You know, people are still thinking about drugs, prescription drugs for sleep, which, you know, have their place for certain people. But most people hadn't considered Mag 3 and 8, theanine, chamomile. Now I would add to that saffron tart cherry, you know, we can increase. Apogenin. Apogenin and chamomile extract. Yeah, similar. Lemon balm. Lemon balm. Skull cap. You know, it sounds kind of crazy, right? It sounds like we're behind the counter at some like-- A multi-chromatizing shop, right? I have mutes and a fucking wizard tale. Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, I didn't come here to do an AGZ plug, but I basically-- I've played around with a number of different non-supplement things for sleep over the years, because I'm an experimenter, in and out of the lab. And, I mean, I can tell you a wild story from high school where the girl sitting behind me, I'd remember her name. When I was Aaron Cranard, her mom had some tablets, some Chinese medicine tablets, and I took one, because I was having some issues sleeping, and she gave me one. And the whole night, I was wide awake, hearing music blaring from behind my head. And I think I was in a pseudo-sleep state. Wow. I thought I was away. I was like, that's really scary. But I was like, well, there are compounds that really work for sleep. And then, you know, there are things like the peptide pinealin I experimented with a bit. Not a lot of human studies at all. Some interesting rodent studies may regenerate the pinealisides in the pineal. It gives me like two hours a night of REM sleep. But I will say, having completely halted pinealin, I did a short run experiment with it, I will say that the formulation that's in AGZ has me sleeping with double the amount of REM sleep and at least a third more slow-wave deep sleep every night. And I can only drink about two-thirds of that stuff before it's almost like too much. Not because it's too much volume, but because any more in my dreams are just too elaborate. And you know, what's magic about it? I think it has a bunch of different things in it. So, again, I didn't come here to plug AGZ, but I think that they really nailed it in the sense that in the last ten years, the scientific community, the health and wellness community has really come to the conclusion that there are things that can nudge your sleep in the right direction. So just being told, like, if you don't sleep, you're going to die of dementia is scary. You want to give people agency. In other news, if you're feeling tired, you might not need more sleep, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated. And proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's about having sufficient electrolyte to allow your body to properly absorb those fluids. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio. Sodium, potassium and magnesium with no color, no sugar, no artificial ingredients or any other BS. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, it optimises brain health, regulates your appetite, helps curb cravings, and that's why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams. This, the lemon. Lemonade flavor, Nicole Glass of Water, is how I've started my morning every single wait for years. They've got no questions asked refund policy, so you can return it and they won't even ask you to send the box back. Plus, you can get a free sample pack of their favourite flavours with your first purchase. If I go into the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom, there's no code. I usually care about the box more than that. Drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What would you say to people who are struggling to fall asleep? Maybe they've done most of the things sort of through the day that you're supposed to, they're not taking caffeine too late at night, they're maybe having a hot shower. The room's cool, it's quiet, it's dark, they've seen some morning sunlight, but calming down a racing mind at night is a challenge that I think a lot of hard charges will deal with. What are some strategies for slowing that down? One thing that I think is really important is that if somebody's very health conscious and a hard charger, they're very likely eating pretty clean, and one of the challenges for many people, not all, to falling asleep, is that their starchy carbohydrate intake is just not high enough. If you go on a very low-starch diet, like let's say you just go meet fruit vegetables or you go pure keto, you'll have a lot more energy. Some people who follow that kind of regimen can sleep well. Some people, like myself, find that unless I have some rice or oatmeal at some point during the day, especially if I'm doing resistance training, it's actually very hard to fall and stay deeply asleep. If I just add, you know, I guess you call it porridge, we call it oatmeal, but a small amount of starch in the form of whatever starch is fine for you. I eat starches. I realize this is heretical in the health and wellness space, but you know, I have some rice or some homemade pasta or some sourdough bread or oatmeal or something. If you're having trouble falling asleep, take a look at how much starch you're having. I don't recommend gorging yourself with starch late in the day, but having some starchy carbohydrates in your final meal, which probably comes what, two, three hours before sleep or something like that, can certainly help a number of people fall and stay asleep. I've heard that many times. I did meet and fruit as a part of trying to fix my health because brain inflammation was really high. I was getting a lot of brain fog, memory loss. One of the things that I found that could counteract that a little bit was going very, very low carb, but that also impacted my sleep, and I felt wired but tired, very adrenaline-y all the time. Sure. My caffeine was limited as well, so I was trying to limit stimulants. I always felt on edge, sort of ambient anxiety thing, and it impacted my sleep fragmentation was fucking horrendous. I'm like, "Well, can I have a rice cake or like two rice cakes before an hour before I go to bed to try and sort of kink me into this a little bit?" I'm experimenting with a bunch of that, but yeah, if you are carnivore, meat and fruit, keto, I wonder what the net effect is when you account for what's happening to sleep. And I'm sure that many people can sleep well on low carb of different stripes. But I, for one, couldn't, and then I'm like having to weigh this up. Like how many, how much carbs can I have before brain inflammation makes me feel a little bit more sluggish and more tired? And why I need to have some in order to make me, so that was a. Yeah, it becomes a little bit of a devil's dance. If we return to our discussion about cortisol from earlier, cortisol's job is to deploy energy into the body and for the brain, under conditions of stress or just getting up in the morning. I mean, the transition from sleep to awake is a massive state shift. It's a normal, healthy one, but it's a massive state shift in terms of mobilization requirements and thought requirements. And just the ability to linearize your thought, which is nerd-speak for the ability to think, not dream, right, or be unconscious, essentially. So when you have low circulating glucose or energy stores, cortisol's job is to mobilize glucose. So when you're on a low carbohydrate diet, your baseline cortisol is a little bit higher. This actually has been examined. Okay, so here's the deal. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet for a period of time, I think in this case it was three weeks or more, your cortisol curve that high in the morning, low in the afternoon and evening kind of normalizes a bit. It's still a little bit higher at every point than it normally would be. But if you suddenly switch from eating carbohydrates, when I say carbohydrates, I mean, starchy carbohydrates. Okay, well, let's leave aside sugar and fructose and et cetera, which of course is a former sugar. But if you shift from a sort of standard macronutrient distribution of, you know, 40, 30, or whatever it is, where you're eating starches to a low carbohydrate diet, your cortisol levels go up significantly. This has been explored over time they normalize. So I think the important thing for people to remember is when we talk about comfort foods, people have taken that phrase to mean junk foods, pizza, ice cream, those aren't the comfort foods that were originally described as comfort foods. The comfort foods that were coined comfort foods are starchy, warm foods, which guess what, suppress cortisol. Because when those foods are available, your brain and essentially your adrenals know that you don't have to mobilize from stored sources. It's already circulating. So it makes perfect sense. So I mean, this is just one kind of, you asked for what people could do. Take a look at your nutrition. Are you exercising too late in the day? Can you move that to the morning? Can you never want to tell people to reduce the intensity? Because frankly, you know, as Dorian Yates has been saying so beautifully lately, like reps and reserve, our results and reserve, you know, we could talk about that. But, you know, I think most people are probably not pushing hard enough, but some people are just pushing way too hard in the gym, way too late. And then their cortisol levels are elevated. It makes perfect sense why you couldn't sleep. So I would say, look at your diet. Make sure you're getting enough starches at some point throughout the day, maybe even taking in a few starches in the couple of hours before sleep and just see how your sleep does. There's some interesting data, although people should talk to their doctor about taking very low dose, one milligram lithium, I think it's the aratate form, in order to encourage the ability to fall asleep and get more deep sleep. But of course, we're talking about lithium here, so people need to definitely talk to your doctor. There's some other things too, you know, look at your lighting environment, of course. But I think for a lot of people, the major issue with falling asleep is that they can't forget about the position of their body. And this is where the data becomes super interesting. There are some technologies that are being spun up right now, some of which I've had the opportunity to dabble with. And I have no financial relationship too, but I sure wish I did, because it is so cool. Imagine a sleep mask that could put you to sleep. Okay, how would it do that? Well, it turns out that eye movements are not just present during rapid eye movement sleep, but one of the prerequisites for falling asleep is that you forget about your body position. You're not like how this is uncomfortable. That doesn't belong there. You shut down what's called proprioception, your awareness of body position. So there's actually some interesting data, and here I'm clinging from a few places I want to be fair, because one of them about to say sounds kind of kooky, but this works for many, many people who are having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep. You can try this tonight. I do this often. It works for me. Keep your eyes closed or you close your eyes. You move your eyes relatively slowly to one side, then the other side, one side, then the other side. Then you move your eyes in a counterclockwise circle, and then a clockwise circle, then up, then down, and then you sort of do a kind of faux cross-eyed attempt. You sort of look down towards the bridge of your nose and you exhale, which is going to slow your heart rate down. Now, what is all this nonsense about eye movements? Did I just do this as a joke to see if you would do it? The truth is, if you do this when you're trying to fall asleep, your vestibular system, which is essentially working in concert with your eyes, for reasons we could talk about, but your cerebellum and your vestibular system are essentially transitioning from where you need to be very aware of your body position and make adjustments all the time to one in which you're forgetting about body position. We know in their great data showing that a very slow rocking of a bed will help you to sleep. When you rock back and forth, your body doesn't have a little metronome in it. It's your eye movements that compensate in the opposite direction, which tell your cerebellum, "Hey, we're rocking. This is why if you're on a boat and the horizon is going like this." You get seasick because you can't orient to dead zero for pitch, yaw, and roll. Anyway, I don't want to get too technical here, but if you have trouble sleeping, try what I just described a few times. Many people find that it helps them fall asleep because you stop thinking about your body position. Of course, bed coolness, room coolness, all can help, but what I just described can be very, very helpful for a number of people whose minds are racing because if their mind is racing, you also need to give people something to do with their mind. You can't just say don't think about it or stop thinking or just go to sleep that doesn't work. You can say just wake up, but you can't say just go to sleep. There's a weird asymmetry built into our autonomic nervous system that way. It's so funny. Two things that I found because Wide Batide has been kind of the fucking summary to the last 18 months for me fighting with the health stuff. One from Matt, which is a mind walk. Oh, yes. You go through a walk that you're very familiar with. Yeah. Has that been helpful? Wonderful. One of the things that I found by doing that for the people that didn't listen to the episode, they can go back and listen to the one I did with Matt a few months ago, brilliant. Basically, you can imagine that you're going for a walk somewhere that you know unbelievably well and try and do it with as much resolution as possible. So I go to the cupboard. I open the cupboard doors. I've got my shoes in there. I take them out to my right hand that reaches in and put them on the floor. I get the shoehorn. Everyone needs a shoehorn. Left foot in, right foot in. I get the key. I know the sound of the key. I close the doors. I turn around. I go toward the door. I put it in. I turn it. That's the feeling of the door. I get outside. I feel the pressure. Like all of that stuff. At least what I found is what I'm falling asleep, the sort of I'm on a journey. This is an adventure thing is like reading fiction. And the I have problems to solve. This is executive function. It's like reading nonfiction. And for me, the former helps me fall asleep way more than the latter. So that's the first thing. The second thing is resonance breathing. I think this, if I was to pick first to flick a little bit of money onto the roulette table of the next five years of health. I think HIV resonance breathing is going to be fucking huge. And there's a couple of products. What one in particular that I'm super, super excited about. It's this cool lamp. So imagine a bedside lamp. And on the top of it is a little divot, like a little pocket. And that's got a stone in it. You take the stone out. The stone's got an FDA HRV sensor. You just hold the stone in your hand. And you can either turn the light of the lamp on or off and sounds and all the rest of the stuff. But it does 369 12 minute sessions with like a super high fidelity sensor. And it means if you're struggling to fall asleep on a night time, we can just sort of grab it put in your hand. Do the breathing based on like a tactile vibration coming from the stone to so it can all be silent. So if your partner's in the bed next to you can do that. And it knows when you hit resonance as well when you get into that maximum vagal tone. And then you just pop it back on the top and the top of it is an induction charger for the stone. I was like, this is the fucking sickest. Who makes this? It's a company called OEM OHM. It's currently in dark mode. I think OEM.Health. Not anymore. Well, you just told the world. That's true. I don't even know if you can buy. I don't think you can buy them. But yeah, Jay Wiles, who's my sleep coach from absolutely rest. He's Andy Galpin's guy. Jay's a part of it. And I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got one. I was like, this fucking rules because HIV resonance breathing is great and makes you feel really good. But if you're going to use elite HIV and you've got to put the like strap thing around your arm or your wrist and then you got to press it and you got to connect the Bluetooth and it's going to be up to you phone in front of you and all right. There's no just stand alone. Pick it up and go of this and the fact that it's a lamp. It looks really beautiful. All the rest of the shit. Anyway, I've been using that. So between those two, the mind walk thing for me was was very, very powerful. But some days you need a more physiological intervention and the resonance breathing. Those two things for me, I think from struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime. But the eye movement stuff, I think, has got has got a lot of legs. So stack all of those together. I'm going to be cross eye, imagining that I'm going for a walk holding a stone in my hand breathing. Not excessively cross eye. It's just more like you sort of look. It's like you're sort of looking down and, you know, there are these nuclei in the brain stem that literally control levels of wakefulness. When you look up, it's essentially activating the arm of your autonomic nervous system, which makes you more alert. This is wild and eyelids open. It's really interesting. And when you look down and when I bring your eyelids down, you're actually you're actually pedaling on the on the circuits that promote sleepiness or at least that are more parasympathetic. I mean, it makes it makes good sense. In other news, I've been drinking a G1 every morning for years and I do you tried to fastball me that that was down the plate and I've just show Hey, or tiny did I been drinking a G1 for as long as I can remember it is the best all in one drink that I've ever found. And that's why I'm such a fan of them. And that's why I partnered with them as well. I have got my mom to start taking it, my dad start taking it and all of my friends as well. And if I found anything better, I would switch, but I haven't. Why do you keep throwing it at the mic? Stop throwing it at the mic. See, anyway, over 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food source ingredients, got probiotics and prebiotics, also NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And in the throat, in the throat, how dare you? Ah, this isn't even an ad read anymore. It's just a fucking war zone. Oh, okay. Okay. Anyway, if you too want something to throw at your friends or a tasty blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food source ingredients designed to drink first thing in the morning in one scoop. It's here. Go to drinkage1.com/modern wisdom. The stuff. I thank you. Talk to me about this raised head for glimphatic clearance thing, because I've, if anyone's got an eight sleep with the mattress raising functionality, one of the things it does for sleep is it actually raises your head a little bit. Is that that's good related to what we're talking about here? You want head above feet? You know, I think they designed that for snoring, but it has other other benefits. So without doing an entire lecture on the lymphatic system, because we did a solo on that recently in my podcast. I mean, I'll just say the lymphatic system is amazing. It's amazing. And I, I liken it to the microbiome where 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you talked about the microbiome, people like, that's just crazy. Like fermented low sugar foods. Like, this is like health food, lunacy. Now, I mean, they're probably close to a, you know, maybe 500 million or a billion dollars, even in federal grants, certainly in the US and around the world. Looking at the microbiome, it's important for everything. Mental health, physical health. We just know this, right? The gut is so important. The lymphatic system, I think, is going to follow a similar trajectory. And all the stuff that we hear about rebounding, you know, bouncing on a trampoline or skipping rope, and all of that stuff turns out to be absolutely true. The lymphatic massage, which is essentially a clearing. I love lymphatic massage. You know, it's interesting because lymphatic massage for those that are accustomed to deep tissue. It feels like nothing, but the lymphatic vessels run so superficially that if you press on them too hard, you actually, you, you cinch them off. It feels like you're being stroked by somebody. Yeah. So I think they talk about a light brushing, and then that, you know, maybe a little bit more emotion. There are deeper lymphatic vessels that can take more pressure, but people are trained to do this, do it right? And there's some tutorials online that there's a great account. I don't know the guy, but he was referred to me by Kelly Starrett. It tells me that the stop chasing pain guy has this big six. I don't want to describe them here because I'll get them wrong, but he has a number of videos on Instagram and YouTube. The big six describes ways that you can encourage lymphatic massage. I always thought that the tapping here was kind of silly. It's actually because the lymphatic ducts drain back into the essentially dump all the lymph that's been surveilled by your immune system, et cetera, back into the vascular system just below your clavicle. And as another point, then we'll get to lymphatic clearance. I gave a shout out to someone I've never met. Don't have any association with, you know, business wise or anything. This anesthesia beauty fascia is this woman, I think of Middle Eastern, excuse me, is this woman of Eastern European, it's certainly not Middle Eastern appearing of Eastern European origin talking about non surgical non Botox interventions for facial augmentation, you know, for, for, you know, higher cheekbones and clearing away puffy on puffyness underneath the eyes for men and for women, but mostly what you see there are women. But what you find is that the before and afters that these people list off and they insist that I think they take an oath or something that they're not doing any injectables or surgeries are striking and it's lymphatic drainage from the face and from the scalp and from around the jaw and you go, this is, I mean, it is unbelievable. Okay, so in any case, the glymphatic system is glymphatic lymphatic is it the same thing. So they're, they're analogous. So for many, many years, it was thought that there was no lymphatic lymphatic system in the brain. It was thought that it was actually for many years, we thought that the brain was immune privilege turns out that's not true. You have all sorts of immune genes and proteins in the brain. But it turns out, and this was discovered some years ago, 2012, it was actually discovered prior, but as science goes, it was kind of suppressed and then it was finally discovered that the during sleep, in particular, deep sleep, the story goes, the spaces around the vasculature of the brain get bigger. Okay, you have these little cell types in the brain called astrocytes that are among the different types of glia and they have these little N feet and they literally push the brain tissue out and away from the arteries and vessels and capillaries. Allowing more cerebral spinal fluid, which is circulating in your brain all day long and collecting the waste from your cells, in mind you, there's a lot of waste from your brain cells because your brain is the most metabolically active organ. And then that needs to get washed out and actually goes out near the surface of your brain underneath what's called the meninges and then it flows down and then drains into the vascular system. If people can remember nothing else about lymphatic drainage, remember this muscular movement clears lymph in the body. So you need to walk low level muscular contraction, essentially moves the lymph up because it's fighting gravity, these are one way valves, it brings it in from your limbs and it essentially dumps it back eventually into the blood supply. Inactivity of the body is what drives lymphatic clearance in the brain. Now, and so it's when you're essentially immobilized during sleep that you get the maximum amount of lymphatic clearance. Sleeping on your side right or left side doesn't seem to matter with the head slightly tilted does seem to be the preferable position. So all you back sleepers like me, you know, some people, you're a back sleeper. I have been a back sleeper. With that neck. Unless I'm spooning, I'm a little bit of a back sleeper here. But I've been working on sleeping on my side and I heard actually maybe Andy Galbin's involved in some studies where subjects wear a fanny pack so that they can't sleep on their back, they have to sleep on their side. He sent me from absolute rest this huge fuck off roll thing, which looks like soft furnishing. That's probably what it is. Yeah, well, I mean, this was it's a big roll that goes down the middle of your back. So there's no way that you can be on your back at all. It's a much more calling it a fanny pack or a bum bag is a wild disservice to how like colossal this thing is. You're just going to have to hire somebody to spoon you, Chris. It just means that you'll have to give in. I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that you sleep well on your side. I mean, you're on human sleep, sleep doll. I like sleeping on my side and it does feel good to hold somebody. I suppose if you're a back sleeper, I do use the nasal strips to open up my breathing. Have you tried intake what you use? I just I order some nose strips that online. Let me allow me to fucking fix your nose strip problem. Everyone has a nose strip problem if they're not using it. They've got patterns on it. Instead of it being a flexible, disposable thing, this is a hard 3D printed piece of plastic that's got magnets attached on both sides and then you put two magnet patches on the skin of your nose and then you. But no magnets at my nose. No, it's all on the outside. Two patches on the outside and then you snap this non-disposable thing on and it's. I'm not kidding, it must be three times, four times, five times stronger than the normal ones. And that's like. Yeah, because I have pretty good respiration through my nose. But years ago, I stupid accent actually in a lab and I cracked a sinus. It stood up, hit a freezer door and it was. There's a whole story there, sometimes when you talk about over-not beers. So it's neither a restaurant. Did you drink? Intimately. When did I have beers recently? When did I have beers? After the show. Thank you. I haven't had alcohol in a long time, but we could talk about some of the. Injury stories are always fun offline. But yeah, I think that for glimphatic clearance, the data are very clear that you want to. If you can't sleep on your side, you're still going to get glimphatic clearance. If you sleep on your back, have your head slightly elevated, not too much. But keep in mind that your body is fighting the glimphatic clearance in your legs is fighting gravity. So in theory, if you want to be a little bit boba, not too much. Now, what we do know is that if you sleep in a chair, these studies have been done in various sleep labs. If you sleep in a chair like on a flight or something like that, you would think, well, you must get a lot more glimphatic clearance. And you probably do, but you probably get a lot more lack of glimphatic drainage from the body. So there's some really nice pictures in these studies. Every mammal, it seems, puts its head down to sleep. I think giraffes actually just kind of like drop their forehead onto the ground. But there are no mammals that. And someone will probably tell me I'm wrong here, and I'd love to see the examples because I love animals. But the argument that's been made in these papers is that every mammal puts its head down to sleep. And if you think about. Take a picture of yourself sometime before sleep and after sleep. Or worse, take a picture of yourself after one really terrible night sleep. Just look at your face. A couple of things become clear. You look bloated, the bags under people's eyes, that's build up of lymph. Okay. A couple hours late. That's what that is. That's what that is. It's build up of lymph, which is why this anesthesia beauty fascia thing is about learning to kind of increase the portals for lymphatic drainage. And it has a lot to do with the fascia because they run so closely together. The vessels, of course, at different depths relative to the fascia. So that's a lot of what lymphatic drainage for aesthetics is. But look at yourself after sleep, your brain fog. The brain fog you feel after lack of sleep. The build up of crap is within the cerebral spinal fluid. It's all the ammonia, the carbon dioxide, all the. Some protein fragments that are built up during the day. And the more active you are with your brain, the more they build up and the more they need to be cleared out at night. And then what's equally impressive, if you ask me, is take a look at that picture of yourself sleep deprived. You get a good night's sleep the next night. Take a picture of yourself the next morning. You look like a completely different person, including the brightness of the eyes. So it turns out around the iris of your eye, that black dot in the middle and around it. You can actually see when people haven't slept well. There's actually a change in color of the eyes that has to do with the accumulation of lymph in the anterior chamber of the eye. And the posterior chamber of the eye, which is where the light sensing tissue is, the retina, actually shares the same glimphatic clearance system as your brain. And by the way, everything I'm talking about for brain for glimphatic clearance is true for spinal cord, too. So for all this stuff about motor learning and people are so concerned about their spinal cord, all the athletes are thinking, "Yeah, I need a brain, but most of you are spinal cord." Just kidding, but you need both. But the idea here is that when people look tired, the eyes look tired. It's not just in the eyelids being hooded. The eyes look glassy. They don't look quite right. And then they sleep well and their life comes back in the eyes. It's because they cleared the lymph from their eyes. Who knew that the ultimate looks-maxing solution was to just get a better night sleep and raise your head a bit? Well, I think it's a pillow enough. Yeah, it's not too much. What you don't want is your head tilted back. And that's also, of course, a risk for apnea. I mean, this is, you know, why all the bodybuilders and big guys drop dead in their sleep, you know, often is because they just basically is fixating themselves. So I do think fixing snoring is important. The nose strip sound great. I'm about to try a mandibular device. You know, like a special mouth god to try and adjust- Do you have apnea? A little. Yeah, it's reminjuus apnea. So any happens in real? You and I should take a trip up to Stanford to the other. Seriously, there's a couple up there. Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the population bomb many years ago. I think he would say it probably didn't pan out. And Sandra Cahn, who's, I think is in craniofacial surgery or orthodontics or something, they were the ones that wrote the book "Jaws." Not the "Jaws" with, forward by Robert Sapolsky, Jared Diamond, I think wrote the introduction. These are heavy hit or serious science academics. And they were the ones that talked about the, you know, the transition to soft foods, to packet-based foods, to baby food, has created this kind of massive explosion in the industry for orthodontics. So it was "Nest" as worked on stream from them. James Nest is- Yes, yeah. Yeah, Nestor's kind of the, his book was kind of the modern iteration of a lot of what they were saying. But, you know, they are, I think they're coming out with another book that's really pushing this thing that the nasal breathing is real. The ability to, I can't quite do this, but can you close your mouth and put your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth without having to curl it back behind your teeth? Is there space for your tongue in the roof? A little, my palate, I could do with a bit of expansion because I had 60th removed as a kid. Like four from the top and two from the bottom, I think. So, I mean, Max, who isn't here, my videographer, had a release. He's going through two or three really serious dental procedures. And with one of them, he was trying to do it through Invisalign. And it was a slow palate expander. Invisalign, do a palate expander now. He's like, dude, this is going to take like fucking three years for me to do this. But they can do it a little bit more aggressively. Sounds like he's a kind of extreme case because Con and Ehrlich have this association with, you know, the mewing guy. Is that true? Is that real? Well, the mewing thing is, it plays into this notion of getting your nasal breathing, right? It's like, you know, close your, you know, like, like close your mouth, put your tongue on the roof, your mouth. And then can you swallow while, you know, pushing the, I'm describing this, you know, cautiously. You know, that the problem is, you know, anytime you get a figure like dad, and I've never met him. I think his name is Mike Mew, right? Mew. Anytime you get somebody who's kind of extreme off of the normal thrust of a one branch of medicine, it's got that person is either going to be ostracized or they're going to have to go through some serious gymnastics to get acceptance. Look, my colleague David Spiegel. I love David. Vice chair of psychiatry at Stanford, right? Very serious scientist clinician. His father and him developed hypnosis as a tool for pain management, smoking cessation, anxiety, even people going through chemotherapy. And the data are beautiful. They're 25% of people that do hypnosis for smoking cessation. Have it in one session for life. It's amazing. I mean, it's a brain plasticity accelerator. But had it not been David, right? Who's very thoughtful in how he approaches these discussions, how he frames it with science, how he explains what's going on. And just, his, like, and I'm not saying Mew isn't, isn't this way. I don't know him, haven't, haven't met him, although I've read some of his work. You know, but David has a special gift of the ability to frame what, for many people, will be like hypnosis. Are you kidding me? As a brain plasticity accelerator. Gentle convincing demeanor in David. Yes, and also broad training in all of psychiatry and in acceptance of other branches of medicine. He's not saying this is the way and this is the only way and there's this problem with my view. I'm here to fix the field. No, he's, he's saying here's one tool in the toolkit and there are other tools in the toolkit. He's also, and again, I'm not saying anything about Mew in tacitly here. David's beagle is exceedingly smart. Like he's on a whole other level of intellect and yet he doesn't talk over anybody. He's extremely kind. So, you know, bedside manner and how you bring your stuff forward is very good. Especially if you're going to be a revolutionary or somebody that's at the sort of cutting edge for cutting frontier of this stuff. No, I agree. I am, I've been thinking about this a lot this year. What do we need to know about the neuroscience of making habits setting more easy? I imagine that there must be some really interesting. Oh, man. I just said James Clear on the podcast and it's so interesting when you sit down with somebody who's like the habits guy. And you compare it against the neuroscience. And so there's two ways into this. And James has done a magnificent job of explaining things that people can do to improve their habits and reduce bad habits. The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand mechanism it gives them flexibility over the so-called protocols. And I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves. Let's face it. If you want to go online now and just say what are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep and you get a list and put those on your refrigerator poem next to your bed, why does everyone just do that? It's because the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information. Okay, so in fairness to James and the incredible work that he's done, I'm going to just kind of look at this a little bit through the lens of neuroscience. And I'm really glad that we're talking about this because one of the things that he said that I think is so, so true is that the thoughts and by extension the emotions, but really the thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours. And even days. So one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention and a lot of habits have to do with I don't want to procrastinate I want to do this we talk about exercise, but let's talk about cognitive stuff. It's very, very clear that if you have a hard time getting into about of work or even staying focused, there's a there's a very good chance I believe that your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating. I'm a big advocate for boring breaks and I'm a big advocate for silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons, let's think about it on the back end. Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you're not reflexively doing you want to create this habit. It's very clear that neuroplasticity yes requires alertness requires focus. You need sleep layer that night. I've been beating that drum for a number of years. It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time just kind of like post learning reflection walk into your car sitting on the plane for a second thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information. And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones you're constantly bringing in new sensory information all the data I did an episode on how to best study and learn I went to the data to find out because I have my methods but that doesn't mean they're the best best methods. Reading rereading note taking highlighting it's all fine but it turns out the biggest lever is to self test at some point away from the material. So testing is not just something for evaluation of others it's a way that we should think you know yet how much can I remember about that conversation what was tricky okay I don't remember that piece I'm going to go back and look it up. All learning is and this will sound like a giant duh but all learning is anti forgetting how do we know this because if you have people read a passage one two three four five times versus one time and they self test one time and self testing significantly better. So I had Peter C Brown on the show no author of make it stick no but I like the title you need to bring Peter on Peter was episode I would guess like 30 on modern wisdom you'll be a thousand and 30. And the best synopsis that I got from him learning how to learn was learning is repeated recall not repeated exposure. Beautiful right fucking money exactly and that's that's exactly and this is having house forgetting that's it is like him guys like James clear that they have a real when I say unconscious genius I mean clearly they put thought into and structure into what they teach but the neuroscience supports everything you just said which is what he just said and reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve. Even if you don't remember even if you're still puzzled by it is so vitally important to the anti forgetting process okay now in terms of actually being able to focus actually being able to do work it's so clear that thoughts and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman in Jenny grow who's DROH at Duke University is a neuroscientist been saying sincere sensory integration for a long time you know I I've long thought about and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are so sensations are the physical stimuli environment photons of light mechanical pressure odor a volatile odorance in the environment that lead to you know site touch smell et cetera how that gets converted into chemical electrical signals in the brain we understand as a field we understand sensation we understand perception perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to okay we understand emotions now more as a subset of something that we think of more broadly estates. That are set by your autonomic nurses and how alert you are how not alert you are and then emotions are kind of layered on top of that right Lisa Feldman Barrett as beautiful descriptions of these and so on and there's some debate about what emotions really are but we we know what they are neuro biologically and psychologically and behaviors we know what they are right as a behavior and then there's the don't go behaviors that suppression behavior and then their memories right but for the longest time it's been unclear what are thoughts like what are there they just like spontaneous guys are in up of of memories or like what's going on there and Jenny grow I think has the absolute best description of these if and this is based on experimentation if we see some idea so let's say I say to you let's not talk about cats because I'm a dog person but I say okay okay Chris and this isn't a trick question I promise because it's always weird when people start doing this I'm not osperlman or something I'm not going to like tell you your pen code think think about a dog okay what kind of dog is it going retriever okay so as you think about the golden retriever like what other things come to mind about the golden retriever it's got a little neck a chief on okay red neck a chief great red neck a chief like what else about golden retriever fluffy fluffy you say so there's a tactile thing okay anything else about golden retrievers is very specific to you bouncing up and down rolling on its back smells a little bit but I like it great okay so there's a I like it you like this okay so Jenny grows and others data point to the fact that thoughts basically start with some seed element some noun some pronoun some things some event and then what the brain does is essentially starts to call on more and more sensations and starts layering those in more and more prior sensory events it's red handkerchief okay brain it's fluffy there's a tactile and that thoughts really are the layering on more and more sensory memories and thoughts are really a layering of the senses in an abstract thought space now this is not meant to you know make something from nothing but it's so important that we understand this because you think what is the ability to think well the ability to think is is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things and so that's what that's how we navigate through environments which is what Jenny grows main work is about how you find yourself in space I can't look at everything in this garage I have to focus on certain things find the Phillips head screwdriver go over there and you're discarding all the other information now when you think about sitting down to do work or to learn something prepare a podcast it is so important that you limit the number of sensory inputs coming in not just during that event but before because the sensory stimulus that kind of sets off this cascade of layering in more and more sensory memories and understanding is begun before you sit down to read your book this is why you read a portion of the book and then like I was paying attention you your brain is still working with the sensory inputs from before it's not thinking about them consciously so this is vitally important if you go back and you look at the history of attention and thinking and I have you can find these incredible pictures that they would give kids a trouble probably at ADHD or just kind of rambunctious boys in most cases and they literally gave them helmets with two eye holes so they couldn't look at anything else I couldn't like to hear anyone else right used to be you know get it with the hoodie on and the cabin and you'd write now what have we done the challenges that we've brought an infinite number of sensory experiences into the thing that you're looking at a lot we can we brought the we brought all the sensory inputs through the device that you're holding so the narrowing view perspective hasn't helped you to narrow the distractions that's right cognitive space is still infinite even though your space the spatial limitation of where you're placing your attention is very restricted so the fact that you have so many competing thoughts has everything to do with that and it also has everything to do with what you were doing in the 10 or 15 minutes before you sat down to try to work now China they're doing some very interesting experiments of having kids stale stare literally at a focal point on the wall for a number of minutes before beginning their work sounds a little extreme little military but one thing that I've been doing before I prepared to do any writing any podcasting any work is I I try and make myself as bored as possible I try and remove as much sensory input as possible I might think about my breathing because it's hard to not think about anything but I really have started to limit the amount of sensory information coming into my space I have an entire floor of where I live now I live in an odd structure now but the entire bottom floor is a no phone zone once or twice I brought my phone down there but it's a no phone zone going down the stairs are no phones in there I'm trying to figure out how I can have no internet there I just a little tent sauna that I use now with with incandescent Saturday I love because I couldn't use my my barrel sauna where I was at it's I think it's sauna space makes these incredible I like because they get hot right away and it's about the red light I go in there it's in a it's it's grounded and there's no Wi-Fi in there the phone goes dead the moment you know in there you're in a mini fire day kid yeah not only bring the phone into the phone you say place that I went to or is this anyone now no so I actually converted a art gallery into a living space I've always wanted to do this so now I have my no it's not the same so I have my gym I've got an upstairs loft where I live and then the downstairs is a workspace I have an octopus now I have a tank with an octopus in it although it's a bit shy so I'm probably becoming increasingly esoteric anyway and I have my my disk is fish and my gym and my doing all the illustrations for my books I spend a lot of time drawing down in the basement I mean I've always wanted to do this at some point I was like yeah you have to live in our gallery at some point if you're able you know and okay so but that's my unique kind of weird space but doesn't matter if you're in an empty box if you are not good at clearing the slate before you try and focus you're going to have a very hard time for understandable reasons in fact I'm amazed that anyone can think at all I'm amazed that anyone can focus at all I don't believe everyone has ADHD I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from and once you understand you go oh yeah it makes perfect sense it might supposed to walk around with my eyes closed not taking any sensory input no but am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device in fact Mike Easter the author of the comfort crisis told me something super scary when he came on the podcast he said that the person who developed these algorithm the people excuse me who developed the algorithms for social media borrowed heavily from the casinos and I didn't realize that some years ago slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income maybe like 10 20% now it's 80% and it was one guy who watches kid playing video games who realize that the kids will play video games for hours and hours and hours and what they were playing for was novelty and so they switched the slot machines and casinos on his suggestion to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was because they're now electronic you can get a near infinite number of combinations of novel items and people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning the brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning and so at some level like I love social media teach on social media I I partake in it as a consumer and the creator there but I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go okay I need to read this book I need to write this chapter I need to do this drawing and you'll notice once you drop into that trench the brain has these attractor states it's like a ball bearing on a flat surface as you get more into a thought trench or activity trench it's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a deep valley and it's actually hard to leave you'll notice you're walking out and unless you pick up your phone you'll still be thinking about that and this is how the brain works the brain is not working in step functions the brain you're none of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long and none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily you just have to ride that that sort of layering on of thoughts going from board to sensory input to deeper and deeper and then work for about so you know 90 minutes or a couple hours and then give yourself a little bit of time pause reflect and it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation but people are like texting in between it's it's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think the good news is as Goggins would say nowadays it's very easy to be spectacularly good in pretty much any field you just have to do what no one else is doing now he's an extreme case and I have immense admiration for David I mean he's just so David you know but if you want to be the best in your class at anything or best in class at pretty much anything it's to become so much easier now you just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are doing before we continue if your sleep's been off taking ages to fall asleep waking up at random times or feeling groggy in the morning moments is sleep packs here to help they're not your 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bar has never been set so low it's just sad and yet it's an exciting opportunity for people I get it like the rampant fragility that seems to be destroying your classroom or your country or the world with constant distraction and people not being able to focus or deal with a little bit of discomfort or resilience is not great but from a selfish perspective that widespread fragility is your competitive advantage and if you're one of the people you're not going to be able to change the world certainly not before you've changed yourself and that means that the first step is ah this is an opportunity for me I can step into it so you mentioned that you sort of touched on some of the bad habits that distract people I've always been interested in this for a neuroscientific perspective is it truly possible to deprogram bad habits or once those neural pathways are down is that locked in for life are you just creating deeper fishes somewhere else in order to replace those ones how do you think about getting rid of bad habits the process of overcoming those yeah I think you know if we look at the data on neuroplasticity it's much easier to reactivate a pathway that was laid down early in life even if it's been suppressed is a beautiful data of a guy named Eric Nudson who was actually my next door neighbor my lab before he retired Stanford showing that you know if once learning takes place those those maps are forever there you can unveil those maps again later the kind of like never forget to ride a bike kind of thing but when you're talking about bad habits and then you get into its sort of contingencies like rewards and and punishments you know these days because of my own interests and trajectory you know I think a lot about you know the the seven deadly sins and and the virtues right I mean if you look at any of the sins okay they're all very hypothalamic in nature right now they're the extremes of hypothalamic function in fact if you could probably map the seven deadly sins on to the hypothalamus and say that nucleus the venture media hypothalamus those neurons are responsible for rage for unbridled rage okay those neurons are responsible for unbridled sexual activity I'm not talking about merged with violence I'm just like independent of that those are our consummatory behaviors so eating hyperfagia these are anorexia you know so I mean all I have a question on that because envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good yeah so you write and I hadn't thought about that but you envy is probably not easily mapped to a hypothalamic nucleus in that an interesting insight NBC only one of the seven deadly sins that isn't something that can be enjoyable at low or high dose yeah our good friend Paul Conti talks often about how much of the ills of the world are based on people's envy when people don't have when they have an uncomfortable feeling they most people will turn that into self destruction or destruction of others and people who are successful in life transmute those uncomfortable feelings into self support and creating things and supporting others same feelings divergent paths um and envy uh you know Paul said many times is is the enemy of all of all personal development right you see something you I always had noticed you know coming up in science if um if something bad happens to somebody we we most of the time unless we really dislike them but even then you can on that sucks you know like really feel bad but if something good happens for somebody you know immediately how you feel about that person are you happy for them or was there that feeling of like yeah exactly you know immediately that's such a good litmus test yeah how do you feel when this other person wins when somebody else loses I guess even with that it's an interesting one like is there a sort of weird sense of satisfaction are you like fuck like wish that person was okay it would never it might be okay bad habits yeah so with bad habits I mean so I think about the you know the sins and bad habits mapping to hypothermic nuclei because I'm me and that's my nerdy perspective but then you also think about the virtues right and and overcoming bad habits or the virtues they I mean I believe that most people are inherently good I do it may be true young may be right that we have all things inside of us but I think most people are inherently good I think they're a subset of people that given the opportunity to do things and not get caught they would do really bad things but I don't think that's most people okay or most dogs by example cats I'm still on the on the fence about that's sorry cat people and I know some nice ones but but in all seriousness I think that the bad habits thing involves breaking bad habits involves a lot of top down control prefrontal cortex suppressing the activity of these hypotherlemic and other subcortical neurons and how do we know this well we if you want to summarize how the prefrontal cortex works you'd say it's the structure in the brain it's that no don't reach for that cookie it's that no don't say that thing it's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus don't do the thing it's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus and other structures are creating some internal activation of the autonomic nervous system that kind of vibration of you want to do it it smells so good it tastes so good you just want to I don't know why I did it this kind of thing so that top down control can be learned and the beautiful thing and this answers your question more directly the beautiful thing is that at some point that top down control is not required anymore unless you do the thing you're not supposed to do and then it requires top down control again now the reason I'm so interested these days one of the reasons I'm so interested in spirituality and notions of God etc is that you know the virtues also I believe can start to arrive through things that are outside of us now I realize that sounds very unscientific but if you look at the science around religious belief or belief in higher power or the notion that humans don't have all the answers not even the collective consciousness what you find is that for everything from recovery from addiction to recovery from immense immense loss I mean the kinds of losses that go way beyond you know a death of a family member although that's intense you know death of all ones children for instance horrible things that people have been put through almost without fail moving through that with any kind of sense of self preservation and not engaging in just self-destruction which is what most people do almost always involve some notion of top down control from outside you know being being encouraged or even instructed to do the right thing feeling as if something is coming through oneself now we often hear about this in the creative process be like Rick Rubin and I'm a big twilight art fan the choreographer we'll talk about you know it's it most creatives we'll talk about sort of downloading things from outside of them it kind of moves through them as opposed to arising purely within them because of all that sensory experience but they can get into these higher realms of spirituality but when we're talking about breaking bad habits overcoming immensely difficult scenarios that normally withdraw people into complete self-destruction or just giving up which is a bad habit in its own its own right it it's as if the the top down control is so immense like the going against oneself that's required is so immense that when people hand that over to God whether or not it's Christ or whether or not some other form of God that they that they are you know that they're attached to you know it seems as if they get some relief from the process and yet it's very effective and you can't deny this right just as a phenomenon I mean let's take off our hats of scientists and people kind of parse things like the it how could it be that the the thing that's hardest for humans to do for themselves becomes far easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves it's a it's a it's a wild mind bend that neuroscience doesn't really understand but but you know what we're really talking about let's say this were alcohol and I'm not an alcoholic fortunately but let's say I had immense difficulty in refraining from alcohol and this would be the parcise environment and where this would where alcohol would be attractive the amount of top down control that's required is immense for somebody that's recently sober you have to you know hopefully they're in 12 step they have to call their sponsor there it can be a jarring anxiety that anxiety eventually subsides I mean alcoholics eventually can hang out in bars and not have a drink but there's a long period of time where they can and many never will be able to do that but the notion of a higher power is is central to almost every alcoholic at least who goes through AA getting sober it's a it's a it's almost a prerequisite and in some sense it is a prerequisite and it's so brilliant that it is because it takes away the need for constant top down control you give that over to something else this notion of a higher power for some people that's god for some of the world's christ for some people it's you know just general higher power because 12 step is very agnostic as to you know what people consider higher power but I think it is not a coincidence that the Bible writes in these kinds of things about sins and virtues and the need of not just good works but avoiding sin and acknowledges in some sense that it's in some cases near impossible for people to do on their own and yes community can help and yes reward processes can help and yes punishment can help these all work we know this you see this an animal learning studies where humans are different is that they can as far as we know humans are unique in their ability to give this top down restriction process over to some other entity and it makes it easier not harder and it makes it more concrete somehow not more abstract the only abstract piece of it is that you know you you can't shake this entity's hand at least not in the standard sense what do you think's going on I you know I had as usual you always ask the question um which is why I I'm stomped right I mean it's I mean I'm trying to parse what could be going on but it always lands me back in neural circuits and neural structures I mean I'm excited by some of the data that are starting to look at how consciousness might involve things from outside the brain and you know maybe multiple brains and all I know is that um having spent nearly three decades thinking about and researching and talking about neuroscience that you know we know a great deal about how sensations perceptions thoughts memories you know emotions and behaviors are constructed right what we do and um and yet we don't know how this piece comes about but this piece has been central to the human historical perspective and human experience and you know I don't think we're at any longer in a place where we can even talk about human evolution without this right I think humans evolved in the context of this and that's why I don't see them as mutually exclusive much more a part of our history than the anterior mid-singulate cortex is yes in fact no one needed to know that the anterior mid-singulate cortex existed to know that there's a sink called tenacity and will power I think that the fun twist is that it's a highly plastic structure that we can engage and grow and and that reinforces that the sets of behaviors that are that are involved and I think adaptive right but I absolutely think there's something real there and I say that completely as a scientist right I mean I'm used to immunostaining for proteins and running westerns and you know like a recording from neurons and you're looking at neural circuits using any number of labeling techniques I mean I'm a man of science but there's just no doubt in my mind that this process of giving over to the understanding there's something much greater than us and that we are not in total control at least not in total control that feels very comforting to me because of the way it's I've seen it help so many people and you know I don't I won't be shy about it's helped me tremendously I mean I'm in a very serious prayer practice daily now every night before I go asleep without fail I'm going on a couple years now where I've not missed a single night I'll get out of bed if I fall asleep and do that it's it's like and then also just prayer as a thing and let's say it's just purely neurobiological let's say there's nothing outside of us that you know that in the real sense I don't believe that but let's just assume for a moment well then my neurobiology seems to be responding to all this very very well and I don't think I'm alone with that in fact I think there are too many burdens in life for anyone to be able to navigate life extremely well without these notions of higher power I don't think people can do it and if and you could show me the most successful wealthiest people in the world and I would say yeah but they are highly deficient in this area not because I'm judging them right we are all deficient in some area but it must be it has to be because there's a huge gap in the in the knowledge set I've never thought that I've never thought of that paradox the fact that for a lot of people billions of people relinquishing control the exact opposite of what it is that for most of the habits that okay we're going to suppress the anterior mid-singular cortex we're going to use our cognition to limit our distraction we're going to narrow our focus all the rest of it it's intention it's lean in it's agency it's taking control and then there's this other bit that literally billions of people and up until a hundred years ago almost everybody did assume was the seat of where their motivations and their discipline and for a while with the bicameral mind maybe even the voice inside the head came from that was the thing that was real that was that that was the source of this we evolved in that context the brain independently right this was convergent evolution from a 50 million fucking different corners of the universe absolutely and and you know it's my you know I love teaching science I love learning and teaching science I hope that's obvious to people I but it's my one wish for for people that at some point in their life they at least explore the possibility and and get morning sunlight but the but you know open to faith and get morning so like I just hit 50 recently and and I will say if I look back on my life I sure I wish I had done certain things differently I mean who who doesn't right this notion of like no regrets like yeah I wish I'd made certain decisions not others but by and large I'm very very happy with the decisions I made by and large and I was happy to discover resistance training and running and neuroscience and you know cuttlefish and ferrets I had a pet ferret and I don't recommend a bulldogs and I have the amazing relationship to family and friends and I'm very blessed in my personal life and my romantic life is feeling awesome these days and and it's just like it's overwhelmingly positive despite a lot of strain and hardship but the one thing that I wish that I had done earlier was to stop resisting the voice in my head that said you know I think I think there's a god and I'm gonna pray I kept pushing that away I was like incompatible with my notion of what it meant to be a scientist it was just incompatible with with things I just kept pushing down and yet the same time wishing for it and the reason on my 50th birthday I had to give an uncomfortable toast because believe it or not I'm somewhat introverted especially in large groups I'm happy to talk signs and talk like this with you but um and I and I said it then and I'll say it again now like I'm 50 and for the first time in my life my entire life I've experienced sustained time of real deep peace like just peace like just like everything's okay everything is as it should be not just some little mantra that you say when you're on the big circus like and why I think it's because I stopped fighting so hard to try and control everything inside me and in my life and as a consequence everything has become much easier it's still challenging but much much easier and it's 100% because of giving over to notion of higher power I'm very direct about God higher power for me right reading the Bible this kind of thing prayer I mean it's these are practices this isn't just I believe in God these are practices as a faith-based practices and it's become a source of immense intellectual stimulation for me and also just relaxation and it's really it's my wish for anyone that's like struggling or doing well because I I'm certain that it holds so much power and again even if it turns out and I'll never know but even if it turns out that it's all filtered through you know standard neurobiological mechanisms you know um okay I'm good with that but in the meantime like I'm gonna keep praying like and you can look at examples all around and all through history where people have said similar things it in circumstances far more challenging than mine and they'll always point to the same thing I mean people are are pretty um can be pretty irrational but at the same time humans are also pretty miraculous in what they're able to build and develop and this whole thing of you know God and religion has not been discarded if anything it's growing right I mean you know the data on that better than I so anyway I don't have a whole lot more to say about that you said something to me over three years ago now you said it's all internal can we revisit that yeah I guess now I would say it's all internal except for the stuff that's coming from from outside the human human awareness yeah but it's all internal in the sense that um good on you for remembering that um it's all internal in the sense that you know I think that the big mistake that I made for a number of years was trying to find the thing that comes from outside that's gonna change things and you know Lord knows I love caffeine and I love doing certain activities and um and learning but at some point you realize that the ability to um like withhold uh like reflect reflexes that you don't want to have like you know getting your temper sparked or something you know people say no one can make you feel anything and I say that's crazy people make you feel things all the time you know the the ability to not speak from your first thought by your second or your third you know you hear these kind of cliches right but all of that ability comes from inside it's from doing internal work and it's kind of amazing how much we can accomplish and I'm certainly not the first to say this how much we can accomplish by just stopping and listening and going well like my brain's crazy it's like all these thoughts all this stuff oh too much input coming into this like I've got to shut down this thought path also realizing that you know because these thoughts layer on themselves our sensory sensory memories layer on top and can feed we feed our thoughts I mean that Jenny grows description of how thinking works things you think that yeah like if you're ruminating on something that really bothers you you probably do want to distract yourself unless that you're really going to work on that thing that you really can feed thoughts like embers and a fire and it's important to not do that if it's not adaptive a quick aside if you have been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be the problem they play a huge role in your energy your focus and your performance but most people have no idea where there's our or what to do if something's off which is why I partnered with function 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dripping dopamine it's into the back of your brain right it's all internal this is self-generated stuff the satisfaction that you get for finishing a hard workout the love that you feel from being with the people that you care about the peace that you have for lying in a hammock in a you know sunny spring afternoon or whatever at no point are you being sort of flicked different neurochemicals and sensations like this is a part of your system yeah and if you hit the system hard like you know like the thing I absolutely suggest people never do is you know something like methamphetamine's right is gonna what the thousandfold increase in dopamine within moments I mean is that what that is yeah as compared to or even more as compared to cocaine which I think is like 200 you know like a 200 x and I mean it's it or maybe a doubling I mean I forget the exact numbers but there's this chart that on a Lemki who often put up a methamphetamine is gonna you're basically gonna dump as much dopamine as you ever could in that moment and then the trough is obviously proportional to that it's kind of fun too to think about how because of conversations for me and you and others and Matt Walker like the world that kind of understands dopamine now they understand the nuance of every little bit of every one of the four different pathways and there's probably five um etc no like but that's okay like do they do people understand everything about cortisol no but I think the world is is now armed with a lot better knowledge of their own physiology and psychology and how those merge I also think that we're starting to understand actually on the way over here my producer and close friend Rob was talking about this that you know everything now is gambling social media is a form of of essentially gambling for dopamine you know likes and follows you know markets you know I mean my team their team the politics I mean a good friend has said you know that all addiction is gambling you know all addictions maybe are gambling in different forms I would say it all boils down to the same neural circuits of anticipation and and the scariest thing was I have a good friend Ryan Swav who works with addicts and and he's trauma therapist as well incredibly talented guy and he said that um you know the scary thing is he's known many gambling addicts that get addicted to the shame from losing oh wow you know they're chasing the winds anymore you're chasing the losses and the way that you feel about yourself after you've lost yeah it's almost like the winds were not big enough and so they're just chasing the self-shame and the hatred and the it's really sad get gambling addicts struggled big time coffee's allergic to a huge new video um about gambling and sort of how endemic it is and there's banking apps that allow you to gamble inside of the app now and he's done I learned a lot about gambling from from watching a bunch of the videos he's done in the past and uh it really is kind of wild to me that it's legal and the only way that I can say I'm sure like you we've been offered like an unlimited number of gambling sports betting partnerships and stuff like that I like gambling actually I'm a little bit but I don't have a problem with it I don't have a problem with it again which is exactly why it's for yeah we should go Vegas um um but it's kind of it's kind of mad to me that that those that that this is legal and you know fucking don't hate the player you know the game is much bigger than any individual person that's contributing to it like fat play but it's it is really fucking destructive for for some people but then so's alcohol so's driving fast cars on motorbikes or the hypothalamus isn't going anywhere right I mean everyone's got one and so you got to find the things that allow you to be adaptive and functional in life not crater the things you've created and also um to feel like you're in the hunt I mean the hunt was the original gamble right hunting for animals hunting for food hunting for mates seeing that thing grow closer on the horizon working out the anticipation of it coming towards you I'm getting closer I'm getting closer I'm getting so I'm driving a storm probably felt like a big win at some point I mean the um you know like the number of uh of women who used to die in childbirth and then they were you know and then someone solved that puzzle right it was a hand washing I think had a lot to do with it right I don't know if this story is true but the the story goes that um there there used to be a ton of of death and childbirth and some of the same physicians who were trying to figure out why were um handling and dissecting the cadavers of these these poor women who died in childbirth and then delivering babies the same afternoon without hand washing in between because we didn't understand bacteria we understand the the importance of hand washing I don't know if that's true that wasn't what's been reported but once they started washing their hands between essentially doing autopsy and delivering babies uh rates of death and childbirth went down here it is so I wrote this article about uh the Cassandra complex you know the Cassandra complex no oh dude this is and I don't know anyone named Cassandra uh well let me uh let me you do well yeah uh allow me to teach you about the Cassandra complex there are a few feelings worse in this life than being right but early you correctly predict a future catastrophe trend opportunity for growth or important area of focus only to be castigated for how short-sighted xenophobic judgmental out of touch left-wing right-wing or alarmist you are the Cassandra complex is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth but no one believes them and they're often dismissed ignored or even ridiculed it's named after Cassandra figuring Greek mythology they got Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy but after she rejected his advances he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her warnings she foresaw the fall of Troy warned everyone and was met with scorn the city burned anyway Rachel Carson in her book 1962 silent spring warned about the environmental damage caused by pesticides she was mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists but her work eventually led to the environmental movement at the banning of DDT igne s camel wise in the 1840s realized that doctors were transmitting childbed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands he begged his colleagues to adopt hand washing they laughed at him he died in an asylum decades later germ theory proved him right let me give you this i'm going to keep the one the best example of the Cassandra complex that I fucking love is the comparison between Copernicus and Galileo so obviously people that are right but early get marked cast get it's you know pushed to one side which is um incentive for someone to not speak up if they feel like they are telling the truth but that the world is not going to be sufficiently receptive to it and uh Copernicus and Galileo like so great as an example of this Copernicus in the early 1500s quietly proposed something radical the earth orbits the sun humans once the unmoving center of gods design when our spinning through space on a planet among many but Copernicus hesitated he delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades his great work de la revolution abus came out only as he learned his deathbed likely to avoid the wrath of the church and academia his truth was too disruptive and so for most of his life it went unheard Galileo century later took that same Copernicus spark and shouted it from the rooftops he saw the moons of Jupiter the phases of Venus and the imperfections of the moon surface all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught the church responded with fear Galileo was dragged before the inquisition forced to recant under threat of torture and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life in retrospect it is not surprising that Copernicus kept his mouth shut given how Galileo was treated this is a core truth of the Cassandra complex being right isn't enough and being early can feel like being wrong wow yeah i mean much lesser example than what you just described but you know the glinfatic system was discovered many years earlier by a woman at NIH oh excuse me at University of Maryland a larger more powerful scientific group tried to repeat the experiments made a method methodological flaw couldn't repeat it everyone believed them there's no lymphatic system in the brain fortunately she became an NIH program officer which is somebody who has some degree of control over where funding gets directed and funded the work that later verified her her findings but it was purely by virtue of the fact that the power structure was arranged in a certain way this happens a lot in science i think you'd enjoy it's that you know everyone thinks of Darwin and natural selection but there was another guy Alfred Russell Wallace who essentially discovered all of it in parallel and should have been elected to the royal academy and all of this stuff as well like like Darwin but was not in the club in the end club and Darwin knew it and actually was very come from what I understand very conflicted about not sharing the credit yeah it was only because of that rivalry that Darwin ended up pushing his study out his work out right I think he he had it he sat on it for a while he wanted to work on it more he had a little bit of sort of hypervigilant uncertainty and insecurity about himself and then finally upon hearing oh I might not I might be beaten to the punch published is that right yeah nobody associates Alfred Russell Wallace with the theory of evolution natural selection I mean I'm most people don't even know who it is I mean because my dad's a physicist and because I grew up in science I I know a lot of these stories I mean I know a story of I'll keep this intentionally vague there's a very very famous and accomplished physicist that probably should have won a Nobel Prize but he made one error which is that he stole the girlfriend of one of his graduate students married her that graduate student did reasonably well and this would be very uncomfortable to work in the lab where your girlfriend is now sleeping with your boss went on he went on to marry a Swedish woman and let's just say that guy that stole the girlfriend never won a Nobel prize the Swedish community is very close knit you know so I mean the the number of store I could tell you story after story after story like that but I try and avoid those stories even though they're true I'd much rather tell stories about the great scientific discoveries so when stuff goes right because you know that stuff's very enticing it's the drama that we you know are drawn to as humans just naturally we have a perclivity for that but but I think that they're there's so many stories of people making incredible discoveries through serendipity and hard work and things like that so I mean that's the good stuff and and so I always try and if I mention a story like that I like to balance that out and remind people that I do think that most scientists are well intention I do think most physicians are well intention I just had a guest on the podcast David Faganbaum who's a physician at UPEN um and scientist and you know he was a football player big dude Jack he's like six three Jack he's playing football he's in medical school and he gets this Castleman's disease which is a cancer like um a disease of the of the lymphatic system he's told that he's going to die he he basically was near dead and then he decided to just start trying all these already approved prescription drugs that nobody thought had anything to do with Castlemans or cancer and he's alive now 11 years later and he's developed this not for profit called every cure where they is completely not for profit and his lab focuses on taking all the diseases that we have like 14,000 diseases we have no treatments for and taking existing approved drugs that basically stand to make companies very little money because they've a generic form now and using AI and doing these things in combination they've saved kids from nonverbal forms of brain illness they've saved people adults and and toward them from from cancers turns out that women who have breast cancer surgery that involves lidocaine as a local anesthetic have a 30% less less chance of getting a you know having interference um different uses for aspirin for colon cancer I mean you know and so his repurposing old drugs for exactly current unanswered so his belief as a physician as a as a card-carrying member of that community is that the field of medicine has many cures in hand and excellent treatments in hand for the things that people are struggling with you know so then when I hear this stuff about well low-dose lithium everyone you know maybe pinging that once a year for offsetting the potential for Alzheimer's or now we're hearing a lot about the particulate in certain air pollution you know might be one of the primary players and causing dementia you know when I hear this stuff it's like we need to be testing existing medication so the field of medicine the fields of science you know as having been in this field of science for a long time although now I'm in public education still faculty member at Stanford the the key thing to understand is that is it is a business of people it's there's a sociology to the business just like there's a sociology of podcasting in media you know which you know is a discussion to itself it is actually what really maybe understand Rogan a lot better I remember at one point some years back um I asked him I'm like where where does your kind of like belief or skepticism and certain things come from and he just took me then the eye and he just said because I know people and he anyone knows Rogan knows he has a lot of different kinds of friends and he interacts with a lot of different types of people yeah he's not narrow he's extremely broad in his interactions not just on his podcast and I realized in that moment I was like okay got it he casts his really wide net but he has a very selective filter of what he integrates and it's because he understands people the you know good and bad aspects of people yeah and and I think that's the kind of acumen that it is only developed through life experience and if you're a scientist or you're a physician and you're very entrenched in your field you can be the best oncologist the best ophthalmologist the best neurologist and if you're considered the best because of your knowledge within that silo or even multiple silos but you don't have life experience and no people from different areas of life I guarantee you are not the physician I want to be treated by or that I want a family member treated by yeah because you have to understand not just the information and the source of the information in terms of paper and rigor and laboratory you have to understand the motivations and almost the personality types of the people behind that work it's so true I mean this was the beautiful baptism of running nightclubs for so long I met a million people in person and their and their inhibitions are down because they're absolutely and some things are tuned up you know aggression or openness or the humor or you know whatever it is that they're trying to do it really reveals and kind of I guess exaggerates the who people are but fuck like you become really really good at judging people and really really good at assessing this person's motivations how how sort of real is this it's been a couple of times on the pod where I've sat down with someone and I'm like I don't know what to think about this person and after I've sat down with them like I know and I know him one of the couple of directions and like that was good or whatever but like I when I'm gonna go where you didn't believe what they were saying we're not gonna go yeah we're not gonna go I've had that experience I won't mention the guess obviously I would say 95% of 98% of our guess I've felt that way there was there's only one or two instances that that I got any kind of inkling that like they weren't as sure as they sounded or something of that sort but but I think that that's the that's the good thing about podcasting is that it's not just an interview right like you can ping people for ideas and you can ping people around those ideas you're not trying to you're not trying to catch them in anything but you really I mean that's why because we're sitting across from it's it's like how you get to know anybody you would sit across from them and you would talk to them it's in the smallest I use this example of um watching musicians on stage so one of the things that I find coolest about anybody that does does anything a lot is not them doing the main thing it's their transition activities within the thing so for instance I spent a long time at university if you put a pen in my hand it just immediately starts moving through my fingers I said you're one of those dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig students if I look out I kind of blur my vision I I'm not teaching in the classroom much these days although soon I will again and um it's like it's like watching a bunch of propellers a Mexican wave of pen twirling yeah I can't I just because I did I put a pen in my hand and I do that um one of my friends act the way that he takes if he bing if one of his guitar picks goes while he's playing he's warming up for me on tour um if one of his guitar picks goes like the way that he fucking like just just seamlessly snags another one like that's what's fucking cool because that is this moment of unconscious betrayal of pattern would be a way to think about it um a drummer that like snaps a stick and you'll just see and he'll switch seamlessly or he'll be playing he was playing the high hat with his right hand and his right drumstick goes so he'll switch and you'll see him move with his left and then it's back out and you're like do that's so fucking cool I love seeing people that are the way that the guys will set up their cameras like I'll see the guys taking a shot and they'll need to change something think, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, and I'm like, you just did six things in two seconds. Is that hyper proficient? I am so fucking cool, right? I think that's so sick. I want to touch on what you said before, which was sort of the fixation that people have, groups, different groups have on stuff. What do you make of the attempt of legacy media to turn, get more high quality protein into a political issue? I think this has been one of the most interesting patterns to see that, like, protein has become politically coded somehow, and obviously this is kind of further the health and wellness industry, kind of old hat now to talk about, like, protein is prioritizing protein is something that you probably should consider or at least be aware of. But, yeah, what do you make of the fact that protein consumption has become politicized? And resistance training for a little while, although I think the wave caught to stimulate the idea that everybody, men, women, young and old, should be resistance training so you can no longer, like, kind of, bro science resistance training, although I have to say, even though I have respect for certain elements of bodybuilding, I do think that the body, the bodybuilding culture, I think, has kind of distracted from what's possible with resistance training as a positive health stimulus. A lot of people are still averse to it because you look at people who are bodybuilders and don't exactly see the picture of health. Yeah, and I think it's also the way that bodybuilding changes the entire relationship to food, in general, and to life in general, and any look, anything that's so, look, I think Daryn Yates is an amazing athlete, right? I can think of him as an athlete and what he did and the way he did it, and I knew Mike Menser, and he was the one that you knew Mike Menser, no way. He sold me my first training program by phone. I can tell you the story. I'll tell you that in a moment. New Menser, I read about him in my book that comes out later this next year. New Menser had a lot of conversations about Menser, not just about resistance training, but also about school and philosophy. He was one of the people that really encouraged me to get serious about my academics. Yeah, Mike Menser was part of your origin story. Mike Menser, I'll get back to the track media thing, but yes, I signed up for a program. He's the reason why I still to this day, since I was 16, 15 hours, I mentioned, still train three, maybe four days a week, not one set to failure, but keeping set volume low. One thing that isn't advertised a lot, Mike didn't talk about it in his seminars, is that a lot of what determines total set number is how well you can, like really direct the effort toward the muscle you're trying to target. So some people are exceptionally good at that, I think Dorian was. Other people like, no matter how hard they try and curl with just their biceps and forearms and anterior delts, like it's going everywhere, you know. And so a lot of his about being in muscle connection is. One thing he was very clear about is that as you get better at training, the neural component of contracting the muscles that you're trying to contract, you actually can get by with fewer sets because you're able to direct more intensity to those muscle groups. So over time, I found, yeah, I probably do somewhere between six and eight sets per muscle group, but with two, I can not slaughter the muscle, but I can get where I need to go. But I like training, so sometimes I'll do more, but yeah, Mencer was great. I signed up for this program. My mother was like, I was 16, maybe even 15 years old. And she was like, why is this grown man calling the house, because back then you do like a phone consultation and Mike didn't talk Mike barked. He'd be like, listen, and the only thing you know, and he would say he's like, and the number one thing is you don't want to listen to anyone else besides me. He told me he said, he said, most people in gyms are explicative morons. He said, they're morons. He kept saying these people have the intelligence of a toad, and he would just like yell and yell. And then he'd recommend these six sales code, and then he'd recommend these anoran books. And then I even had some sleep issues when I was in college, because my dorm was really loud. You know the advice he gave me, this is so well. And I have a friend from college who's now a fertility doc here in, in an LA, and he remembered the story. Mencer, this is terrible advice. He said, get a jug of white wine and just have like a half mug of white wine. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll fall back. First of all, it doesn't work at all. Okay, so like hitting miss. Oh, listen, Mike was an extreme guy, but he actually said he said, stay away from anabolic, which I did. He said, enjoy learning to train hard, enjoy your training hard. He said, even though it wasn't a fan of cardio, like get out and live life. And he said and read really good books. And we gave him his book list and to that, yeah, I still follow the same. Yeah, Mike was amazing. And then when he died, I heard later I was very sad. I mean, we'd been touched a little bit because I was in Santa Barbara and he was down in LA at that time. Okay, so mencer protein politicization. What's going on? Well, traditional media is like, we'll take anything at this point as an attempt to gulp for error because they're really struggling, right? I mean, there are some decent journalists in traditional media, right? There are. I think that they, but they'll not just, by quote unquote, politicizing something, gives them something to say about it, right? One gram of protein per pound of lean or desired body mass is kind of the standard thing now. Some people will less, some people a little bit more. Okay, fine, fine. I think we all get that. That's the goal. If you get a little less, you're probably fine. If you get a little more, you're probably fine. If you get tons more, you're probably not fine. You get tons less. You're probably not fine. Animal protein is clearly superior as a, as a pro quality protein to calorie ratio, right? You give me an eight ounce piece of steak or you have to eat half a jar of peanut butter, which is not protein. It's a bunch of fat with a little bit of protein in it. Okay, so why do they politicize it? Well, because they're struggling. They're struggling big time in terms of how to generate revenues. I mean, people expect to get their news. Two things have certainly happened. I believe as a decline on this, that people are no longer digesting their news as local news as much. It's more national level news and international level news. Look, putting your name in a title or Rogan's name in a title is going to generate clicks. And saying great things about people, kind of things about you. Generally, he's such a nice guy. Doesn't, yeah, I mean, listen, I've had a few nice articles written in. Some of the health magazines will pull protocols and things and I love it. And, you know, I would say things in the health section, the New York Times, very often parrot what I've covered and other people have covered. And they do it differently, but you can often predict what they're going to cover by looking at the various health podcasts of Peters. It's our Peter was just on 60 minutes, Peter Tia. Yeah, I texted him about it. And he said, as he said, nice to see, nice to see traditional media not accusing me of something unspeakable for ones. Yeah, I mean, they seem to focus a bit much on like how much he charges his clients and this kind of thing. I mean, the fact that he said that that was a sort of clean and fair interview. Despite the fact that there is some fuckery going on in there. Yeah, it just goes to, I mean, well, listen, they're, they've, to say they're losing power is an understatement, they've lost power. They, to some degree, there's still some trust there from a number of people. And to some degree, you know, every topic, health topic in particular seems to go through the same arc. It's like, nobody knows about it except in niche cultures. Let's just take the glimphatic system. Nobody knew about it. This one woman discovered it was some, not suppressed, but it was kind of knocked back. Then it came out as all the rage, then 20s, a few years ago, there's study. Not as much glimphatic clearance as we thought. And you occasionally someone said, oh, it's not a, not a real thing. One mouse study, one mouse study, didn't see it, right? And I know the history of the glimphatic research. So it's very clear. It's there. Okay. So then the, the arc is, okay, exciting, exciting, exciting. Take dopamine, dopamine nation on a Lemki's beautiful work. Then about 18 months later, it's, well, it's not, you know, it's just in mind. All alone. Right. Listen, creotene, the next, it looks, you can guarantee that in eight weeks or six months or whatever it is, it's going to be creotene, not as important as we thought. It's, there's just the natural arc, right? And then it's the, yes, the things that work still work and the things that don't, don't. It's very rare for anything to sort of capture and then just get completely obliterated. Like I was talking about delaying caffeine by, you know, 90 minutes or so. If you crash in the afternoon, it's a great thing to try. And there was, so it was, got a lot of positive attention. Then there was the pushback. Show me the clinical trial. Show me the benefits. It's like, no, it's, show me whether or not you crash in the afternoon, try it if you want or don't. Like, hey, easy. It's, it's a suggestion. It's grounded in mechanistic science, but even the, even the coffee accounts on YouTube were pissed off about this. Listen, the big thing that, I guess the, the direct answer to your question is you're taking their paycheck. Do you know how much these reporters make? You're taking their paycheck. The irony of it is if you look at some of the advertisements in traditional media, it's like, Fendi bags and like all these like fancy things and in some cases dietary supplements. So they are our competitors, but, and this is the critical caveat. They're competing with us. I never think about what they're doing. I never look. I don't care if somebody said I'm like, okay, I'm never going to modify my content on the basis of what any of these traditional media houses are doing. They are in the chase position now. 100%. Now, does that mean that we will always be, you know, leaders in this space? No, one has to be very careful to not assume that, right? There's some kid, some guy or gal, some place who's going to take my lunch someday. That's the way, you know, and I'm not a kick out the ladder from you. I don't give, I don't hop on an Instagram live and give people 100 suggestions about how to get their content out more broadly and from based on what I know. I'm just not that way. It was weaned in a culture of science where you train people. My students are now on the job market or have labs, et cetera. That's the way it's done. But traditional media are competitors of podcasts. That's why they started podcasts. You and I are very fortunate that we started podcasts in, I wouldn't say the first wave, but like if we were making now, second wave pop, I mean, listen. When did Joe's lunch? 2021. Did it really? Yeah, January 2021. Fucking hell. I thought he was before that. But in 2020, I was going on a lot of podcasts. I went on like 30 podcasts. And prior to that, I was trying to teach a little bit on Instagram and that kind of thing. But I mean, podcasting is growing like crazy. I mean, I want to encourage people to make content. But the content that I think is most important is not content about content. This is the, this is the really dangerous hook for people. Content about content. And also you'll find that the people who have very successful podcasts tend to be people who are successful in something else first. You certainly have that Lex, me, Rogan, Rick Rubin, I mean, Theo Whitney, he goes on and on. I mean, Tim Dylan, et cetera. And there's a bridge. There's a natural overlap between what people were trained to do and what they're doing in their podcast. But there are very few podcasts. I mean, I'm sure there are some that are just like someone decides like I'm a podcaster. So the person who wants to be influential for lack of a better phrase in media, they want to teach, they want to teach science, they want to encourage thinking and make a living doing it, encourage health practices, make a living doing it. I would encourage them to go do something else first that they really enjoy because that, the structure of that and that very thing is going to inform their content. Very few people are going to, like if they start giving out degrees in media, it's our social media. I don't think it's going to be very useful. Whitney Cummins got the best take on this. She says in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. So good. It's one of the challenges you get as people become more successful that the ability to generate new ideas decreases because their life is increasingly out of touch into the comedian who only talks about dinners, shows and airports and hotels on stage because that's the entirety of their life experience or craft or sorry, Ginger, but or their craft. I mean, you said I'm leading an increasingly eccentric life. I mean, the reason I have a pedoc was that I always wanted when I had cuddle fish, I love a query. I have this art project with someone who's a kind of, you're going to try and justify buying an octopus as like inspiration for, I'm going to teach an octopus how to use an iPad. Okay. And I'm going to decode what the camouflage patterns of the octopus mean for thinking. Is it a mimic octopus? What is it? No, well, right now I have a, I have an Indonesian octopus that's not very interactive. I want a Pacific Two Spot. This is the whole thing. It's going to open up some, some trauma for me, but I'm getting a new, new octopus soon. Caribbean Day Octopus is probably on the way, but, but the, the, the idea is actually to use AI to try and decomvolve what the octopus is thinking and maybe even communicate with the octopus. They are very smart. I had 40 cuddle fish in my lab in San Diego. They are so smart and they're also cephalopods, cousins of the octopus. So, but the reason I'm doing that, the reason I have my art projects, the reason I extended my book for a year to add more studies because I like learning and I, as my friend of mine said, he's a very intelligent guy. He's a tattooer among other things. He's an exceptional artist and he said, people with interests are interesting. Correct. You know what's not interesting? Other people's failures, other people's minor wins, like there's nothing more boring than that. Yeah. But it hooks in the short term. So social media, I think of as a very, we should go up to clouds rest sometime and height clouds rest. And you know what I mean? It's beautiful. But there's this very narrow rock bridge out to the top. And on either side, it's slide to your death, slide your death. And so I'm always doing, I don't get down on all fours, but it's, it's a, it's precarious. But it's beautiful when you get to the top and it opens up into a big flat spoon here above half dome. It's gorgeous. I go there as often as I can. But on either side, you fall to your death and I always think of the internet and much of life like this. On one side is the, the fall to your death that is numbing out by going online. And the other one is drama, like, like, who's, I mean, I don't want to name names because I don't want to give it anymore. Like recently, there was an online drama in the fitness community and I was like, I unfollowed a bunch of accounts. I was like, this is the most boring, stupid thing I've ever seen in my entire life. And this is seeding my thoughts. Yeah. This is seeding my, but in like, I got to go back to reading good books. I'm going into my basement, you know? So you're allowed to unfollow accounts that you're not learning from or that are pulling you into either numbing out or drama. The drama piece is very serious because it gives the illusion that there's something meaningful there. But you realize this is just like, it's, it's nothingness and it is, that's a fascinating way to look at it. It is kind of the empty calories of the content world that you leave this. Being given the sort of simulacrum of learning something, but if somebody said, okay, after watching this 10 minute half hour, one hour, expose a or deconstruction, what do you know that you didn't know at the start? You go, why I can know about what this person and this person said to each other about each other and how the interplay and look, deconstructing someone's psychological profile, understanding how human motivations work. I'm fascinated by the way that sort of social interaction, hierarchy, status games, all of that stuff. But I'm not learning that. I'm not reading the status game by Will Store. Well, you're a thinker. I mean, so when I mention this rock bridge, I mean that my, it's the visual I keep in mind when I'm trying to get into solid work or solid thinking or going on social media, like there's a narrow band of very useful things to learn and participate in. I think that. Infinity of bullshit. You know, numbing out or drama on either side, the fall to the death, little by little. But what I think is that because you are somebody who thinks deeply about human nature. I mean, I listened to your episode with Scott Galloway and I'm just saying this what they call glazing on it. We used to just call it kissing somebody's ass. So I'm not trying to kiss your ass because like this is, there's an awesome episode and you're command of statistics and data and understanding your ability to frame it and remember that it's world class. Thank you. And you do that through hard work, but also through life experience. So I do think that living a life in a way where you're collecting data so to speak and your understanding things is wonderful. But I guess what turned me off to this one particular drama in such a strong way was it's yet another example of something I've seen thousands of times before. There was no new learning for me there except that humans are just being humans. And so at some level, like there's, at some point, the novelty of life, the excitement of life, the enriching parts of life are about new experiences. Sometimes it's about experiencing the same thing and go, oh yeah, this is a general theme of me or of them or of life and understanding human nature. But at some point, you're like, this is just yet another drama on the school yard. This is just, this reminds me of and it's sometimes useful to make the parallels. This is like in junior high school when so and so said something about so and so you go, there's no new data. This would be like running, you know, I publish it some papers. I don't want to do those experiments again because especially if I get the exact same result, right? Now if I get a different result, that's different. But I've seen the same thing again. And so I think in order to develop a healthy relationship to social media, which is really a big slice of life now for many people of all ages. And to scale the tone you've been around for 10 years. Right. I mean, I think you have to be extremely conscious of like when it got you and why. You know, I mean, you had a nightclub. You couldn't, you might have to respond to a catastrophe or something happening, but like you can enjoy yourself there too, but you were there to work. You were able to navigate that chaotic environment and get things done. Well, a good example of this, you know, post-nut clarity after copulation, the devil's laughter can be heard. I think Shope and Houset that an equivalent is post content clarity. So after you've finished consuming a thing, how do you feel? Do you feel enlightened, hopeful, peaceful, do you want to ring your mom and say that you miss her? Do you want to talk to your friends? Or do you feel like the world's out to get you? And that there's less than is needed for everybody. And you shouldn't really trust people. And you're a bit sort of tight and tense and your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears. Well, here's my litmus test. After I spend a bit of time on social media, I ask myself later, do I remember anything from being on there? You know, the reflection, was there any learning? Did I learn anything? Listen, I learned some things from your discussion with Scott. I still got a little bit more to go in the discussion, so don't quiz me on it just yet. But I intend to think about it. In fact, this morning I went out for a run. I listened to a podcast of somebody that I'm not particularly big fan of, but I wanted to get their perspective. And I thought a bit about some of the things that you and Scott had discussed. And I was reflecting on it, right? Because that's learning and that's the anti-forgetting process. I can't recall something I saw on social media yesterday that was very stimulating. But I watched that 60 minutes episode and it gave me some ideas and insights about what's going on in the world or what might not be going on in the world. And you know, thinking about your experiences is so critical to placing value on them, making them meaningful for you. What I'm not interested in is just an endless deluge of sensory input that goes nowhere, actually if it impedes other things. So a little bit more reflection, 10 minutes, one minute, five seconds of just asking, did I remember anything useful? I want to do that again as opposed to just the infinite. You mentioned, I think this a fucking great take. The arc of something you get to introduce, there is excitement, there is reaction, there is criticism, and then usually acceptance, presuming that this thing is like true or valid or whatever. Yeah, like creatine, right? I was laughing so hard. So I want to talk about so what do you think is the next frontier for public acceptance? Because I would say vitamin D3 was check, yeah, that's already done. It's gone through the cycle. Correct, it's out there. We should actually plot this out. Be fun to do it. We should do a post together, which is, by the way, public careers follow the same trajectory. You show up, people are like, who's this person, then it's like, oh, you're very exciting, then there's always the up, here's the flaw and then, and then there's a very simple equation as to whether or not that they are going to continue and continue to have popularity. Very simple equation was the sort of event more useful or interesting than what they contribute. And if the answer is, yeah, that was actually more exciting than any one thing they've ever said in terms of usefulness, then they're gone. That owned by society. They fade out at different rates, their half life and it disappears. But if what you're providing is useful, if the person is, if they still, if people still want you around, so to speak, it outlives that. I mean, this recent drama, I don't want to dance around it too much, but this recent drama, I was like, this is, nothing could be more trivial or stupid, but I realize the reason it's probably, I'm not pretending this and I don't wish ill on anyone, but it's probably going to pseudo end the career of this online person is because it was much more interesting in its drama than any value ad that they were given. That's interesting. Yeah, and they, and they projected a fair amount of arrogance in their delivery of content and thing. And if you do that, you're setting yourself up, right? That's a very, that's a big attractor early on. People, people like a sort of deserved downfall of the person who's out of touch, a hundred percent. Yeah. There's no coming back from that in, in a real way. Okay. So vitamin D3. Yeah. Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 through the cycle. Creatine is in the cycle, right? Creatine is powerful. So protein. So as a vitamin, I would say vitamin D became first. Then protein. Right. Protein. And the protein thing is politicized a little bit too, because there's something about meat that's considered right way. Right coded. Yeah. And then creatine, you know the reason that creatine, I don't think is going to get politically coded, is it's been so heavily pushed by women for women. Ronda Patrick, a lot of like Kelly Levesque, if you know her, super hardcore female lead audience, it's important for women. Despite the fact you're probably going to gain, you know, three pounds of weight, water weight. Yeah, weight. You're going to, your scale's going to be heavy. Maybe you're going to look a little bit fluffier, but you can get rid of it by stopping it, right? It's, you know, it's like having a scale that's off. Like as soon as you, curves are in. Yeah, exactly. There's a one way in which things are not mimicking the 90s when everything was super wafty. I mean, I came up in the 90s when it was like, the expectation on women was really excellent in the heart. Do you know the environmental security hypothesis? Sit back. Let me give you this one. Okay. So there is evidence to suggest that men prefer thicker women during times of economic downturn and thinner women during times of economic uplift. So if the study, original study was done on students that were in halls of residence, and they were eating at, you know, like a dinner time together where it would be provided by the halls of residence. And they showed men, images of women of varying sizes before they ate and after they ate multiple iterations all over the place. Before men ate, they preferred the bigger women after men ate. They preferred the thinner women. And you can track the general turnage interpretation. Yes. Yes. You can track the sort of public popularity of body size, not shape, waist to hip ratio always remains the same typically, but of body size overall to how the economy is doing. It's called the environmental security hypothesis. Basically, the human behavioral ecology stuff, Mac and Murphy taught me about this university in Melbourne. He's brilliant. He's out with Candice Blake's lab. And what it seems is happening is if you feel secure in your environment, you are not queuing for a mate or while she can survive a tough time of a famine because times aren't that tough. Resources are abundant. Therefore, I don't need a woman who can signal that she can get extra calories and is more sort of metabolically well-reserved. You might be able to say, the opposite is also true. And this tracks the economy, tracks with the preference of body size. I'm wild. Wow. I love your command of this literature. It's awesome. I just remember the '90s being a time of very wavy models, because I always came up through the skateboarding thing when I departed from biology before I went back to it. They had models like Kate Moss, who were extremely thin, and actually in friends of ours who were skateboarders in New York, like in Washington Square Park, our friend Peter B.C. was discovered in New York and ended up in Calvin Klein ads. Skinny skateboarder. I mean, he became a firefighter, so now he's like, he's Jack, appears still around, a super good guy. But, and really into his health now and stuff, but we can kind of chuckle about the fact that like in the '90s, like that was the look, and it was the Kurt Cobain look and that whole thing. Yeah. And the larger guys were like, you know, it wasn't Mark Wahlberg, then it was Marky Mark and the funky bunch. Remember, and he was in the Calvin Klein ads with Kate Moss. Okay, so I suppose-- He was now. Well, he was pretty built then by those standards, so, but now compared to the sort of typical sort of expectation of muscularity in men. But that big flation thing is huge. You watch Biggest Stronger Faster, Mark Wahl's thing, but that's a great movie. Yeah. Watch it some time ago. Yeah. It's 20th, 2007, I think. Anyway, so D3. Yeah. Protein. Right. Creatine. Creatines in it. Creatines made the cut, although I think because it's a powder, and they're trying to put in gummies, and the flavored versions are really-- the flavored momentous version, by the way, it's awesome. It's like-- I always had a-- That's a little pastel thing, right? It's like a chewable-- Yeah. It tastes like sweet tarts. It tastes too good. They've just-- Yeah. Jeff sent me-- in fact, I had a little-- Yeah, there can be. It's creatine. Right. With one gram of-- One gram. So, I've been taking creatines since I was probably 15, 16, I do-- I actually do the loading thing where I'll take like 30, 40 grams a day for a week, and then cut back to 10 grams a day, and then I do a wash out every 16 weeks or so where I stop taking it completely. I know this is very conventional for a week. You drop some weight. It's actually interesting to see how much strength you hold on to in that week. This is what I am without the assistance of 10 grams of creatine. Yeah. I just do it for me. I don't-- Well, look, you're talking to the school of fucking Mike Mensa. Yeah, exactly. Okay, what's next? What do you think's next? Magnesium. Okay. Magnesium, three and eight are bisclicing eight. I know there are multiple forms. You know, you mallet for soreness, you know, et cetera, et cetera, it's a citrate. It's a laxative, you know, I would say. But bisclicing eight and three and eight across the blood brain barrier more readily, I would say, pre-sleep, you know, 30, 60 minutes before sleep. But, you know, I had our chair of auto-laryngology, head and neck surgery at Stanford. Okay. Came on my podcast. Obviously, he studies the hearing system and she said that magnesium is protective against hearing loss. First of all, hearing loss, low level hearing loss is associated with dementia, less sensory input. Okay. Deaf people can be obviously very cognitively strong, but they have other ways of bringing in sensory input, but partial hearing loss strongly correlated with dementia. Hearing loss, very common after concerts and industrial workers, things like that. Magnesium protects against hearing loss. Why? The endolymph in which the hair cells that vibrate in response to sound, that endolymph is like a thick kind of fluid, viscous fluid, is magnesium is a prominent feature of that endolymph. It's depleted by very loud sound, to some extent, but encouraging more magnesium in the endolymph is protective against hair cell loss, which is hearing loss, which is permanent, even though it's low level, it accumulates over time. So magnesium, magnesium for cognition, magnesium for sleep, the whole argument that there's less magnesium in the soil nowadays because of the way farming is done has just been depleted, so you can get less of it. Oh, the viral. And the viral. Yeah. Your kale of yesterday is not your kale of today, so to speak. So I think magnesium supplementation is going to go through a wave of like, eh, they're just talking about that. Like Chris and Andrew are talking about that on podcasts. This is Rosa. Then it's going to show up. Oh, wow. Like, you know, we've got the, you know, chair of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery. Stanford talking about magnesium supplementation to offset things like tinnitus, maybe a bit, but also protect against hearing loss, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's going to be like magnesium. Everyone should be taking magnesium. And then, you know, what will happen? Magnesium sofa below. You know, it's only an 11% difference in this population, et cetera, et cetera. But I think this is one moment we're revisiting, just very briefly, the data on alcohol is worthwhile. It's been so many years of alcohol is into problem. Then alcohol is actually good for you, one or two drinks and I as long as it's red wine. Then it's bad for you. And then recently it was, no, it's actually not that bad for you. And then now finally, Stanford, Keith Humphreys and colleagues at Stanford did an analysis of all those previous papers and essentially found that the control groups in those studies that concluded moderate drinking is good for you. They were completely off. They were comparing sick people to less sick people in one case. And it turns out that when you normalize for proper controls and you look at all the studies, you do the meta-analyses without fail, zero is better than any. One or two per week, you're probably fine. Still do all the things that you're supposed to promote your health. Moderate drinking is bad for you in terms of elevated and cancer risk, certainly disrupting sleep and microbiome and a bunch of other things that aren't good. You want to drink, drink, but we are now landed squarely in zero is better than any. And those aren't my data. Those are data from the best people for analyzing the large scale studies, the smaller studies across the board. And I can refer you to the analysis of the analysis. It's quite solid. It's very clear. That Lancet article, that Lancet study from what, 2016, '17, so the reason that my company in the UK is called 6 months sober limited is because the first thing that I ever did before even launched the podcast was I was like, elective sobriety as somebody who didn't have a drinking problem was so fucking beneficial to me as a productivity strategy as a guy in his 20s. Because northeast of the UK club promoter's stopping drinking was fucking revolutionary a decade ago. Like what do you, oh my god, like he's crazy, it's like the, you know, Brian Johnson fucking penis injection. I like the Ben Greenfield. That crazy. Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh my god, why are you doing this thing? Now, you know, low and no is very sort of common. And I was like, I want to get other people to do this. I think that'll be cool. And I was like, if I can teach people to go sober for six months, that'll be fucking sick. And instead of registering it as like modern wisdom limited before I did modern wisdom, I was like, I'll do six months sober. And like I'll teach people that this is like real good for them. And I was, I want to one coached four people through, I think six months of it to like test whether or not my approach had done it was daily coaching and people would follow this course and do all the rest of it. But yeah, that Lancet thing was like the, my foundational scientific justification. But it's like, okay, these are all of the reasons that the outcome is good. As you said, it's like just do the thing and see if you feel better. Like do you push your caffeine by 90 minutes and tell me if you don't have a crash later that day. I don't need to explain to you the mechanism if you can get the outcome that you're looking for. The same thing is I learned from you. What is it? A, a low commotion with lateral eye movement on a morning walk down regulates anxiety. Big time. I'm not if you're looking at your phone. I'd been doing that. I'd been doing morning walk thing from maybe Mark Bell's like post-prandial thing for. As long as I can remember, right? Like it might. Yeah. I had this ridiculously convoluted morning routine which like escape velocity me out of being the adult infant. I was as a club promoter. And like I'll do meditation and I'll do gratitude and all the rest of the shit. And I was like, if I wake up and I'm on the wrong side of the bed and I go for a walk and I come back, like, shit doesn't feel as hard as it did before. So I didn't need you to tell me that it's because of the low commotion and the passage of stuff moving past you as your focal point stays the same and the lateral eye movement down. As you said earlier on because it sort of justifies the buy-in I have this sort of odd kind of investment and I'm almost more the fact that I found it myself than it gets justified by the science. I'm like, yes. Well, I think there's an interaction there. Look, I mean the placebo effect is very real. The mechanism underlying what you're describing, also very real independent of placebo effect. I think that what I'm referring to is the buy-in of people understanding a bit of underlying mechanism for the things that clearly work. Do you need to understand that there are three forms of stimulus for hypertrophy, damage to the muscle? Hyperplasia, hypertrophy. Yeah. Do you need to know, but can it inform better choices about training? Yes. Do you need to understand what those are in order to grow a particular muscle group? No. But if you understand a bit of what's apt, likely happening under the hood, it affords you tremendous flexibility. That's also, I also believe that knowledge and gaining knowledge, not only learning, but learning and doing is what humans thrive on. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge and learning. I mean, a lot of my podcast content, like I'd love to tell you the protocol for this, but it's actually just really effing cool. And if you don't think it's cool, that's okay, but this is how you do worse. You do your essentials thing, right, which is kind of the stripped back. Critical science protocol is only, but what you'll find is that people who do the buy-in of learning a little bit about how something works, hopefully they learn to say about cortisol and sunlight today and these kinds of things, it starts to make sense as to why you actually feel better when you feel more energized. It's not a placebo effect. What you're explaining is why it's not a placebo effect. That's a good, so you get more buy-in. What I think is, for me, is cool, and you said it earlier on, is if you know why this thing works, you can be a little bit more robust and flexible with how your strategy goes. You're not just do this thing. If you don't know why you do the thing or what the mechanism is, even at a very basic level, as soon as you don't do that precise thing, you have no fucking idea what you're doing. Or when things don't seem to go so right. So for instance, if you exercise late in the day and then the next morning, you're like, "I'm feeling sluggish, like, is there something?" No, actually, you had a cortisol bump last night, it's a negative feedback loop. Your cortisol is naturally suppressed, get a bit more sunlight. The mechanism, excuse me, the protocol starts to bridge together. What to do in case A, B, C, or D because you understand the principle below it, which is cortisol at one time impacts cortisol at another time through this thing called the negative feedback loop. What Josh Wade's skin, the great Josh Wade's skin, you know, I love that episode. Dude, I think that. You guys should sit down and have a conversation. And to text you about it, I was like, "This guy, me and George, my house mate, I like have obsessed over Josh, the art of learning." He's got another book in progress. I'm going to connect you guys because you guys would hit it off. I fucking love it. So well. He comes to the States pretty often. He lives out of. Yeah. He moved down to the jungle at one point. But he talks about knowing like the principles below the principles or underneath the principles. So the principles underneath the principles, and then being a practitioner as well of some of those principles, right? And then being connected to people in your field and related fields that deeply understand a stack of principles as well. That's what expertise really is. And this is why, and I'm not taking a dig at doctors, but this is why, listen, recent, I had a weird medical thing. I took a new prescription drug. As somebody said, then I had what I thought was a vestibular thing turns out it was low blood pressure. It was diagnosed in one moment by a superb physician by that afternoon. I was fine, but I could have just chased gotten down the rabbit hole. I was getting all sorts of crazy suggestions about what to do. Look, just like they say in music, sport, I'll say it for podcasting and in medicine and science. There are levels to this shit. Some people are way better because they have principles understood and underneath those principles are understood underneath. They understand how they connect up and connect down and they know people. It's one thing for a physician to say, this will handle your cholesterol. But more often than not, what a physician in one siloed aspect of medicine will suggest will create a side effect that will create a job someday for another physician in a different silo. And it's just the way the training is done. And Faganbaum would say, this is also the way that drugs are categorized. This drug is for this and this. And therefore nothing else. And you say, wait, no, that drug could potentially cure or treat many other things. So he's exploring that in a serious way and getting results, curing disease, literally. So I think it's not to say that people with degrees already, it's that, let's hope not. All right. I spent a lot of time getting degrees. It's that just having degrees in some cases, not always are necessary, but not sufficient. But most what is absolutely necessary and sufficient is to understand the major principles, the principles below those and how those connect. And then to be able to contact people and to talk to people and to be a practitioner like I, it's very clear to me that you're training as a nightclub owner informed you so strongly about human nature, also about biology, not just because you were staying up late and sleeping into the day. But those, the, the, the themes of what you experienced and learned are carried forward in the themes of every discussion that you have. And that's what being a real expert is. This is why Derek from more plates, more dates, love him. The first time I saw, I was like, what's this guy, what's this guy's credentials? The guys credentials are he's an act, he's what, he's an actual expert, a true intellectual and a true expert practitioner understands something at every level. He is. And Derek is a really good example. Great example of like sufficient, necessary, but not sufficient, given that he's outside of academia. Like he's not doing the academics are now going to him. Yeah. Peter Tia, who's a physician trained at Stanford and Johns Hopkins asking Derek about hormonal and like hormonal. Yeah. And here's a super smart guy. And he has his expertise. And so what you saw there was people who have different stacks of principles connecting. It's so cool. Right. All right. I got to ask you this. You mentioned protein kind of the, or at least it's vitamin D creatine vitamin D protein creatine. I think it's going to be magnesium. But what about diet and if I was to put my little bat down from what I'm the whispers is Rick Rubin would say that I'm hearing fiber. I think like the push toward fiber because it's kind of been the forgotten element of diet. I think that that I'm beginning to hear an awful lot more about that. I think in a nuanced way, I hope because here's the deal. I had Mike Snyder, our former chair or maybe still current chair of genetics at Stanford. He talked about blood sugar regulation and incredibly smart guys really into biomarkers. And he's almost 80, he looks like he's like 55, incredible, incredible health. And he and I were discussing that fiber certain forms of fiber cause inflammation in some people. Well, why a lot of people say they can't eat a lot of vegetables in this kind of thing. Some fibers inflame the gut and body of certain people. Other fibers do the opposite. Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher Gardner ran a study looking at low sugar fermented foods versus fiber effect on the gut microbiome. The outcome is very clear. Eating low sugar fermented foods decreases the so-called inflammatome. They call it as opposed to genome, et cetera, proteome, okay. So reduces inflammation, body-wide. So eat low sugar fermented foods, sauerkraut, the brine, kimchi, beer doesn't quite count. Tefia. What's that? Tefia. Tefia, these sorts of things. People can pick their favorite ones. I'm not a big kimchi fan only because it's cut to coarse if they would shred it. I like it, but it's like, I have a hard time chewing it. Tefia is the hack for this, huh? Tefia is great. I love the full Bulgarian yogurt. Listen, I love Greek food, but Bulgarian yogurt makes Greek Bulgarian supremacist when it comes to the yogurt world. Careful, you call me Bulgarian supremacist if you don't. The Bulgarian people seem like very agnispy over known a few. But the point was that low sugar fermented foods reduce inflammation. They support the gut microbiome in a major way. The fiber group was divided. Some people who intentionally ingested more fiber had reduced, so-called in flammatone markers inflammation, and they looked at a lot of markers. The other half had greatly increased inflammation. This is why I think people like Paul Saladino and forgive me, what was the original carnivore MD, a big guy, he's been on Rogan, he's big jack, dude. Fuck, he could be anybody. He's just always eating a steak. Okay. Oh, forgive me. Fuck, okay. Okay. Anyway, shout out to him. I think, I think. Sean Baker. Yeah. Well, then talk about vegetables causing inflammation, right? I think some people do experience inflammation for vegetables. I think, so I think fiber is going to make a big comeback, but we're going to have to discern between what, and Mike Snyder really understands this, but certain types of fiber are going to help people and harm others, harm in the gentle sense, you know, increase inflammation, which could be severe for some people, autoimmune conditions, et cetera. Other forms of fiber are going to be beneficial. I don't think there are any, I don't think there are any specific forms of fiber that everyone is going to tolerate well. So this is going to be an issue with fibers the next thing. I do think fiber is critical. I eat sauerkraut every day. I drink the brine off the sauerkraut. I actually drink the brine, then I put water back in it, add some salt, put it back in the fridge, because I just like that after I go for a run and work out. It's just delicious, right? It's delicious. And also, if you go by these fermented brines as a product, they're outrageously expensive, and you're supposed to have like this much, okay? I'm a grown man. I'm not going to have this much of anything, okay? Certainly not food or drink. I'm going to have like a thimble's full of brine. It's like, no, I want to drink the whole thing, like, come on. So, you know, and it greatly supports the gut and the healthy bacteria thrive in that environment. So yes, I think this is the way it's going to go. If I were to say, okay, like, what other things, you know, melatonin, we didn't talk about melatonin, which I'm not a huge fan of as you know, but melatonin had a run a long time ago. It was like a hormone in a supplement form and people were just downing this stuff. It's amazing. It ever broke through. And you can get 50 milligram, 20 milligrams. It's crazy. And people will fight me all day on this and I'll fight right back until they quit because they're amazing animal data showing that it can suppress the hypothalamic gonad axis. Like, it's an interlapheabity. Yes. Yes. And it's also true that there's melatonin in all the cells of your body that are not light, that are not suppressed by light by rather stimulate by light axis and antioxidant. You don't want to be taking large amounts of melatonin in supplement form, maybe a tiny bit every once in a while. I was told, a little recently that after a flight of five milligram dose of melatonin was good. Yeah. It's fucking tons because one milligram is pretty much bottom of the u of effectiveness. Right. And then you get over into more fuckery going on. And I'm like, five milligrams, why? And that was the reason, oh, well, you've been exposed when you're flying, typically you've been in a little bit of a dangerous environment, inflammation antioxidant. I'm like, is melatonin the tip of the spear of the antioxidant world? I mean, it's a player. I mean, as long as we're on this, I think that something that's not a supplement, but it's likely going to, and hopefully going to be in the main frame of discussion, is that it's clear that long wavelength light, red light from sunlight, infrared and urine for red light is beneficial for us. Right. It's low energy, but it can pass into our body. It does support mitochondrial health. It charges the mitochondria. I recently learned that the water surrounding the mitochondria actually absorbed the red light, the same way the ocean absorbs red light, and that's why the ocean of blue reflects blue. We're like little mini oceans. Yeah. The mitochondria were essentially, they're originators, bacteria that got into eukaryotic cells. No way. Yeah. They have their own little genome. Yeah. They were initially not part of us. It's somewhat distant version of us. I got to interject. Just hold, like, and keep that in your mind. Yeah. Do you know how you inherit mitochondria through, through mom? Yeah. Yeah. How fucking wild is that? Well, you want to know it. You like the, you seem to, um, sex to be, well, you seem to like sex divers and your hyperfocus on mating and reproduction. So let me, um, you should have kids, man. Yeah. I can't wait. I'm ready. Kids are, well, you know, the two things, one, one of the, the only challenges I have with having you as a friend is that I have to constantly, uh, tell women in my direct messages that I'm not going to relay messages to you. Coming here today, I had several people, not the most, you know, anyway, a lot of women try to get, uh, to you through me. Ah. Okay. Because in terms of sex differences, what were we talking about here, uh, that, uh, you're fucking mitochondria comes. Yes. Sorry. Different brain circuit turned on there. Yep. Um, there's something now happening in England. Okay. This has been approved for mitochondrial diseases. So there are people who have mitochondrial diseases and they want to have children. Right. And so they, you know, they don't want to pass along these mitochondrial diseases. The, when the egg is fertilized, the sort of splitting of the egg into, you know, multiple cell types that forms the blastocyst, which is just means balls of, uh, ball of cells, which is because it was the, um, early embryo, et cetera. It, they might have, the mitochondrial DNA are intensely important for the physical pulling apart. The spindles and things that pull those apart. They come from mom. Okay. So it's actually been solved that you can do three parent IVF to bypass, no fucking weight. So you get. But this is now being done. So think about it as a women age, right? And they're ovarian reserve declines, right? So does the, quote, unquote, quality of the eggs. We can talk about quality of sperm because this is, uh, definitely plays a role in terms of what I call day three crashes, you know, when the embryo doesn't get, doesn't even become a blastocyst. It doesn't get past day three. Yeah. It's typically attributed to the sperm. But a lot of the process is coming from the spindle and therefore the mitochondrial DNA of mom. So there's no real donor where you get two parents and let's say the woman has, let's say she has a mitochondrial issue, um, genetic issue. She doesn't want to pass on. Or let's say that she's, you know, in her, um, late 40s or early 50s or maybe even mid 50s, they can take eggs, presumably, presuming she still makes eggs, take the nuclear DNA, put it into the, essentially an egg that's had its nuclear DNA taken out, but maintains its mitochondrial DNA and then fertilize with the sperm, obviously with the sperm from the, from the father. She's a child that has the nuclear DNA of the intended mom and has essentially surrogate mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplasm. Dude, this is so fucking cool. That's actually being done. Okay. That, that was being done actually fairly often in, from what I understand in Ukraine prior to the war. There were people in the United States traveling there. It's not legal here. They do it. I believe in, in some places in the Middle East in Mexico and certainly in England for mitochond, for mitochondrial disease. So this has been done, it works, but it brings up all sorts of interesting ethical considerations. Who is this child? Well, the child has the nuclear DNA of one mom and the, and the mitochondrial DNA of a different man. Dude, this is so sick. Yeah. Yeah. I only learned about the mitochondrial, only comes from mum thing like three months ago and I kind of, not really being able to stop thinking about it. The reason is, when you look at somebody and I'm going to use Kanye West as my example for this, didn't think I was going to go there. You really want this podcast flat. It reminds, well, invite Lex and Kanye and you know, I know you're going to sit down. What I think about in this, I total, like the most pro-science that we've done today is, if you have a person who has the mitochondrial function of a fucking V12 engine in a garage, mitochondrial function of a V12 engine, but the psychological chassis of a Honda Civic, you have this sort of crazy out there energy, but you don't necessarily have the handling to be able to sort of direct it. You described a lot of teenagers in early 20s, males. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course. Especially where I went to school in Santa Barbara. Yeah. With the testosterone pump and, but I just thought about that when you go, okay, well, you've got this combining of psychological profile, but it's almost uni-heritability when it comes to mitochondria. It's like 99.something percent is that, and I don't know if the other percent comes from the father or if it's like some weird like me, I don't understand. What was it? Mito, something, I did a mitochondrial test, so I've sent off a bunch of cheek swabs, which would be cool. I'll get to see those when I come back home. Anyway, I just thought about, mum could be like this, powerhouse, or the opposite. You could have quite a low mitochondria function. However that presents energy, disposition, or the rest of it, but kind of the psychological predisposition of somebody that's like a fucking hard charging, go get a lots of conscientiousness, industrious, highly disagreeable low politeness, all this stuff, I thought it was real interesting about how those combine. Well, you're still going to get it absolutely. You're still going to get genomic DNA from mum, right? You know, those 23 chromosomes, I mean, you're going to get genomic DNA from mum and from dad. What's really a mind-bent, no pun intended, is there's a woman whose laboratory is at Harvard, named Catherine Doolock, who's a luminary in the field of neuroscience, who did some beautiful experiments showing that different brain areas are genetically identical to mum or to dad, even in you and me. You have entire brain areas that are 100% the genes from dad. It's a myth that every cell is a 50/50 mix of genes from all. Wow. You've got a mitochondrial DNA piece, right, which I'm a genomic DNA. In fact, they did some marking studies and you could actually, well, you see this two ways, you can do it if you mark the cells and, you know, blue ones are mum and, you know, et cetera, you do those kind of studies. The more convincing studies, of course, are where you have genes that are passed specifically through the Y chromosome, right? And you can actually either postmortem or in terms of the requirements of having a gene present in a given brain structure, you can realize that you have brains where a given brain area carries the disease mutation and another brain area doesn't. And even though it all came through dad on the Y chromosome, it should be everywhere. But it's not because there you have some structures that are essentially purely exact. To see the little territories, domains that it, they correspond to entire brain structures that drive of all things hypothalamic fat function. There's a condition of hyperfagia of, like, very obese kids that can't stop eating. This kind of thing comes through, I forget if it's mom or dad. So these things show up in the human genetics. I mean, human genetics is often more complicated than we think about in terms of Mendelian genetics. You can get hypomorphs where you have kind of reducing expression as opposed to just lacking a gene completely. This exists and we can talk about this for hours. But so when people say see an attribute and they say, oh, that clearly got that from your mom or from your dad, that's actually could be true, right? They're much more like their dad in certain ways, like more like their mom in certain ways. Because we're never going to know, but their brain is entirely separated out. Yeah. Very well could be. It's going to be fun when your kids play with my kids and we can, you know, Lex, that's you. Well, Lex and I have this, but we're not going to have kids together. I don't want to give people the wrong impression when I was referring to as the fact that Lex and I always have this discussion about timing, the delivery of our independently generated kids so that they can grow up to. Well, he wants my, he wants his kids to beat up my kids in Jiu-Jitsu. Okay. Okay. I have more a theory about enrichment of sort of the engineering offspring versus the nervous system. You know, much more pro-social than him. He's very competitive in this regard. Yeah. I'm competitive in certain things, but mostly my, my compensate for Lex. My interests are so, you are so like, somehow, I don't really find many people looking at my collection of interests in an overlapping way. I'm going to beat him at octopus, octopus training or whatever it is. Well, the octopus raising community is a little, people are a little guarded, but so, so as a, as a, it's a whole thing, man, it's a whole different podcast, a whole thing. But I did want to ask you something, I want to make sure, so you put out this video about your health journey or I guess you had to your sickness journey and seek and search about, you're seeing really good. Can I wager a hypothesis? Because I've experienced this myself at one point, do you think that at some point, sounds like I'm leading the witness, but that it's possible to, like, the in pursuit of recovering someone's health that along the way, because I've done this, you do something or take something that layers in another health thing that makes that, like, direction increasingly confusing. Like I took this, on the suggestion of some conventional doc recently, I decided to try and knock down my apobie a bit, it's a little high and it created a whole set of all bladder issues for a couple of days. I stopped taking it. I feel fine again and I probably don't need to take it in the first place. So I believe medications work, I think they can be very useful. I also think that some of them work so well that they can drive the system in directions we don't want to go. And so when I hear about these blood cleansing methods or I hear, you know, I worry as your friend, I worry a little bit that, let's say I don't want you to struggle with the symptoms of Lyme's, but I do worry a little bit because these things are really extreme. Yeah, okay, so the health documentary that we put out, which is episode one, the reason that I did that was I assumed at the start of last year, the day that I got the diagnosis, I knew that something was up. I knew that I was tired all the time. I knew that I wasn't recovered in a matter of how long I slept. I knew that I had brain fog and I knew that my mood was low and like, you know, maybe this is just getting older, maybe it's something, whatever. And the day that I started filming with my videographer was the day that I got a, hey, we've done an EKO test on your stool and it turns out that there's a line. We don't know if it's IGG or IGN. We don't know how prevalent it is when you got it. Don't know if it's burriela, but be easier. It could have been way back when. You got to take it back. Right. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. Almost certainly was vestigial. Um, all of the stuff, all of the basic shit that wasn't exciting I did, right? I did. Doxycycline. Yeah. Doxycycline, minuscycline, like all of the usual treatments. This was not me jumping straight to going to Tijuana to have an intra jugular line put in and me live in a hospital. It wasn't me going straight to Vienna to get a fucking hyperthermia treatment, like teaser about what the next episode is. It wasn't me going straight to those. I'd gone through all of the standard, it's Gabrielle Lyon that's looking after me. It's her team. And she is as like western great physician. Western by the book as you're going to get, but she's just a bit more like integrative than most people would be. So we're trying to make changes to diet. We're trying to make changes. So well, my training had to get backed off from like 10 out of 10 to six out of 10 for a while. Maybe we need to do. And then I had a fucking migraine with aura that I thought was a stroke. I thought it was having a stroke. So have you ever had a migraine with aura? No. Okay. Do you know what they are? It's like a ring. So some people get it visually, but other people get it olfactory and I get it olfactory. So I'm on an assault bike doing Norwegian 4x4, it's fucking run to Patrick. And my heart rate is coming back down. It's been 165, 165, something like that and it's coming back down. And like, it was as if someone shoved a piece of burning toast under my nose. Like that was all like a smell worries me because normally when somebody gets the sort of phantom smell of burning toast, we worry about temporal lobe seizures and. And so immediately I go immediately I drugs that's why I thought I'm like, this is how I die. I die on an assault bike in on it, Jim Austin, Texas. This is how I fucking got. I mean, I mean, it's not like super bad ass, but it's it's in the right. Is that how I get taken out? We're just like on social media. That's true. So anyway, I immediately go and get CT scan. No, it's not. I go in to get it. What is it? A transient ischemic attack, TIA. Yeah. I'm like, we're going to do another one with contrast. So now I've got fucking gadolinium in me and I'm going to have to like detox the gadolinium. We're going to people creating after TIAs, you know. It doesn't surprise me. It's never protective. Anyway, so like the amount of shit that wasn't included in that vlog that I went through like hundreds of sauna sessions with colostyramine or chalk, like charcoal body wash as a binder to try and like get the mold out of me. And so you had mold and lime? Oh, the litany of things, mold. I mean, I saw that in the video, but the mold was confirmed. Mold was through the roof. I've done, uh, who does total talks? Can't remember who does the test. Anybody that's got it, uh, total talks is kind of the gold standard test. We're going to need to key later metals after being in this garage, right? That's true. Smells like bumper in it. Heavy metals were in there. But I mean, the, the problem is, and I said this in the, in the dog, if you do a huge battery of tests, loads of shit's going to come back and be out of whack, but if you don't feel bad, it doesn't matter. Yes. You have antibodies to chocolate or strawberries, or you probably develop those as a kid. And I love dark chocolate and strawberries, but I'm sure I make antibodies to them. That doesn't mean I have a food allergy. Yeah. So you, if you do a lot of tests, stuff's going to come back and what you're doing is you're basically like a guest who show like homes in your way through a list of potential suspects for why you don't feel good. And one of the problems that I found and have found since the dog came out, even though lots of people, especially people from like the M, M, E, C, F, S community, chronic fatigue, syndrome stuff, I'd tinnitus for a long while. Like that, that community was like, fuck, like somebody is talking about this and they're saying it's kind of a silent, like, suffering that nobody really appreciates. And this was met at least in a large pot by people going, Chris looks fine. This is all psychosomatic. It's in his head. It's because he's pushing himself too hard. It's because of blood loss. Well, that makes it worse, right? And I'm certainly not suggesting that. I mean, I think you're doing an important public health service by talking about these things. You know, I think I'm hearing more and more lately from people, young men who took drugs for, to avoid hair loss, plus an asterisk syndrome in the medical community, the standard medical community thinks it's nonsense. But you talk to these guys that are having serious and at least till now, permanent, hopefully some of this stuff can be reversed, sexual, sexual health issues, psychological issues. I mean, it's cratered the lives of a lot of young guys. And there's actually a scientist out at, a scientist's physician out in Florida who I made up posting on the podcast. There needs to be more discussion about these things. I always thought that you could kill Lyme with high dose or just long-duration doxocycle in treatment. And you found it helped or didn't help. Yeah. It's, it helped. But there's just, when you start to get deep into these things called fish tests, you do a fish test for it. And I'm working with like Dr. Floress and in situ hybridization. Yeah. Yeah. There's this, uh, Dr. Kastin, who is a German guy who's like the number one on the planet, Matt Cook out of San Francisco, San Jose is the guy that's leading this, like more name so on. Forward thinking. He does like, he's does a lot of stuff forward thinking sports medicine doc who's now doing peptide stuff. And um, just not quite right and not quite fixed. All of that is to be said, I got inverse pretty privilege, which is you look fine on the outside. You're in good condition. You're a young dude that seems to still be performing at an okay level. But it's kind of the same as saying to you same bolt, oh, you ran a sub 10. You must be great. It's like, yeah, but I should be running like nine, nine five fours or nine fives. And I know where I'm supposed to be at. And I know where I want to be at. And I don't like surrender to entropy in this way and just accept a lower standard of living for myself. And that was the main thing I wanted to people to take away was like, there are so many people who don't have the inclination, the time or the resources like I do to be able to text you or a tear or fucking ronda or whoever I want or, or, or Matt Coco fly to take time off to go to Mexico. Do all of this bullshit. So just like, this is life now. This is my life now. Yeah, I'm just a bit more forgetful. I don't think I used to be that forgetful. Yeah, I fall asleep at 8 p.m. I don't think I used to fall asleep at 8 p.m. Yeah, like my mood's a little bit low, but maybe it's just because of, and it's explained away and explained away and explained away by lifestyle environment, psychological disposition, aging, something, and you're like, oh no, you, there are chronic underlying infections that you've got and to treat them is so fucking complex and so expensive. But the mold was the COVID and mold with the two things that really fucking push me over the edge. And then when you get into autoimmune, all you need for autoimmune is genetic predisposition, permeable gut lining and environmental stressor. And if you live in a house with mold for two years, like I challenge anybody that's got those two to do the third and not get fucked, is it true that that mold is a prominent issue in Austin? I hear this. It's one of the highest, Texas is one of the highest states in the country. Is it the, you know, hot, humid days? It's a tropical. So for some reason, this country decides your country decides it's going to build houses out of wood, it's an organic material, but while it's being built out of wood, it's exposed to the elements. It's wet and hot and wet and hot and wet and hot and now the skeleton of the thing that you live in has been wet and hot and now it gets covered in cladding while it's been wet and hot and sometimes it's wet as it gets covered. Yeah. And the home design is something I think a lot about from the lighting perspective. We didn't get into it, but like you know, we hear so much about the benefits of red light, but you know, long wavelengths light can really offset some of the toxicity of blue light. But it's not just about sleep, but going back to what you were just describing, do me a favor? I'd love for you to talk to David Faganbaum, who cured his own castle man through an intelligent approach of taking these already approved drugs to treat castle man's, I mean, he cured himself. He's alive 11 years now. He's got kids, he's married with kids. He was going to die, like dead, but he has this not for profit every cure where they use AI and hardcore scientific methods basically. I mean, not to sound loose about what exactly they do, but he's a serious scientist in physician to try and decode different diseases and try different existing drugs to cure them. So I think it'd be worth talking to him and he's very open-minded and he understands the medical profession and he understands that if the solution hasn't been handed to you yet, it's because people aren't aware of it, but it's very likely that it does exist. So I think it'd be a good conversation for you. I mean, look, if I was to track my journey, we were here in this location, I lower a different angle, about 14 months ago or so, I think, and just after that September of last year, and sort of spring of this year with the two worst times for health, brain was so slippery, I was so forgetful, he was insane, it was like trying to think through mud. I love the agility of my own thoughts and the fact that that was taken from me through, you know, no fault of my own, I fucking hell, oh God, you were too hard-charging. I focused on sleep. I mean, bed for like, at least-- No, you're a vigorous guy, I don't buy, though, like you're just pushing too hard. I mean, there are ways in which people push too hard, but you're, like you said, you have a 12-cylinder engine, that's you. You built yourself to that and you came into the world, presumably, with some forward center of mass. I feel like you were born, started nursing, finished nursing, and got into the world, and started doing stuff. Yeah, so-- but that period, the last time that we were here, you can even go back and watch the vlog from after we've recorded, and I think I finished up with Eric, and I'm outside, and I'm like half asleep, falling asleep on this couch, and it was-- if I two and a half years ago were a 10, if that was Chris at where he's supposed to be. 14 months ago, I was at a four or a five, and then the start of this year, and for much of the start of this year, it was like a three or a four. I would say I'm up to now, I swing between seven and an eight, and the fact that I was able to do the live shows in New York and Toronto last week, and I've got LA coming up, and then Boston, Denver, Boston Chicago, Nashville, and it feels like there's color back in the world because it felt very grayscale for a long time. I mean, there's a-- I say it in the dark, but there was a day when I forgot how to time my shoes, like I looked down at my feet, and there were laces that were undone, and I didn't know the combination to tie my laces in, to be able to get them to be in a bow anymore. And I'm like, I've gone from that, which was like a three out of ten, to now, I feel okay, and there's some color in the world, and I can have fun with my friends, and I can fucking send it, like, and I can stay out after 11 o'clock without fearing that the next day is going to be ruined, not drinking at least 37, shall I be treating myself with that much fucking fragility? No, I don't think so. I mean, it's almost like you're describing kind of having a sort of dementia for a while in general. It felt like, have you ever taken an anticholinergic? No. So I took one, this is funny, during the-- I like to stimulate the colonergic system. Well, you should do, but if you-- I'm not a big nicotine guy, but everyone's in a while. If you have overactive bladder syndrome, which I and a lot of men develop during COVID, because we were right next to our bathroom, and we had nothing else to do, so we were drinking fluid and going to the bathroom and drinking fluid and going to the bathroom, and I was like, I found myself urinating more frequently when I didn't need to, and I'm like, prostate problem. I'm like, this is-- going to the doctor, I tell him any laughs in the UK in, like, 2020, and laughs. I was like, is this funny to you or what, and he was like, you would not believe how many men I've seen over the last couple of months that have come in with this problem. My business partner at the time in the nightclub stuff, Darren comes around, we have a meeting it's the first meeting we've had in ages after I ruptured my Achilles, so my foot's up on this thing. And while we're having this meeting, he drinks half a glass of water, and it's still in the back of my mind, right, because I've just gone to see my doctor that week. During the meeting, an hour and a half, he goes to the bathroom three times. And I'm like, mate, are you signing yourself urinating more frequently than usual? It's not just from sitting too much, because certainly during the pandemic there was a lot of sitting. I just standing desk. I don't know. Anyway, you've detrained the little muscle in between the bladder and the urethroid to be like the sensitivity that you're supposed to be at, which is a fucking podcaster, right? It's one of the primary things you need to develop beyond your working memory is your bladder. If you're going to be a podcaster or a touring musician, you got to learn how to, you got to learn how to hold your piss. So one of the things that they give you is an anti-colonurgic, which gets that little sense of thing. Yeah, then you probably feel like you're floating. It's horrible. But what they used to give, I mean, this was the whole thing of witches, you know, to give them this, they would take it to give themselves the sensation of flying. This taps into the muscarinic colonergic system, different than the nicotine colonergic system. So nicotinic colonergic system, it's the stuff of muscle movement and contraction and focus and all the reason people take nicotine. The muscarinic stuff is what you took. Muscarinic agonists are going to give you a sensation that you're floating. It's going to make your. It's going to make your pupils about this big, but your relax normally, your pupils are big, your more alert, you're going to feel dissociated. This was actually recreational witch drug use. Dude, it's fucking sucks. Yeah. You can't remember shit. Anyway, it felt like. It felt like that. I remember I was talking to Michaela Peterson at the time and I was like, I'm being forgetful and I've got this thing and obviously she was experienced from dealing with her dad. And she was like, taking a new medication recently and I was like, yeah, like I've taken 10 milligrams a day of this anti-colonurgic, she was like, rings me immediately. She's like, stop taking that stuff right now. The prescription drugs work very well to hit the mechanisms they're supposed to hit, which is why. They often. They often. They often. Listen, some of them are great. Some of them create real problems. I mean, I'm. Yeah, I'm man. Anyway. So it sounds like things were just getting layered in and layered in. And you're fighting through this stuff and yeah, you're right. As you try to treat one thing, maybe something else comes up. Like if there was H. Pylory Candida, SIBO, leaky H. Pylory treatment. Yeah. That's like four different antibiotics. Correct. All timed with different sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence. And you're a hard-driving guy. So the thing about autoimmune stuff is like a lot of men, women too, but a lot of men who tell me like, oh, I'm like, got this weird skin thing, are these like, you know, and they freak out. It's because if you're the kind of person who can push and not get sick too often, oftentimes it means that your immune system can really ramp up in parallel with your kind of levels of driving activity. I don't get sick people who always end up getting sick sooner or later, but they just push, push, push, push. You get high levels of interleukins and things that you end up, you know, essentially deploying so, so much cortisol, but also anti-inflammatory molecules, right? It's not just cortisol that you can start, you know, getting skin conditions because you're immune system attack from that. People get likened planus. You really want to get scared. Look up, likened planus is some scary photos. Sounds like a moss. Well, they're like, you're right, but it's an autoimmune condition where the immune system because of stress in it, excessively long days, et cetera, excessive caffeine, push, push. People will get, it's almost like, looks like bruising on the wrists. They can get them on their genitals, on the tops of their feet. People get very, very scared and it's actually just, they're pushing themselves too hard. Some relaxation, look, I think humans can tolerate a ton of stress, provide they get enough sleep at night and sleep well. Let me give you this. But what you're telling me is you're looking down at your shoelaces. You don't recognize them as shoelaces even. This is how I know I'm too sleep deprived when I used to pull all nighters and I'd work on grants and papers really late. I'd look at the word "va" and I go, that's misspelled. That has to be misspelled. It's like, it's time to go to sleep. That was my, I mean, just to show you how unhealthy perhaps I was, that was my red lining. When I, when the word "va" looked, I'm not sure if that's spelled correctly, I'm like, I'm sleep deprived. I think I'm going too far. But yeah, dude, I've come to believe that there is basically no such thing as being overworked under rested and I was resting. I was going to bed. I mean, I couldn't even show you my fucking whoop data and Andy's got it. All the team have got it. Oh man, in terms of that. Dude, I was in bed. I'm not kidding. I was in bed from 7 p.m till 7 a.m. for like weeks, months at a time. I'm like, I'm dedicating, and I'd wake up having been asleep for all this time. And I'm like, I'm so drained. And it's not. Anyway, I'm now moving between, like if it's a really fucking bad one, like a six. Up to a seven and sometimes up to an eight. And dude, when it's an eight, like today's probably a seven and a half. I woke up this morning, I mean, I'm at the W in West Hollywood. I'm like surrounded. But I saw a homeless guy literally pissing into a wine bottle this morning and I'm like, hey, what's going on? The sun's shining. Fucking shit. I'm like, go to a Dunkin' Donuts. We have a serious homeless/mental hell/addicted people. The world just felt like color, like fuck, this is so good. It's bad in a color. It honestly feels a little bit like I kind of got a second. It feels like I died a bit. It feels like me who I am kind of died. And now I've been so gentle with myself this year. I've gone to bed early and I've restricted my diet and I haven't had any fun and I haven't really had an adventure and I've worked and I haven't got to do new stuff. I've just tried to hold on. You know, I used to have this, I still do this really long end of your review. I had two goals for this year. Usually it'd be a lie. I'm a meditation practitioner, training, muscle gain, we would straight all this stuff. Two goals for this year. Fix my health. Don't let the show drop. That was it. If I got to the end of the year and I hadn't fucked the show and my health was fixed, I'm like, that would be, and as I come into land, you know, we've got a few months left in the year. I'm like, I think might just sort of bring this into land there. So it's been a real, it's been a real sort of fucking adventure that I wouldn't wish on anybody, especially the hopelessness, having hope, expectation, that being dashed, that really sucks. That's the hardest part that you think that things are going to change or be improved and then they don't. And then you have to deal with the expectation and then the disappointment and the disappointment was the worst thing. But if nothing else in kind of Brian Johnson's on the show later this week, Brian, very few people want to be Brian, but appreciate some of the things that he's learned by the stuff that he's done. I'm like, dude, if I can tell you 20 different modalities that I think didn't move the needle and two that did, at least there's a bit of still the lining on the fact, and now obviously I'm hopefully on the trajectory of being back to being better. It seems like it sounds like it. I'm being hopeful. It feels like that to me and, you know, I did, to sort of round it out, I did peers Morgan show a couple of weeks ago and Michaela came on and was talking about Dad and Jordan's having a really fucking rough idea, super rough, like just not good. The answer is not good. And she finished up with like, so we think it's because of mold and we think it's maybe because of this nod to immune, but then we also think that it might be because of demons. And like that was what she left the conversation with. And then peers turns to me and is like, Chris, you're real. I think it's the work of the devil. And I'm like, why do I have to clean up this? Like this is her claim. Should just say, yes. Well, look, my point is I understand why because it feels so fucking cosmically unfair after a while that you're like, this has to be a fucking curse. Like this feels so much bigger and greater and more painful than it should be. I can only attribute this to like some comic retribution that is owed to me for some past slight, some something. And that's when you start to ask yourself. And you're really an excessively harder. I mean, whatever the reasons, let me, let me ask you a question. I mean, we're on a podcast, but in all sincerity, how can I and your other friends support you? And since we're doing this as a podcast, I'll also say, how can the people who listen support you? I mean, like, but really, I mean, you want them, I mean, I'll be praying for you. I'd decide that. Do you want people to pray for you? Do you want? They will be. But do you want people to send you suggestions? Do you want people to not send you? You know, oftentimes when somebody's struggling like my or anyone's impulses be like, I'm like, talk to Fagan, mom. Let me fix it. Let me fix it. You know, we all want to do that. But I hear it's clear. This is like, you know, what started as lime has as it's opening up all sorts of doors and cupboards and stuff in there. And, um, I mean, I, as your friend, I caution you against exploring whether or not you did something in a past life or did I think your, um, my understanding of you is that you're sufficiently in touch with your mistakes and your, uh, good choices. Hopefully in touch with you. No, no, I don't think overly. I think you, you're, you're a, uh, introspective person and, and flagelling yourself is certainly not going to help. But, um, yeah, how can, um, how can I support you? You do already, man. We had a, a close run in over this weekend, which we'll, we'll see whether or not that ends up surfacing, uh, perhaps relevant to our conversation about what's going on with, with mainstream media and how they are, uh, garnering momentum by attaching themselves to industries and platforms that have momentum. Very interesting that it never happens before. There's any status associated with trying to, uh, imagine that something, um, you are dude, like, I really cherish our friendship, like the fact that I can take your one text away from like giving me a fucking essay, you even sent me, this is to break the fourth wall, how good of a friend you are. You knew that I was like sad and worried this weekend. So not only did you give me a ton of different bits of advice, you then decided to peel off to give me like a miniature novel about a black ferret who repopulated an entire, like, female colony of ferrets and this entirely, he saved the species, saved the, and I'm like, you're like Scarface. You're going to save the species. I appreciate you. I appreciate all of the stuff that you do for me that, that, that's it. Um, I really do, I really cherish our friendship, uh, likewise. When does the book come out? People want to know September, 2026. Let's fucking go, dude. 12 months later, we're going to be back here. I can't wait. We'd love to. Um, yeah, I delayed it to add some things, change some things and do some illustrations. And, um, I apologize in a real way for the delay, but I, I'll make it worth people's while and, um, thanks for the kind words I, you're an amazing friend. You know, I mean, I've been so fortunate to be part of this colleague set that we called, you know, podcasters and the more or less same vintage of podcasters, although you got into it before me. Um, I will be praying for you and I also will do everything I can in terms of my connections and resources in the medical and scientific community to try and figure out what's going on. We're on the, on the recovery slope now and, um, and I'll be praying that that continues and do anything to support you. I appreciate you, man. You're, uh, equally, if not more amazing friend, how do you quantify these things, right? And, um, it's such a pleasure to be in the same field, to call you a friend and you're going to beat this fucking thing. No doubt. Thank you, man. Until next time. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the modern wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com/books, that's chriswillx.com/books.