Speaker 1Here's the diabolical thing. The risk of dying early, if you have bright nights, goes up immensely. There have been a lot of studies on people after 6 p.m. on devices, getting artificial LED exposure. They live shorter lives, cancer rates go up, they're metabolically unhealthy. But here's the really scary thing. We have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick. They cling to their iPads, they're on devices. But the problem is the most things are designed to make people do less of what's good for them. And we don't talk about this enough.
Speaker 2And Andrew, you're one of the most trusted voices in health today. And we've waited many, many years for this. Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
Speaker 1Yeah, these 10 protocols are well-established. They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and performance. Okay, so let's get into it. So protocol number one, you want to get sunlight because exposure each day to the skin increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men and is important for libido. And then the second, and this is really key, is to reduce stress fast. And I'll explain how to do that in a moment. And then number three, working out with weights for 45 minutes, taking your sets near to failure. It will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels. But a lot of people have been told, don't spike your cortisol. It's the stress hormone. But it's a preparation hormone. You're preparing for adversity, but also great things. The next thing, and this is one of the most valuable skills. If you do it for five minutes per day, you will experience a significant improvement in mental and physical health. And then sleeping on your side, very important for offsetting dementia, getting rid of bags under your eyes. But Steven, the number one thing that you need to know about is the moment I started, my life got so much better. And I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles. Andrew, I have this outstanding question
Speaker 2that I have to ask you. You don't really talk in depth about supplements. Oh, I do. I go ham. So you can only do five for the rest of your life. Oh, gosh.
Speaker 1I highly recommend getting a...
Speaker 2Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Andrew Huberman. We've waited many, many years for this. And now it has arrived. This is your long-awaited book called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And inside this book, I counted roughly 50 different protocols split across seven different areas. Sleep, exercise, stress control, nutrition, light, focus, motivation, and learning, and personal growth. You've written 10 of the protocols you want to focus on sharing today. Can I ask, why did you choose those 10?
Speaker 1They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and quote-unquote performance. Your life will be so much better if you do them.
Speaker 2And do they cost a lot of money to do the 10 that you've picked?
Speaker 1No. They could be done either at completely zero cost or on an existing budget. And do you do these 10 things? Every day.
Speaker 2Every day?
Speaker 1There's one on there that I don't do every single day. I take off one day per week. But every single day without fail.
Speaker 2And when you wrote them, did you write them in order of sequencing?
Speaker 1Yeah, throughout the day. From start to finish. Because this is the other thing. Protocols synergize. They ratchet together. How well you slept last night is dictating how well you feel now. These are gears in a larger system. One moves, the other ones move. And while there is a place for pharmacology and supplements and things that you take, ultimately these gears fit together based on what you do.
Speaker 2Okay, so let's get into it. What was the first thing that you drew? Because I saw there was a picture there.
Speaker 1Okay, so in my unelegant drawing, but I am a biologist, so we're allowed to do this. I mean, this is essentially a plot of where you wake up in the morning and then where you go to bed. You go to sleep at night, you know, and these are not hours of the day. These are the different protocols. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Okay, so this line represents the healthy cortisol curve. Most people don't realize that, but you wake up because of a rise in cortisol. It's literally called the cortisol awakening response. If you've ever woken up one minute before your alarm clock, it's because the cortisol awakening response is heavily entrainable, meaning it can be matched to external stimuli. You want this peak in cortisol as high as possible. in the first 60 minutes of your day. Everyone thinks you want low cortisol, but here's the deal. High cortisol in the early part of your day is what provides for elevated mood, focus, attention, your ability to learn. It's also what establishes low cortisol in the afternoon and at night, which is a requirement for falling and staying asleep. So this peak sets up this trough. So you want high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol. These represent melatonin, the hormone of sleepiness. As we know, if you slept the night before, then melatonin essentially is low at morning. And the dash line is adenosine, which is a downstream product of the use of ATP in your cells. The more you're awake, the more activities you do, the more you think. Adenosine builds up. That's why you get sleepy. So what's very interesting is that when you spike your morning cortisol, and I'll explain how to do that in a moment, and you do that within the first hours of your day, you also establish a case where these little blips, are stress. Stressful text, stressful event. But they're brief. We always hear that cortisol is bad, but our ability to have big inflections in cortisol, stress out, and then they come back down to normal, is very, very good. If this peak was high. If this peak is not as high, and this is kind of like a medium or flat, what they call a flattening of the cortisol curve, you see shorter lifespan, less recovery from every kind of illness, and these stress bouts last a very long time because they're riding on a higher base.
Speaker 2So if your morning cortisol level is lower or flat, then if I get that stressful text during the day, it will be a longer cortisol spike, more stress.
Speaker 1Bigger and longer. Oh, wow. And not only that, but there's an indirect but very important interaction between cortisol and melatonin. Your sleepiness hormone doesn't come on and function as well, and so sleep gets very disrupted. So a lot of people think, oh, I don't want my morning cortisol high. And a lot of women in particular have been told, don't spike your cortisol. It's going to lead to, excess visceral fat, moon face, et cetera. There's this condition called Cushing syndrome, which is a massive overproduction of cortisol. Very rare condition. I mean, it happens, but most people are not dealing with that, right? Most people's morning cortisol is too low, and their afternoon and nighttime cortisol is too high.
Speaker 2How do they know this stuff?
Speaker 1Like, how do they test this? This healthy curve, as it's called, was measured through just consistent blood draws around the 24-hour cycle, and then it's been looked at in response to everything from caffeine to cold plunges to exercise to sunlight. And there's this very... So protocol number one is hydrate. Okay. Your mind is exceedingly more sharp when you're well hydrated, and it actually helps boost your morning cortisol. There's a very interesting interaction between when the bladder being emptied, usually after people wake up, they use the restroom, they urinate, and then hydrating. And there's an... I'll talk about this a few times, but there's an ascending pathway along the vagus nerve that serves to wake up the brain. And part of that has to do with hydration first thing in the morning. You awake, from bed to urinate in the middle of the night because of an arousal phenomenon of hydration and the bladder being full.
Speaker 2When you say hydrate, do you mean electrolytes or just water?
Speaker 116 to 32 ounces of good clean water is fine. If you want to add electrolytes, great. How much is that? Is that a cup or is that... This is 16 ounces, maybe 18 ounces. Okay, so like a big mug. You want to consume about 80 ounces of water throughout your day. It's a lot, but you don't want to... Basically, everything you want to do in the early part of the day, you want to do less in the evening part of your day. The next thing, and this is really key, it could... It could have gone first, but you want to view sunlight or a 10,000 lux artificial light. I could spend three hours talking about this, but I'll keep it really brief. When you view sunlight, there's this beautiful phenomenon that activates these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells, you know, the major focus of my work for many, many years, so I'll resist saying more. They literally extend physical wires that we call axons into your hypothalamus. Your master circadian clock resides there. We call that your suprachiasmatic nucleus. And when you view low solar angle sunlight, sun low in the sky, there's an abundance of, yes, UV, but it's lower when it's low in the sky. You actually can look at the morning sun more easily than you can the overhead sun. Why? The morning sun looks more yellow, orange, or even some red tones compared to the overhead sky. Well, the light coming from the sky is the same, right? But the specific wavelengths of light, as we call them, that are coming from the sun when it's low in the sky are the optimal stimulus for these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive cells that tell your central clock it's time to wake up. The day is beginning, okay? There's also something incredible that happens if you get bright light in your eyes in that first, ideally 30 minutes, but even 60 minutes of your day, which there are two pathways by which your brain circadian clock wakes you up. One is it sends signals through peptides it releases and neural signals, but it's able to activate what we call the HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary gland, which is sort of hangs outside the brain, and then adrenals, you release adrenaline. There's a unique, unique window that passes after about an hour following waking where your suprachiasmatic clock can trigger an alternate pathway that literally goes down your spinal column and triggers your adrenals to release additional cortisol. In fact, viewing sunlight in the first hour of your day takes this peak. Here's what it would look like if you didn't view bright light in the first hour of your day. It would be here, which is bad. And your stress responses then would be bigger and longer. This increase in cortisol is driven by viewing sunlight. now when i say sunlight people say especially in the uk they'll say there's no sun where i live okay this could easily see say daylight why because there's always daylight out if you look at how bright it is on an overcast day in the middle of december even in the uk at 8 a.m versus midnight the night before it's different you know it's obvious when there's overcast skies less of the long wavelength like the oranges and reds are coming through but you want daylight in your eyes in the first hours of your day go out on your balcony if that's all you can do if you're in a car roll down the window it's not good to try and do this through a window or windshield there's so much data showing that spiking your morning cortisol this way establishes low cortisol and high sleepiness hormones let's call them at night which is great buffers stress and moreover kick starts your immune system to protect you against bacteria and viruses you can encounter during the day the day it is great for your metabolism mood ability to learn and on and on and in the book i explain a number of different ways how this peak relates to this trough if people are interested but if you don't have access to sunlight or daylight having it using a 10 000 lux artificial light can be very beneficial these 10 000 lux lights have been shown to significantly offset the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder etc but what we're finding from this huge study from the uk biobank is that you want bright days and you want dark nights and they're additive so having bright days is great for your mental health and physical health along a huge number of parameters significantly improves them but having dark even if you were in dim light all day making it dark at night people are healthier the risk of dying early if you have bright nights goes up immensely and we don't talk about this enough if you don't have access to enough daylight like you wake up before the sun comes out and you're up for two hours let's say before the sun comes out i highly recommend getting a 10 000 lux artificial light and last time we spoke you took me outside after the
Speaker 2conversation and you had an app on your phone right light meter so i have no relation to the
Speaker 1app but i use it and that is able to tell you how much lux of light you're getting at the moment but it's additive so one thing that's important to note is let's say you miss a day right the next day get outside for twice as long how long should you do it on a very clear morning with the sun rising and by the way you don't need to see the sun cross the horizon you can just wait till it's elevated but it's low in the sky people who are concerned about uv damage should know that when the sun is low in the sky the uv index is much lower and there's a reason for that it's a phenomenon called relay scattering sunrises and sunsets are very beautiful and colorful when the sun's overhead it's hard to look at it's this big ball of light it's so bright because you're getting all the wavelengths the uv all the way out to the infrared coming at you in more or less equal intensities when the sun is low in the sky the uv is it's not completely scattered but not as much of that as is reaching your eyes sunburn much lower risk of eye damage and so on so here's the diabolical thing your screens are not nearly bright enough to kick start this increase in cortisol in the morning but they are very capable of increasing your cortisol levels at night because that this low level of cortisol makes you vulnerable to big increases in cortisol it's a little bit of a detail that i explained in the book but i was going to say on this point is it just exposing my eyes to the light or does my body need to be exposed to it great point and one of the protocols in there it's not one of the 10 i listed is about the importance of getting sunlight on as much of your skin as possible as is socially appropriate uh beautiful work from glenn jeffries lab at university college london you know i can believe this they do a glucose tolerance test so they fast people they have them drink a glucose drink they measure how fast a blood sugar rises and if they shine red light so long wavelength is red is long wavelength light like that like that yeah like this would be medium wavelength because it's yellow a red would be um so this is probably i'm guessing somewhere between 500 and 600 nanometers of light and red would be probably somewhere between 580 and 700 and then infrared goes out further you know into the 800s and thousand the sun emits all of those okay so this is long wavelength light okay so they shine long wavelength light on people's backs and they do the glucose tolerance test and and they observe a more than 25 reduction in the peak and they also look at the rate of rise of blood glucose it's
Speaker 2a glucose rise which we know is a good thing just to summarize they shine red light on someone's back while they have a glucose shot and their glucose spike is lower that's right and you can
Speaker 1do this onto bare skin or you can do it through a t-shirt turns out that these people's metabolism rose significantly why how well long wavelength light can actually go into and through your body it gets absorbed and it can go about eight centimeters into the body red light long wavelength light of infrared can pass all the way through the body they show that beautifully in this study so that's not good no it's fantastic because along the way it makes conformational changes in the way that your mitochondria handle the electrons basically this long wavelength infrared light that comes from the sun is the heat that you feel from the sun or from a long wavelength light device allows is so amazing it actually allows your mitochondria to to function more effectively more efficiently now it's not to say that short wavelength light and greens and ultraviolet light are bad we need ultraviolet light we need it on our skin to make vitamin d what you want is full spectrum balanced light but not so much uv that you get a sunburn and you don't want a lot of short wavelength light in the absence of long wavelength light best way to do that sunlight in the early and later part of the day because the uv index is low you're getting the full spectrum indoor led lights like this which we all spend a lot of time under there's now evidence from from glenn jeffries lab and others that it actually may damage the mitochondria we talked about melatonin coming coming from the pineal gland that makes you sleepy at night you also have melatonin in most all of the cells of your body and there it doesn't make you sleepy it serves as an antioxidant but it's sort of captured and the way to liberate it is through long wavelength light so you have a protective mechanism that's kicked on with long wavelength light that protects you protects you against the oxidative stress and damage to cells and this has many many positive effects so glenn's lab has done experiments where they literally take in a light like this and they have people look at it like this for one to three minutes a couple times a week they look at people different ages different eye conditions he's a serious vision scientist right he's not he's not a biohacker he's not he's has no interest in commercial products actually although sometimes i wish he did people over 40 who experience age-related vision loss we all do a little bit experience improvements in vision when they do this simple thing and why would that be well it turns out that your photoreceptors which absorb a lot of light and convert it into electrical signals that allow you to see are the most mitochondrial rich and metabolically active cells in your entire body now biologists love to play this game where they go your tongue is the most metabolically active then they go no you're you know everyone makes a claim on this the photoreceptors my friends are the most metabolically active cells in your entire body so they have a ton of mitochondria and they need to protect themselves against the oxidative damage that comes with generating a bunch of downstream products from atp so long wavelength light is what protects us in this so you can see significant improvements in vision for people that view long wavelength light a couple times a week but only in people older than 40 and get this only in people that do that in the first three hours of their day what yes your eyes and your body and brain are not the same at this first third of your day versus this middle third of your day versus the last third of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day what's happening in the second third of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your day and at night they're not your sensitivity to what's happening in the first three hours of your the later half of your day when the UV index is lower and to get out and get some light onto your skin. You don't have to be naked or in a swimsuit. Great if you are, and that's appropriate, but you can also just wear a t-shirt because the long wavelength light will go all the way through. So Glenn Jeffrey and Robert, Roger Schwelt, he's a physician who talks about the immense benefits of getting sunlight onto the skin for getting over disease, for enhancing immune system function, and on and on. Can you, because there's going to be a lot of people right now that are going to go buy a red light lamp. Not necessary. Not necessary. No. Sunlight. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd apple. Past sunlight, through a prism, it bends the light and you see the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But also in that sunlight is ultraviolet light, some UVB exposure each day to the skin, increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men, and is important for libido. It actually reinforces romantic relationships for reasons other than sexual interactions, attractiveness, et cetera, strong effects. So sunlight has it all. What you don't want is to go outside when there's so much UV that you get a sunburn. And you don't want to think that red light's the only light you need. You want that warmth from the sun. And it gets better because, and notice I'm sort of like, it gets better like a salesman. I'm selling nature. I'm telling you, when you go outside and there's a lot of greenery, greenery reflects long wavelength red and infrared light. Throw on some infrared goggles and you're like, oh, that's a lot of greenery. And you're not going to do this, but you look and all that stuff would be glowing white in those goggles. Greenery reflects down infrared light. How do you know it reflects light? I'm stealing Roger's words as I say this, but where's the coolest place to be on a hot day? Under a tree. Why is that? Because it's reflecting the heat, the infrared light. But when you're out in greenery, you're getting all that long wavelength light and it bounces around and it goes through you. So get out into nature, walk outside. If you work and live in a city, get outside, take off a brimmed hat because you do want the sun getting down onto your face. People are so terrified about accelerating aging based on UV, but we're not talking about baking yourself in UV light all day. The health benefits of this are immense. There's a Swedish study that actually showed that the more sunlight people got, the longer they lived. In fact, smokers who got a lot of sunlight, this isn't my favorite study, but we have to admit it's there, lived longer than non-smokers who didn't get enough sunlight. And there are other things too, like exercise, et cetera, but don't smoke, but get sunlight. There'll be a lot of night shift workers. I have a section specifically for night shift workers because here are the two scariest things. Night shift workers live shorter lives, cancer rates go up, they're metabolically unhealthy, and it's very hard to mitigate. But I provide some tools specifically for night shift workers and for jet lag, by the way, because people travel. Here's the really scary thing. You and I qualify as night shift workers because the studies on night shift work, barring some of the more extreme ones, was most of them were on how many people after 6 p.m. are on devices, getting artificial LED exposure, or doing activities besides eating and socializing with their family or in bed. If you work at night at home, you're still a night shift worker. You don't have to work all night to be a night shift worker. So we have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick. And I don't like to be one of these fear monger people, but here's the cool thing. I'm going to skip because we're on to this. I'm going to skip to number six.
Speaker 3Okay.
Speaker 1And I'm going to skip to number six. Okay. And I'm going to skip to number six. Okay. And I'm going to skip to number six. Okay. And I'm going to skip to number six. Okay. So you've got a population of people, kids, who have their cortisol is slightly but significantly higher in the evening and at night because they're on devices. And the next morning, their cortisol levels are struggling to get up. You know, this is a tough one because teens socialize that way and you don't want to take their phones away and they cling to their iPads like, you know, like my new bulldog, Strummer, clings to a chew toy. You know, it's like you take it away from them, but like they hate you for it. So I said view daylight because you can't always see the sun, but even if it's overcast. Just get out for a few minutes and take a walk. Your sleep will be better. I feel like I'm giving a lecture in class. That's amazing. That's what I want. So we said hydrate, sunlight. And then number three, I know everyone's heard it, but if you can exercise in the first three to four hours of your day, you could do it in the afternoon without problem. But there's a huge advantage to doing cardiovascular resistance training in the first three hours of your day.
Speaker 2Cardiovascular or resistance training.
Speaker 1Yeah. And in the book, I devote an entire chapter, chapter two to exercise. And I explain what I think personally is the best. Best way to structure an exercise program for somebody who doesn't want to be the most jacked, but wants muscle and definition and strength. Somebody that doesn't need to run a marathon for a record time, but wants endurance. Somebody who wants to be able to sprint reasonably fast and has middle distance ability too. And it's basically structured. You either lift or do cardio on alternating days. Three days total of lifting. Warm up reasonably low volume of work sets. Two to three work sets per exercise. Emphasizing compound movements. So not a. Like a preacher curl or a tricep kickback. Those are fine, but you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck if you're doing pull-ups, rows, dips, multiple presses, multiple joints moving at once as a compound exercise. Some hip hinge movement. So it could be squat, hack squat, some deadlifts. And I talk about how to get specific aesthetic effects in there too. I mean, I'm by no means an exercise physiologist, but I've been in resistance training since I was 16. I'm now 50. I'll be 51 in a month. So I feel great. Cardio at the start if you're doing resistance training. Or not at all. I warm up for five minutes of cardio and then resistance train. But I do the cardio on alternate days. Three days total of cardio. One day of cardio is long and slow for about an hour. One is about 30 minutes at moderate intensity. One is a short one like I did this morning. Jumped on the airdyne bike. Pedal. Easy for a minute. Then go all out for 30 seconds. Easy for 10. 30, 10. 30, 10, 30, 10. And then you're off the bike. Basically max heart rate training. And the day after leg day, if you do your legs right, take a rest day.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 1But here's the. Here's the interesting thing about exercise. You'll notice I didn't say deliberate cold exposure. You want to blow some minds. I will go toe to toe with anybody on the internet or off the internet. Deliberate cold exposure does not raise cortisol. This much. It's amazing to me that the same people that are suggesting moderate to high intensity exercise are saying that deliberate cold exposure raises cortisol. It's simply not true. Not true for women. Because a lot of people said, is your book going to be for women and men? I distinguish between data when. There are data showing that it's different for women and men. I acknowledge when there's no data in women. And the data are very clear in women and men. Trivial increases in cortisol. Magnificent, huge increases in adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine from deliberate cold exposure. And those so-called catecholamines are great to have rolling into your day. They're the things of alertness and focus. The appropriate stressor for cortisol, appropriate meaning the one that you want, is a psychological stressor. We know that. Working out with weights for 45 minutes. Taking your sets. Near to failure. Going for a run for 30 minutes. So, the point being, if you do this exercise in the first three hours of your day, you're getting a big inflection in cortisol. Again, this is what you want. Now, some people can't exercise first thing in the day. They either don't want to or they can't by way of schedule. And if you're going to exercise in the later part of your day, that's fine. Your cortisol will come back down. You can do some long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. Andy Galpin talks about that. Take a hot shower, which... Paradoxically, lowers your core body temperature and then helps you sleep. When you heat up the surface of your body, you have a thermostat in your brain called the medial preoptic area. And it goes, oh, the surface of my body is warm. I should probably cool my core body temperature down. And you fall asleep better. You know, this is like the putting socks on effect or the hot bath effect, right? I assume a massage or something like that also. Great. You have access to that in the last hour of your day. Like, we need to learn more about your life. My fiance used to be a masseuse for many years.
Speaker 2So, she...
Speaker 1Awesome. Yeah. So, when you exercise for a few days early in the first three hours of your day, let's say you do that two times. The next morning you wake up feeling a little bit more willing to exercise. Did your willpower change? Well, in some sense, yes. But what happened was your cortisol entrainment mechanisms changed. Your suprachiasmatic nucleus all day is clocking what you're doing. Let's say you eat like 9, 12, snack at 3 and 6.30. You have a food anticipatory signal. You have ghrelin is secreted. Makes you hungry. We are clocks. And the synchronization of those clocks is very, very important. When you exercise at roughly the same time of day, early in the day, you will have more energy to exercise in the first 15 minutes before that. You'll notice you kind of start stirring around. Yes, part of it is cognitive. But a lot of it actually is your brain is anticipating exercise is coming. Oh, cool. That's why. I teach neuroanatomy. So, this is fun.
Speaker 2I have a brain here in front of me. It does open up in case you want to open it up. But you just reminded me of something. Yeah. Yeah. You reminded me of something that I saw you talk about, which was the anterior mid-singulate cortex. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I think you described this as being one of the most interesting discoveries of neuroscience.
Speaker 1So, singulate cortex, I mean, it's not directly exposed here. But the anterior mid-singulate cortex would sit somewhere like there. This is an amazing structure, right? I mean, just to remind people, like, when we feel some sort of pressure, social pressure, physical pressure, traffic that we hate, and we decide, I'm going to lean into this, like, I'm going to compete, or I'm going to push through this internal or external resistance, neurons in the anterior mid-singulate cortex are just firing away. And if that area is stimulated, my colleague Joe Parvizzi at Stanford showed this. He's a neurosurgeon. People say, I feel like a challenge is coming on, and I'm going to lean into it. This is the brain area of tenacity. And the amazing thing is it has connections all over the brain with, reward systems, et cetera. So it's collecting information about when it gets activated what's going on in the world that makes you feel pressure when you feel like pushing back when you don't but the best part is it is highly subject to plasticity people who diet successfully their anterior mid cingulate cortex gets bigger and more active people who embark on a new exercise program adding some component of exercise for me it's mobility work because i've got a little stiff over the years i know so when you do something that you don't want to do that you don't reflexively do your anterior mid cingulate cortex gets bigger and more willing to engage in challenging things
Speaker 2going forward yeah so that's the key point which is that sets you up to be able to do more
Speaker 1challenging things in the future that's right why would you do deliberate cold exposure i'll tell you why because your ability to sit calmly or even not so calmly when your system is flooded with adrenaline and norepinephrine and to be able to trigger that with cold water safely like cold shower getting into a cold ice bath it's safe as long as it's not so cold you're not hyperventilating beforehand on purpose that carries over to your ability to keep your head straight when other things trigger adrenaline you don't get 10 stress systems you get one and stress looks like your adrenaline goes and it comes down slowly there's a hallmark of stress cortisol goes up goes down right so the you are prepared my friend my goodness you should be a university professor you want to teach with me at stanford so i came up with a model for arousal right when people hear arousal and they think oh it's got a lot of stress and they think oh it's got a lot of stress and they think oh it's got a lot of stress and they think oh it's got a lot of to be romantic arousal it can be but arousal is really just how alert or sleepy you are so you can be really sleepy like in a coma or you can be in full-blown panic nobody wants that but a seesaw is the right analogy here because we have this thing called the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system is made up of two parts parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system they're in different parts of the body they both connect to most every organ but in general when you are relaxed that's what we call the reflection of parasympathetic tone going up when you're stressed it's the reflection of sympathetic tone going up but as you get sleepy your parasympathetic nervous system starts to dominate a bit and as you get really sleepy it dominates more when you wake up in the morning and then if you do the right things like hydrate get sunlight and some exercise well then your cortisol goes up and you're going to be more alert the ability to navigate stress of all kinds depends on your ability to navigate stress and your ability to navigate stress to do what i call is control the tightness of this hinge when you train your ability to think breathe stay calm when your system is flooded with adrenaline and that happens later in a way that was non-voluntary something happened that you didn't want to happen your brain immediately flits to the understanding of that place and you are able to maintain thoughtfulness you can know to not speak that's often the best thing you can do you know to react or not react when you get into a cold plunge one of the beautiful things about cold is that your prefrontal cortex that's involved in strategy setting and making meaning out of what's going on its activity is greatly suppressed for the first 20 to 30 seconds know this about every stressful circumstance in the first 20 or 30 seconds you are brain damaged you are brain damaged you're you are in that mode of like you could react physically sometimes that can save your life but most times you just don't want to do anything step out of the way of the car get away from the aggressor whatever but most times you're best off not saying a darn thing and then your prefrontal cortex slowly starts coming back online and then you're back again because you're ruminating you know and this is good relationship advice very good relationship advice i wish i had learned it long ago right actually last night i looked on twitter and i saw something that was both perplexing and a little bit upsetting to me and i went to sleep like i know how to deal with this some long exhale breathing which will slow your heart rate and we'll talk about that but i woke up this morning turns out it was a complete understanding and everything was reversed but last night i thought about sending a text but i thought later at night the prefrontal cortex is already diminished this is why stress feels so much harder to deal with at night and prefrontal cortex we should describe yes oh i'm sorry logic and stuff so um frontal cortex so here it's logical you have the frontal and motor areas here and your prefrontal cortex is basically a big patch of real estate behind your forehead that in humans is greatly expanded compared to in other mammals i don't like calling them lower but they have less prefrontal cortex so they're more driven by their impulses one of the most incredible things that every child and adult needs to develop is what's called top-down inhibition you feel an impulse but you resist the impulse in fact the way i've mostly trained my dog strummer because it works is i taught him at nine weeks of age put down a piece of food of course he goes for it he loves food and you teach him weight and he sits and then now he i can have him moving toward a piece of food and i say wait and his nose can be this far and he'll just stop he has great top-down inhibition is it about food no am i trying to torture him of course not it's so that if i say wait he can suppress his arousal this is one of the most valuable skills and people with frontal damage show an inability to do that which is why sometimes they're violent or they say inappropriate things people who are tired stressed drunk prefrontal cortex activity is so bad that they don't want to do it they don't want to do it suppressed get in a cold shower first 20 30 seconds it's kind of fun you're you're like here i am with less of a brain than i had getting in and then 30 seconds later you're like i can do this this explains why you should do this do things tired don't do things tired don't say things
Speaker 2tired oh my god impulse control is way worse so when i heard you talk about the anterior mid cingulate cortex and that there was this part of the brain that was kind of like the willpower or you described it then as the tenacity muscle yeah it completely changed my relationship with hard things because it made me realize at some sort of like i guess some conceptual level that every hard thing i overcome is better equipping me like when i you know curl weights in the gym to do harder things tomorrow yes when i heard oh there's like a neurological i'm making a neurological investment in my future and then you talked there about doing voluntary difficult things like the cold plunge whatever or learning a new language it can be cognitive
Speaker 1in nature it can be learning to dance if that's for you and it can be anything that creates some resistance for you internal resistance anything of that sort this is a beautiful structure because it's wired into cognitive capacities and our ability to build them and challenges with that to emotional challenges
Speaker 2we're kind of optimizing our lives towards comfort though aren't we that's like a winning
Speaker 1formula is more comfortable things i think jack dorsey said it best there's this great video of him online it was it was a small lecture that he was giving where he said any time we exchange ourselves our money our time for convenience we are almost always giving up something that's like fundamentally useful for us neurologically and it's okay to do i order food on doordash because there's great food and i don't have a lot of time to cook i'd like to devote my time to other things i'm trading for convenience but if you're aware of the trade-off you're much better off and the real question is what you're going to do with that additional time while i'm against you know over optimization to the point that it pulls you out of life like it diminishes life i am all for striving and optimization quote-unquote in ways that allow you to lean into the rest of your life with more vigor i think arthur brooks says it best you know i mean we are wired and meaning comes from striving and within striving is some struggle and within struggle is also the release from struggle and that's also very uh satisfying here's the over optimization thing to me in a nutshell which is there are people for whom doing two of the things i described for five minutes each per day will experience a significant improvement in their mental and physical health there are people for whom they're sort of like junkyard dogs they can live on anything they have a ton of vigor and they're gonna be like yeah i didn't feel that much from like drinking some water and getting something cool i got you you're one of those people who fall asleep in front of the screen get up and just keep going on uh you know sugary muffin and something like great but everyone can afford to take a look at what they're doing now and try and move the needle toward more vigor well-being happiness peace by doing certain things do you become more sensitive to the thing when you stop doing the thing depends on the thing so for instance if people like i talk about nutrition in there and it's one of the cards i actually cover everything from the all meat diet to vegan diets to i really go into the literature so people can choose but really if you look at what most people could benefit from doing and you could do this with vegan or vegetarian it's a little harder but the best diet is going to be the following right not too many calories not too few that's individual you can calculate that it's an easy thing to do but i provide a way to do that you need to get what's what are high complete protein to calorie ratio proteins this is a concept i came up with because if you look at the literature yes we need the essential amino acids so that's a complete protein but you can get that from beans and rice but to get 30 grams of complete protein from beans and rice you're going to consume about four to five times as many calories as is required if you get it from a chicken breast so this is the factor that's kind of obvious but no one ever talks about so you want to eat some high complete protein to calorie ratio protein so you know eggs lean meat fish and then everyone knows you need fiber right so vegetables and fruits but what i will say is that many people who remove us starches entirely or remove vegetables entirely will find that they their autoimmune issues resolve and there are reasons for that and we have to acknowledge that but most people should be eating some vegetables and fruits for micronutrients and fiber. Low sugar fermented foods, it's very clear. Justin Sonnenberg's work from Stanford, very clear, lowers the inflammatome. In fact, when they had people eat more fiber, for many people, inflammatory markers went up. No one likes to talk about that, especially not the vegans, but too much fiber can be noxious for some people and pro-inflammatory. So low sugar fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, beet kvass is delicious. Problem is, they tend to be expensive, but you can make your own. And there's recipes online to do these things. I don't want to get into the seed oil debate. Just eat, just use olive oil. It's delicious. It's relatively inexpensive nowadays to get real olive oil, small amounts of butter. Okay. Like, like why are we even debating seed oils? It's so dumb. It's like the seed oil debate is like the fastest way to kill neurons that I'm aware of. You know, it's like so dumb. It's like, because the studies are not well done. You're comparing a processed food diet that includes seed oils versus, or you're talking. Clean seed oils versus a high meat diet with processed meat. It's a, it's a mess. It's like as a scientist, you just look at this and you go like, this field sucks. Like it, someone wants to have a magnificent career in science, go into the field of nutrition and do some really good studies because the studies are lousy. 90% of them, like you can look at it. You don't even have to be trained in nutrition. You go there five different variables here. And four over here, there's like what you would call a bad experiment. So olive oil, the data are great. It's impressive. And then starches are great for fueling muscles and glycogen and brain, but you don't want to overdo them. And the way that people tend to overdo starches is by eating starches combined with a lot of fats. So sourdough bread is great. Sourdough bread with butter. It's even better. If you ask me sourdough bread with equal amounts of butter and bread, you're starting to get into problems. It's very hard for people to go from like to overeat starches, unless they have a lot of fats with them or sugar with them.
Speaker 2On starches, is there an impact? I think I've had you talk about an impact on your sleep with what you eat late at night.
Speaker 1Many people who don't eat enough starches find that they have sleep issues. And there are reasons for this because we talk about comfort foods. Typically, people think junk foods when they think comfort foods, but foods that increase glucose, lower cortisol. Hmm, that's weird. Starches lower cortisol and you want your cortisol low at night. Helps you fall and stay asleep. Now, you don't want to eat too much. You want to eat a lot of fat. You want to eat a lot of fat. You also don't want to have gnawing hunger at bedtime. We talk about that. But here's the interesting thing. What is cortisol? I should have mentioned this earlier. What is cortisol? Is it a stress hormone? No, it's a hormone that's released during stress. But cortisol's job is not to deal with stress. Cortisol's job is to mobilize energy in the body. When cortisol goes up, glucose is mobilized and other fuels too. So when you eat starches, you buffer cortisol. There's a very clear relationship here. So people who are not eating enough starches, who then allow themselves that bowl of rice or a bowl of pasta in their final meal of the day, or a little bit at lunch and at dinner, maybe even a bowl of oatmeal breakfast, they feel more even psychologically. They have more physical energy. Sometimes people with chronic stress issues notice they stop shaking. People with autoimmune issues sometimes resolve those because your cortisol is buffered, because your blood glucose is elevated. And so your body isn't tapping into the survival system. And so you're not able to do that. And so you're not able to try and mobilize glucose. I have this outstanding question that I have to ask you. It goes back to
Speaker 2the picture that you drew of the graph. Where is that one? You said high cortisol in the morning is a good thing. So what if I pick up my phone first thing in the morning and I look at my worst
Speaker 1emails? In some sense, from the perspective of spiking your cortisol, it's a good thing. But can you do it outside while getting sunlight? I was wondering if it matters how the cortisol
Speaker 2comes. Because what if I stress myself out in the morning? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1The problem is the rumination that comes with stress. So the nice thing about physical stressors that we control, like a workout or a cold plunge, is that they have an onset and an offset. And yes, they start faster than they end. You have stress and it kind of carries over, you ruminate. But psychological stressors tend to bang around in our brain a lot and late at night, and they tend to come back. I will say this. I think 2027 is going to be the year that we close the coffin on our own. I think it's going to be the year that we're going to be able to talk about cortisol as a bad thing. So how should I think about cortisol? Because right now I think of it as the stress hormone. It's to mobilize energy. Okay. So you can use it. Okay. And if you're going to sleep at night, you don't need to mobilize energy so you can use it. You need to rest and reset your body.
Speaker 2Okay. Cortisol is an energy-promoting hormone. So if I walk up on stage, my cortisol level,
Speaker 1like before I go up on stage and there's a big audience, whatever, my cortisol level is going to go up then? Yeah, if you're stressed about it, maybe a little bit more. But it's a preparation but also great things. There are these beautiful studies from a guy named James McGaugh and Larry Cahill, which showed, do you know that if you want somebody to learn something, you know what you do? You spike their cortisol before, during, or after that thing. Should work. Why not? Trauma does that and you never forget. All you do is work on trying to remove the emotional load of that traumatic
Speaker 2thing. Wait, so does that mean that someone who's listening to this podcast right now in the gym is going to have better knowledge recall of what we talked about than someone who's listening in bed?
Speaker 1Great question. So I have a chapter that's all about learning motivation and plasticity. And we've all heard exercise makes your brain better. How? Why? Turns out it's very important to understand there are two ways it does it, or at least two. One is it raises your levels of arousal. Exercise doesn't make you smarter. Exercise makes you more alert coming out of the exercise so you can go learn things, because it turns out you have to be alert to learn things. In particular, you need adrenaline and cortisol elevated to learn things. So when people say, you know, weightlifting makes, is good for your brain. Cardio is good for your brain. Turns out long, slow cardio, my endurance friends aren't going to like this. Not that great for your brain. It's not bad for your brain, but it's not that great for your brain. Turns out an intense weightlifting session or high intensity interval training session, in the four hours after that, you are primed for learning. Why? You got a lot of stimulatory molecules in your body and you can
Speaker 2focus better. What about if I'm a podcaster and I want to be able to ask good questions and use my mouth and my brain in that way? I'm not going to be able to focus better. I'm going to be able to in that context, but not, not necessarily just learning, but performance of my sort of cognition.
Speaker 1So the performance curve basically is inverted you. If you're not alert enough, you can't do what you need to do. If you're too alert, you can't do what you need to do or learn. So you want to be at the top of that inverted you. And a lot of what learning is about, and a lot of what the anterior mid cingulate cortex is about is getting from, I don't want to do it up to the top of that you, then it's usually about not getting too stressed. Now I learned the best trick for this, like the two best tricks. And in fact, that will take us to number five. You can use any time of day, which is use physiological size to reduce stress fast. Okay. So I have a chapter on stress mitigation and it's got essentially two components. One is how to limit stress in the moment.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1Very, very important to know how to limit stress in the moment. And here, Why is it so important? Oh gosh, because meditation, great night's sleep, massage, social relations, being well fed, hydrated, all of that helps you buffer stress. But when, when something happens and your heart rate is too high or you're shaking and you can't organize your thoughts in the way you want, none of that helps. You've gone over the line. You're too far on the arousal spectrum towards alert. And it was about 2016 that I realized I'm going to take a significant portion of my lab and work on this problem. I want to find real-time tools for mitigating stress. So I started hanging around with people from special operations who sit in ice baths and cold water. And they don't actually do ice baths, by the way, in the SEAL teams, they spend a lot of time in cold water. And they don't actually do ice baths, by the way, in the SEAL teams, they spend a lot of time in cold water. during their training. And I started talking to people in performance fields, in particular neurosurgeons, people who deal with life or death circumstances for many, many years and maintain immense calm. One of my closest childhood friends, you should have him on this podcast. His name is Dr. Eddie Chang, and he's a neurosurgeon at UCSF. He's the chair of neurosurgery, and he's brought people out of locked-in syndrome to speak through AI. He's also a bioengineer. He's also been my friend since we were seven years old. And we talk three times a week these days about science. And actually visited his laboratory and got to see him take a golf ball-sized tumor out of a guy's forebrain while the guy was awake. Eddie is the calmest guy you'll ever meet. Why? Because a movement of less than a millimeter in the wrong direction for him could cost a patient's life. People have ways to calm down in real time. So I teamed up with a colleague. His name is David Spiegel. He's ours. At that time, he was our associate chair of psychiatry, and he studies hypnosis, but clinical hypnosis for smoking cessation, pain management, and anxiety. And I should say, mainly, Melisse Yilmaz-Balbon in my lab did the study. She built this stress lab with VR and stress, and that's a whole other thing. And then we did this study where about 100 or so subjects were fixed with trackers that measured heart rate and heart rate variability and sleep. And people were in one of four groups. They either meditated for five minutes a day, or they did box breathing, inhale, hold, exhale, hold for five minutes. Okay?
Speaker 2Like four seconds each or something?
Speaker 1There's a way you can measure it, which is the carbon dioxide tolerance test. Like, how well you can control an exhale will tell you a little bit about how stressed you are. When you're stressed, you tend to blow off carbon dioxide very quickly. And when you're less stressed, it tends to shift towards long exhales become easier. So one of the groups, and then I'll say what the mechanism is, did cyclic hyperventilation. Some people call this Wim Hof breathing, Tummo breathing, Pranayama breathing. It's big inhales, passive exhales, repeated for five minutes. Massively spikes adrenaline, which isn't a bad thing. anyway, does not spike cortisol very much, incidentally. And when you do those exhales, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide. So it shifts your internal state and tends to make people very alert. Or they did, there was a fourth condition where they did a double inhale, long exhale, repeat, the so-called physiological sigh. So Jack Feldman at UCLA and some other folks in the 1930s had observed that animals and people, when they're very relaxed, would do this kind of strange pattern of breathing where they would go. It's a double inhale, long exhale. Jack's lab discovers there's a brain area called the parafacial nucleus, which is specifically there to generate this double inhale, exhale pattern in animals and in humans. Wild. Well, nature doesn't make mistakes like that. Okay. Turns out there are two breathing centers. One is called the pre-Bottsinger complex named after a bottle of wine. Pattern of breathing where you inhale, exhale, what that you alternate. This other structure, the parafacial nucleus, which we all have, is involved in any time you double up the inhales or exhales. And it's involved in breathing while you speak or sing or eat. And it generates these physiological sighs, which it turns out get triggered in environments where there's not enough oxygen or when you get claustrophobic or when you get very stressed, carbon dioxide goes up. Your brain senses that. And it triggers the gas reflex. That double inhale maximally inflates the millions, hundreds of millions of little sacks in the lungs. And then when you exhale, you offload the greatest amount of carbon dioxide. So if you just go, you're not offloading as much carbon dioxide, but if you, that second short inhale takes these little sacks in your lungs, which are like balloons at a kid's party and they're empty, but they're fluid lined on the center. So there's some surface tension inside them. They're sticking together. So you go, it's the double inhale that opens those up. And then you offload the carbon dioxide. Now that's great. But the real magic of deliberate long exhales is that they slow your heart rate down through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. This is like the most important thing for anyone interested in stress, exercise, sleep, and wellness. Because the wild thing is we have this vagus nerve. Everyone likes to talk about the vagus nerve. It's a massive nerve bundle that collects sensory information and chemical information from the organs of the body and sends it up to the brain. Cool. And it's classified as parasympathetic, calming. But you know what's funny? Neuroscientists, when they want to wake up a person during an experiment, like a neurosurgery experiment, they stimulate the vagus. A treatment for depression is to stimulate the vagus. Guess what that does? It makes people feel better. It makes people feel more alert. So it's a mixed nerve. But the really cool part about the vagus is that it's not all ascending. 85% of the information is going up from the body through the vagus, but there's another pathway too, and it goes down. And it goes down to your heart and it controls the slowing of the heart rate when you exhale. Heart rate variability is the slowing of your heart rate when you exhale. So you want to increase your HRV, do a few deliberate exhales during the day. People go, how do I get my HRV up? Well, yeah, you do some VO2 max training, right? Like, you know, obviously you do some max heart rate training, some HIIT workouts, et cetera. You really want to increase your HRV in sleep and while waking, just do some deliberate exhales during the day because that's the parasympathetic, the calming arm of the vagus pushing down on your heart rate. And all of the benefits, but it was the people who did these physiological size that benefited the most. So then I started exploring, well, how fast does heart rate slow down with physiological size? And turns out you don't need to do it for five minutes. Do it once. You just go, okay, you're feeling stressed. You're going on stage. You're waiting for a diagnosis. You're, you don't feel, you feel too alert relative to how you want to feel for whatever reason, good or bad. You're feeling stressed. You're feeling stressed. You're feeling stressed. You're feeling stressed. You're feeling until your lungs are empty and it's immediate. And I, for me, that was immensely gratifying. Yes. Cause it's fun to publish papers. We publish it and sell reports and Melissa gets, let's the lion share the credit for that. There were other people on the paper, but she did so much hard work from that and analysis. I was so gratified because I'm like, oh, finally, like if I didn't sleep well, or if I'm something stressful, even though I slept well, I can calm myself down. Like, like that. I thought real time tools for stress. Stress are what we all need. The interesting thing is that you can also raise your stress threshold. And a lot of the stress mitigation chapter is also about how to do that. We need to train for discomfort so that the little things don't feel so big. This is also important in survival situations, right? You need to be able to think very clearly about what order of operations to take, what direction to escape through. This is not about like setting yourself to tolerate more pain and abuse. This is about the exact opposite. So this is about safety. This is about self-protection. This is about noticing when you're, when we're alert, but calm, we can notice the subtle ripples in people around us who needs our attention, who we really don't like, but we never really realized it. You can notice that stuff.
Speaker 2A lot of people, they wake up at like two or 3:00 AM in the morning in the middle of the night, and they don't really know why they don't know how to get back to bed. They start worrying and remunerating.
Speaker 1Very, very common.
Speaker 2Yeah. So what they can use this as a tool.
Speaker 1Definitely. 10 long, long, deliberate exhales. There's also this really crazy trick that I put in the book has indirect scientific support. You want it like best way to fall back asleep. You want to hear this crazy. This is so nuts to fall asleep or to fall back asleep. You need to stop thinking about your body position. Hmm. Turns out there's a direct relationship through a, through a few steps, but there's a dedicated circuit. I should say between your eyes, their movements and your cerebellum, which is involved in proprioception. Yeah. And balance and a number of other things we call, we call the cerebellum, the mini brain, but it's this, this guy back here who really get nerdy at these hyperfoliated lobes back here at foliators. You're just folds. It's just nerd speak for foldy bumpy. It's involved in balance. It's involved in learning. It's actually very important for generating and responding to the error signals between what you're trying to do and what you can do. That error signal turns out to be one of the most important things for generating learning to make errors through genuine attempts and your cerebellum is going to be able to do that. It's also involved in timing. So you need to kind of turn off your recognition of your own limbs to fall asleep. How do you do that? You know, what works with babies walk back and forth at a particular pace. And this was defined in this Japanese study and have people swing the baby back and forth just gently as they do it. And baby falls asleep. Guess what? Parents figure out the exact cadence with a very small margin of error through trial and error to figure out how to get their kid to sleep. It's like a natural experiment. It's been looked at in the lab. Turns out when you rock back and forth, your eyes move. This is a very, very ancient system that exists in all jawed animals, including us, that as we move through space, walking, running, swimming, whatever, the world is gliding by what we call optic flow. You would see the world blurry, but you have a compensatory eye movement that unbeknownst to you because of a connection between your eyes and these brain cells. Stem areas whose names aren't important right now. And your cerebellum creates a visual slip error and your eyes automatically offset that error. So when I go like this, the world seems stable. And it turns out there's a pattern of eye movement that can shut down the proprioceptive circuits in the cerebellum, which make you forget your limb position. And it greatly facilitates the speed at which you fall back asleep. Okay, you're going to close your eyes. Great. You're going to move your eyes slowly to one side, underneath your eyelids, then to the other side, then up, then down. Now you're going to move them counterclockwise in a circle-ish, and then clockwise in a circle-ish. And now still with your eyes closed, you're going to kind of point them towards your nostrils. You're not going to cross your eyes and you're going to do a long exhale. Great. That done two or three times generally has people waking up the next morning. I mean, like wild. What happens? What happened is your proprioceptive circuits are shut down. Now, that's kind of fun to do. And you'll see, and it costs nothing. And it generally works. Some people, if they're really, really stressed, it might not work. But this is what I do if I wake up in the middle of the night. I usually go to the bathroom, get back in bed, do long exhale breathing. And I do that and I wake up the next morning. It really works well. So well, in fact, that there's a company based on work done from two MIT scientists. They have a sleep mask. That generates this pattern of eye movements through a little electrode behind the ear. It just like, and it stimulates the extra ocular muscles in just the right patterns. And I tried it and you fall right asleep. You're joking. No. And it monitors REM. You know, we monitor REM through like an eight sleep or a whoop or some other device through changes in heart rate and breathing. This is direct monitoring of REM. It's wild. It can control your eye movements to induce more REM if you want more REM. There will be a time very soon. like within the next 12 to 14 months, when because of devices like the one they and others are making, when you're going to be able to say, you know what, I want two hours of deep sleep. I want two hours of REM across a six hour night because I can't afford to sleep my ration of eight. And you will be generating those eye movements during sleep in order to facilitate, not force, but
Speaker 2facilitate those patterns of sleep. I've spent the last decade building and investing in companies. And so often the conversation around marketing budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved, but then the results don't come back. And most of the time, the creative pitch and the offer is fine. The problem lies with the audience. Ads reach people who will never buy or refer, nor do they have the power to sign off anything at all. And this is why so much budget gets wasted. LinkedIn ads, who are a sponsor of this podcast, lets you reach them specifically by job title, seniority, company size, industry, have, and much more. You're no longer hoping your ad reaches the right person. Instead, you're defining exactly who sees it. And LinkedIn ads drives the highest B2B return on ad spend across all major ad networks. Give them a try at linkedin.com slash diary. And if you spend $250 on your first campaign, you'll get a $250 credit for your next one just by going to linkedin.com slash diary. Keep this to yourself. Terms and conditions apply. I want to speak to the business owners listening. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old. And honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day. And that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With Function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more. They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com slash DOAC to join and use code DOAC25 for a $25 discount. Did I hear you say that there's a peptide that can help your REM sleep?
Speaker 1Yes. I have no affiliation to it because it's called pinelon. I will tell you, in the book, I do not talk about hormone therapies, peptides, or psychedelics. The book is about what I know for sure. Hormones, peptide therapies, and psychedelics are at the front edge right now. I'm very much involved in looking at the research, talking to the people that are doing these things. And yes, I dabble in these things, right? I'm very interested. I'm an expert. I'm an adult. I can do that. So pinelon is very interesting because I found that if I took an itty bitty bit every third night, I tried this experiment for about a month, I got massive amounts of REM sleep that night, but also on subsequent nights. I hosted a Dr. Abud Bakri on my podcast, who's, in my view, is the most knowledgeable
Speaker 2physician on the topic of peptides. Oh, I saw that episode. It's amazing.
Speaker 1He's amazing. And I think you guys, have an even better conversation, frankly. But in any event, he tells me that pinelon is potentially involved. There are some data supporting its use for encouraging pinealocyte health. So the actual health of the pineal. Pineal gland. Yeah, the pineal gland, which makes melatonin and does other things too. So I think pinelon is a great tool to use sporadically. I don't use it regularly. You know, as long as we're talking about peptides, I do think that there's, I mean, I'm peptide curious, you know, I'm from the Bay Area. I have not tried any GLPs yet, but I'm getting curious about very, very low dose terzepatide or redditrutide.
Speaker 2I'm peptide curious, but I'm scared. Yeah. I'm scared because I don't, you've got to inject most of them, right? It's a tiny little thing, you know. What's your take on peptides as like a cat? It's a big category, isn't it? Bloody everything seems to be a peptide these days.
Speaker 1Here's my opinion. It will be popular with some people, unpopular with others, but obviously as with hormone therapies or anything else or supplements, like, sleep, hydration, sunlight, exercises, nutrition, like you need all that stuff. The behavioral tools are the foundation. Great things can happen when you build on a foundation. Okay. Things can happen when you build on non-foundation, but it doesn't last long. But the combination of the two can be pretty awesome, especially if somebody has the means and the interest. So the GLPs. Which are the weight loss drugs. The weight loss drugs. I think redditrutide is amazing. It's not just a GLP. It also hits the glucagon and GIP pathway. This is the one that. Lily invested, Eli Lilly invested hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more into researching and it's went through phase three. People lost one third approximately of their body weight in about a year or so. Is that a, is that a good thing for everybody? No. So what's happening is people are okay. So the psychedelic community talked about microdosing that microdosing phrase has been now incorporated into GLPs and people realize they could bypass a lot of the side effects. And the cost by microdosing GLPs. These are anecdotes. So I want to be clear and I'm not pushing peptides or selling peptides. I say quite comfortably. I have a friend who's very, very skeptical about anything. That's not fully FDA approved. I don't want to hear about your biohacking nonsense, this kind of thing, but she has chronic fatigue syndrome. And she talked to me about like, what can I do? She's seen all these physicians. Mind you, these are physicians at Stanford. These are physicians at UCSF. Like she's, and she's a very smart nuanced person, but she has a wall there. She's started taking a very low, very low dose of trusepidide once every 10 days. And trusepidide is? It's one of the GLP drugs. So we could talk about Monjaro, Zempic, but it's, it's not, it's not touching GIP or glucagon. It's mainly just increasing levels of, of glucagon like peptide, which is this thing that suppresses hunger and appetite, but also seems to lower inflammation. Yes. There are concerns about vision loss in people who have certain structural abnormalities of the eye. Yes. There are concerns about vision loss in people who have certain structural abnormalities. There are concerns about apathy. If people take too much of them, you know, it seems to reduce alcohol craving for people that like alcohol and sugar craving more generally, and it can reduce craving for everything. If you take enough of it. Yeah. Keep in mind, these drugs are ramping up levels of GLP thousand fold or more thousand fold or more. The body has never seen this level of, of glucagon like peptide in the history of humans. And remember this whole thing was discovered because a smart biologist was studying why Gila monsters, these reptiles, that I think are ugly, he probably thinks are beautiful, only have to eat a couple of times a year. It's because they make a peptide called extending, which turned out to be homologous to glucagon like peptide one in humans. The reason these reptiles don't have to eat very often is because they always feel satiated. Why? Because at very high levels of glucagon like peptide circulating, we don't. And it works through two mechanisms, tells the brain mechanisms for satiety to ramp up their activity. And so your brain is telling you, I don't really want food. And it also makes people feel fatigued. And so your brain is telling you, I don't really want food. And it also makes people feel full, which is the basis of some of the side effects of nausea and other things. So she will tell you, oh my God, my energy's back. My inflammation markers are way lower. I I'm not cured, but I feel so much better. Very, very hard to dispute that kind of experience. If you're the patient, we could talk about safety and sourcing and, you know, et cetera. But anyway, so people are starting to realize they can microdose stuff, but you won't see randomized control trials that are going to push this kind of notion. You can tell it's terrible for business. Right. So then there are things like pinealon for sleep, epitalin, perhaps for DNA repair. I haven't dabbled with that one yet. And then there are the so-called growth hormone secretagogues. So we're talking about tessamorelin, ipamorelin, CJC1295. These will promote more growth hormone release and sleep. They will have a negative feedback effect where they're going to shut down some of your own production and people get a bit leaner and they claim their deep sleep is better. Increased insulin sensitivity. I'll tell you, I've tried sermorelin. I've tried a few of these other ones. They nuke my REM sleep. They give me a ton of deep sleep. I don't like them. I've tried pinealon. I'll take it now and again. I don't do it right now. And BPC is the one that gets everybody talking because body protection compound 157 is made in the gut. People claim, and I do think their claims are accurate, that they feel, notice what I said right there, is they feel as if their recovery from injury was accelerated. And I believe them because I've spent a lot of time with the animal data, whether it's an Achilles tendon transection or nerve regrowth or tendon or ligament regrowth and vascular. Yes, it does seem to accelerate healing across the board, but the concern is you could vascularize tumors. Now, would I take it? No, I don't have an injury right now. I don't have any reason to take it. So I don't think people should say, should I take peptides? You should ask what effect in your life are you trying to achieve, right? And then maybe BPC makes sense. Maybe it doesn't. You're not going to find many clinical trials on it. It has a very, very high, maybe infinite, you know, LD50, meaning no one has really figured out how much can kill you, but that's not a good kind of way to run your life.
Speaker 2And, you know, it's somewhere between a drug and a supplement. I think this is one of the concerns or one of the conversations I often hear around GLPs at the moment is that they've just not been around long enough for us to know the side effect profile over a long period of time. Is there any truth to that?
Speaker 1Well, do you want to be in the experiment or out of these? You want to be in the troll group or you want to be in the experimental group? Well, for somebody who has like serious obesity issues, the terzepatide. and Monjaros and Ozempics and Reddit True Tide could potentially save their life, okay? Vision loss is a serious consideration. Although I'll go on record, you know, vision is my home and I'll just be direct. I don't tap dance at all. And I'm not trying to start any battles. And David and I can talk about it directly. David Sinclair recently went on Rogan and said, you know, the amount of blindness caused by GLPs has doubled, which scared everybody. I heard that. But there's a structural abnormality in the eye of a subset of people for whom that's true. And it's a great idea to get your eyes scanned. But yeah, so as the, ah, comes apart. Yeah. Oh man, this is fun. It's a good thing I only come on here every once in a while because I do this, I'll do this all day, every day. So, you know, light obviously comes in. You've got that cornea on the outside of the eye and the lens focuses the light onto your retina, which is this pie crust-like structure that lines the back of your eyes. It's an amazing structure. You know, three cell layers thick, catches light, absorbs light. The photoreceptors turn that into electricity through phototransduction. Amazing. Then that electricity is cast forward to a set of cells that line the inner part of the retina that we call retinal ganglion cells. And then they send their wires, their so-called axons out the optic nerve into your brain. They course along the bottom of the brain and they enter your brain, including your circadian clock. You get vision, you get sleep-wake rhythms, you get hormone regulation by light. You get, it's just incredible. Well, where they exit the eye is called the optic nerve head. And if the optic nerve head is a nice, nicely shaped and sized tube for them to exit, great. Too big, that's not good. But too tight's not good either because those wires get pinched off. This is part of what happens in the disease glaucoma, which is the eye pressure goes up and those axons die away, these cells die away. And it's the second leading cause of blindness in the world. So in some people who have a structural abnormality, a structural feature of the optic nerve head here where these wires leave the eye, it does seem that the GLPs put them at greater risk for causing some cinching off of those cells. And there have been cases of blindness. But the thing that wasn't really cool, David, is this. He is developing some very potentially impressive tools to rescue vision in glaucoma, et cetera. But meanwhile, GLPs are not making many people go blind. Okay? You know, GLPs are not making many people go blind. You know, that's about as true as masturbation is making people go blind. I'm not saying you should do either one. That's your personal choice. But the point here is that he scared the daylights out of people, pun intended, telling them that they can make you go blind. But everyone should get this area of their eye image. And it turns out it's very easy. You can go to your ophthalmologist or optometrist, ask for an eye pressure test. Usually insurance covers it, but definitely worth paying for. That was number five. Ha. Number five. We got into peptides. Yeah. Yeah, we've done quite a few. Good thing we're not talking about psychedelics. We'll do that another time. Oh, gosh. We won't do them another time. I don't do psychedelics publicly.
Speaker 2Listen, I'm open-minded. I did DM, look, I don't care.
Speaker 1Not as open-minded as you'd be if we do psychedelics. No, I'm kidding. Right, true, yeah.
Speaker 2You took DMT? In a faraway land where it was very legal. Because, you know, I sit here and talk about these things and psychedelics. And I actually did work in a psychedelics company for about a year. But it was deeply, deeply fascinating. And the reason I was compelled by it is the efficacy as it relates to mental health and the studies being done out of London around things like, you know, psilocybin and Ibogaine and DMT treatments. And I just thought, wow, you know, it's unbelievable some of the clinical data. I'd love to learn more. So I did psilocybin and then I did DMT. And it was really just...
Speaker 1Well, I've not done DMT.
Speaker 2You've never done DMT?
Speaker 1No, no, I've done clinical MDMA and psilocybin. I think I'm done with that, not because I had a negative experience, but I got what I wanted out of it. And I found it to be immensely beneficial.
Speaker 2The psilocybin?
Speaker 1The combination of therapy going in, therapy during, and therapy coming out of combination MDMA, psilocybin.
Speaker 2Do you know what? It's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion was having a DMT experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable from this reality in terms of the vividness and the realness of it. And me just pondering this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality. So therefore, I concluded that my material reality is literally, I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong, is a small amount of chemicals being uninterrupted. Does that make logical sense?
Speaker 1Yeah, so I think about this way too much. I guess we are going to talk about psychedelics, reality, and religion. A couple of short statements about this. You're, I'm fascinated by this. I'd love to hear you talk more about it, but here are a couple of ways that I think about it. In a non-dismissive way, most all of biology is just compartmentalized chemistry. So whether or not it's the flow of electricity along neural circuits to generate tenacity, for instance, or learning, you're just guiding chemistry in particular ways, okay? That's not a way to trivialize it. It's kind of a way to think about it. There are two ways that you can change brain function, behavior, and chemistry. One is mechanical. I can breathe differently. I can get a massage, right? I could poke myself with a knife, okay? So there are mechanical forces that change our physiology. And then there are chemical forces. Pharmacology, things we eat, and chemicals within us, serotonin, et cetera. That's really it. There's no other thing. In many ways, you're absolutely right. It's compartmentalized chemistry, and mechanics and other chemicals are what control that chemistry. And I think organizing one's thoughts sometimes in that way can be helpful because you realize the stress response is really just a bunch of chemicals happening in certain places and so on. I personally am, you know, I'm not a chemist. I'm not a chemist. I'm not a chemist. I'm not intrigued about the idea of things outside of our conscious understanding in biology that maybe things like DMT give us access to, or maybe just prayer gives us access to, or faith gives us access to. And it comes from my recognition, both as a neuroscientist and just a human who's been alive for 50 years and some change, that our biology and psychology, let's mold those together, are extraordinarily good at accomplishing our goals. at accomplishing certain things. But there are certain things that are outside the abilities of our psychology and biology. And if we are asking our psychology and biology to satisfy something that our psychology and biology simply cannot satisfy, we're going to miss out on a lot of potential meaning in life. And to be very direct about it, like at the point where I decide to really embrace the idea of faith, of a God, right? That there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful. Everything got better. It relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally. And I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us, some people call it God, the universe, right? Some people might think it's Jesus. Some people might think it's, something else might actually hold some power in how we could potentially behave, be better, be, wouldn't it be wonderful if there's this thing planted in us or some of us, which is a question about things outside of us that if we were to embrace could allow us to get to a better place as a species. Why would we think that a technology like AI would do that? AI is wonderful, but why would we think that it would come from computers? That's of us, right? Why would we, think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do? To me that embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which by the way is about having doubt, but still doing the things, the practices, prayer is like to me, one of the most liberating and educating thing, not just about stuff of God in the universe, but about the human brain. - Okay, I've got some questions. - Yeah, I mean, it's like, we're not meant to solve this on our own. - Do you believe in God? - Absolutely. - When did God come into your life? - Very early, but I was very good at suppressing the notion that it was real. Like I would pray in private, I would hide it and not just in bad times. And then I think I lived enough and observed enough hardship. We've talked about some of this on a previous podcast. I talk a little bit about that in the book, but I observed it out there too, not just in my own life. That I started to realize, especially if you stick your hands in enough brains and you see my good friend, Eddie Chang, record from the brain of a awake human and remove a tumor and save that person's life. And you also realize that brain areas are controlling things 'cause when they're stimulated, that person feels and responds in a certain way. You realize that we're not all meat and potatoes in there. There's something else, but I'm not sure that it all comes from us. It's sort of hard to explain. This way I kind of wriggle out of this is that I brought my dad on my podcast. My dad and I for many years had a choppy relationship. We have a great relationship now. He's 83 years old. He's super vigorous. He loves ideas. He's into quantum, you know, quantum computing and he's a theoretical physicist, right? And I asked him to explain quantum mechanics. I go, yeah, like tell my audience how relativity works. He worked on chaos theory. Okay, tell us how chaos works. And he said, I'll do this. that, but you have to understand that one of the most important things about understanding quantum mechanics is that early on you are told and you learn that the human brain can't wrap its head around quantum mechanics with logic with the with human understanding you have to rely on the math and he says anyone who talks about the quantum field who can't show you the math can't show you the proofs is lying he loves it when people are like oh the quantum this and the quantum that is often is in like the meditative communities but others too and he goes people throw this word around because very few people actually understand quantum biology there's gaps there's some logic but there's gaps in their logic that the math doesn't line up with and the math doesn't lie so what he was saying and we were having a discussion about god and he said yeah at some point if you're going to have faith in a higher power god you have to depart this notion that your logical brain can go from a to b to c and boom you're there but in quantum mechanics it's the same thing but on the basis of quantum mechanics you can't have a logical brain that can go from a to b to c and boom you're there but in quantum mechanics you can build stuff you can engineer stuff in the real world like that red light or a rocket are you saying but you don't know all of this there's no math to prove this thing that i call my the existence of god there's no math and it's not worth torturing yourself over what i believe is worth torturing yourself over and there's also great beauty in there is embracing the practice of prayer embracing the questions and like opening the aperture of your beliefs just for a moment going maybe i'm going to just believe in god for 10 seconds and see what that's like and i started to experience beauty and experience um peace around not trying to control things that obviously were not under my control not just within me but in other people and i really started to see what i could only describe as miracles and by miracles i mean i would pray for some indication of what the right path might be on something where it wasn't clear to me and then two or three days later something would happen which would like seem almost completely unrelated and the answer would come in that thing and then i just locked in i'm like listen i'm a disciplined guy when i really want to be i'm going to pray every night before i go to sleep if i fall asleep i'll get out of bed and pray when i if i wake up in the middle of the night i've not missed a night nearly three years i was recently invited up to stanford to give a talk with arthur brooks who's a lifetime catholic he's in mass every morning you know he and i have very different experiences of god in religion my family was mixed religion i got to sit up there and just say listen i'm going to tell you that i for sure i'm the person who's least knowledgeable least versed in this room but what i can tell you is my experience with prayer what i can tell you is what i've observed in myself when i open the aperture for faith the reason i did that talk is because our former director of neurosciences at stanford had written to me and said i think you should consider talking to this group and he did some of the most important experiments in the history of neuroscience linking neuronal activity to perception really show that if you stimulate certain brain areas people perceive things a certain way regardless of what's happening out in the world like there's a brain area i could trigger right now and i could show you a movie of a bunch of dots moving up and everyone here would be like they're moving up and if i tickled the right neuron in your brain you'd say they're going down like that's wild i turn it off and you say oh yeah of course they're is an abstraction that occurs inside your skull on the basis of photons that come in through your eyes, sound waves that hit your ears, mechanical forces that hit your skin, and chemicals that go in your nostrils and in your mouth. And then you create, you abstract reality in here. Now, the laws of physics dictate how those things, like photons have properties, sound waves have properties, and those are converted, they're transformed into signals, but then you abstract the world. With enough accuracies that I can pick up this pen, okay, and not miss it, at least for now. So if you understand neuroscience that way, and then you go, we don't see infrared in this room because we don't have the sensors, but a pit viper does. Does that mean that there's a God? No, not necessarily. That alone doesn't prove that. But what it does prove is that we only have access to the physical events in the world that we have the filters within us to extract, which is a kind of mealy-mouthed way of saying, you can't see it because you can't see it. You don't have the sensors. You can throw on infrared goggles and then you can see it, but that's a technology. I don't think there will ever be the God goggles. The emotional goggles, so to speak, come from this thing that we call faith. Faith is the infrared goggles of human understanding about why we're here. And the challenge, the challenge for people is, I feel like people come in three categories. They either, at least three, they either would force religion in a bad way, so they hate it. They never had access to it in a way that made them gently pulled toward it, or, you know, they were like, it was like people knocking on their door. It felt like a disturbance. And, you know, I'm not against proselytizing if it's done kindly and with, you know, delicately. Or they're absolutely convinced that it can't be, which I look at as sort of a spiritual anorexia. You know, there are regions of the brain that when stimulated, people get a God-like experience, the experience of God, not as themselves, but they feel it. You had this idea. And so people have said, oh, well, then there's a God region of the brain and it's just a brain region. It's just a brain region. That can't be. But we have brain regions. Arthur says this much more eloquently than I could. There are brain regions for thirst, which in the philosophical way, again, this is coming from him, not me, would say, well, that proves the existence of, of water. The thirst proves the existence of water, right? So I have a thirst circuit for gaining understanding of this thing that we call life and whatever comes after it. And in that thirst, I decided to open the aperture to the idea that the thing, the stimulus, the water, the photons, I'm not able to extract that through thought, through my eyes, through my ears, just like my dad couldn't come to understand quantum mechanics by thinking really hard about it. You have to do the math. And there are gaps in the, in my reasoning here. Like it's not a perfect one-to-one, but also life's just so much better, man. I don't think anxiety sticks in us very long. If we were feeling anxious, you pray, God, please like help me remove, help me remove this. It's not do this for me. It's help me put energy in me to do the right things today. Put energy in me to serve people. I prayed before I came in here. Get on my knees before every podcast guest or host I prayed. I prayed for, I just said, please help me move my ego out of the room. We all have an ego. Help me move my ego out of the room. I would hope that people could learn useful information that might help them and that they would propagate that information. Please make sure that I maintain humility, maintain like, help me strive for clarity. And I also said, and help Stephen and I, do something that we're not predicting that would happen, but you want us to happen that we don't understand. And maybe that's this part of the conversation, right? Like, you know, I don't know. And the point is not to know. It's also fun as a scientist who loves mechanisms and cells and circuits and neuromodulators. And it's enriching to have a part of life that like I can just explore in. Like it's, I like mysteries, like science is about mysteries and it's about solving mysteries, but it's also about being in awe of the mystery. And I'm all in, man. I mean, I'm different all in than other people talk about being all in. And I don't tell people what to do morally. I'm really just trying to navigate my own path. But it is, it's like one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's so liberating and life is still plenty hard, but I love it.
Speaker 2It seems to be an antidote that a lot of people are reaching for now, based on the way that we've kind of designed our lives over the last couple of decades. The sort of individualism, the loneliness, the, I don't know, nihilism, the me, me, me, the material success, the, you could say like low level narcissism of being on social media and trying to get as many followers as you can. And we've become islands. And I've been thinking a lot about this idea of like God and meaning, because it does appear to me that we are meant to be like anchored to, you know, ourselves and our family and then like, I don't know, our community and then maybe our city and then maybe our country and then maybe the planet and then something above.
Speaker 1I mean, you're an ambitious guy. Go bigger, man. I'm not trying to push you. No, no, please. The biggest thing is that is a non-human force in the universe that wants goodness and can exemplify perfection. And you and I, if I may, by virtue of being human, by virtue of having circuits, that, I mean, the famous studies, like people get to stimulate different areas of their brain, you know, the area that people like to stimulate a lot, the area that generates frustration and anger, that arousal. I saw that result and I was like, oh, man, that's disappointing. Why not beauty, giddiness or even feelings of being drunk? They found that too, but they were not as interested in that. You know, are we bad? No, we're not bad. We are wired with an animal part of our brain and we are wired with a conscious, thoughtful part of our brain. And it's a lot of work to ascend, I know that word is like in the looks maxing thing now, but like it's to ascend as a human to a place where you're living in a controlled and thought thoughtful and peaceful way with yourself and with your pursuits and you're putting trying striving to put goodness in the world and take care of people and and to do that uh with a little less friction i know from experience that comes from trying not to control every aspect of every process and somehow everything just goes much better so you know people will be like oh he really drank the kool-aid like i don't know i i actually think that this was pumping in my veins from go yes i worked on a lot of topics um stress vision etc but i studied neural development for a long time and you know sperm meets egg and cells start dividing and you get a human and um yes we understand induction factors i teach developmental neurobiology cell migration acts on guidance you know mesoderm ectoderm etc great like compartmentalized chemistry can give you a human but there are gaps in our understanding and there's magic in that orchestration that goes beyond what the science can even begin to understand and it's nothing short of spectacular you just like also who doesn't want more awe in their life it's like dr keltner is like the awe guy at berkeley like he said yeah the awe is when you go from small aperture to big aperture and from big aperture to small aperture that transition induces awe and you can hear it in sound too like when you walk in off the street and you go into like stanford has this incredible church memorial church is unbelievably beautiful with this giant organ and you walk in there and people change not just because it's like there's this high ceiling you know like wow yeah like this is incredible of course i know humans made it like i'm not an idiot but day aperture to holy aperture the like these and you can get this other ways right i'm not saying you can't get this other ways but i like the idea that if we dial out really far that there's something much greater than us and and i don't know what exactly what form it takes or exactly what shape it takes or exactly what ways that it um god would exert uh influence over our minds but
Speaker 2you don't need to you don't need to this is the thing that i have to i think i have to come to terms with is i i go okay this is really interesting there's lots of meaning and benefits to my life you know if we're just thinking about benefits right and then okay so which which bible have i got to believe and then i start looking at the bibles and i'm like okay noah's ark look at a
Speaker 1bunch of them i think one will call to you more than the others listen it may end up being atheism for some people but when i said um when i said spiritual anorexia earlier anorexia is the most deadly of the psychiatric illness and i think it's the most deadly of the psychiatric illness and i it's like it's incredibly deadly and it's a something happens to the neural circuits where people with true anorexia feel reward some sort of sense of quote-unquote reinforcement it's better than reward reinforcement from avoiding food as opposed to eating it so that's very like runs against our evolution as a species right and our health but the desire for food as arthur would say proves the existence of food right desire thirst it proves the existence of water and there are atheists who are like yeah i don't need it not for me and then there are atheists who are who have a kind of spiritual anorexia it's almost like they get their spirituality is not believing in a god and i look at them and i go well you're kind of on the like the same like extreme it's almost like it wraps around so far that you you the truly religious people and the atheists kind of meet right here they both have the same sort of thing but there's kind of an inversion of the circuit right there and so i don't know someone will work out the neuroscience or not i'm gonna keep praying because my life is that much better when you when i heard you talk
Speaker 2about it i started praying a little bit oh right on not all the time but there's several moments where i thought do you not now be a good time to just pray because i know someone like you saying that you do it gives a lot of other people permission to try and to investigate for themselves because you know like if i'm in the huberman camp maybe i'm someone that really cares about scientific rigor and precision and and then if you if that if you change that camp to also be open-minded to spirituality and religion and these sort of other pursuits i can still be sort of ideologically who i believe i am while also investigating these other things so when i it was really impactful for me to hear you talk about prayer because it impacted my it gave me permission i should say at some weird level to also investigate and yeah like i report the same findings as you that it helps yeah it helps my former chair and
Speaker 1director of neurosciences at stanford who encouraged me to do that talk at veritas where i mostly talked about how ignorant and naive i am on these topics he's a brilliant neuroscientist he has faith and i respect him and i respect his mind i also think there's maybe a kind of fun analogy here that just came to mind you know it happens in every dimension like audience and podcasters right but this happened during the pandemic with the with the health community and we're seeing that the long tail of that now but you know when you're a kid you think your parents are everything you think they can do no wrong you think they can do no wrong you think they can do no wrong and then there's this thing called being an adolescent teenager and you catch them do it like lying or saying things occasionally or doing things you go wait you said that and and it's like this and all of a sudden you're like you don't know anything then you gain some hopefully some agency and some velocity in life and you get to this point where you think you know everything and you accept that they don't but you're really the one that understands i think that as adults we eventually get to the point where we're like oh my god i'm not gonna do this i'm not gonna do this get to the place after that where we go oh wait it's outside of me i'm gonna look outside of me and then you go no everyone like all these adults we were all they went through it and we went through it and the real like it's going oh wait no no i'm looking at humans for something that doesn't isn't going to come from human beings we're all flawed we're all we're all imperfect and so that the notion the belief that there's that their perfection exists outside us and that we can strive for certain things through works through practices that's not just compelling that's just like downright fantastic to me because it you fully embrace the the woes and the the beauty of being human in embracing god it's kind of a weird thing so listen more power to the atheists if they if they can pull it off without all that great but
Speaker 2you know meanwhile i'm gonna keep at it amen this is something that i've made for you i realize that the diversity of audience are strivers whether it's in business or health whether it's in business or health we all have big goals that we want to accomplish and one of the things i've learned is that when you aim at the big big big goal it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of mount everest and looking upwards the way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps and we call this in our team the one percent and actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here so what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these one percent diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out so i asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary so now we have a better range for you so if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation then i highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again and you can get yours at the diary.com and if you want the link the link is in the description below and i'll see you in the description below okay so we haven't done number seven and we and what's number eight that we haven't done number eight yeah and we haven't done well we sort of did this so at night once you're
Speaker 1asleep try and keep your sleeping environment as dark as possible okay a good eye mask is useful some people like earplugs too if you wake up in the middle of the night do some long exhale breathing or do the you know the this wacky eyes to the side eyes up and then you know counter clockwise and clockwise so at night dim the lights why bright lights stimulate cortisol release you want your cortisol release to be in the middle of the night you want your cortisol release to be low at night everyone says yeah dim the lights because it suppresses melatonin that's true but that's just half of the story the other reason is it increases cortisol and you want your cortisol
Speaker 2low at night what about this whole conversation around phones at night yeah well dim dim your
Speaker 1phone or triple click program it to the go to the red screen oh yeah yeah just do that i think in the last let's be reasonable the last 30 minutes before sleep no screens first 30 minutes after waking you should be looking at the sun and exercising hydrating and doing that kind of thing and check the partner out the bed i've had i've had really oh you're sleeping babe i'm joking i'm the opposite i'm i'm a spooner so am i you know i've read some studies i sleep best as big spoon yeah with a human i have no choice yeah i didn't get
Speaker 2yeah yeah you're not no but i did hear a study that you know it does impact sleep but who cares
Speaker 1i don't know i mean uh the the bed cooling thing is very helpful because i tend to run warm so having another person in there is like really warm like it it's like sleeping on the bed and sleeping with a safe one i don't want to diminish come into a giant hot water ball but she runs really warm so having the cooling mattress helps but okay you really want to do these two things these actually go very well together you need to do a bout of work of 90 minutes to two hours you like you got to strive and try and learn something do something hard every day mentally this is critical for your ability to focus and by the way you asked about phones awesome study came out they had people with their phone off upside down on the table or in their bag underneath their chair or in the opposite room a separate room what they found is people can focus just fine in all three conditions but if the phone is anywhere in the room, the amount of cognitive flexibility they have with the material they're focusing on is diminished. In other words, it requires more energy to focus, even if they're not getting calls and notifications. There's a subscript running in the brain, apparently, that's anticipating that this thing is going to reach for me. It's going to call me. So it's calling you even if it's not calling you, which is pretty cool. And so the way to increase focus and cognitive capacity is actually to just get the phone out of the room. That's a big part of it. And actually, visual field matters a lot too. You know, like the kid in school with the hoodie who's not asleep, like that actually is helpful. I talk about some of the history of tools for focus, pharmacology, but also physical devices. You know, they used to design helmets for kids to like try and focus the kids that had troubles. The problem is now with the phone, you've moved the whole world right in front of you. So focusing just here doesn't work, but get the phone out of the room and do some effortful learning bout. And it should feel like a fight. Keep it going. Keep in mind the friction you feel trying to learn something. That's adrenaline. Remember, how do we block learning? We block adrenaline and its downstream effects with propranolol. Being alert but calm or a little stressed and making errors through deliberate attempts to do something, not just throwaway errors. That's how you learn. Why? If I can reach out and grab this pen, my brain doesn't change. One of the biggest lies in public education about neuroscience is that it's not just about the brain. It's about the brain. It's about the brain. It's about the brain. Every experience changes your brain. By the time I'm done saying this, your brain will be different. No, that's absolutely not true. That's a bunch of hooey. I studied neuroplasticity. I teach neuroplasticity. I'll tell you, you know what induces neuroplasticity? Being a baby who's trying to learn or being an adult who's forcing yourself to try and learn and you can't do the thing. The error is what stimulates the plasticity. So if you and the appropriate level of difficulty, say the computational modeling is somewhere around 15% on average. Now, what does that mean? There's two kinds of practices. There's two kinds of practices. There's two kinds of practices. There's one is practicing doing things I already know how to do. There, you're aiming for 100% performance, right? You're reinforcing what you already know how to do. Talk to a great dancer and they'll tell you they drill, drill, drill, drill the things they already know how to do. But when you're trying to learn the new language, the new emotional skill, the new physical skill, the new cognitive emotional skill, you need to make genuine attempts and you need to fail some of the time. And those failure signals are relayed to your cerebellum and your cerebellum activates through networks that say change. So there's a set of conditions in the chapter on plasticity that say you need to be alert. So I talk about all the ways you can get alert, including pharmacology supplements and behavioral tools. Then you need to be focused. I talk about all the tools for focus, which you can devote to anything, not just learning. And then I talk about the conditions for plasticity and you need to get this friction and these errors. And then you need to stop. You need to come back a day or two later, do it again. And then you need to make sure that you reinforce what you learned. Here's where AI is going to be a wonderful tool, already is a wonderful tool. The best way to learn is to not forget. Meaning if you test yourself mentally, or you could use any one of the LLMs, but I'll go into chat GBT and I'll just say, generate a short test of a graduate student at Stanford level questions about neuroplasticity. And I go, I remember this. Remember, that's how you maintain and build knowledge over time. Self-testing, self-testing. People hear the word test, they think of external tester. You're the test taker, self-testing.
Speaker 2That's a really interesting idea for this podcast episode, which we should definitely run team. Should we generate a quiz? Yeah. So we can take the transcript and we can turn it into a test. Cool. Of the 10 protocols that you've talked through. And we'll link it below if you want to take the test. Awesome.
Speaker 1Yeah. Chat GBT is great at doing this. You can change the difficulty and you can actually say, I'm a professor of neuroscience and I want a 15% error rate on average. So it's pretty cool. You know, the study I love that really backs this up is that there've been a lot of studies of learning where they have students read the same passage one, two, three, or four times. And then they also have them highlight or take notes or just have them read it once and self-test and they look six months and two years later reading it once. No notes, no highlighting and self-testing, you know, about a week later. And looking up what you got, couldn't remember or got wrong, led to much more stable learning over time. Awesome. Now this doesn't work so well for physical endeavors because there you have to like actually do the physical thing. You have to test yourself physically, but I love that set of experiments. Um, cause tells us everything we should be doing. So I think in doing this for me, it could be a book. It could be lately. I've been, podcasting and recording my audio book. Have you done a book?
Speaker 2Yes. And I did the audio book, which was horrific. Are you due for another one? I am. I've, I've actually written it already. I wrote it. I finished writing it last year, but I, it's cool. Just fucking do it. I asked the audience multiple times what I showed them multiple covers of books, hundreds of them and ask them what they wanted. And that was the one that most of them tried to buy. And so it's really just a, it's really a breakdown of how to do the thing. And actually I referenced you in there in the chapter about the anterior mid-singular cortex
Speaker 1and what you said about it. And so to be clear, I didn't discover that structure, but I'm happy to, to expound on all its incredible abilities.
Speaker 2I just quote what I heard you say about it in your podcast, but I'll show you what I wrote.
Speaker 1Cool. I'll get a copy. I'm late to the train, obviously. So I think it's, it's, it's enriching as a person. It's not about optimization per se. It's, it's about being a human being and learning and effort that's followed by learning and reward, especially for things that you might, well, may not immediately benefit you, but just to enrich your mind is, is cool. Like if you're interested in the history of medicine, read a hard book, the Prince of Medicine about Galen. If you're interested in light, there are a bunch of cool books about sunlight coming out now from people other than me about how cool sunlight is. And there's just like cool books out there. But this is, this is linked to brain health and dementia, these kinds of things, no? To some extent. Yeah. I mean, the data on dementia say that people who stay mentally and physically active and are socially enriched, um, do very, do much better. In fact, Masoud Hussain, uh, who's this brilliant neurologist from Oxford, um, has been talking about patients who it turns out live a very long time, have lots of plaques and tangles, the signature anatomical features of Alzheimer's dementia, but no dementia. Oh yeah. And these people are exercisers and they are people who stay very avidly engaged in learning. So there are a lot more people with quote unquote, with Alzheimer's walking around. They have all the diagnostic features of Alzheimer's except the memory loss and dementia. So this says that to some extent, the physical ramifications of Alzheimer's and the consequence of those changes in neurons are somewhat, somewhat separable. We want to be fair. I mean, he also told me that there are patients who have Parkinson's who can't generate smooth movement, but if they have to escape a burning building, they can, which is interesting, a little frustrating as a message because it sort of sends, could potentially send the wrong message. Like they're just not, motivated enough, but it points to the fact that if motivational systems are high enough, that there may be alternate motivational systems in the same way that kids with very severe ADHD, if you give them a video game, they love, they are locked and loaded. They're in a, they're in a focus tunnel like this for two hours, which tells you they can focus, but not on things that they're not really interested in. And a lot of life is about forcing yourself to be interested in things you don't really want to do.
Speaker 2So that's number four. We've got one left. Number 10. Yeah.
Speaker 1Number 10 to frame this a little bit. The last chapter of my book is on personal development. I thought a lot, like, am I going to write a book, a last chapter on like relationships? That seemed like a no, not because I haven't had them or not because I haven't had some great ones. But because I think people who like work on that as their academics, you know, fundamentally should do that. Then again, I had a chapter on nutrition and exercise, but in any event, I decided to write about relationship to self. And then I thought, no, personal development is something we're all trying to do. And here's the key question set up at the beginning. I talk about grief and what the science of grief is and how to navigate grief. But early on in that, the chapter on personal development, I sort of set it up the following way. I look out on the landscape of all the personal, psychological and relationship development stuff out there online, in books, in papers, et cetera. And it looks like there's sort of two bins. One is how to find what you're looking for. And the other is how to find what you're what's important to you, do what's best for you and be the person you're supposed to be for the world and maybe for you also. And then there's this other bin, which is that we need to be very careful about pursuing things and fulfilling roles, because we can get very far off track from our core, like what Martha Beck would call our essential self. And I'm a huge fan of her work, if in no small part, because she talked about that in her books, which were very, very impactful for me. But she also has three degrees Harvard. So this isn't somebody who like can't get stuff done. And she's a mom and she's navigated complicated life landscapes. So I was like, okay, this is this kind of it. And then I hosted James Hollis, this 84 year old Jungian analyst on my podcast. And he just wowed the heck out of all of us. And he basically said this, here's a really good life. Mind you, this guy's written books like the Eden Project on relationships. He's written books like Under Saturn Shadow on the healing and trauma of men. And he's written books like Under Saturn Shadow on the healing and trauma And he's a brilliant thinker, and he said, "Look, There's three things you got to do every day. And he encourages his patients to write this on their refrigerator or carry it around with them. He says, first, shut up. I'm like, I thought it was gonna be like this, like nice young analyst. Like he goes, shut up because there's always somebody suffering more than you. You have to have gratitude. You have to have a gratitude practice. So I spent some time talking about what that really looks like because there's a science of gratitude. And then there's the common understanding about what that is. It's really about receiving gratitude or yes, having a gratitude practice of all the things that are good in your life, but really it's about giving gratitude and receiving gratitude. And that's a, I talk about that and how to accomplish that. The second thing he said, so I go, okay, now he'll kind of soften up and he is, he says, suit up. You're not going to be able to do well in anything in life unless you prepare, get up in the morning, take care of your health, do what you need to do to shower, brush your teeth, get organized. This sounds a little bit like George. Jordan Peterson's clean your room, but it was even like edgier than that. It was like, how in the world could you perform well on an exam or in a relationship or in a sport or at work? If you don't actually do your homework, I was like, oh man, this guy's like, this is some like boomer knowledge right here. And then he says, and show up. He said, happy people fulfill outward roles for the world. They fulfill roles, father, mother, sister, brother. They look at themselves and this is not the totality of it. But they look at themselves and they look at themselves and they look at themselves as somebody who needs to fulfill roles, teacher, mechanic, whatever, engineer, podcaster. But you have to shut up, suit up and show up. You need to fulfill roles. There is no human being that doesn't get, doesn't have to do stuff for the world. You can't freeload. But then he said, there's this other bin, which is if you carry on like that for 10, 20, 30 years, you can end up quite happy. But most of the time, if people just do those things, they're not going to be able to do those things. They end up pretty miserable. And I was like, oh man, like, and he said, the other piece is once a day, you need to get out of role fulfillment. You need to get out of preparation, suit up, and you need to get out of trying to be more grateful. You still need to do that, but you need to get out of that. And you need to go into what he called exiting the stimulus response mode of being, which could be sitting quietly in meditation. It could be drawing, listening to music. You're not trying to accomplish. You're not trying to accomplish anything. And you're just letting your unconscious mind feed you information about what he called your deepest heart desires. And I was like, yes, this is why we go camping. He said, yes, you can take longer extended breaks. You can go backpacking. You can run. You can do that. You can allow this to happen in any number of ways. But once a day, take some space for yourself and just touch in with self. Now, if you're sitting there going, okay, what do I want to be when I grew up? It should happen. It's not the way it works. You're unconscious mind. It speaks to you in emotions, in analogies, and it sets you up to go back into life, to be able to see connections and start navigating in new and interesting ways, ways that are unique to your heart's desires about what you like and what you don't like. And to know that those choices are in goodness and in keeping with who you are. I can't tell you what your deepest heart's desires are. Only you can come to that clarity, but you need to do it through a practice where you're not trying to be the football coach, the mom, the best, this, you need to listen to yourself. But you also need to keep fulfilling those roles because he and I both agree. And I mentioned this several times because I get asked all the time, how do I find my calling? You find it while working your butt off doing something else. That's how you don't sit around going, well, that's my calling. You work your butt off doing something else and you hate it. So you do something that you hate a little less than you do something you hate a little less maybe. And eventually you get pulled forward to this thing that is your key self.
Speaker 2And there's not necessarily a sink because people often, when they talk about finding a, find your passion, passion is not necessarily a thing. There's a word that happens to be singular, which can be somewhat distorting because then you think it almost like an Easter egg. I have to go, I have to go search for it. And there's going to be one of them somewhere.
Speaker 1I can handle five-year chunks. Maybe this just reflects my years and years of like getting degrees where it's like three to five years for this, then three to five years for that postdoc, graduate school, et cetera. I'm navigating from 50 to 55 now. That's what I know. I know what I'm going to carry forward, exercise, faith, hydration. So I know what I'm going to carry forward, but I don't know what's coming next. I've never been 60 before.
Speaker 2So the end of the day, and there were two questions that I had for you here based on some of the research. The first is, I'll say it's a technical one, but sleeping on your side, I heard there's different outcomes for your brain based on how you sleep at night.
Speaker 1When you sleep, you have a washout of waste products from the brain. Very important for offsetting dementia, very important for feeling rested. And if that's not enough incentive, very important for getting rid of bags under your eyes. You know, in the morning when you're, have you ever seen yourself after one night's shitty sleep? Oh my gosh. Right. Sleep two nights well, you see yourself. Yeah, you're like, what the hell? Yeah, you're your handsome self again, Steven, you know? So what is that? That's accumulation of lymph and other fluids and waste products here. That weren't flushed out. Yeah. Really? So during sleep, there's this glymphatic clearance. And it does seem it can be slightly but significantly improved by sleeping on your side with your head slightly elevated. We used to think it was slightly inverted. Now we think it's slightly elevated. When you get up in the morning. I'm actually a big fan. I've got one of these inversion tables, but most people won't, you know, where you lie back and you go upside down. No, you just hang upside down. This feels good on my back. But some people get the shaker. Some people do some jump rope. You can just kind of shake out and move because the lymphatic system is really incredible. It's one way valves stacked up from your feet all the way up to your brain. People think about the role of lymph and lymph nodes in immune checkpoints and immune system. That's all true, of course. But the lymph system is taking liquid and it's dumping it back. Into your blood circulation and it can accumulate when you're lying or when you're, you know, this is lymphedema is, you know, swelling of the lower limbs, et cetera. And you, so you need to move when you move the, you're essentially squeezing the lymph in these one way valves up to dump back into the general circulation. Your brain doesn't have that mechanism. So miraculously in sleep, you get the astrocytes, the glial cells actually create a bit of extra space in the brain between neural tissue that allows. The waste products, the glymph, as we call it, glia, lymph, glymph to flow up and out towards the surface of the brain. And then it dumps out of the brain. Still in the body, of course, and down and out, actually the puffiness of the eyes, the interior chamber of the eyes, some of the cloudiness of the eye, these systems are shared. And actually some of it actually comes out through the nose, which is wild, but get upright, move around. There's a bunch of ways of. Like, you know, these like tapping, shaking, it looks silly. It looks kind of crazy. It looks like you've been in California too long. If you do these things, but it can help move lymph out, but sleeping does that clears glymph. The other thing that's, there's a recent study published in proceedings in the national academy of sciences that I do detail in the book, which is a short meditation, believe it or not increases glymphatic clearance in the daytime. Now, this is super interesting because folks like you and me always want to figure out how we can get by with less sleep and still feel awesome and not short. Circuit our health turns out that the regular meditators are probably able to shave an hour off their sleep, 20 minutes a day meditation, because they're getting the glymph clearance during their meditation. And so in sleep, the timing of sleep and how long you sleep has a lot to do with body temperature, but also there seems to be a drive for glymph clearance that says you need to sleep longer, which is why one of the reasons why when you're sick, you sleep a lot more. One of them, there are others as well. So short, I'm now back to meditating. And my meditation practice is pretty feeble compared to many. But here's what I do. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is 10 breaths of meditation. I tell myself if I can't concentrate for 10 breaths without my mind going elsewhere, what kind of day am I going to have? And also what kind of human am I? If I can't organize myself for 10 breaths, then I get out of bed. I usually go straight to the bathroom, pee, then I go hydrate, then I get sunlight. Then I try and get some movement. Although these days I, because of the dog, I get a walk in. Then I come back, drink some caffeine, exercise. And the 10 step starts? It starts all over again. We are this rhythm. No human being has ever escaped these circadian influences in cortisol and melatonin. Do you take, you don't really talk in depth about supplements or recommend supplements? Oh, I do. I always get asked, what should I take? I talk about alpha-GPC, L-tyrosine. I talk about theanine. I talk about theanine's use with low dose caffeine for enhanced task switching, which is a very interesting literature. I talk about. Ways to improve sleep, everything from tart cherry to apigenin to quivivic, which is one of the DORAs, one of these orexin drugs. I talk.
Speaker 2Oh, I. But what do you take every day?
Speaker 1You got another three hours? Oh, really?
Speaker 2No, no, no. Is that a lot? No, not really. What are you like if you had to pick five? If they said to you, Andrew, you can only do five for the rest of your life. What five supplements would it be?
Speaker 1Well, if somebody's sleeping terrifically well, I'd say nothing for sleep. If they're not sleeping terrifically well, I would suggest they, they try. I would say magnesium three and eight or magnesium bisglycinate. They're interchangeable for sleep. Okay. That's one. I'm a big believer in getting at least one gram per day of EPA omega three.
Speaker 3Okay.
Speaker 1I suggest getting it because it's now available generic and cheap, but prescription form lovasa.
Speaker 2EPA would.
Speaker 1The form of omega three that's that you want for brain health, probably also for cardiovascular health and reduced inflammation.
Speaker 2How do I know if that's the omega three that I have? You need a prescription. Oh, you need a prescription.
Speaker 1- But here's what's awesome about it. It's very high concentration. EPA and it's cleared of all heavy metals. Okay. And it's very, very inexpensive. So the challenge is getting a doctor to prescribe it for you. Just tell them you want Lavazza or else you're going to take a bunch of stuff over the counter. You might get mercury poisoning. There you go. Don't threaten your doctor, but you get the idea. So that's for mental health, physical health, big believer in boosting omega-3s. Also, I don't eat fatty fish. I don't like salmon unless it's sushi. And like, I'm just not good at eating seafood. So that's two. Vitamin D.
Speaker 2Vitamin D.
Speaker 15,000 to 10,000 I use per day. People will be like, oh, you don't know that. You need a blood test. You don't want to over... Okay. Don't take 25,000, but most people are underdosing vitamin D. And also I'm not, I know it pisses people off, but I'm not trying to like hit the RDA. Okay. Just like I... Recommended daily allowance. Yeah. I'm not just trying to hit the RDA. I'm also not trying to like blow up the RDA. I'm not trying to like hit the RDA. I'm also not trying to like blow up the RDA. by taking too much. Like, let's be rational here, right? I'm trying to get to a point where I can derive safety, but additional benefits. And it's clear that dosing of 5,000 IU per day has some additional benefits that go way beyond conventional benefits of vitamin D that are discussed. For instance, hormone health. Like I can see my blood's getting better when I take 5,000 as opposed to 3,000 IU of vitamin D and I'm not changing anything else. So vitamin D and I get sunlight. Maybe 10,000 was a little high, but I take 5 to 10. So that's three. And then the other two would be if you're going to exercise or work intensely late in the day, or if you're going to, if you really want a stimulant to go with your caffeine, by the way, 90% of the world consumes caffeine every day. So that's a foregone conclusion that they're already taking it. I am a big fan of alpha GPC. I am 600 milligrams or 900 milligrams of, of it. It increases choline, which is a choline. Oh, I feel like acetylcholine in the cupboard. Yeah. Which can increase your ability to focus. I'm a big believer in this. Not for everyone, but rather than going straight to a prescription stimulant. And I'll tell you why there are very, very few things that can increase focus and energy that don't damage your sleep, but even better alpha GPC gives you more REM sleep. Nobody wants to hear this, but it's absolutely true. But the other thing, the important caveat is that it can increase something called TMAO, which can increase cardiovascular risk. So it's simple way to mitigate that as you take 600 milligrams of, of, uh, of a garlic capsule and it doesn't smell like garlic. So I kind of tuck that in with it and you can take it anytime, same day. Is that five? That's five. Cause I threw garlic in there. No. Cause we said it was, um, magnesium bisglycinator three and eight. We said, um, omega three, we said vitamin D and then I said, alpha GPC would be my preferable thing to nicotine or prescription stimulants. And I'm, but caffeine is great, great data on caffeine. Um, in fact, 200 to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day has been shown to offset dementia in meaningful ways, meaningful ways. It's not causal, it's correlative, but those data are covered in there as well. So I'm, I'm going to continue drinking my Yerba Mate and my coffee. And then, so I suppose the last one, you know, that's kind of like creatine. Yeah. So I was going to say dealer's choice, but creatine seems to work best for cognitive and enhancement when you're a bit sleep deprived or stressed, this kind of thing. I don't know. I've been taking creatine since I was 17 or 18, somewhere in there, five to 10 grams per day. I like it cause it, I mean, I'm trying to maintain or build strength and it puts water in your muscles and it makes you stronger and it feels good to be strong and you got, you got trained,
Speaker 2but that's why I take it. Okay. The last thing I wanted to ask you about is, um, I saw a clip. I think it was one of your most viral clips of all time where you just talked about how going for a walk has a really big impact on your body. Yes. Most people don't realize. Most people don't
Speaker 1realize there's a section. I think walking is necessary, but not sufficient for health. You know, I don't think you need to count 10,000 steps per day, but I think 7,000 to 8,000 steps per day should be the goal. You can do it. I'll pace while I'm on calls. I take every, I finish a podcast with my team. We take a walk. I'm always trying to take stairs. When I travel, I take stairs, not the escalator. You arrive, a little sweatier to your plane, but you're also rucking your bags and this kind of thing. So walking is, is incredible because those low level repeated muscle contractions really help buffer blood glucose, especially after a meal. But there's this wild study where the soleus muscle, the one that gives the calf width, width, you know, when you do seated calf raises, right? It's this muscle underneath the gastrocnemius, right? That muscle is about 1% bigger than the other muscle, but it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So it's about 1% bigger than the other muscle. So in this study, which is not practical, they had people do what they called soleus pushups, which are basically non-weighted seated calf raises while sitting. And they had them do it repeatedly. And they looked at blood glucose regulation and that powerfully regulated blood glucose increases. It buffered the peaks. And it turns out that this is related to walking. So I'm not suggesting unless perhaps you're stuck on a plane or while, while in an office that you, you know, if you're a knee bouncer, rejoice, you know, you're doing yourself good. But this movement really seems to help blood glucose management. Now, some people say, oh yeah, this is so silly. They're talking about all day. You're going to do this. Yeah. Some people probably accuse us of this. No, what I'm saying is walk because when you walk, you're getting that low level repeated muscle contraction. It's a slow twitch muscle. And it seems to be, I don't want to call it a sink, but it seems to be an unsuspected furnace for glucose utilization. And why does that matter? You don't want big peaks in glucose. You can manage them. I mean, you get more insulin will be secreted if you have a big peak in glucose. That's why insulin's there to make sure that glucose is managed. You don't want it too high. You don't want to be hyperglycemic. In fact, that can be deadly. You don't want to be hypoglycemic, but when people eat, they experience an increase in blood glucose. And while the peaks are manageable, if you're buffering them, so you're, you're, you're sort of flattening out those peaks with, you know, five to 10 minutes of walking after a meal, you will have fewer and fewer peaks. So you don't want to be hyperglycemic. You don't want energy crashes. In theory, over time, your metabolic health can be better, at least cannot get worse. And, you know, there's Dr. Rhonda Patrick has pointed out, there's a sort of a comparison study where people either walked after meals or for 30 minutes or so on per day, or they did, you know, 10 air squats every 45 minutes or so, just stand up and do air. And it looks like they were comparable. Maybe the air squats were better. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to stand up and do air squats in a restaurant. Or when I get out into the street of New York, if I have the great, you know, experience of having dinner with you and James Sexton again, that was the last time he shared a meal. I'm not going to do air squats. Oh, we're going to walk. So I think I'm not being disparaging of Rhonda. I think she was pointing out a mechanistic feature, not, not a, not a, a protocol, but necessarily, but if you're stuck on a plane, you could do some air squats. You could, you could, you know, bounce your knee and, you know, non-exercise induced thermogenesis is a massive calorie burn. You know, people who move a lot tend to be rather thin. They tend to be lean. The studies on those, uh, I go back to my undergraduate days when we worked on metabolism and physiology, like Rothwell and stock and some other folks, scientists who figured out that there were people who could eat a lot more than you would think they needed, but they always stayed lean. It turns out they're moving a lot during the day, burning up to 1800 calories a day. Now that's extreme, but some people who just move a bit more are a thousand calories. And there's this paper published in the journal science, which is a great journal, not as great as nature, but the Brits get the cake there and people will argue, but it's true that the decline in metabolism that we all associate with aging, like, Oh, metabolism slows as you age. It turns out that's not true. It turns out that if people maintain muscle mass, that doesn't happen. You say, okay, well then aging is muscle mass loss is reduction in metabolism. Actually, no, people are moving less. And I've been, as everyone else has been absorbed with this longevity thing, I look at older people and particularly people in their eighties. And you know what I see a lot of a lot less spontaneous movement and a lot of mouth breathing, which at rest is not good. We know this deprives the brain of oxygen. It's not good. You can mouth breathe during exercise, physiological size, et cetera, but you don't want to be a mouth breather in sleep or in wakefulness. And then you host people like James Hollis or Twyla Tharp, who's, I don't know her exact age. I think they're early eighties, but choreographer, world-class dancer who deadlifts a lot and works out for two hours a day at five in the morning who boxes, who choreographs. They're so mentally sharp. They're physically lean. There are other examples I could rattle off and you go, what is happening? Mike Snyder, my colleague at Stanford, who's not that old, but he's in his seventies. You look at him, you go, what's going on? And they're moving all the time. They're moving. They're mentally active. They have posture like you they're exercising. Sure. But they're moving, moving, moving. The spontaneous movement is burning calories. That's one piece, but it's also the glucose regulation. It's the fact that they're not sitting stagnant in their own. It, you know, there's Lane Norton has pointed out quite beautifully, actually, that what's the problem with caloric excess. Okay. There's the fat aesthetic piece, right? Body fat aesthetic piece. But that aside, it's that you have a toxicity of energy. The world's expert in mitochondria came on recently, Jared Rutter. I mean, he's phenom in the biochemistry and the genetics of mitochondria. And he will tell you, he's like, When you overload a system and therefore a cell with calories, the mitochondria, the whole system gets sick. The energy management system of a cell gets sick and your metabolism, this thing that you call your metabolism is the collective makeup of all these trillions of cells. So you jam too much fuel in there, like they don't work as well. And caloric restriction at times might be beneficial, caloric maintenance, maybe a little bit more at times, a little bit less. This is good. So movement, movement, movement, because it's obviously calories in, calories out.
Speaker 2You know what this is, right?
Speaker 1You're telling me I need to stop.
Speaker 2No, no, no, no, no. This is not a clock. This is a, this is a, this is a CO2 monitor.
Speaker 1I thought it was a lux meter. Okay. Okay. How, how, oh, we have a lot of CO2 in here. Yeah.
Speaker 2It's something that we always have in the studio because I think I learned over time that the higher this got, the more sort of tired I felt. And obviously because there's not great ventilation in this studio here, we started at 600 and we're now at 1,700.
Speaker 1And we're under short wavelength light. But before we came in here, what did we do? We went outside and we got a blast of full spectrum sunlight. Sunlight.
Speaker 2Yeah. I always, yeah, I think about this a lot now when I'm trying to do good cognitive work. Yeah. I've read some studies that if this gets above a thousand parts per million, cognitive performance starts to go down. Well, if your cognitive performance gets any better, we're all hosed because you're. You're very kind. Andrew, thank you so much for so many reasons. It's such an honor to get to learn from you, but I, you know, there's, I'll be honest. There's no books that I'm waiting for. There's no books that I've been waiting. Is there any book in my life that I've been waiting for? No, there's not. This is the only book in my life that I've been waiting for, for years now. And, um, I say that to say, cause I, I, I believe in your approach. I believe in your approach, your scientific rigor, the nuance you apply, the stories that you tell, the experiences you've had, the unbelievable, almost like mesmerizing ability you have to remember things. Remember, Nate, you didn't reference one study without referencing like the author of the study. And I've like never seen it. I was like, how the fuck has he done that? Like, how do you know all the names of all these people?
Speaker 1Years of, years of training and advisors who drilled into me that attribution is important.
Speaker 2It's remarkable. There's so much information out there around health and all the things that we've graced today. But, um, I was waiting for your book because I'm not very good at reading books, right? Well, there's an audio version too, if you prefer. It'll be a long run. No, I'm trying to build the anterior mid-singular cortex, Andrew. So I'm going to, I always said to myself, whenever he, whenever he publishes that bloody book, I will read the whole thing from cover to cover. And this is the first book in the world, I believe that's been printed.
Speaker 1Yeah. Can I, this is an opportunity to say what I've been waiting this entire podcast to say the copy you're holding in your hand is the first, the very first and the only hardcover copy that I have or have touched or have seen. And I'm gifting it to you. And I'm gifting it to you. I want you to have the book. Seriously. I want you to have it. And, um, and I'll sign it if you want or not sign it if you don't, but, um, it would be an honor for me, uh, to be able to do that because I've learned so much. You've been an amazing colleague and friend and, and supporter, but also just really a, you're an amazing human being. You're a truly good human being. And I've spent time with you on and off Mike. And you know, the number one thing that you need to know about Steven is he is who he appears to be. He's a super kind, curious, loving person, flawed like the rest of us. I'll be less flawed than me. That's clear. Um, but you really are a great human being and you're trying to do great things in the world for everyone around you and for the world. So, um, it's a vastly lesser token of my gratitude to you for all those things than, than it could be or should be, but I'd like to gift it. No, it's such an honor.
Speaker 2I was like thinking of ways to steal it. So I'm gifting it to you.
Speaker 1I'm gifting it to you. And, and, um, and now I'm going to go read your book and I look forward to your next book.
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2Thank you so much. It's such a. It's such a beautiful book and I, I'm really glad that it netted out at the size that it did as well. It is, I think the perfect size. And I think you've, you've done a wonderful job throughout as I was flicking through as you're speaking and jumping to different sections. I think you've done a wonderful job of making it really accessible because, you know, I'm not the smartest cookie as it relates to science, but I was able to understand everything. And I think that's a really remarkable thing. It is also gorgeous. Um, I, there I say, and I'll probably get fucked up for this, but I think, uh, sometimes the, the British version of books is a, is a gorgeous book. A good looking. And then the American versions are always wonder why they're a little bit uglier.
Speaker 1The, the aesthetics in Britain, you know, um, like people dress really well in Britain. They take care, they like pay attention to these little details, like in their shoes and things like, what do you call it? Smart. Like they dress really smart. Right. Uh, I'm a big fan of like Ben Sherman and Fred Perry clothes and things like that. And I like the, the, the details are what make those look so cool.
Speaker 2Well, this felt like a very sort of European designed, beautiful book. And, uh, and also your podcast is incredible. I, you know. I have to say so many of the guests that I've had on here are because I listened to your show and I get mind blown by the guests that you have on your show. And then I'm like to my team, but oh my God, this person is unbelievable. He said this one and I'm sending your podcast all around. Whenever my, someone in my life is really struggling with something, I go out and search usually on YouTube. And then I stumble across your channel and find an episode that you've done about that particular thing. And I'm always sending them around. So I highly recommend anyone that subscribes to my channel to go and subscribe over on your show as well. I'll link it below so everyone can get it.
Speaker 1So it turns out Huberman lab is a sort of.
Speaker 2Gateway drug to diary for science and health content. It's worth being honest about it. Um, and you've got to get the book. It's finally here. Um, comes out September. So this episode will air in September. So it should be out now for pre-order or order. You've got to go get it. It's, it's the, for me, the definitive book on this subject. Thank you so much, Andrew. Thank you, Steven. I love this conversation. I hope to have another conversation sometime soon. Yes. Thank you. Bye.
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