#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships

Speaker 1 following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his fifth time on the podcast.

Speaker 1 He is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and is an amazing scientist, teacher, human being, and someone I'm grateful to be able to call a close friend.

Speaker 1 Also, he has a book coming out next year that you should pre-order now called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.

Speaker 1 And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor check them out in the description it's the best way to support this podcast we got a sleep for naps element for electrolytes a g1 for nutrition shopify for e-commerce netsuits for business management software and better help for mental health choose wise my friends also if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me go to alexfreedman.com slash contact and now on to the full ladder reads as always no ads in the middle i try to make these interesting but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.

Speaker 1 I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by A-Sleep,

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Speaker 1 First of all, Pod 4 is an improvement over the Pod 3, which was already awesome. 2x, the cooling power.
I always love it when stuff is just improving.

Speaker 1 When smartphones are improving, LLMs are improving. Like jump to Claw35.

Speaker 1 It's just great. And then GPT-5 might be coming out soon.
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Speaker 1 So basically, you can sleep in your bed and you can also read in your bed. Which is a thing that I think a lot of people like doing.
I have trouble reading too much in my bed because i fall asleep

Speaker 1 the bed is just too nice anyway go to atesleep.com slash lex and use code lex to get 350 bucks off the pod for ultra this episode is also brought to you by element the drink that uh andrew and i consume a lot of during the episode i drink a lot of element almost not almost on every single podcast episode that's just what i drink i put element in the water i take uh i have one next to me right now a pod power-rated zero bottle with 28 fluid ounces, fill it up with water, put one packet of element in there, usually watermelon, salt, mix it all up, put in the fridge, and

Speaker 1 about 30 minutes later, there's cold, refreshing deliciousness. But yeah, in the Texas heat, when I'm doing the long runs or hard training sessions, like I just did 10 rounds the other day.

Speaker 1 in grappling, no drinks. I usually don't like to drink during training.
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Speaker 1 And that's such an amazing feeling to replenish it with all the electrolytes you need. So, especially when it's cold and delicious.
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Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

Speaker 1 It's kind of hilarious how when Andrew and I hang out, how the supplementation and the diet and just our way of being is on point.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of AG1 consumed. There's a lot of element consumed.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of ground beef or steak consumed on a regular basis.

Speaker 1 We've been planning to run together more, but we haven't quite done that. It's mostly my fault because

Speaker 1 running has just been such a solo thing for me. I really don't remember the last time I've ever run with anybody.

Speaker 1 I get so much into my head that I just feel like I'm even more introverted than I usually am. Like I lose myself inside my mind.

Speaker 1 It's become such a meditative process that to do running with another person,

Speaker 1 it just feels a little bit weird. I feel like I wouldn't be able to sort of contribute to the conversation if there's a conversation.
And also like...

Speaker 1 Pacing wise, there's a certain pace where conversation is still possible, but it's a little uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 So, and I can't really think at that pace that well and talk i already struggled with talking so i don't know we'll have to figure it out but he's just such a great person to work out with and a great person to talk to that we'll have to figure it out anyway ag1 is always part of the picture and i drink it twice a day it's the foundation of my nutrition it's the thing when i consume it i feel like i've got all my bases covered no matter the crazy mental or the physical stuff that i'm going to do they'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/slash Lex.

Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell stuff anywhere with a great-looking online store. It took me a really short time to set everything up.

Speaker 1 LexFreeman.com/slash store. There's a few shirts on there.
I actually got a Leonard Skinner shirt via Shopify recently, and I love it. I need to get more

Speaker 1 rock, music, like classic rock shirts. They brought so much joy to me that I just want to celebrate it.
I don't know why, but that seems like a cool way to celebrate it.

Speaker 1 Especially if it's like a nice Leonard Skinner or Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd shirt. You know, a shirt I haven't quite found that's the go-to-night.
I'm sure one exists is SRV, Steve Raybon.

Speaker 1 I just don't want a generic one. I want a super cool one.
Him and Jimi Hendrix have a certain way about them that requires a super cool shirt, not just a generic one.

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Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.

Speaker 1 It is the machine inside the machine, where the company is the meta machine, and society is the meta-meta machine, because it's a collection of groups and companies.

Speaker 1 it's also a collection of nations in a constant state of anarchy against each other with no centralized control the centralized control comes from the government

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Speaker 1 Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. I wonder how many companies there are in the world.

Speaker 1 It's kind of cool to think that there's 37,000 companies, each one with a person who founded or a collection of people founded that had a dream and that are working hard to bring bring that dream into a reality, trying to survive, trying to thrive, trying to make money, trying to put food on the table of all the families involved, all the responsibility of that.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Those are all little puzzles, little battles, sometimes big battles fought.

Speaker 1 It's cool. I love humans.
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Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P-Help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.

Speaker 1 It's kind of incredible the power of language, the power of spoken language to explore the human mind. Because in order to generate speech, you have to take an idea that's in your head.

Speaker 1 You have to compress that idea into

Speaker 1 something that can be represented in comprehensible sequence of words, and you have to speak it within the full context of everything that's been spoken previously and everything that's been going on around.

Speaker 1 And then there's another human being on the other side that hears it.

Speaker 1 First of all, they have to hear it correctly, you know, if it's noisy or whatever, or maybe their whole mind is focused on some aspect of the scene that prevents them from being able to really hear what's being said.

Speaker 1 But once they do, they have to then interpret it and decode, decompress

Speaker 1 the thing that was represented in language into an idea and visualize it, integrate it, load it in to the brain, and make sense of that idea again in the full context of everything that's happened before.

Speaker 1 And in that way, back and forth, humans talk and make sense of the world together and make sense of their own mind together.

Speaker 1 It's just cool. It's cool that that's even possible.

Speaker 1 And it's cool that that's actually a powerful way to understand yourself and to understand the world. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of talking, of rigorous, deep conversation.
And

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Speaker 1 This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

Speaker 1 You think there's ever going to be a day when you walk away from podcasting? Definitely.

Speaker 1 I mean, I i came up within and then on the periphery of skateboard culture and for the record i was not a great skateboarder i always have to say that because skateboarders are relentless if you call something you didn't do or whatever i mean i could do a few things and i loved the community and i still have a lot of friends in that community jim febo at deluxe you can look him up he's kind of the man behind the whole scene i know tony

Speaker 1 hawk danny way all these guys i got to see them come up and get big and stay big in many cases, start huge companies like Danny and Colin McKay, start DC.

Speaker 1 Some people have a long life in something,

Speaker 1 some don't. But one thing I observed and learned a lot from in skateboarding

Speaker 1 at the level of observing the skateboarders and then the ones that started companies. And then what I also observed in science and still observe is you do it for a while.

Speaker 1 You do it at the highest possible level for you.

Speaker 1 And then at some point, you pivot and you start supporting the young talent coming in.

Speaker 1 In fact, the greatest scientists, people like Richard Axel, Catherine Dulak, there are many other labs in neuroscience, Carl Dyseroth.

Speaker 1 They're not just known for doing great science. They're known for mentoring some of the best scientists that then go on to start their own labs.

Speaker 1 And I think in podcasting, I am very fortunate I got in in a fairly early wave, not the earliest wave, but thanks to your suggestion of doing a podcast, fairly early wave.

Speaker 1 And I'll continue to go as long as it feels right and I feel like I'm doing good in the world and providing good. But I'm already starting to scout talent.

Speaker 1 My company that I started with, Rob Moore, SciComm Media, there's a couple other guys in there too, Mike Blayback, our photographer, Ian Mackey,

Speaker 1 Chris Ray, Martin Phobes.

Speaker 1 We are a company that produces podcasts. Right now that's Huberman Lab podcast, but we're launching a new podcast, Perform, with Dr.
Andy Galpin. Nice.

Speaker 1 And we want to do more of that kind of thing, finding a really great talent, highly qualified people, credentialed people.

Speaker 1 And I've got a new kind of obsession with scouring the internet, looking for the young talent in science, in health, and related fields. And so will there be a final episode of the HLP?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, bullet buster cancer aside, you know, someday they'll be the very last.
And thank you for your interest in science. And I'll clip out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love the idea of walking away and not be dramatic about it. Right.
When it feels right, you can leave and you can come back whenever the fuck you want. Right.

Speaker 1 Jon Stewart did this well with the Daily Show. I think that was during the 2016 election when everybody wanted him to stay on.
He just walked away. Dave Chappelle for different reasons.
Walked away.

Speaker 1 Disappeared, came back. Gave away so much money.
Didn't care. And then came back and was doing like stand-up in the park in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Genius. You have Habib, who undefeated, walks away at the very top of a sport.
Is he coming back? No.

Speaker 1 At least we don't know. Yeah.
Right. You don't know.
I don't know if you have. Bears everywhere are words.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think, you know,

Speaker 1 it's always a call. You know,

Speaker 1 the last

Speaker 1 few years have been tremendous growth. We launched in January 2021, and even this last year, 2024, has been huge growth, you know, in all sorts of ways.
It's been wild.

Speaker 1 And we have some short form content planned,

Speaker 1 30-minute, shorter episodes that really distill down the critical elements. We're also thinking about moving to other venues besides podcasting.
So there's always the thought and the discussion.

Speaker 1 But when it comes to like when to hang up your cleats, you know, it's like.

Speaker 1 There just comes a natural time where you can do more to mentor the next generation coming in than focusing on self. And so there will come a time for that.
And I think it's critical.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, I saw this in skateboarding, like Danny and Colin and Danny's brother, Damon, started DC with Ken Block, the driver who unfortunately passed away a little while ago, rally car driver.

Speaker 1 And they eventually sold it, I think, to Quicksilver or something like that. But they're all phenomenal talents in their respective areas, but they brought in the next,

Speaker 1 you know, the next line of amazing riders, the Plan B thing, you know, Paul Rodriguez. For skateboarders, they know who this is.
Now, in science, there are scientists like Feynman, for instance.

Speaker 1 I don't know if anyone can name one of his mentor offspring. So there are scientists who are phenomenal, like beyond world class, right? Multi-generational world class who don't make good mentors.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying he wasn't a good mentor, but that's not what he's known for. And then there are.

Speaker 1 scientists who are known for being excellent scientists and great mentors.

Speaker 1 And I think there's no higher celebration to be had at the end of one's career if if you can look back and be like, hey, I put some really important knowledge into the world.

Speaker 1 People made use of that knowledge. And guess what? You spawned all these

Speaker 1 other

Speaker 1 scientific offspring or sport offspring or podcast offspring. I mean, in some ways, we look to Rogan and to some of the other earlier podcasts as like they, you know, they paved the way.

Speaker 1 Rhonda Patrick, first science podcast out there.

Speaker 1 So, you know, it eventually the baton passes. But fortunately, right now, everybody's active and it feels really good.
Yeah, well, you're talking about the healthy way to do it, but there's also

Speaker 1 a different kind of way where you have somebody like

Speaker 1 Grisha Grigori Perlman, the mathematician who refused to accept the Fields Medal.

Speaker 1 He's one of the greatest living mathematicians, and he just walked away from mathematics and rejected the Fields Medal. What did he do after he left mathematics? Life.
Private. 100%.

Speaker 1 I respect that. He's become essentially a recluse.
These photos of him looking very broke, like he could use the money.

Speaker 1 He turned away the money. He turned away everything.
You know, there's, there's,

Speaker 1 you just have to listen to the inner voice. You have to listen to yourself and make the decisions that don't make any sense for the rest of the world and make sense to you.

Speaker 1 I mean, Bob Dylan didn't show up to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. That's punk.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He probably grew in notoriety for that.

Speaker 1 Maybe he just doesn't like going to Sweden, but it seemed like it would be a fun trip. I think they do it in a nice time of year.
But hey, that's his right. He earned that right.

Speaker 1 I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize. They aren't doing it for the fame or the money.
They're doing it because they love the art. Yeah, that's the Rick Rubin thing.

Speaker 1 You got to verb it through, download your inner thing. I don't think we've talked about this.
That

Speaker 1 this obsession that I have about how Rick

Speaker 1 has this way of being very, very still in his body,

Speaker 1 but keeping his mind very active as a practice.

Speaker 1 I went to spend some time with him in Italy last June, and we would tread water in his pool in the morning and listen to history of rock and roll and 100 songs.

Speaker 1 Amazing podcast, by the way. It is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then he would spend a fair amount of time during the day, you know, in this kind of meditative state where his mind is very active, body very still.

Speaker 1 And then Carl Dyseroth, when he came on my podcast, talked about how he forces himself to sit still and think in complete sentences late at night after his kids go to sleep. And,

Speaker 1 you know, there's a state of mind, rapid eye movement sleep, where your body is completely paralyzed and the mind is extremely active.

Speaker 1 And people credit rapid eye movement sleep with some of the more elaborate emotion-filled dreams and the source of many ideas. And there are other examples.
Einstein,

Speaker 1 people described him as taking walks around the Princeton campus, then pausing and would ask him what was going on, and the idea that his mind was continuing to churn forward at a high rate.

Speaker 1 So, you know, this is far from controlled studies, but we're talking about some incredible minds and creatives who have a practice of stilling the body while keeping the mind deliberately very active, very similar to rapid eye movement sleep.

Speaker 1 And then there are a lot of people who also report, you know, great ideas coming to them in the shower while running.

Speaker 1 So it can be the opposite as well, where the body is very active and the mind is perhaps more on kind of like a default mode network, not really focusing on any one specific thing.

Speaker 1 You know, interesting,

Speaker 1 there's a bunch of physicists and mathematicians I've talked to. They talk about sleep deprivation and going crazy hours through the night, obsessively pursuing a thing.

Speaker 1 And then the solution to the problem comes when they finally get rest. Right.
And we know, we just did this sixth episode special series on sleep with Matt Walker.

Speaker 1 We know

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 when you deprive yourself of sleep and then you get sleep, you get a rebound in rapid eye movement sleep. You get a higher percentage of rapid eye movement sleep.

Speaker 1 And Matt talks about this in the podcast. And he did an episode on sleep and creativity, sleep and memory.
And rapid eye movement sleep comes up multiple times in that series.

Speaker 1 There's also some very interesting stuff about cannabis withdrawal and rapid eye movement.

Speaker 1 Sleep people are coming off cannabis often will suffer from insomnia, but when they finally do start sleeping, they like dream like crazy.

Speaker 1 Cannabis is a very controversial topic right now. Oh, yeah, I saw that.
What happened? There's a bunch of drama around the episode you did on cannabis.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we did an episode about cannabis, talked about the health benefits and the potential risks, right? It's neither here nor there.

Speaker 1 It depends on the person, depends on the age, depends on genetic background, a number of other things.

Speaker 1 We

Speaker 1 published that episode well over a year ago and it had no issues online, so to speak. And then a clip of it was put to X, where, you know, the real action occurs, as you know, your favorite spot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the four-ounce gloves, as opposed to the 16-ounce gloves. That is X versus Instagram or YouTube.
There was

Speaker 1 kind of an immediate dogpile from a few people in the cannabis research field. So PhDs and MDs, yeah.
There were people on our side, there were people not on our side.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, the statement that got things riled up the most was this notion that for certain individuals, there's a

Speaker 1 high potential for inducing psychosis with high THC containing cannabis. For certain individuals, not all.

Speaker 1 That sparked some issues.

Speaker 1 There was really a split. You know, you see this in different fields.

Speaker 1 There was one person in particular who came out swaying with language that, in my opinion, is not like of the sort that you would use at a university venue,

Speaker 1 especially among colleagues, but that's fine. You know, we're all grown-ups.
Well, for me, from my perspective, it was strangely rude. And it

Speaker 1 had an air of like elitism

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 to me

Speaker 1 uh was at the source of the problem uh during covid that led to the distrust of science and the the the popularization of disrespecting science because so many scientists spoke with an arrogance and a douchebaggery that i wish we would have a little bit less of yeah it's tough because most academics don't understand that people outside the university system

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 um they don't they're not familiar with like the inner workings of science and, um, and the culture. And so, you have to be very careful how you present when you're a university professor.

Speaker 1 Um, and when, yeah, so you know, he came out swinging at some, you know, four-letter word type language, and he was obviously upset about it.

Speaker 1 So, I simply said what I would say anywhere, which was, hey, look, you come on the podcast, let's chat. And, um, why don't you give your, tell me where I'm wrong and let's discuss.
And,

Speaker 1 and fortunately, he agreed. And initially he said, well, no, how can I be sure you're not going to misrepresent me?

Speaker 1 And so I said, we got on a D DM, then an email, then eventually a phone call and just said, hey, listen, like you're welcome to record the whole conversation. We've never done a gotcha on my podcast.

Speaker 1 And let's just get to the heart of the matter. I think this, this little controversy is perfect

Speaker 1 kindling for a really great discussion. And And he had some other conditions that we worked out.
And I, and I felt like, cool, like he's really interested.

Speaker 1 You get a very different person on the phone than you do on Twitter. I will say he's been very collegial, and that conversation is on the schedule.
I said, We'll fly you out, we'll put you up.

Speaker 1 He said, No, he wants to fly himself. He really wants to make sure that there's like kind of a space between.

Speaker 1 Um, I think some of the perception of science and health podcasts in the academic community is that it's all designed to sell something. No, we run ads so it can be free to everyone else.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I think, look, in the end, um, he agreed, and I'm excited for the conversation. It was interesting because in the wake of that little exchange,

Speaker 1 there's been a bunch of press from traditional press about cannabis has now surpassed alcohol in many cultures as within the United States.

Speaker 1 As when I say cultures, I mean demographics, the United States as the drug of choice.

Speaker 1 There have been people highlighting the issues of potential psychosis and high THC containing.

Speaker 1 And so it's kind of interesting to see how traditional media is sort of on board certain elements that, you know, I put forward.

Speaker 1 And I think there's some controversy as to whether or not the different strains, the indicas and sativas, are biologically different, et cetera. So we'll get down into the weeds, pun intended,

Speaker 1 during that one. And I'm excited.

Speaker 1 It's the first time that we've responded to a direct criticism online about scientific content in a way that really promoted like, oh, here, the idea of inviting a particular guest. And so it's great.

Speaker 1 Let's get a guest who is expert in cannabis i i believe i could be wrong about this that he's a behavioral neuroscientist of slightly different training but look he seems highly credentialed it'd be fun and we

Speaker 1 you know we welcome that kind of exchange i deeply i'm not being diplomatic i'm just saying like it's cool like he's coming on you you know and he was friendly on the phone right like he literally came out online and was like basically like kind of like f you like f this and f you but you get someone on the phone and it's like hey how's it going and they're like oh yeah well you know i there was an immediate apology of like hey listen i came out normally i'm like not like that but online you know you got a different okay listen so it's a little bit like it's a little bit like jiu-jitsu right people say all sorts of things i guess but if they if you're like all right well let's go then it's probably a different story you know it's not like jiu-jitsu because in jiu-jitsu people don't talk shit because they know what the consequences are let me let me just say on mic and off mic you have been very respectful towards this person

Speaker 1 and i'm look up to you and respect you and admire the fact that you have been that said, to me, that guy was being a dick.

Speaker 1 And when you graciously, politely invited him on the podcast, he was still talking down to you the whole time. So I really admire and look forward to listening to you talk to him.

Speaker 1 But I hope others don't do that. Like you are a positive, humble voice exploring all the interesting aspects of science.
Like you want to, learn. If there, you've got anything wrong,

Speaker 1 you want to learn about it.

Speaker 1 The way he was being a dick i was just hurt a little bit not because of him but because like there's some people i really really admire brilliant scientists that are not their best selves on twitter on x definitely i don't understand what happens to their brain well they regress they they regress and and they also are protected you know you know when you remove the I mean, no scientific argument should ever come to physical blows, right?

Speaker 1 But when you remove the real world thing of being right in front of somebody,

Speaker 1 people will throw all sorts of stones at a distance, you know, and over a wall.

Speaker 1 And they've got their wife or their husband or their boyfriend or their dog or their cat to go cuddle with them afterwards.

Speaker 1 But you get in a room and it's like, you know, confrontational people in real life are pretty rare, but hopefully if they do it, they're like willing to back it up with knowledge in this case, right?

Speaker 1 We're not talking about a physical altercation. Yeah, he kept coming and he kept putting on conditions.
How do I know you want this? And I was like, well, you can record the conversation.

Speaker 1 How do I know you want that? Listen, we'll pay for you to come out. How do you know? And eventually he just kind of relented.
And

Speaker 1 to his credit, you know, he's agreed to come on. I mean, he still has to show up, but once he does, you know, we'll treat him right like we would any other guest.
Yeah, you treat people really well.

Speaker 1 And I just hope that people are a little bit nicer on the internet. Yeah, well, you know, X is an interesting one because

Speaker 1 it thickens your skin, you know, to just to go on there. I mean, you have to be ready to deal with.

Speaker 1 Sure, but I can still criticize people for being douchebags because that's still not good inspiring behavior, especially for scientists that should be sort of symbols of

Speaker 1 scientific thinking, which requires intellectual humility. Humility is a big part of that.
And Twitter is a good place to illustrate that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Years ago, I used to, I was a student in TA, then instructor, and then directed a Cold Spring Harbor course on visual neuroscience. These are summer courses that explore different topics.

Speaker 1 And at night, we would host

Speaker 1 what we hoped were battles in front of the students where you'd get two people on it. You know, would it be neural prosthetics or molecular tools that would first, you know,

Speaker 1 restore vision to the blind kind of arguments. And you kind of like, it's kind of a silly argument because it's going to be a combination of both, right?

Speaker 1 But you'd get these great arguments, but the arguments were always couched in data. And occasionally you'd get somebody would go like,

Speaker 1 or would curse or something, but it was the rare, very, um, very well-placed, you know, um, insult. It wasn't, you know, coming out swinging.

Speaker 1 Um, I think ultimately, you know, Twitter's a record of people's behavior. The internet is a record of people's behavior.
And here I'm not talking about news reports about people's behavior.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about how people show up. online is really important.

Speaker 1 You've always carried yourself with a ton of composure and respect. And, you know, you just would hope that people would grow from that example.

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you that the podcasters that I'm scouting, it's their energy, but it's also how they treat other people, how they respond to comments.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we're blessed to have pretty significant reach when we put out a podcast, like someone else's podcast, it goes far and wide.

Speaker 1 So, like a skateboard team, like a laboratory where you're selecting people to be in your lab,

Speaker 1 you want to pick people that you would enjoy working with and that are collegial.

Speaker 1 Etiquette is lacking nowadays, but you're in the suit and tie. You're bringing it back.
Bringing it back.

Speaker 1 You said that your conversation with James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst, had a big impact on you. What do you mean?

Speaker 1 James Hollis is a 84-year-old Jungian psychoanalyst who's written 17 books, including Under Saturn's Shadow.

Speaker 1 which is on the healing and trauma of men, the Eden Project, excuse me, which is about relationships and creating a life.

Speaker 1 I discovered James Hollis in an online lecture that was recorded, I think, in San Diego. It's on YouTube.
The audio is terrible called Creating a Life.

Speaker 1 And this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span, I can't remember. And I was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time.

Speaker 1 I was like, I just found the most incredible lecture I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he talks about the shadow. He talks about

Speaker 1 your developmental upbringing and

Speaker 1 you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents' tendencies and values in certain areas.

Speaker 1 He talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages of life to live a full life. So, it's always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast.

Speaker 1 And he wasn't able to travel, so our team went out to DC and sat down with him. We rarely do that nowadays.
People come to our studio. And

Speaker 1 he came in, he had had some surgeries recently, and he kind of came in with some assistance from a, you know, a cane and then sat down and just

Speaker 1 blew my mind. From start to finish, he didn't miss a syllable.
And every sentence that he spoke was like a quotable sentence of with real potency and

Speaker 1 actionable items. I think one of the things that was most striking to me was how he said, when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response

Speaker 1 and we we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or while seated or while lying down, doesn't have to be meditation, but it could be

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we really want. And that if we do that practice repeatedly, 10 minutes a day here, 15 minutes a day there.

Speaker 1 that we start to really touch into our unique gifts and the things that make us each us and the directions we need to take, but that so often we just stay in stimulus response.

Speaker 1 We just do, do, do, do, do, which is great. We have to be productive,

Speaker 1 but we miss those

Speaker 1 important messages. And interestingly, he also put forward this idea of what is it? It's like get up, shut up, suit up.
Yeah, something like that. Like get out of bed, suit up.

Speaker 1 and shut up and get to work. He also has that in him, kind of a Goggins type mindset.
So be able to turn off all this self-reflection and self-analysis and just get shit done.

Speaker 1 Get shit done, but then also take dedicated time and stop and just let stuff geyser to the surface from the unconscious mind.

Speaker 1 And he quotes Shakespeare and he quotes Jung and he quotes everybody through history with incredible accuracy and

Speaker 1 in exactly the way

Speaker 1 needed to drive home a point.

Speaker 1 That conversation to me was one that I really felt like, okay, you know, if I don't wake up tomorrow for whatever reason, that one's in the can and I feel really great about it.

Speaker 1 It's it to me, it's the most important

Speaker 1 guest recording we've ever done

Speaker 1 in particular because he has wisdom. And while I hope he lives to be 204,

Speaker 1 chances are he's got another, what, 20, 30 years with us, hopefully more.

Speaker 1 But I really, really wanted to capture that information and get it out there. So I'm I'm very, very proud of that one.

Speaker 1 And he's the kind of guy that anyone listens to him, young, old, male, female, whatever, and you're going to get something of value. What do you think about this idea

Speaker 1 of the shadow?

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 the good and the bad that we repress, that hides from plain sight when we analyze ourselves, that's there. You think there's like an ocean? that we don't have direct access to? Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Jung said it.
We have all things inside of us, and we do. And some people are more in touch with those than others.
And some people, it's repressed.

Speaker 1 I mean, does that mean that we could all be, you know, horrible people or marvelous people,

Speaker 1 benevolent people? Perhaps. I think that,

Speaker 1 thankfully, more often than not, people lean away from the like violent and harmful parts of their shadow. But I think spending time thinking about,

Speaker 1 you know, one's

Speaker 1 shadow, shadows is super important.

Speaker 1 How else are we going to grow? Otherwise,

Speaker 1 we have these unconscious blind spots of denial or

Speaker 1 repression or whatever the psychiatrists tell us. But yeah, it clearly exists within all of us.
I mean, we have neural circuits for rage. We all do.
We have neural circuits for altruism.

Speaker 1 And no one's born without these things. And some people, they're atrophied and some people they're hypertrophied.
But

Speaker 1 looking inward and recognizing what's there is key. Or positive things like creativity.
Maybe that's what Rick Rubin is accessing when he goes silent. Silent body, active mind.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. What is it for you?

Speaker 1 What place do you go to that generates ideas, that helps you generate ideas? I have a lot of new practices around this. I mean, I'm always exploring for protocols.
I have to. It's like in my nature.

Speaker 1 When I went and spent time with Rick, I tried to adopt his practice of staying very still and just letting stuff come to the surface or the Dysarothian way of formulating complete sentences while being still in the body.

Speaker 1 What I have found works better is what my good friend Tim Armstrong does to write music. He writes music every day.
He's a music producer. He's obviously a singer and guitar player for Rancid.

Speaker 1 And he's helped dozens and dozens and dozens of female pop artists and punk rock artists write great songs and many of the famous songs that you've heard from other artists Tim helped them write Tim wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night and what he does is he'll start drawing or painting so what he's done and Joni Mitchell talks about this too you find some creative outlet that's

Speaker 1 like 15 degrees off center from your main creative outlet And you do that thing. So for me, that's drawing.

Speaker 1 I like doing anatomical drawings, neuroscience-based drawing, drawing neurons, that kind of thing. And if I do that for a little while,

Speaker 1 my mind starts churning on the nervous system and biology. And then I come up with

Speaker 1 areas I'd like to explore for the podcast, ways I'd like to address certain topics. Right now, I'm very interested in autonomic control.

Speaker 1 A beautiful paper came out that shows that anyone can learn to control their pupil sizes without changing luminance through a biofeedback mechanism.

Speaker 1 And that gives them

Speaker 1 control over their so-called automatic autonomic nervous system. And I've been looking at what the circuitry is and it's, it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 So I'll draw the circuitry that we know underlies autonomic function.

Speaker 1 And as I'm doing that, I'm thinking, oh, like, what about autonomic control and those people that supposedly can control their pupil size?

Speaker 1 Then you go in and there's a paper published in Nature Press, one of the nature journals, and there's a recent paper on this. Like, oh, cool.
And then we talk about this.

Speaker 1 And then how could this be put into a kind of a post or how could this, you know, so doing things that are about 15 degrees off-center from your main thing is a great way to access, I believe, the circuits for, in Tim's case, painting goes to songwriting.

Speaker 1 I think for Joni Mitchell, that was also the case, right? I think it was drawing and painting to singing and songwriting. For Rick, I don't know what it is.
Maybe it's listening to podcasts.

Speaker 1 I don't know. That's his business.
Do you have anything that you like to focus on that allows you then an easier transition into your main creative work?

Speaker 1 No, I really like to focus on emptiness and silence. So I pick the dragon I have to slay.
So whatever the problem I have to work on. And I just sit there

Speaker 1 and stare at it. I love how fucking linear you are.

Speaker 1 And if there's no, if you're tired, I'll just sit. I believe in the in the power of just waiting.
And usually I'll stop being tired.

Speaker 1 Or there energy rises from somewhere or an idea pops from somewhere, but there needs to be a silence and an emptiness it's an empty room just me and the dragon and we wait that's it like if it's a usually with programming you're thinking about a particular design like how do i design this thing

Speaker 1 to solve this problem

Speaker 1 any cognitive enhancers i've got a quite the gallery in front of me oh that's right yeah

Speaker 1 should we walk through this yeah this is not this is not a sales thing it's just um I tend to do this bounce back and forth. Your refrigerator just happened to have a lot of different choices.

Speaker 1 So water. this is all my refrigerator.
I know, right? There's no food in there. There's water, there's element, which they now have canned.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and yes, they're a podcast sponsor for both of us, but that's not why I cracked one of these open. I like them provided they're cold, and that's by the way, my least favorite flavors.

Speaker 1 I was saying that's that's the reason it's still left in the fridge. The cherry one is really good.
The black cherry is good, there's an orange one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I pushed the um sled this morning and pulled the sled for my workout at the gym, and it was hot today here in Austin. So, um, some salt is good.

Speaker 1 And then Matina Yerbo Mate, zero sugar, full confession, I helped develop this. I'm a partial owner, but I love yerbo mate.
Half Argentine, been drinking mate since I was a little kid.

Speaker 1 There's actually a photo somewhere on the internet when I'm like three sitting on my grandfather's lap sipping mate out the gourd.

Speaker 1 And then this might find interesting, this is just a little bit of coffee with a scoop of Brian Johnson gave me cocoa, just like pure unsweetened cocoa. So I put that in chocolate and I like it.

Speaker 1 It just for the taste. Well, it actually nukes my appetite.
And since we're not going out to dinner tonight until later, I figure that's good. Yeah, Brian's an interesting one, right?

Speaker 1 He's really pushing this thing. The optimization of everything.
Yeah. Although he just hurt his ankle.
He posted a photo that he hurt his ankle.

Speaker 1 So now he's injecting BPC body protection compound 157, which many, many people are taking, by the way. I did an episode on peptides.

Speaker 1 I should just say, you know, BPC 157, one of the known effects in animal models is angiogenesis, like development of new vasculature, which can be great in some context, but also if you have a tumor, you don't really want to vascularize that tumor anymore.

Speaker 1 So I worry about people taking BPC157 continually, but

Speaker 1 and there's very little human data. I think there's like one study and it's a lousy one.
So a lot of animal data. Some of the peptides are interesting.

Speaker 1 However, there's one that I've experimented with a little bit called pineelin, which

Speaker 1 I find even if I've just taken it twice a week before sleep, then it times, it seems to do something to the circadian timekeeping mechanism because then on other days when I don't take it, I get unbelievably tired at that time that normally I would do the injection.

Speaker 1 These are things that I'll experiment with for a couple of weeks and then typically stop, maybe try something else. But I stay out of

Speaker 1 things that really stimulate any of like major hormone pathways when it comes to peptides. That's actually a really good question of how do you experiment?

Speaker 1 Like how long do you try a thing to figure out if it works for you? Well, I'm very sensitive to these things. So, I, and I have been doing a lot of things for a long time.

Speaker 1 So, if I add something in, it's always one thing at a time. And I notice right away if it does not make me feel good.

Speaker 1 Like, there's a lot of excitement about some of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues, hypermorelin, testamorellin, surmorein.

Speaker 1 Um, I've experimented a little bit with those in the past, and they've nuked my rap and eye movement sleep, but given me a lot of deep sleep, which doesn't feel good to me, but other people like them.

Speaker 1 I also just

Speaker 1 generally try and avoid taking peptides that tap into these hormone pathways because you can run into all sorts of issues. But some people take them safely.

Speaker 1 But usually, after about four or five days, I know if I like something or I don't, and then I move on. But I am not super adventurous with these things.

Speaker 1 I know people that will take cocktails of peptides with multiple things. They'll try anything.
That's not me. And I do blood work.

Speaker 1 But also, I'm, you know, I'm mainly reading papers and podcasting. And

Speaker 1 I'm teaching a course next spring, Stanford. I'm going to do a big undergraduate course.

Speaker 1 So I'm trying to develop that course and things like that. So

Speaker 1 I don't need to lift more weight or run further than I already do, which is not that much weight or far as it is. Right.
You're not going to the Olympics.

Speaker 1 You're not trying to truly maximize some aspect of your performance. No, and I'm not.
And I'm not trying to get down below whatever, you know, 7% body fat or something.

Speaker 1 I don't have those kinds of goals.

Speaker 1 So hydration, electrolytes, caffeine in the form of mate, and then this coffee thing and then and then here's a one that i think i brought out for discussion this is a piece of nicorette they're not a sponsor um nicotine is an interesting compound it will raise blood pressure and it um

Speaker 1 is probably not safe for everybody but you know the nicotine is gaining in popularity like crazy mainly these um pouches that people put in the lip not we're not talking about um smoking vaping dipping or snuffing you know my interest in nicotine started this was in 2010.

Speaker 1 I was visiting Columbia Medical School and I was in the office of the great neurobiologist Richard Axel, won the Nobel Prize, co-recipient with Linda Buck for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction.

Speaker 1 Brilliant guy. He's probably in his late 70s now, probably.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he kept popping Nicorette in his mouth. And I was like, what's this about? And he said, oh, well, this was just anecdote, right? But he said, but he said this.

Speaker 1 He said, oh, well, you know, it protects against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, it does.
And he goes, Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he was kidding or not.
He's known for making jokes.

Speaker 1 And then he said that when he used to smoke, it really helped his focus and creativity, but then he quit smoking because he didn't want lung cancer. And he found that he couldn't focus as well.

Speaker 1 So he would choose Nicarette. So occasionally, like right now,

Speaker 1 I do a half a piece, but I'm not Russian. So I'm a little, you know, did you just pop the whole thing in your mouth?

Speaker 1 So I'll do a couple milligrams every now and again. And it definitely sharpens the mind on an empty stomach in particular, but you fast all day.
You're still doing one meal a day. One meal a day.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I did a nicotine pouch with Rogan at dinner.

Speaker 1 That got high. Yeah, that's a lot.
That's like usually six or eight milligrams. I know people that get a canister of Zin,

Speaker 1 take one a day. Pretty soon they're taking a canister a day.
So you have to be very careful. I will only allow myself two pieces of Nicorette total.
per week.

Speaker 1 And you will notice that, you know, in the day after you use it, you know, sometimes your, your throat will feel a little bit like a little spasm-y, like you might want to cough once or twice.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, if you're a singer or you're a podcaster or something, you have to do long podcasts. You want to just be mindful of it.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you're supposed to kind of like keep it in your cheek. And here we go.
But it did make me

Speaker 1 intensely focused in a way that was a little bit scary.

Speaker 1 The nucleus basalis is in the, you know, in the basal four brain nucleus has cholinergic neurons that radiate out axons, little wires that release acetylcholine into the neocortex and elsewhere.

Speaker 1 And when you focus on one particular topic matter or one particular area of your visual field or listening to something and focusing visually, we know that there's an elaboration of the amount of acetylcholine released there and it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor sites there.

Speaker 1 So it's a kind of a tensional modulation by acetylcholine. So you're getting it with nicotine, you're getting a exogenous or artificial heightening of that circuitry.

Speaker 1 And the time I had Tucker Carlson on the podcast, he told me that apparently it helps him, as he said publicly,

Speaker 1 keep his

Speaker 1 love life vibrant. Really? It caused vasoconstrictions.
Like he literally said, it makes his dick really hard. He said that publicly also.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, as little as I want to think about Tucker Carlson's

Speaker 1 sex life,

Speaker 1 no disrespect.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 major effect of nicotine on the vasculature my understanding is that it causes vasoconstriction not vasodilation drugs like sialis todalophil

Speaker 1 viagra etc are vasodilators they allow more blood flow um

Speaker 1 nicotine does the opposite less blood flow to the periphery but provided dosages are kept low and i i don't recommend people use it frequently or at all and i don't recommend young people use it you know um

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 25 and younger Brain's very plastic at that time. And

Speaker 1 certainly smoking, dipping, vaping, and snuffing aren't good because you're going to run into, we'll run into trouble for other reasons. But in any case,

Speaker 1 and even there, vaping is a controversial topic.

Speaker 1 Probably safer than smoking, but has its own issues. And I said something like that, and boy, did I catch a lot of heat for that.

Speaker 1 You can't say anything as a health science educator, not piss somebody off.

Speaker 1 It just depends on where the center of mass is and how far outside that you are. For me, the caffeine is the main thing.

Speaker 1 And actually,

Speaker 1 it's a really big part of my life. And one of the things you recommend is that people wait a bit in the morning to consume caffeine if they

Speaker 1 experience a crash in the afternoon.

Speaker 1 This is one of the misconceptions

Speaker 1 I regret. maybe even discussing it for people that crash in the afternoon.

Speaker 1 Oftentimes, if they delay their caffeine by 60 to 90 minutes in the morning, they will offset some of that.

Speaker 1 But if you eat a lunch that's too big or you didn't sleep well the night before, you're not going to avoid that afternoon crash.

Speaker 1 But I'll wake up sometimes and go straight to hydration and caffeine, especially if I'm going to work out. Here's a weird one.

Speaker 1 If I exercise before

Speaker 1 8:30 a.m.,

Speaker 1 especially if I start exercising when I'm a little bit tired, I get energy that lasts all day.

Speaker 1 If I wait until my peak of energy, which is mid-morning, 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and I start exercising then, I'm basically exhausted all afternoon. And I don't understand why.

Speaker 1 I mean, it depends on the intensity of the workout. But so I like to be done, showered,

Speaker 1 and heading into work by 9 a.m., but I don't always meet that mark. So you're saying it doesn't affect your energy if you start with exercising?

Speaker 1 I think you can get energy and wake yourself up with exercise if you start early. And then that fuels you all day long.
I think that if you wait until you're feeling at your best to train,

Speaker 1 sometimes that's detrimental because then in the afternoon, when you're doing like the work we get paid for, like research, podcasting, et cetera, then oftentimes, you know, your brain isn't firing as well.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. I haven't really rigorously tried that wake up and just start running or listening.
This is the Giaco thing.

Speaker 1 And then there's this phenomenon called entrainment, where if you force yourself to exercise or eat or socialize or view bright light at a certain time of day for three to seven days in a row.

Speaker 1 Pretty soon there's an anticipatory circuit that gets generated. This is why anyone in theory can become a morning person to some degree or another.

Speaker 1 And this is also a beautiful example of why you wake up before your alarm clock goes off. You know, people wake up and all of a sudden it goes off.
It wasn't because it clicked.

Speaker 1 It was because you have this incredible timekeeping mechanism that exists in sleep.

Speaker 1 And there's some papers that have been published in the last couple of years, Nature Neuroscience and elsewhere, showing that people can answer math problems in their sleep, simple math problems, but math problems nonetheless.

Speaker 1 This does not mean that if you ask your partner a question in sleep, that they're going to answer accurately. Like they might screw up the whole

Speaker 1 cumulative probability of 20% across multiple months. All right, listen.
What happened? What happened? Here's the deal.

Speaker 1 A few years back, I did a four and a half hour, after editing, four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility.

Speaker 1 The entire recording took 11 hours. And at one point during the, and by the way, I'm very proud of that episode.

Speaker 1 There's many couples have written to me and said they now have children as a consequence of that episode. And my first question is, what were you doing during the episode?

Speaker 1 But in all seriousness, we should say that it's four and a half hours.

Speaker 1 And for people, then they should listen to the episode. You're, it's an extremely technical episode.
Like you're non-stop dropping facts and referencing a huge number of papers. It must be exhausting.

Speaker 1 I don't understand how you can possibly. It talks about sperm health, spermatogenesis.
It talks about the ovulatory cycle.

Speaker 1 It talks about things people can do that are considered absolutely supported by science. It talks about some of the things kind of out on the edge a little bit that are a little bit more experimental.

Speaker 1 It talks about IVF. It talks about ICSI.
It talks about all of that. It talks about frequency of pregnancy as a function of age, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But there's this one portion there in the podcast where I'm talking about the probability of a successful pregnancy as a function of age. And

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 there was a clip that was cut in which I was describing cumulative probability.

Speaker 1 And by the way, we've published cumulative probability histograms in many of my laboratory's papers, including one that was a Nature article in 2018. So we run these all the time.

Speaker 1 And yes, I know the difference between independent and cumulative probability. Okay, that's like, I do.

Speaker 1 The way the clip was cut

Speaker 1 and what I stated, unfortunately, combined to like a pretty great gaffe where I say, you're just adding per I said, you're just adding percentages 20, 20, 20 to 120%.

Speaker 1 And then I made a kind of unfortunately, my humor isn't always so good. And I made a joke.
I said,

Speaker 1 120%, but that's a different thing altogether. What I should have said was,

Speaker 1 that's impossible, you know, and here's how it actually works. But then it continues where I then describe the cumulative probability histogram for

Speaker 1 successful pregnancy. But somewhere in the early portion, I misstated something, right? I made a math error,

Speaker 1 which implied I didn't understand the difference between independent and cumulative probability, which I do.

Speaker 1 And it got picked up and run, and people had a really good laugh with that one at my expense.

Speaker 1 And so, what I did in response to it was rather than just say everything I just said said now, I said, I just came out online and said, hey, folks, in an episode dated this on fertility, I made a math error.

Speaker 1 Here is the formula for cumulative probability, successful pregnancy at that age. Here's the graph.
Here's the, you know, and I offered it as a teaching moment in two ways.

Speaker 1 One, for people to understand cumulative probability. It was sort of interesting, too.
A number of people that had come out critiquing the gaff.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 like Bolly and folks came out pointing out that they didn't understand cumulative probability. So there was a lot of posturing, you know, the dogpile.
Oftentimes, people are quick to dogpile.

Speaker 1 They didn't understand, but a lot of people did understand. Some smart people out there, obviously.

Speaker 1 I called my dad and he was just laughing. He goes, oh, this is good.
This is like the old school way of hammering academics.

Speaker 1 But the point being, there's a teaching moment.

Speaker 1 Give me an opportunity to say, hey, I made a mistake. I also made a mistake in another podcast where I did a micron to millimeter conversion or centimeter conversion.

Speaker 1 And we always correct these in the show note captions. We correct them in the audio now.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, on YouTube, it's harder to correct. You can't go and edit in segments.
We put in the captions, but that was the one teaching moment.

Speaker 1 If you make a mistake, it's substantive and related to data.

Speaker 1 You apologize and correct the mistake used as a teaching moment. The other one was to say, hey, you know, in all the thousands of hours of content we've put out, I'm sure I've made some small errors.

Speaker 1 I think I once said serotonin when I meant dopamine. And, you know, you're going, you're, you're riffing.

Speaker 1 And And it's a reminder to be careful to edit, double check, but the internet usually edits for us. And then we go make corrections.

Speaker 1 But it didn't feel good at first, but ultimately, you know, I can laugh at myself about it.

Speaker 1 Long ago at Berkeley, when I was TAing my first class, it was a biopsychology class, maybe 1998 or 1999.

Speaker 1 I was drawing the pituitary gland, which is, you know, it has an anterior and a posterior lobe. Actually, it's a medial lobe too.
I had five, six hundred students in that lecture hall.

Speaker 1 And I drew it was chalkboard and I drew the two lobes of the pituitary. And I said, my back was to the audience.
I said, you know, and so they just sort of hang there.

Speaker 1 And everyone just erupted in laughter because it looked like a scrotum with two testicles.

Speaker 1 And I remember thinking like, oh my God, like, I don't think I can turn around, like and face this, you know, and like, oh, I got to turn around sooner or later.

Speaker 1 So I turned around and we just all had a big laugh together. It was embarrassing.
I'll tell you one thing, though, they never forgot about the two lobes of the pituitary.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you haven't forgotten about that either. Right.
There's a high, high salience for these kinds of things. And it also was kind of fun to see

Speaker 1 how excited people get to see people trip. It's like an elite sprinter trips and does something stupid, like, you know, runs the opposite direction out the blocks or something like that.

Speaker 1 And, and, or, uh, you know, I recall at one World Cup match years ago, a a guy scored against his own team. I think they killed the guy.
Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 Some South American or Central American team. Yeah.
And they killed the guy. But yeah, let's look it up.
Just said

Speaker 1 World Cup. Yeah, he was gunned down.

Speaker 1 Andres Escobar

Speaker 1 scored against his own team in 1994 World Cup in the United States. Just 27 years old, playing for the Columbia national team.
Yeah. Last name, Escobar.
It's a good name. I think it would protect you.

Speaker 1 Listen, you know, so

Speaker 1 there are some gaffes that get people

Speaker 1 killed, right? So,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 how forgiving are we for online mistakes? You know, it's the nature of the mistakes. People were quite gracious about the gaff and some weren't.
And, you know, it's interesting that

Speaker 1 We

Speaker 1 as public health science educators,

Speaker 1 will do long podcasts sometimes and you need to be really careful. What's great is AI

Speaker 1 allows you to check these things now more readily.

Speaker 1 So that's cool. And

Speaker 1 there are ways that it's now going to be more self-correcting. I mean, I think

Speaker 1 there's a lot of errors out there on the internet and people are finding them and it's cool. Like things are getting cleaned up.
Yeah, but mistakes nevertheless will happen.

Speaker 1 Are you do you feel the pressure of

Speaker 1 not making mistakes? Sure, I mean, you know, I try and get things right to the best of you know, to the best of my ability.

Speaker 1 Um, I check with experts, it's kind of interesting when people really don't like something that was said in a podcast.

Speaker 1 A lot of times I chuckle because I'm, you know, at Stanford, we have some amazing scientists, but I talk to them elsewhere elsewhere.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 and it's always interesting to me

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 you know, I'll get divergent information and then I'll find the overlap in the Venn diagram. And I have this question, do I just stay with the overlap in the Venn diagram?

Speaker 1 Like, I did an episode on oral health. I didn't know this until I researched that episode, but oral health is critically related to heart health and brain health.

Speaker 1 There's a bacteria that causes cavities, streptococcus, you know,

Speaker 1 that can make its way into other parts of the body through the mouth that can cause serious issues.

Speaker 1 There's the idea that some forms of dementia, some forms of heart disease start in the mouth, basically. I talked to no fewer than four dentists, dental experts, and there was a lot of convergence.

Speaker 1 I also learned that teeth can demineralize. That's the formation of cavities.
They can also remineralize.

Speaker 1 As long as a cavity isn't too deep, it can actually fill itself back in, especially if you provide the right substrates for it.

Speaker 1 That saliva is this incredible fluid that has all this capacity to remineralize teeth provided the milieu is right things like alcohol-based mouthwashes killing off some of the critical things you need is fascinating and i put out that episode thinking oh well i'm not a dentist i'm not an oral health episode but i talked to a pediatric dentist there's a terrific one dr downscore stacey s-t-a-c-i on instagram does great content talked to some others um

Speaker 1 and I was like, and then I just waited for the attack. I was like, here we go.
And it didn't come. And dentists were thanking me.
I was like, whoa, you know,

Speaker 1 that's a rare thing. More often than not, if I do an episode about, say, psilocybin or MDMA, you get some people liking it or ADHD and the drugs for ADHD.

Speaker 1 We did a whole episode on the Riddle and Vivance, Adderall stuff. You get people saying, thank you.
You know, I prescribed this to my kid and it really helps.

Speaker 1 And this, and I, but they're private about the fact that they do it because they get so much attack from other people.

Speaker 1 So I like to find the center of mass, report that, try and make it as clear as possible. And then I know that there's some stuff where I'm going to catch shit.

Speaker 1 What's frustrating for me is when, like,

Speaker 1 I see claims that I'm like against fluoridization of water, which I'm not, right? Like we talked about the benefits of fluoride. It builds hyper strong bonds within the teeth.

Speaker 1 I went and looked at some of the

Speaker 1 literally the crystal structure, excuse me, not the crystal structure, but the

Speaker 1 essentially the like micron and submicron structure of teeth is like incredible. And where fluoride can get in there and form these super strong bonds.

Speaker 1 And you can also form them with things like hydroxyapatite. And why is there fluoride in water? Well, it's the best.
Okay.

Speaker 1 You get, you say some things that are interesting, but then somehow it gets turned into like you're against fluoridization, which I'm not. Or I've been accused of being against sunscreen.

Speaker 1 I wear mineral-based sunscreen on my face. I don't want to get skin cancer.
Or I use a physical barrier. There is a cohort of people out there that think that all sunscreens are bad.

Speaker 1 I'm not one of them. I'm not what's called a sunscreen truther.
But then you get attacked for like, so we're talking about there are certain sunscreens that are problematic.

Speaker 1 So what, and Rhonda Patrick's now starting to get vocal about this. And so there's certain topics that's interesting for which

Speaker 1 you have to listen carefully to what somebody is saying, but there's a lumper or lumping as opposed to splitting of

Speaker 1 what health educators say. And so it just seems like, like with politics, there's this like urgency to just put people into a camp of

Speaker 1 expert versus like renegade or something. And it's not like that.
It's just not like that.

Speaker 1 So the short answer is I really strive, really strive to get things right, but I know that I'm going to piss certain people off. And you've taught me

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 Joe's taught me and

Speaker 1 other podcasters have taught me that like if you worry too much about it,

Speaker 1 then you aren't going to get the newest information out there.

Speaker 1 Like peptides, there's very little human data unless you're talking about Vilecy or the melana, you know, the stuff in the alpha melanocyte stimulating hormone stuff, which are prescribed for female libido to enhance female libido or surmarellin, which is for certain growth hormone deficiencies.

Speaker 1 With rare exception, there's very little human data. But people are still super interested and a lot of people are taking and doing these things.
So you want to get the information out. Do you try to

Speaker 1 not just look at the science, but research what the communities are talking, what the various communities are talking about?

Speaker 1 Like maybe research what the conspiracy theorists are talking about, just so you know

Speaker 1 all the armies that are going to be attacking your castle. Yes.

Speaker 1 So, like, for instance, there's a community of people online that believe that, like, if you consume seed oils or something, that like you're setting up your skin for sunburn.

Speaker 1 And if you don't, you know, like, there's all these like theories, but I like to, so I like to know what the theories are.

Speaker 1 I like to know what the extremes are, but I also like to know what the standard conversation is. But there's generally more agreement than disagreement.
I think where, um,

Speaker 1 you know, I've been kind of bullish actually, is you know, or like supplements, like people go, oh, supplements.

Speaker 1 Well, there's food supplements like a protein powder, which is different than a vitamin.

Speaker 1 And then they are compounds, there are compounds that have real benefit, but people get very nervous about the fact that they're not regulated.

Speaker 1 But some of them are vetted with for potency and for safety with more rigor than others, you know. And it's interesting to see

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 people who take care of themselves and put a lot of work into that are often attacked. That's been interesting.
Also, one of the most controversial topics nowadays is Ozempic Munjaro.

Speaker 1 I'm very middle of the road on this. I don't understand why the

Speaker 1 quote-unquote health wellness community is so against these things. I also don't understand why they have to be looked at as the only route.
For some people, they've really helped them lose weight.

Speaker 1 And yes, there can be some muscle loss and other lean body loss, but that can be offset with resistance training. They've helped a lot of people.
And other people are like, no, this stuff is terrible.

Speaker 1 I think the most interesting thing about Ozempic Monjaro is that they are GLP1. They're in the GLP-1 pathway, glucagon-like peptide one.

Speaker 1 And it was discovered in Hila Monsters, which is a

Speaker 1 lizard, basically. And someone, now the now the entomologist will dive on me.
It's a big, big lizard-looking thing that doesn't eat very often.

Speaker 1 And they figured out that there's this peptide that allows it to curb its own appetite at the level of the brain and the gut.

Speaker 1 And it has a lot of homology to sequence homology to what we now call GLP-1.

Speaker 1 So I love anytime there's animal biology links to cool human biology links to a drug that's powerful that can help people with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Speaker 1 And there's evidence that can even curb some addictions.

Speaker 1 Those are newer data. But I don't see as either or.

Speaker 1 In fact, I've been a little bit disappointed at the way that the whatever you want to call it, health, wellness, biohacking community has like slammed on Ozempic Monjaro.

Speaker 1 It's like they're like, just get out and run.

Speaker 1 Listen, there are people who are carrying substantial amounts of weight that running could injure them. They get on these drugs and they can improve.

Speaker 1 And then hopefully they're also doing resistance training and eating better. And then, you know, you're bringing all the elements together.
Well, why do you think the criticism is happening?

Speaker 1 Is it that Ozempic became super popular, so people are misusing it or that kind of thing? No, I think what it is, is that people

Speaker 1 think if it's a pharmaceutical, it's bad.

Speaker 1 And then, or if it's a supplement, it's bad, depending on which camp they're in. And, and wouldn't it be wonderful to kind of like fill in the gap between this divide? You know,

Speaker 1 what I would like to see in politics and in health is neither right nor left, but what we can just call a league of reasonable people that looks at things on an issue-by-issue basis and fills in the center.

Speaker 1 Cause I think most people are in the, are, I don't want to say center in a political way, but I think most people are reasonable. They want to be reasonable, but that's not what sells clicks.

Speaker 1 That's not what, that's not what drives interest.

Speaker 1 But I'm a very like, like, I look at issue by issue, person by person. I don't like in-group, out-group stuff.
I never have. I've got friends from all walks of life.

Speaker 1 I said this on other podcasts, and it always sounds like a political statement, but like the

Speaker 1 push towards like, you know, polarization is, it's so frustrating.

Speaker 1 If there's one thing that's discouraging to me as I get older each year, I'm like, wow, are we ever going to get out of this like polarization?

Speaker 1 Speaking of which, how are you going to vote for the presidential election?

Speaker 1 I'm still trying to figure out how to interview the people involved and do it well. What do you think the role of podcast is going to be in this year's election? I would love

Speaker 1 long-form conversations to happen with

Speaker 1 the candidates. I think it's going to be huge.
I would love Trump to go on Rogan.

Speaker 1 I'm embarrassed to say this, but I would love to,

Speaker 1 honestly, would love to see Joe Biden go on Joe Rogan also. I would imagine that both would go on, but separately.
Separately, I think is, I think a debate.

Speaker 1 Joe does debates, but I think Joe at his best is one-on-one conversation, really intimate.

Speaker 1 I just wish that Joe Biden would actually do long form conversations. I thought he had done a, what's the, I think he was on

Speaker 1 Jay Shetty's podcast. He did Jay Shetty.
He did a few, but when I mean long form, I mean

Speaker 1 really long form like two three hours and more relaxed it was much more orchestrated because what happens when it's the interview is a little bit too short it becomes into this generic

Speaker 1 political type of

Speaker 1 NBC CNN type of interview you get a set of questions and you don't get to really feel the human expose the human to the light in it the full we talked about the shadow the good the bad and the ugly so i think there's something magical about two three, four hours.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't have to be that long, but it has to have that feeling to it where there's not people standing around and everybody's nervous and you're going to be

Speaker 1 strictly sticking to the question-answer type of feel, but just shooting shit, which Rogan is the best by far in the world at that.

Speaker 1 I don't think people really appreciate

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 skilled he is at what he does.

Speaker 1 And the number, I mean, the three or four podcasts per week, plus the UFC announcing, plus comedy tours in stadiums, plus,

Speaker 1 you know, doing comedy shows in the middle of the week, plus

Speaker 1 a husband and a father and a friend and jiu-jitsu. The guy's got like superhuman levels of output.

Speaker 1 I agree that long form conversation is a whole other business.

Speaker 1 And I think that people want and deserve to know the people that are running for office in a different way and to really get to know them.

Speaker 1 Well, listen, you know, I guess you,

Speaker 1 I mean, is it clear that he's going to do jail time or maybe he gets away with a fine?

Speaker 1 Because I was going to say, I mean, does that mean you're going to be podcasting from in prison? Yeah. We're going to.
In fact, I'm going to figure out how to commit a crime so I can get in prison.

Speaker 1 Please don't. Please don't.
Well, that's. I'm sure they have visitors.
Right. That just doesn't feel an authentic way to get the interview.
But yeah, I understand.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't be able to wear that suit. You'd be wearing a different suit.
That's true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's going to be interesting. And you do, I'm not just saying this because you're my friend, but you would do a marvelous job.

Speaker 1 I think you should sit down with all of them separately to keep it civil and

Speaker 1 see what happens.

Speaker 1 Here's one thing that I found really interesting in this whole political landscape. When I'm in Los Angeles, I often get invited to these, like,

Speaker 1 they're not dinners, but gatherings where, you know, a local,

Speaker 1 you know, bunch of podcasters will come together, but a lot of people from the entertainment industry, big agencies, big tech, like big, big tech, many of the people have been on this podcast.

Speaker 1 And they'll host a discussion or debate.

Speaker 1 And what you find, if you look around the room and you talk to people, is that about half the people in the room are very left-leaning and very outspoken about that.

Speaker 1 And they'll tell you exactly who they want to see

Speaker 1 win the presidential race. And the other half half will tell you that they're for the other side.
A lot of people that

Speaker 1 people assume are on one side of the aisle or the other are in the exact opposite side.

Speaker 1 Now, some people are very open about who they're for, but it's been very interesting to see how when you get people one-on-one, they're like telling you they want X candidate to win or Y candidate to win.

Speaker 1 And sometimes I'm like, really? I can't believe it. Like, you? Like, yep.
And so it's what people think about

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 people's political leanings is often exactly wrong and and that's been eye-opening for me and i've seen that um in university campuses too and and so it's it's going to be really really interesting to see what happens in in november in addition to that as you said most people are close to the center despite what twitter makes it seem like most people whether they're center left or center right they're kind of close to the center yeah i mean here's the to me the most interesting question who is going to be the next big candidate in years to come like who's that going to be right now i don't i don't i don't see or know of that person who's it going to be yeah the young promising candidates we're not seeing them we're not seeing like who another way to ask that question who would want to be well that's the issue right you know it who wants to live in this 12-hour news cycle where you're just trying to you know dunk on the other team so that nobody notices like the you're the shit that you fucked up, you know, like that, that's not like, that's not only not fun or interesting, it also is just like,

Speaker 1 it's got to be psychosis inducing at some point. And I think that,

Speaker 1 you know, God willing, we're going to, you know, some young guy or woman is like on this and refuses to

Speaker 1 back down and was just like determined to be president and we'll make it happen. But like, I don't don't even know who the

Speaker 1 viable candidates are.

Speaker 1 Maybe you, Lex. You know? We should ask Sagar.
Sagar would know. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Maybe Sagar himself.

Speaker 1 Sagar's show is awesome. Yeah.
He and Crystal do a great thing. He's incredible.
Especially since they have somewhat divergent opinions on things. That's what makes it so cool.
He's great.

Speaker 1 He looks great in a suit, looks real sexy. He's taking real good care of himself.
I think he's getting married soon. Congratulations, Sagar.
Forgive me for not remembering your

Speaker 1 future wife's name.

Speaker 1 He won my heart by giving me

Speaker 1 a biography of Hitler as a present. That's what he gave you? Yeah.
I gave you a hatchet

Speaker 1 with a poem inscribed in it. That just shows the fundamental difference.
With a poem inscribed in it.

Speaker 1 Which was pretty damn good.

Speaker 1 I realize everything we bring up on the screen is like really

Speaker 1 depressing, like the soccer player getting killed. Can we bring up something happy? Sure.
Let's go to Nature's Metal Instagram. Those are pretty intense.

Speaker 1 We actually did a collaborative post on a shark thing. Really? Yeah.
What kind of shark thing?

Speaker 1 So to generate the fear VR stimulus for my lab in 2016, we went down to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, me and a guy named Michael Mueller, who's a very famous portrait photographer, but also takes photos of sharks.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we

Speaker 1 used

Speaker 1 360 360 video to build VR of great white sharks, brought it back to the lab. We published that study in current biology.
In 2017, went back down there.

Speaker 1 And that was the year that I exited the cage. You lower the cage with a crane.
And that year, I exited the cage. I had a whole mess with an air failure the day before.

Speaker 1 I was breathing from a hookah line while in the cage. I had no scuba on.
Divers were out.

Speaker 1 The thing got boa-constricted up, and I had an air failure, and I had to actually share air, and it was a whole mess. Story for another time.

Speaker 1 But the next day, because I didn't want to get PTSD and it was pretty scary, the next day I cage exited

Speaker 1 with some other divers. And it turns out with these great white sharks, in Guadalupe, the water is very clear, and you can swim toward them, and then they'll veer off you if you swim toward them.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, they see you as prey. Well, in the evening, you've brought all the cages up, and you're hopefully all alive.

Speaker 1 And we were hanging out fishing for tuna. We had one of the crew on board had

Speaker 1 a line in the water and was fishing for tuna for dinner, and a shark took the tuna off the line.

Speaker 1 And it's a very dramatic take. And you can see the just absolute size of these great white sharks.
The waters there are filled with them. That's the one.

Speaker 1 So this video, just the Neuralink link, was shot by Matt McDougall. who is the

Speaker 1 head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. There it is.
It takes it. Now, believe it or not, it looks like it missed, like it didn't get the fish.
It actually just cut that thing like a band saw.

Speaker 1 So I'm up on the deck with Matt. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so when you look at it from the side, you really get a sense of

Speaker 1 the girth of this freaking thing.

Speaker 1 So as it comes up, if you pop, look at the size of that thing. And they move through the water with such speed.

Speaker 1 Just a couple, so when you're in the cage and the cage is lowered down below the surface,

Speaker 1 they're going around. You're not allowed to chum the water there.
Some people do it.

Speaker 1 But and then when you cage exit, they're like, well, what are you doing out here? And then, you know, they swim toward them, they veer off.

Speaker 1 But what's interesting is that if you look at how they move through the water, all it takes for one of these great white sharks, when it sees a tuna or something it wants to eat, is like two flicks of the tail

Speaker 1 and becomes like a missile. It's just unbelievable economy of effort.

Speaker 1 And Ocean Ramsey, who is, in my opinion, the greatest of all cage exit shark divers, this woman who dove with enormous great white sharks.

Speaker 1 She really understands their behavior when they're aggressive, when they're not going to be aggressive.

Speaker 1 She and her husband, Juan, I believe his name is, do they understand how the tiger sharks differ from the great white sharks? We were down there basically like not understanding any of this.

Speaker 1 We never should have been there. And actually, the air failure the day before, plus cage exiting the next day, I told myself after coming up from the cage exit, that's it.

Speaker 1 I'm no longer taking risks with my life. I want to live.
Got back across the border a couple of days later. And I was like, that's it.
I don't take risks with my life any longer.

Speaker 1 But yeah, McDougal, Matt McDougal shot that video and then it went quote unquote viral through

Speaker 1 nature is metal. We passed them that video.
I actually

Speaker 1 saw a video where an instructor was explaining how to behave with a shark in the water and that you don't want to be swimming away because then you're acting like a prey. That's right.

Speaker 1 And then you want to be acting like a predator by looking at it and swimming towards it. Right towards them and they'll bank off.
Now, if you don't see them, they're ambush predators.

Speaker 1 So you know you're swimming in the surface and apparently if they get close you should just like guide them away by yeah like grabbing them and moving them away some people will actually roll them um but if they're coming in full speed you're not going to roll the shark but here we are back to dark stuff again i like the shark attack map and the shark attack map shows that um you know northern california there were a couple actually a guy's head got taken off um he was swimming north of san francisco there's been a couple in northern uh california that was really tragic but most of them are in florida and Australia.

Speaker 1 Florida.

Speaker 1 The Surfrider Foundation shark attack map. There it is.

Speaker 1 They have a great map. There you go.
So they look like they have all these scars on them. So if you, if you zoom in on, um, I mean, look, look at this.
If you go to North America, um, look at skulls.

Speaker 1 There's, there's a, yeah, where they're, where they're deadly attacks. Um, but in yeah, northern California, sadly, this is really tragic.
If you zoom in on this one, um, I read about this.

Speaker 1 Uh, this guy, if you can click the link, 53-year-old male, he was in chest-high water. This is just tragic.
I feel so sad for him and his family. You know, he's just

Speaker 1 three members of the party chose to go in. He was, you know, nine

Speaker 1 was in his chest high water, 25 to 50 yards from shore. Great, breached water, seized his head, and that was it.
You know, so it does happen. It's very infrequent.

Speaker 1 If you don't go in the ocean, there's a very, very, very low probability.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 if it doesn't happen

Speaker 1 six times in a row,

Speaker 1 120% chance. Yeah.
Who do you think wins, a saltwater crocodile or a shark? Okay. I do not like saltwater crocodiles.
They scare me to no end.

Speaker 1 Mueller, Michael Mueller, who dove all over the world, he sent me a picture of him diving

Speaker 1 with

Speaker 1 salty saltwater crocs in Cuba. It was a smaller one, but goodness gracious, have you seen the size of some of those saltwater crocs?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking the sharks are so agile. They're amazing.
They've head cammed one or body cammed one moving through the kelp bed.

Speaker 1 And you look and it's just, they're so agile moving through the water. And it's looking up at the surface, like the camera's looking at the surface.
And you just realize if you're out there,

Speaker 1 you're not

Speaker 1 and you're swimming and you get hit by a shark.

Speaker 1 I was going to talk shit and say that a salty has way more bite force, but according to the internet, recently data indicates that the shark has a stronger bite.

Speaker 1 So I was assuming that a crocodile would have a stronger bite force and therefore agility doesn't matter. But apparently a shark.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and turning one of those big salties is probably not that, you know, turning around. It's like a battleship.
I mean, those sharks are unbelievable. They hit from all sorts.
Oh, and

Speaker 1 they do this thing. We saw this.
You're out of the cage or in the cage and you'll look at one and you'll see its eye kind of like looking at you. They can't really fove it, but they'll look at you.

Speaker 1 And you're tracking it. And then you'll down and you'll realize that one's coming at you.
They're just they're they're ambush prayers. They're working together.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating. I like I like how you know that they can't foveate right you're already considering the vision system there.

Speaker 1 It's a very primitive eyes on the system very primitive eyes on the side of the head. Their vision is decent enough.

Speaker 1 They're mostly obviously sensing things with their electro sensing in the water, but also

Speaker 1 oh olfaction.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I spend far too much time thinking about and learning about the visual systems of different animals. If you get me going on this, like we'll be here all night.

Speaker 1 See, this is what I have the smugglet on to. I saw this in a store and I got it

Speaker 1 because this is from a shark.

Speaker 1 Goodness. Yeah, I can't say I ever saw one with teeth this big, but

Speaker 1 imagine that. It's beautiful.
Yeah, it's probably, you know,

Speaker 1 probably your blood pressure just goes and you don't feel a thing. Yeah.
It's not going to. Before we went down for the cage exit, a guy in our crew, Pat Dossus,

Speaker 1 very experienced diver, asked one of the South African divers.

Speaker 1 So, what, you know, like, what's the contingency plan if like somebody catches a bite? And they were like,

Speaker 1 he was like, every man for himself. And they're like, basically saying, like, if somebody catches a bite, like, that's it.

Speaker 1 You know.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I thought we were going to bring up something happy.

Speaker 1 Oh, that is happy.

Speaker 1 Well, we

Speaker 1 live. Yeah, nature is beautiful.
We lived.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 1 there are happy things. You brought up nature as metal.

Speaker 1 This, see, this is the difference between Russian yeah americans and americans it's like maybe this is actually a good time to bring up um your ayahuasca journey i've never done ayahuasca

Speaker 1 um but i'm curious about it i'm also curious about ibogaine iboga um

Speaker 1 but you told me that you did ayahuasca

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 that for you it wasn't the dark scary ride that it is for everybody else yeah it was an incredible experience for me i did it twice actually and have you done high dose psilocybin never no i just did small dose psilocybin a couple of times.

Speaker 1 So I was, you know, nervous about it. I was very understandable.

Speaker 1 I've done high-dose psilocybin. It's terrifying, but I've always gotten something very useful out of it.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, I was nervous about like whatever demons might hide in the shadow, in the Jung in the shadow. Like, I was, I was nervous.

Speaker 1 But I think it turns out, I don't know what the lesson is to draw from that, but my experience, be born Russian.

Speaker 1 It must must be the Russian thing. I mean, there's also something to the jungle.

Speaker 1 It strips away all the bullshit of life and you're just there.

Speaker 1 I forgot the outside civilization exists. I forgot time because like

Speaker 1 when you don't have your phone, you don't have meetings or calls or whatever, you lose the sense of time. The sun comes up, the sun comes down.
That's the fundamental biological timer.

Speaker 1 You know, every mammalian species. has a short wavelength.
So you think like blue UV type, but like absorbing cone and a longer longer wavelength absorbing cone.

Speaker 1 And it does this interesting subtraction to designate when it's morning and evening, because when the sun is low in the sky, you've got short wavelength and long wavelength light.

Speaker 1 Like you look at a sunrise, it's got blues and yellows, orange and yellows. You look in the evening, reds, orange and blues.
And in the middle of the day, it's like full spectrum light.

Speaker 1 Now, it's always full spectrum light, but because of some atmospheric

Speaker 1 elements and because of the low solar angle,

Speaker 1 that difference between the different wavelengths of light is the fundamental signal that the neurons in your eye pay attention to and signal to your circadian timekeeping mechanism.

Speaker 1 Like we are at the core of our brain and the supercharismatic nucleus,

Speaker 1 we are like

Speaker 1 wired to be entrained to the rising and setting of the sun. Like that's the biological timer, which makes perfect sense because, you know, obviously as the planets, as the planets spin and revolve.

Speaker 1 I also wonder like how that is affected by, you know, in the rainforest, the sun is not visible often.

Speaker 1 So you're under the cover of the trees so maybe that affects well there are social rhythms they're feeding rhythms sometimes in in terms of some species will signal the timing of activity of other species and um

Speaker 1 but yeah getting out from the canopy is is critical of course even under the canopy during the daytime there's far more photons than at night you know this is always when i'm telling people to get sunlight in their eyes in the morning and in the evening people say there's no light no sunlight this time here i'm like it go outside on a really overcast day it's far brighter than it is at night, right?

Speaker 1 So there's still lots of sunlight, even if you can't see the sun as an object. But I love

Speaker 1 time perception shifts. And you mentioned that in the jungle, it's linked to the rising and setting of the sun.
You also mentioned that on ayahuasca, you zoomed out from the earth.

Speaker 1 These are like, to me, the most interesting aspects of having a human brain as opposed to another brain. Of course, I've only ever had a human brain, but which is that you can consciously set your

Speaker 1 time

Speaker 1 domain window. Like we can be focused here, we can be focused on all of Austin, or we can be focused on the entire planet.
You can make those choices consciously, but in the time domain, it's hard.

Speaker 1 Like different activities bring us into fine slicing or more broadband of time, depending on what we're doing. programming or exercising or researching or podcasting.

Speaker 1 But just how unbelievably fluid the human brain is in terms of

Speaker 1 the aperture of the time space window of our cognition and of our experience.

Speaker 1 And I feel like this is perhaps one of the more valuable tools that we have access to that we don't really leverage as much as we should, which is when things are really hard, you need to zoom out and see it as one element within your whole lifespan and that there's more to come.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, people commit suicide because they can't see beyond the time domain they're in, or they think it's going to go on forever.

Speaker 1 When we're happy, we rarely think this is going to last forever,

Speaker 1 which is an interesting contrast in its own right. But I think that

Speaker 1 psychedelics, while I have very little experience with them, I have some and it sounds like they're just a very interesting window into the different apertures.

Speaker 1 Well, how to surf that wave is probably a skill.

Speaker 1 One of the things I was prepared for, and I think it's important, is not to resist.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 I understand what it means to resist a thing, a powerful wave, and it's not going to be good. So you have to be able to surf it.
So I was ready for that, to relax through it.

Speaker 1 And maybe because I'm quite good at that from

Speaker 1 knowing how to relax in all kinds of disciplines, playing piano and guitar when I was super young, and then through jiu-jitsu, knowing the value of relaxation and through all kinds of sports, to be able to relax the body fully and just accept whatever happens to you.

Speaker 1 That process is probably why it was a very positive experience for me.

Speaker 1 Do you you have any interest in eboga? I'm very interested in ibogaine, eboga.

Speaker 1 There's a colleague of mine and researcher at Stanford, Nolan Williams, who's been doing some transcranial magnetic stimulation and brain imaging on people who have taken ibogaine. Ibogaine,

Speaker 1 as I understand it, gives a 22-hour psychedelic journey where no hallucinations with eyes open, but you close your eyes and you get a

Speaker 1 a very high resolution image of actual events that happened in your life, but then you have agency within those movies. I think you have to be of healthy heart to be able to do it.

Speaker 1 I think you have to be on a heart rate monitor. It's not trivial.
It's not like these other psychedelics.

Speaker 1 But there's a wonderful group called Veterans Solutions

Speaker 1 that has used eboga combined with some other psychedelics in the veterans community to

Speaker 1 great success for things like PTSD. And it's a group I've really tried to support in any way that I can, mainly by being vocal about the great work they're they're doing.

Speaker 1 But you hear incredible stories of people who are just like

Speaker 1 near-cratered in their life or zombied by PTSD and other things post-war,

Speaker 1 get back a lightness or achieve a lightness and a clarity that they didn't feel they had. So I'm very curious about these compounds.

Speaker 1 The state of Kentucky, we should check this, but I believe has taken money from the opioid crisis settlement for ibogaine research. I mean, so this is like no longer.
Yes, if you look here, let's see.

Speaker 1 Did they do it? Oh no. No.
Oh no. They backed away.
Kentucky backs away from the plan to fund opioid treatment research.

Speaker 1 They were going to use the money to treat opioid. Now officials are backing off.
50 billion. What? Is on its way over the coming years.
$50 billion.

Speaker 1 $50 billion is on its way to state and local government over the coming years.

Speaker 1 The pool of funding comes from multiple legal statements with pharmaceutical companies that profited from manufacturing or selling opioid painkillers.

Speaker 1 Kentucky has some of the highest number of deaths from the opioid. So they were going to do psychedelic research with Ibogaine

Speaker 1 supporting research on illegal, illegal folks, psychedelic drug called Ibogaine. Well, I guess they backed away from it.
Well,

Speaker 1 sooner or later, we'll get some happy news up on the

Speaker 1 internet during this episode. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 The shark and the crocodile fighting. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
That's true. And you survived the jungle.
Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 I was writing to you on WhatsApp multiple times because I was going to put on the internet, are you okay?

Speaker 1 And if you're like, alive, and then I was going to just like put it to Twitter, just like he's alive. But then, of course, you're far too classy for that.
So you just came back alive.

Speaker 1 Well, jungle or not,

Speaker 1 one of the lessons is also, you know, when you hear the call for adventure,

Speaker 1 just fucking do it. I was going to ask you, it's kind of a silly question, but like, give me a small fraction of the the things on your bucket list.

Speaker 1 Bucket list. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Go to Mars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what's the status of that? I don't know. I'm being patient about the whole thing.
Red Planet ran that cartoon of you guys going to Mars. That one was pretty funny.
It's true.

Speaker 1 Actually, that was pretty funny. One with Goggins is already up there.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a funny one.

Speaker 1 Probably also true.

Speaker 1 I would love to die on Mars.

Speaker 1 I just love humanity reaching onto the stars and doing this bold adventure and taking big risks and exploring. I love exploration.
What about seeing different animal species?

Speaker 1 I'm a huge fan of this guy, Joel Sartori,

Speaker 1 where he has this photo arc project where he takes portraits of all these different animals. If people aren't already following him on Instagram, he's doing some really important work.

Speaker 1 This guy's Instagram is

Speaker 1 amazing. portraits of animals.
Well, look at it. Look at these portraits.
The amount of,

Speaker 1 I don't want to say personality because we don't want to project anything onto them, but

Speaker 1 the eyes. And he'll occasionally put a movie.
There's a little owl. I delight in things like this.
I've got some content coming on animals and animal neuroscience and eyes.

Speaker 1 Oh, and dogs or all kinds of animals.

Speaker 1 And I'm very interested

Speaker 1 in

Speaker 1 kids' content that that incorporates animals. So we have some things brewing there.
Like I could look at this kind of stuff all day long. Look at that bat.

Speaker 1 Like bats, people think about bats as kind of like little flickering, little annoying disease carrying things, but look how beautiful that little sucker is.

Speaker 1 How's your podcast with the Cookie Monster coming? Oh, yeah. We've been in discussions with Cookie.

Speaker 1 It's, I can't say too much about that, but Cookie Monster embodies dopamine, right? Cookie Monster wants cookie, right? Wants cookie right now.

Speaker 1 You know, like it was that, it was that one tweet, Cookie monster, I bounce because cookies come from all directions.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like, it's just embodying the, the, the desire for, for something, and, and, which is an incredible aspect of ourselves.

Speaker 1 The other one is, you remember a little while ago, um, Elmo put out a tweet. Hey, how's everyone doing out there? And it went viral.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the surgeon general of the United States have been talking about the loneliness crisis. He came on the podcast.

Speaker 1 And, you know, a lot of people have been talking about problems with loneliness, mental health issues with loneliness. Elmo puts out a tweet, hey, how's everyone doing out there? And

Speaker 1 everyone gravitates toward it. You know, so that the different Sesame Street characters really embody the different kind of aspects of self through very like narrow neural circuit perspective.

Speaker 1 Yes, Nuffalophagus is shy and Oscar the Grouch, grouchy, right? And the Count, one, two.

Speaker 1 The archetypes of the archetypes of

Speaker 1 yeah, and I think that,

Speaker 1 you know, the creators of Sesame Street clearly either understand that or it's an unconscious genius to that. So, yeah, there are some things brewing on conversations with Sesame Street characters.

Speaker 1 It's not, I know you'd like to talk to Vladimir Putin. I'd like to talk to Cookie Monster.
It illustrates the differences in our like sophistication or something. Well, that's illustrates a lot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, illustrates a lot. That's a lot.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I also love animation. So I'm not anime.
That's not my thing, but animation. So I'm very interested in the use of animation to get science content across.

Speaker 1 So there are a bunch of things brewing, brewing,

Speaker 1 but anyway, I delight in Sartori's work and

Speaker 1 there's a conservation aspect to it as well. But I think that

Speaker 1 mostly want to thank you for finally putting up something that like where something's not being killed or like let some sad, sad outcome.

Speaker 1 These are all really positive. They're really cool.
They're really cool. And every once in a while, look at that mountain lion.

Speaker 1 But I also like to look at these and some of them remind me of certain people, right? So let's just scroll through.

Speaker 1 Like for instance, I think when we don't try and process it too much, so like, like, okay, so look at this cat, this civic cat, amazing. Like, I feel like that's somebody.

Speaker 1 I feel like this is like a, like someone I met once as a, as a curiosity and a curiosity and a playfulness. Um, carnivore.
Carnivore, frontalized eyes, found in stereotypes. Forced perception, right?

Speaker 1 So then you go down, you know, it's like

Speaker 1 this beautiful fish. Neon pink.
Right.

Speaker 1 Because it reminds you of some of the like the influencers you see on Instagram, right? Except this one's natural. Just kidding.

Speaker 1 Let's see. No filter.

Speaker 1 No filter. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's see. Like, I feel like.

Speaker 1 Bears. I'm a big fan of bears.
Yeah, bears are beautiful. This one kind of reminds me of you a little bit.
There's like a stoic nature to it, a curiosity.

Speaker 1 So you can kind of feel like the essence of animals. You don't even have to do psychedelics to get there.

Speaker 1 Look at that. He's like the behind the scenes of how it's actually.

Speaker 1 And then there's

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 yeah the in the jungle the diversity of life was also stark from a scientific perspective just the the fact that most of those species are not identified was fascinating right it was like a little every little every little insect is a kind of discovery right i mean one of the reasons i love new york city so much despite its problems at times is that um everywhere you look there's life.

Speaker 1 It's like a tropical reef. If you've ever done scuba diving or snorkeling, you look on a tropical reef and it's like there's some little crab working on something.

Speaker 1 And like everywhere you look, there's life. You know, in the Bay Area, if you go scuba diving or snorkeling, it's like a kelp bed.
You know, the Bay Area is like a kelp bed.

Speaker 1 Every once in a while, some big fish goes by. It's like a big IPO.
But like most of the time, not a whole lot happens.

Speaker 1 Actually, the Bay Area, it's interesting as I've been going back there more and more recently.

Speaker 1 There

Speaker 1 are really cool little subcultures starting to pop up again. Nice.

Speaker 1 There's incredible skateboarding. The GX1000 guys are these guys that bomb down hills.

Speaker 1 They're in nuts like they're just going like so just speed not tricks you gotta see GX1000 these guys going down hills in San Francisco They are wild and occasionally unfortunately occasionally someone will get hit by a car but if you GX1000 Look into intersections.

Speaker 1 They have spotters. You can see someone there

Speaker 1 Oh, I see. There's a like but into traffic.
Yeah, into traffic. So in San Francisco.
Yeah, this is crazy. Like this is unbelievable.
And

Speaker 1 they're they're just wild.

Speaker 1 But in any case. What's on your bucket list that you haven't done? Well, I'm working on a book.
So I'm actually going to head to a cabin for a couple of weeks and write, which I've never done.

Speaker 1 People talk about doing this, but I'm going to do that.

Speaker 1 I'm excited for that. Just the mental space of really dropping into writing.
Like Jack Nicholson and the Shining kind of thing. Let's hope not.
Okay. Let's hope not.

Speaker 1 You know, before I mean, I only started doing public facing anything for posting on Instagram in 2019, but I used to head up to Wallala on the northern coast of California, sometimes by myself,

Speaker 1 to a little cabin there and spend a weekend by myself and just read and write papers and things like that. I used to do that all the time.

Speaker 1 I miss that. So some of that,

Speaker 1 I'm trying to spend a bit more time with my relatives in Argentina, relatives

Speaker 1 on the East Coast, see my parents more. They're in good health, thankfully.
I want to get married and have a family. That's an important priority.
And putting a lot of work in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah,

Speaker 1 putting a lot of work into

Speaker 1 the runway on that.

Speaker 1 What's your advice for people about that? Or give advice to yourself about how to find love in this world,

Speaker 1 how to build a family and get there. And then I'll listen to it someday and see if I hit the marks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, obviously pick the right partner, but also like do the work on yourself. Know yourself,

Speaker 1 the oracle, know thyself.

Speaker 1 And I think,

Speaker 1 listen,

Speaker 1 I have a friend. He's a new friend, but he's a friend who I met for a meal.
He's a very, very well-known actor overseas and his stuff has made it over here.

Speaker 1 And we become friends and we went to lunch and we were talking about work and being public facing and all this kind of thing. And then I...
I said, do you have kids, right?

Speaker 1 And he says, he has four kids. And I was like, oh, yeah.
You know, I see your post with the kids. You seem really happy.

Speaker 1 And he said, he just looked at me, leaned in, and he said, It's the best gift you'll ever give yourself.

Speaker 1 And he also said, And pick your partner, the mother of your kids, very carefully.

Speaker 1 So, you know, that's good advice coming from excellent advice coming from somebody who's, you know, very successful in work and family. So, that's the only thing I can pass along.

Speaker 1 We hear this from friends of ours as well, but um, kids are amazing, and family is amazing, and um,

Speaker 1 you know, that's the different people, all these people who want to like be immortal and like live to be 200 or something. You know,

Speaker 1 there's also the old-fashioned way of, you know, having children that live on and evolve a new legacy, but they have, you know, half your DNA. So that's exciting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you make an amazing dad. Thank you.
It seems like a fun thing. And, you know, I've also gotten advice from friends who are

Speaker 1 super high performing and have a lot of kids. They'll say, just don't overthink it.
Right. Start having kids.
Let's go. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, the chaos of kids is kind of the like it can either bury you or it can or it can feed give you energy. But I grew up in a big pack of boys always doing like wild and crazy things.

Speaker 1 And so that kind of energy is great. And if it's not a big pack of wild boys, it's, you know,

Speaker 1 you have daughters and they can be, you know, different form of chaos, sometimes same form of chaos.

Speaker 1 How many kids do you think you want?

Speaker 1 You know, it's either two or five.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Very different dynamics.
You're one of two, right? You have a brother. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm very close with my sister. I couldn't imagine having another sibling because there's so much richness there.
We talk almost every day.

Speaker 1 Sorry, you know, three, four times a week, you know, sometimes just briefly, but we're tight. You know, we're

Speaker 1 really look out for one another.

Speaker 1 She's an amazing person, like truly an amazing person and has like raised her daughter in an amazing way. She's like, you know, my niece is like going to head to college in a year or two.

Speaker 1 And like my sister's done an amazing job. And her dad's done a great job too.
They both really put a lot into

Speaker 1 the family aspect. Got a chance to spend time with a really amazing person in the, in Peru, in the Amazon jungle.
And he is one of 20 kids. Wow.
So he's got.

Speaker 1 It's mostly guys. So it's just a lot of brothers and I think two sisters.
Wow. I just had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, the guy who's talking about the anxious generation causing the American mind.

Speaker 1 He's great. But he was saying that, you know, in order to keep kids healthy, they need to not be on social media or have smartphones until they're 16.

Speaker 1 I've actually been thinking a lot about getting a bunch of friends onto neighboring properties. You know, everyone talks about this, not creating a commune or anything like that.
But

Speaker 1 I think Jonathan's right. We were more or less, our brainwiring does best when we raised in small village type environments where kids can forage the whole free-range kids idea.

Speaker 1 I mean, I grew up skateboarding and building forts and dirt clod wars and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 It would be so strange to have a childhood without that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think more and more as we wake up to the negative aspects of digital interaction, we'll put more and more value to in-person interaction.

Speaker 1 So I mean, it's cool to see, for instance, kids in New York City just kind of moving around the city with so much sense of agency. It's really, really cool.

Speaker 1 The suburbs, like where I grew up, like as soon as we could get out, take the 7F bus up to San Francisco and hang out with, you know, wild ones like that.

Speaker 1 You know, while there were dangers, I mean, we couldn't wait to get out of the suburbs. The moment that, you know, forts and dirt clawed wars and stuff didn't cut it, we just wanted into the city.

Speaker 1 So I, um, bucket list. I will probably move to a major city, not Los Angeles or San Francisco, um,

Speaker 1 in the next few years, um, New York City, potentially. Those are all such different flavors of experiences.
Yeah. So I'd love to live in New York City for a while.

Speaker 1 I've always wanted to do that and I will do that. I've always wanted to also have a place in a very rural

Speaker 1 area. So Colorado and Montana are high on my list right now.
And to be able to pivot back and forth between the two would be great, just for such different experiences.

Speaker 1 And also, I like a very physical life. So the idea of getting up in the sun with the sun in Montana or Colorado type environment.

Speaker 1 And I've been doing some, putting some effort towards finding a spot

Speaker 1 for that. And New York City, to me, I know it's got its issues and people say, it wasn't what it was.
Okay, I get it. But listen, I've never lived there.
So for me, it'd be entirely new. And,

Speaker 1 you know, Schulz seems full of life. There is an energy to that city, and he represents that.
I mean, there's,

Speaker 1 and, and the full diversity of weird that is represented in New York City is great. Yeah, you walk down the street, there's like a person with like a cat on their their head and no one gives a shit.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 1 San Francisco used to be like that. The joke was like, you have to be naked and on fire in San Francisco before someone takes it, but now it's changed.

Speaker 1 But again, recently I've noticed that San Francisco, it's not just about the skateboarders. It's there's some community houses of people in tech that are super interesting.

Speaker 1 There's some community housing of people not in tech

Speaker 1 that I've learned about and been known people that have lived there. And it's cool.

Speaker 1 Like there's stuff happening um in these cities that's new and different i mean that's what youth is for they're supposed to evolve evolve things out

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 so amidst all that you still have to get shit done i've been really obsessed with tracking time recently like making sure i have daily activities i have habits that i'm maintaining and i'm very religious about making sure I get shit done.

Speaker 1 Do you use an app or something like that? No, just Google Sheets. So basically a spreadsheet and I'm tracking daily.
And I write scripts that

Speaker 1 whenever I achieve a goal, it glows green. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you track your workouts and all that kind of stuff too? No. Just the fact that I got the workout done.
Yeah. So I just, it's a check mark thing.
So I'm really, really big

Speaker 1 on making sure I do a thing. It doesn't matter how long it is.
So I have a rule for myself that I do a set of tasks

Speaker 1 for at least five minutes every day.

Speaker 1 And it turns out that many of them I do way longer, but just even just doing it, I have to do it every day. And there's currently 11 of them.
It's just a thing.

Speaker 1 Like one of them is playing guitar, for example. So do you do that kind of stuff? Do you do

Speaker 1 like daily habits? Yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 I wake up if I don't feel I slept enough.

Speaker 1 I do this non-sleep depressed yoga nidra thing that I talked about a bunch. We actually released a few of those tracks as audio tracks on Spotify.

Speaker 1 Um, 10-minute, 20-minute ones puts me back into a state that feels like sleep, and I feel very rested. Actually, Matt Walker and I are going to run a study.

Speaker 1 He's just submitted the IRB to run a study on NSDR and what it's actually doing to the brain.

Speaker 1 There's some evidence of increases in dopamine, et cetera, but those are older studies, still cool studies. But so I'll do that, get up, hydrate.

Speaker 1 And if I've got my act together, I punch some caffeine down,

Speaker 1 like some matina, some coffee, maybe another matina, and

Speaker 1 resistance train three days a week run three days a week and then take one day off um and like to be done by 8 39 and then i want to get into some real work i actually have a sticky note on my computer it's like just like reminding me how good it feels to accomplish some real work and then i go into it right now it's the book writing researching a podcast and just fight tooth and nail to stay off

Speaker 1 social media, text message, WhatsApp, YouTube, all that.

Speaker 1 Get something done. How long can you go? Can you go like

Speaker 1 three hours, just deep focus? If I hit a groove, yeah, 90 minutes to three hours if I'm really in a groove.

Speaker 1 For me, I start the day actually. That's why I'm afraid I'd really prize that, those morning hours.
I start with the work. Yeah.
And it's, it's, it's a,

Speaker 1 I'm trying to hit the four hour mark of deep focus. Great.
I love it. Then often

Speaker 1 important.

Speaker 1 Yeah, important. I'm really, really.

Speaker 1 It's often torture, actually. It's really, really difficult.
Oh, yeah. The agitation.

Speaker 1 But I've sat across the table from you a couple of years ago when I was out here in Austin doing some work and I was working on stuff.

Speaker 1 And I noticed you'll just like stare at your notebook sometimes, just like pen at the

Speaker 1 same position, and then you'll get back into it. Like there are those won't you're building that hydraulic pressure and then go, yeah, try and get something done of value.

Speaker 1 Then it, the communications start

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 talking to my podcast producer, my team is everything. I mean, like the magic potion in the podcast is Rob Moore, right?

Speaker 1 Who's in the, has been in the room with me every single solo. Costello used to be in there with us, but that's it.
People have asked. Journalists have asked, can they sit in? Friends have asked.
Nope.

Speaker 1 Just Rob.

Speaker 1 And for guest interviews, he's there as well. And I talk to Rob all the time, all the time.
We talk multiple times per day. And,

Speaker 1 you know, in life, I've made some errors in certain relationship domains in my life in terms of partner choice and things like that.

Speaker 1 And certainly don't blame all of it on them, but you know, I've played my role.

Speaker 1 But, but in terms of picking business partners and friends, like, you know, to work with, I mean, Rob's just, it's been bullseyes. And it's just Rob has been amazing.

Speaker 1 Mike Blavak, our photographer, and the guys I mentioned earlier, like, we just communicate as much as we need to and we pour over every decision of like near neuroticism before we make

Speaker 1 anything out there. And so, you clearly like even created decisions of like topics to cover all that, yeah.
Like a like a photo for the book jacket the other day, Mike shoots photos, then

Speaker 1 and then we look at them, we pour over them together. Um, logo for the perform podcast with Andy Galpin that we're launching.
Like, is that the right contour?

Speaker 1 Mike's the real, he's got the aesthetic thing because he was at DC so long as a portrait photographer.

Speaker 1 Um, and he's close friends with Ken Block, who did Jim Conna, like all the car jumping in the city stuff. Like, I i mean mike is a master he's a he's a true master of that stuff and um

Speaker 1 and we just pour over every little decision but even which sponsors you know there are dozens of ads now by the way that that whole jawser sizer thing of me saying oh a guy went from a two to a seven i never said that that's ai like i would never call number off somebody a two to a seven are you kidding me it's crazy so it's ai if you bought the thing i'm sorry um but like our sponsors we list the sponsors that we have and why on our website and like the decision do we work with this person or not?

Speaker 1 Do we still like the product? I mean, we've, we've got ways with sponsors because of like changes in the product or change, you know, most of the time it's amicable, all good.

Speaker 1 But, you know, like just every detail. And that just takes a ton of time and energy.
But I try and work mostly on content and my team's constantly trying to keep me out of the other discussions.

Speaker 1 But I, because I obsess. But

Speaker 1 yeah, you have to, you have to have a team of some sort, someone that you can run things by. For sure.

Speaker 1 But one of the challenges the larger the team is and I'd like to be involved in a lot of different kinds of stuff including engineering stuff robotics work research

Speaker 1 All of those interactions at least for me take away from the deep work the deep focus right unfortunately I get drained by social interaction even with the people I love and really respect and all that kind of stuff you're an introvert yeah like fundamentally an introvert so to me it's a trade-off getting shit done versus collaborating and i have to choose wisely because without collaboration without a great team which i'm fortunate enough to be a part of like you wouldn't get anything really done but as an individual contributor to get stuff done like to do the hard work of researching or programming all that kind of stuff you need the hours of deep work i used to spend a lot more time alone that's that's on my bucket list spend a bit more time dropped into work alone it i think social media like

Speaker 1 causes our brain to go the other direction i try and answer some comments and then and then get back to work. I'm really

Speaker 1 after go to the jungle, I

Speaker 1 appreciate not using the device.

Speaker 1 I play with the idea of

Speaker 1 like spending certain maybe like one week a month not using social media at all.

Speaker 1 I used it so after that morning block, I'll eat some lunch and I'll usually do something while I'm doing lunch or something and then a bit more work and that real work, deep work.

Speaker 1 And then around 2.30, I do a non-sleep deep depressed, take a short nap, wake up, boom, maybe a little more caffeine, and then lean into it again.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, if you, I find if you've really put in the deep work two or three bouts per day by about five or six p.m., it's over.

Speaker 1 I was down at Jocko's place not that long ago and in the evening did a sauna session with him and some family members of his and some of their friends. And it's really cool.

Speaker 1 Like they all work all day and train all day. And then in the evening, they get together and they sauna and cold plunge.
I'm really into this whole thing of

Speaker 1 gathering with other people at a specific time of day. I have a gym at my house and I, I, you know, Tim will come over and train or, you know,

Speaker 1 that we've kind of slowed that down in recent months. But I think gathering in groups once a day, being alone for part of the day, it's like very fundamental stuff.

Speaker 1 We're not saying anything that hasn't been said millions of times before, but how often do people actually do that?

Speaker 1 And, and, and call the party, you know, like be the person to like bring people together if it's not happening. That's something I've really had to learn, even though I'm an introvert.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, I'm like, gather people together. You came through town the other day, and there's a lot of people at the house.

Speaker 1 Actually, it was funny because I was getting a massage when you walked in.

Speaker 1 I don't sit around getting massages very often, but I was getting one that day. And then everyone came in, and the dog came in, and like, everyone was piled in.
It was very sweet.

Speaker 1 Again, no devices, but choose wisely the people you gather with. Right, right.
And I was close.

Speaker 1 Thank you for clarifying. I wasn't, which is very weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The friends you surround yourself with. That's another thing.
It's like

Speaker 1 I understood that from ayahuasca and from just the experience in the jungle is like, just select the people.

Speaker 1 Just be careful how you allocate your time. I just saw on

Speaker 1 somewhere. Connor McGregor has this good line.
I wrote it down about loyalty. He said, don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with.

Speaker 1 That guy is, I mean, he's big on loyalty. All the shit talk, all of that, set that aside.
To me, like, loyalty is really big.

Speaker 1 Because then, if you invest in certain people in your life and they stick by you and you stick by them, and

Speaker 1 what else is life about? Yeah, well, hardship will show you who your real friends are. That's for sure.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, we're fortunate to have a lot of them. It'll also show you who, you know, who really like has put in the time to try and understand you and

Speaker 1 understand people like people are complicated. I love that.
So can you read the quote once more?

Speaker 1 Don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so in that way, a hardship is a gift.

Speaker 1 It shows you. Definitely.
And it makes you stronger. It definitely makes you stronger.

Speaker 1 Let's go get some food. Yeah, you're one meal a day, guy.
Yeah. I actually ate something earlier, but it was like a protein shake and a couple pieces of bill tongue.
I hope we're eating a steak.

Speaker 1 I hope so too. I'm full of nicotine and caffeine.
Yeah. What do you think? How you feel? I feel good.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was thinking you'd probably like, I only did a half a piece, and I won't have more for a little while, but a little too good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you for talking once again, brother. Yeah, thanks so much, Lex.

Speaker 1 It's been a great ride, this podcast thing, and you're the reason I started the the podcast. You inspired me to do it.
You told me to do it. I did it.
And you've also been an amazing friend.

Speaker 1 You showed up in some

Speaker 1 very challenging times. And you've shown up for me publicly.
You've shown up for me in my home, in my life. And, you know,

Speaker 1 it's an honor to have you as a friend. Thank you.
I love you, brother. Love you too.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung.

Speaker 1 Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.