#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
2024 is nearly over, so I decided to put together a compilation of some of my favorite moments from the show over the last year. It was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't choose.
So it's 11, 11 favorite moments. Expect to learn Andrew Huberman's best advice on how to become a morning person, why Oliver Berkman thinks you should stop trying to control your life, the reason Eric Weinstein believes more young men are becoming right-wing, Dr.
Mike Isretel's most important advice for choosing muscle-building exercises, Alex Hormozy's advice on why everything worth doing is hard, and much more. I appreciate all of you.
This year's been insane and tough and beautiful and all of the things. And if you haven't done your end of year review yet, you can go to to chriswillx.com slash review it's a free annual review template that helps you to reflect on lessons from last year and plan what you want to get done next year it's the exact template that i use and i updated it i updated it from last year to this year so there's tons in there uh it's so cool getting to revisit these old episodes uh a lot of stuff that aren't just the biggest moments

from the biggest episodes,

but underground clips and sections,

10, 15 minutes that maybe you missed.

And perhaps there is something that you forgot

that you wish that you hadn't.

And anyway, I'll stop talking.

We can get into it.

Happy New Year.

Have you seen the data showing the movement

of teenage boys politically to the right? Have you been looking at this? Where else are they going to go? It's a good question. I mean, I had a teenage boy.
I still have one, but he's 18 now. And I watched them be pushed farther and farther right by their schools.
You suck. All of your instincts are bad.
These girls are amazing. Look at you.
You're pathetic. Be less masculine and more attractive.
You're just barking at them constantly. They're not moving right.
They're moving out of your stupid way. You've given them what? Nothing.
Nothing.

One of my son's friends died recently by his own hand.

And I don't know what kind of pressures he was put under, but I watched those kids go through

this pressure cooker created by this crazy, parasitized, left-wing educational movement.

Get away from our sons.

Get away from our daughters.

Get away from our sons and away from our daughters.

It's not left or right.

I don't have a Republican bone in my body.

Get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children

stop giving our daughters terrible life advice but like

um

that's one of these milgrim questions what am i supposed to say

Thank you. that's one of these Milgram questions what am I supposed to say let me speak abstractly so we don't get distracted with stupid stuff gender is about reproduction and it's paired and there's nothing you're going to do that's as good as the male female pairingemale pairing that produces families.
Yes, there's a ton of problems with it. There's a ton of problems with traditional femininity, with traditional masculinity.
I actually believe that toxic masculinity used to mean something before it meant nothing. Right now, we are allowing our children to be parented by people who should be nowhere close to a child Because development for humans is different.
We're not like wildebeests where you come out with programming where you can walk on day one. We're basically not blank slates, but self-assembling computers.
And what you put into a developing mind, um you, what normal child trying to figure out gender identity

does not go through a process trying to figure out,

oh, I like that dress.

Do I want to marry somebody who's wearing it

or do I want to wear it myself?

That's a normal process that you go through in development. And if a parent hears that, they usually try to guide natural gender identity.
Now, what happens when an administrator says, oh, he said he wanted to wear a dress. He's a girl.
Everybody respect his choice. You're thinking, wait, what? You took a moment that happens in every boy's life and you turned it into a trans affirmation moment.
And then you tried to freeze it in. And let me guess, you really just want to protect something, which is great.
Some people want to protect trans kids. Trans kids exist.
They have life very hard on them. Let's ask how many trans kids got manufactured by this DEI movement versus how many would occur naturally.
And you have type 1 and type 2 error. You have a trans kid who was always going to be a trans kid that wasn't properly treated.
That's terrible. I agree with the DEI people about that.
You have another collection, huge collection of normal kids who are never going to be trans. And you push them towards this.
I had J. Michael Bailey on the show who his paper on ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, was pulled.
Very, very rare that this happens. And I learned during my research for that about the left-handedness argument for both gay and transsexual people so in the middle ages it was seen as being a mark of witchcraft or being touched by the devil that you were left-handed which meant that people who were hid their left-handedness yeah I think about 12% maybe the population is left-handed, something like that.
But during the Middle Ages, it was significantly less. The ceiling gets released, and people are free to be their true left-handed selves, and more people become left-handed.
I can now fully manifest that forward. And that is an argument that gets put forward a lot.
Well, now that we have released the lid on the pressure cooker that was tamping down people's natural trans or gay proclivities or whatever, they're now free to be themselves. But that doesn't explain why gender dysphoria appears to occur in clumps.
It's not evenly distributed across all schools. You linked two things that I think have to be unlinked.

We are fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong.

I'm old enough to remember when it was a lifestyle choice.

Right.

And I had gay friends in college who it's not a choice. know it's like a quiet i didn't choose this um we're lumping a bunch of stuff together i don't think male homosexuality has almost anything to do with female homosexuality i think calling them both homosexuality is very confusing there's something that seems much more obligate about male homosexuality.
It's highly conserved. I don't think it's unnatural.
I think it's part of the design of humans, and we haven't quite figured out why it's there. I don't disagree, but I think the left-handiness argument makes sense when it comes to homosexuality, but not when it comes to the trans issue.
No, it makes sense in both, but the size of the effect is the problem you're claiming i have no doubt that there were some people who had transgendered brains who were closeted uh you know transvestites and and that they had a closet somewhere in the basement where they got to be their true selves no question that that. The issue is that you created an enormous amount of type 2 error so that you could go after a much smaller amount of type 1 error.
You created all sorts of negative stuff by not balancing type 1 and type 2, and that's unforgivable. You're not actually the defender

you think you are.

You're somebody who's destroying some lives

to privilege others. And

why have you made that decision?

I completely agreed with you.

Like, I won't say there are only

two genders.

You know? Why?

Because it's not true. In humans? Yeah.
Two genders or two sexes? Well, first of all, the gender and sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was, in some sense, obligate biological and the other was software programming. Well, that was a lexical game that was played to try and bifurcate yeah but you can you can make an argument that you need a term i don't think the gender should be purposed for that but you can make it an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility okay so what do you mean when you talk about that intersex is a really important category to me i know people who are intersex and they're screwed they were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them the gender binary is so strong that somebody through zero fault of anybody is born with ambiguity in their genitalia and their chromosome something so yes there are two intended sexes or genders but nature isn't good enough to hit that mark all the time and those are those are human beings those are souls and and the sloppy right wing thing which is to find the shelling point where you just sit there you say, there are only two sexes and two genders.
I understand why you're doing it. You're trying to stop this crazy conversation that's taken off.
So it's not like I don't have sympathies with why you're saying that. But when I bring up, you know, my favorite example is persistent Mullerian duct syndrome, where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid and it's like, well, you have twigs and berries, but you've also got a uterus.
You're female on the inside. Does that person produce both sperm and eggs? No.
Right. I don't think so.
But surely that's the definition. That is the line in the ground around male and female, large gametes.
Yeah, but but sorry the gentleman who goes into his doctor and to find out that he's got a uterus who is he if he wants to be male i understand why he wants to be male if he wants to be able to talk about the fact that he got handed some very strange cards by the creator and her infinite wisdom. I want him or her, however that person conceives of itself, to be, that's a soul to me.
And I don't like the energy of saying there are only two sexes and two genders and that's it. It's like, I get it.
I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to say that there are two intended sexes and genders.
It's reproductive. It's nature.
I get it. It depends on how we're going to define sex.
Because if it comes down to gamete size, that is binary. Sure.
Okay, but what do you do about the edge case? But no one's producing both, so there are none. I don't know that nobody's producing both.
Maybe that's fact you know usually the issue is is that you have this this list of homologs right so that the clitoris maps to the penile shaft and the labia majora map to the testicles what you're doing is you're taking a common female template i believe and you're treating it through the sry cascade differently during development so that the default is female, but you also have this ability through this one protein to create

a cascade that creates male out of female.

Okay?

That doesn't always work out.

Now you've got an ambiguous situation and you've got a culture that basically can't

think in ambiguities.

That's where a lot of this frustration with the gender binary comes from, is that you know somebody in a category where they're not really one thing or the other at a hardware level. I believe that beyond that, there's also a software level.
There are people with male brains and female bodies and conversely. I don't understand this stuff, but I believe that that's true.
If you ever have the opportunity to interview Deidre McCluskey, who used to be, I think, Dennis McCluskey, very famous economist, I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back. And one of the things that she said is that she wasn't doing this to be hotsy-totsy.
She wanted to die an old lady, not an old man. It wasn't a sex thing.
It was just the fact that she'd been uncomfortable in a male body her whole life. So I'm using the term her.
Do I have to use the term? No, I could use the term him or his. But why would you do that?

Don't you have enough compassion that somebody ruined their family life and went through hell

in public because it was so painful to be in the wrong body? I get it.

Okay. Now you have that compassion.
And how many lives are you going to ruin over that?

How many lives are you going to ruin

pretending that this is an enormous cohort?

So, to the extent that I have a slogan,

and I basically never speak about trans,

my slogan is,

make trans accepted and rare. Make it rare means use the developmental environment in order to give good coaching about male strategies and female strategies for life.
Don't relitigate the the fact that we screwed up male homosexuality. Just take your lumps.
We screwed it up. It's a part of the human condition.
It's never going to go away. It's different from female homosexuality, almost certainly.
We don't exactly know why it's here. We've been blessed with untold riches uh particularly in the mimetic realm from male homosexuals it is what it is and now we're going to refight this over trans where no i think you have tremendous opportunities through development to assign behaviors.
Is the skirt a female object? No. The lungi in South Asia is a skirt.
Men wear it. I have a lungi.
It's like telling a Scottish person that he's cross-dressing. What, are you an idiot? You ever dealt with a Sc scotsman you do not want to make that mistake they will let you know very quickly who they are um

we're out of our minds we're out of our minds we're creating so much misery for these young

men and young girls and you know, it makes me upset

because we don't love our children enough.

We don't love our children enough

to tell these teachers, hands off my kids.

Go work out your weird stuff.

I get it.

But get away from our children.

You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work.
You'll stress to make ends meet. You won't finish your to-do list.
You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for years. This is what hard feels like, and that's okay.
Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. the payoff the greater the hardship if it's hard good it means no one else will do it more for you i think a lot of entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard because in the early days hard was oh stop this ooh, stop.
This isn't good. I should, I should, this is a warning sign.
This is a red flag. I should slow down or I should stop, you know, I should pivot.
But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like. And these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure, I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow.
It's a selection effect. And I think if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, then it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh, poor me to oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to fucking try.
And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance. Yeah, that's awesome.
I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about the last time. That was the best, most powerful idea, I think, that we came up with.
And if you see there basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want, there are ways to be more and less efficient, and there are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition, which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier. But ultimately, if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through.

Every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over and you go, wow, fuck, I'm so glad that I've got over that wall. And think about how many people

are going to be selected out. It's like the Hunger Games, you know, think about how many

other people are going to fall that wall there.

People only root for people who don't need it.

Like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with. That's when you want people to root for you.
That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, he's amazing.
He's so good. But that's the time when you need it the least.
And so you always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does.

And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap.
That's just you rooting for you. Um,

and that visual I think is one that you can kind of take because it is

people struggle to do things alone and And the path of the exceptional person

is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people.

And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path.

Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be it's an interesting paradox that the energy requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing and that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward both internal and external than when you've been doing it for ages so i think about this a lot with the show that there was this stat that spotify told us 85 of the listeners of this show found this in 2023 right and I thought at the end of 2022,

remembering at that point,

I'd been on Rogan.

We were at like 650K.

We've got, you know,

we've been doing 550, 600 episodes deep.

Yeah.

Like I've got it.

I've done the thing.

Like this is, this is me doing,

if this isn't fucking doing the thing,

I've moved to Austin, Texas.

I've got an 01 visa.

I've got like the,

all the rest of the stuff.

Jordan Peterson's been on twice.

You've been on.

And yet the what everything up until that point is two months of growth yeah i mean we made we made more money for just from a revenue perspective we made more money and more subs in one month december of last year than we did in the entire first three and a half years of the show.

So it's this odd paradox.

And one of the things that you need to ensure, I've had this idea about protect your passion at all costs.

Because if you begin to hate the thing that you do, you negatively change your trajectory.

And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work, which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit that upward trajectory. And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work, which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit that upward trajectory, if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work in the early stages, because you've not protected it appropriately, that can be by focusing on the wrong things, by not rewarding yourself, by not building it with people that care about you, by just not celebrating when you hit milestones, all of the things that actually help to keep you going.
By being a character. By the time you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have done at the very beginning, you've inverted the passion equation.
It takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing a thing. And yet, in the beginning, the rewards are way lower than they are at the end.
But if you don't protect your passion, your motivation is at its lowest when you are at your highest amount of efficiency in terms of returning your time put in. I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder.
Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill.
It's not that the things that you're, the dragons are going to slay, aren't going to get bigger. They are, but you become so much more equipped to slay them back.
And you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering for you.
You have the audience, you have all of these other things that are behind you. But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear.
And arguably that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you. And so it's not even like the size of the hardship.
It's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time, because you have no leverage. You don't have the money to pay other people to help you.
You don't have the resources to go like get someone to, no one can learn it for you. It's like, there's a lot of the things that we care about a lot.
Like no one can work out for you. It doesn't matter how much money you have.
No one can learn skills for you. And so in the early days, like it feels so painful because you're like, you look around to see who can help you.
And then you're like, fuck, it's me again. And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slumdog Millionaire, if you've seen that movie where he, I'll give you the TLDR, he goes through his entire life of randomness and he gets on the who wants to be a millionaire version in India.
And it has 12 questions to make a million dollars. And from only 12 random experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time, was he able to answer all of the questions and then ultimately win.
The skills that you develop along the way, like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple fonts that, you know, transformed how we type. Those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds, oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else.
And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is.
I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done, whether it was with nightlife or running the podcast or doing whatever.

And I think there's like a degree of nobility to it, but functionally that's kind of, that's just like it's a nothing. like what's the where's the nobility but i think the reason that you can feel noble about it and

the reason that it gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things and that if you want to hold a conversation.

we went out for dinner with our new cfo and and accounts people on saturday and they said you ask a lot of questions most people don't ask very many questions

and i also don't care at all about accounts really like i'm not doing this for money but they said you ask a lot of questions is that well i don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own at least just competently if it's to do with something that i care about the same thing goes for for this. Like I started to learn about focal lengths and frame rates and negative fill, reverse contrast lighting.
And then sure enough, two years after we started doing it, a bunch of different, I sent you the Instagram thing. Like this really awesome film Instagram that I've been following for ages, picked us up for what we were doing and gave us props independent of the talky thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for.
And we created this entire new industry of like cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by, as far as I'm aware, like the best cinematic, it's called Film Lights, at Film Lights, people can go and see it on Instagram, like the best decoder and analyzer of cinematography. And two years ago when we started, I remember thinking, fuck, like I love the way that they've broken down what happens in Ad Astra.
Oh my God, the whole thing was shot on 35mm. Each different scene's got two pairings of colors and stuff like that.
And then, but the reason that we were able to get there, at least in some part, is I can have a conversation with people. So each of the things that you do when you not only win in the weeds, but live in the weeds, then allows you downstream from that to see the things that other people aren't seeing.
There's a quote that I love from Dr. Cash.
I'll probably butcher it, but experts have more ways to win than beginners do. And so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome.
So if you're a master video editor, there are so many things that you can do that while editing, you make one change and then it looks right. You have a positive feedback loop.
And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome as the only positive because you will never make it.

And so the positive frame that I've always used is sure you can have the external ones of like,

I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views. And I'm like, well, if I had an audience

of 13 people, I used to spend years pitching weight loss stuff to rooms of 13 and that was

fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful.
But the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building. So in real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward.
And that would be part of the story I would someday tell. And so some of the biggest reinforcers I've had in my life has been future casting the story that I would tell about the shitty period that I was in.
Like, I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym, because I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, I will fucking tell this story.
And when I lost everything for the first time, I like I have the screenshot of the bank account, like when I show it, people are like, Oh, look, there's that thing. But they forget that there was a person who screenshotted it to be like, this won't fucking happen again.
And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one gives you the vision of where you're like, like knows where he's going, but it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way, the hard things that you have to overcome to feed into the larger narrative of who, of the story that you'll someday tell. And so like no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships.
No one cares, right? Like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. Is there a story there? Not really, But everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them.
And it's the being like them, not the having what they have that we usually like. And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that and thinking, I will tell this story someday.
Have you heard Rogan talk about the, be the hero of your own story thing? Oh dude, it's as old now. I think this is maybe, maybe even 10 years old, maybe 10 years old.
And he's in one of his old, he's in the LA podcast studio. And he says, imagine that you're in a movie and imagine the movie begins now and you're the hero of the movie.
Yeah. What would that guy do? Yeah.
What would that guy do right now? Yeah. Because you are.
I just got into business. Um, so actually I just made the investment in school.
Um, and I was talking to Sam, the founder, and I said, what? Sim.

Sam?

Sim. so actually I just made the investment in school um and I was talking to Sam the founder and I said what Sim Sam Sim what's Sim Sim that's the way he says his oh yeah um and I was and I was talking to him and I said I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior and I said whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do and so oftentimes the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to victory it's the long saga that results in this big thing later eventually and I was like if you ever want to know if you're like I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation just wonder what the the most epic story to tell would be.
And that's usually what I will do. And I don't know if that's self-aggrandizing, but that's, that's genuinely my razor for even making the, just like the big decisions about, okay, I'm going to sell gym launch.
I'm going to, I'm going to marry Layla. I'm going to slum it and live at the gym.
I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds. I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively.
Like, how do I put all these together? It's like, well, what would be the most epic story? And I thought of this idea of just like, when I think about who that story I want to tell is, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave. Because I always thought, I was like, I wish that Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have like, and Jeff Bezos, would have just like, I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content.
And a lot of the content in terms of like, it's getting five views. It's like, it's okay because when we make it, they're going to come back and watch this.
So I don't need them to watch it today. I want them to know that it's here when I do.
And I think that got me out of the loop of it. I have to win right now.
And then every one of them is just dropping a kernel or a breadcrum for future me to refer back to. One of the first places that people are going to go to, and I'm gonna guess one of the most common questions that you get asked, what exercises do I need to be doing? Yeah.
All of them, bro. Right.
Yep. That's it.
And then I just walk away and they're like, wow, that guy's supposed to be smart or something like that. But then they see the back of my very shiny head and it makes them happy.
Yes. Okay.
Which exercises? So there is a lot to say about it, but you can start with the supposition that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the muscle you want to grow. So if you want bigger biceps, some variation of doing this is probably good.
And then to be honest, that's maybe 80% of the answer. So if a lot of people, here's why I'm saying that, a lot of people will look at, let's say for quads, they'll look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll look at lunges and they'll look at regular high bar squats.
And they'll vex themselves infinitely over the question of which one of these is superior, which is kind of like asking, you know, I need to get to Austin, Texas in two days, which airline should I take? Like you, you ask someone who works at the airport, which airlines like really the one I should be taking? They're like, you know, I don't know. All of them really get you there.
There are subtle differences, but at least make sure the ticket says Austin, Texas. So if the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good to go.
Now there are ways of seeing which exercises hit the target muscle that you want. A couple of what we RP at RP call proxies for stimulus.
So this is something like tension, the perception of a lot of tension generated or exposed in that muscle. So if you're doing chest flies and you feel a crap load of stretch and pulling in the chest, that's probably good.
If you're doing what you think is a chest fly, but you misread the machine's instruction thing and you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your forearms or your shoulders, but you don't really honestly feel anything in the chest on a just pure physics perspective because of the mechanics of the movement, your chest has to be getting some exposure. But maybe you could be doing better by actually doing the exercise in a weight or picking an exercise that really you feel some tension off of.
Another clue to if you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn. And that's seen in a medical context when people don't wear proper protection.
I know that resonates with you personally because the conversation we had right before this. I don't mean to expose you, but Chris, you could just be making better choices, what I'm trying to say.
All theoretical, I've never been with a woman as everyone who watches our YouTube knows. But on a serious note, the burn is in especially higher rep sets when you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle.
So the chest fly analogy, if you're doing high rep pec flies and at the end of that set, your pecs are burning, hey, that's probably good. You're probably getting a good stimulus there.
On the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning, but your pecs don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise? Oh, yeah, sure. Is it guaranteed to be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably not because you should be feeling some combination of tension and burn.
And then also there's pump. Again, none of these are mandatory, but together they're kind of like puzzle pieces that take what could be a C plus exercise for you and make it an A plus exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on this.
So another one is pump. How much after several sets of the workout or of the exercise, how filled with fluid is your target muscle? So if you're doing pec flies and after a couple of sets, a girl walks by and you're like, what's up? And she's like, oh my God.
And she runs away. I guess that's good, even though she ran away, but she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your pec size, which is the whole point of the gym.
But if you do a bunch of sets of something, let's say you're doing pec flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms look more veiny. But if you can honestly say your chest has changed in an invisible or palpable way, no doubt still trains your pecs, but maybe not that great.
Another one is perturbation, which kind of presents itself in two forms. One is, is that target muscle feeling really weak? So let's say you do a few pack exercises you think they're for the chest and then you try to push yourself into your car like push off your steering wheel and you feel like a profound weakness in that pack you're like oh my god um and a really good example is if you're trying to walk downstairs after you hit quads yep if you think you hit quads but you really hit glutes and adductors you can hop can hop, skip down the stairs.
No fucking problem. Are we allowed to swear in here? Is that not a good idea? Um, whereas if you're doing this on the handrail, yes, like desperately cleaning for dear life and your legs are shaky.
Uh, another thing with perturbation is crampy. None of this is required, but if your chest cramps hard, when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, the, whatever you're doing, absolutely hit your chest.
The other thing is weakness too. So if I tell you, hey, this mega pec workout, what's your best bench? And you're like, well, it's like 200 pounds for a set of 10.
And I take you through a mega pec workout. After that, if we put 200 pounds on there, if you bench it for any of the close to 10, your pecs never got very fatigued, which almost certainly means they never got very stimulated.
So you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop off. If you can barely do a pushup after a chest workout, oh shit, something happened to your pecs for sure.
Especially if you feel like your chest is the kind of onus of weakness in that movement. So those are all ways to kind of proxy that.
And I would say in another one, again, not a huge deal, not the deal, but a good little additive to the mix is do you feel any kind of weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days after? So for example, if you do some kind of new quad machine at your gym and two days later, your inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore, your quads aren't either the way you did it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique or just the exercise itself. It says quads, but it's really not quads.
Maybe it is to some extent, but you would expect if you had a novel stimulus to feel some kind of soreness. But if you did something that says quads on it, and then the day later you can barely walk and you're sore to the touch, man, you know, you have to have stimulated your quads.
There is no alternative. So all those things are in the plus side category.
And any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks for you, man, that's a good exercise for you. And we're all different.
So some people respond better to a peck fly machine, some people to dumbbells, some people to cable, some people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well, that's probably a good exercise for you, at least for the time being.
We're here in a spooky field with a car on fire and a full moon and a weird house over the far side. Yeah.
Have you got any stories that fit this environment? I do. I do.
I have a really good one from out in Utah in the 1970s. We don't have the names of the people involved.
I'm going to call them a man and a woman, but this is every bit their story. We just don't use their names.
I think they actually didn't want their names used. That's what I recall.
So back in the 1970s, there was this, this young guy and young girl who were the main characters of the story. And they, I think they met in college and they go out on this first date.
They go to a restaurant, a diner and they got along fine, but there wasn't any magic. It was, you know, kind of a nothing date that they both kind of instinctively knew that this was likely not going to go anywhere beyond this first date.
There's no chemistry. However, they both kind of intuitively noticed it.
And the guy towards the end of the date, when it's kind of like, okay, time to wrap things up now, he decided to take a chance. He figured what's the worst that can happen? I already can tell this isn't going anywhere.
And he says to his date, he says, you know, do you want to do something kind of unexpected? Do you want to like go do something kind of crazy with me right now? And the girl was actually like kind of taken aback. Okay.
What, what do you want to do? And he's like, well, I oftentimes go for go for walks out in Provo Canyon, this beautiful Canyon. That's not near, it's nearby.
It's got this amazing trail. It brings you out to this overlook with this incredible view of the stars.
Like it's a really cool spot. And I go there later in the day and no one's there and it's, it's pretty cool, but it's, you know, we're hiking in the woods in the middle of the night.
You know what I mean? And she's like, okay, let's do it. You know, it's like suddenly the date went from going nowhere to it's kind of exciting.
And so now there's, there's chemistry. That's like, they're going into the unknown together.
And so they, they quickly leave the diner, they hop in his car and it's a short drive over to the parking lot where Provo Canyon is, you know, he pulls into the spot. There's nobody there.
They get out. And, and now there really is, they're, they're getting along.
They're kind of laughing, telling jokes. They're holding hands.
And they walk right from the parking lot onto this paved trail that goes right into the forest. And so it's nighttime, you know, just a very, it's a, this is a, this is a well, this is a well-used trail.
This is not some goat trail in the middle of nowhere. This is a well-used trail.
And so they start walking into the forest and after a while, and this is something they would say after the fact, but we know this is what was happening as they were walking there. The, the, the feel, the vibe of the night really changed as soon as they got into the woods, you know, they're, they're excited.
The States suddenly become exciting. And then they get into the forest.
They're on the trail, they're holding hands, they're walking. And both of them began feeling this really intense dread as they're walking in, but they don't know each other.
They just, this is their first date. They don't have the background of a relationship to begin touching on something that's hard to point out.
Neither of them turned to the other and said, I feel uncomfortable. Instead, they just kept their mouth shut and thought, okay, I'll just keep on going.
So they stopped talking. They begin walking faster out of this kind of nervous energy they have now they're holding hands and they're just walking through this trail because they're trying to get to this overlook, basically get it out of the way and come on back.
But it's all unspoken. They haven't said, boy, this is anxious.
They just, they're feeling that way. And so they're walking on this trail, again, surrounded by trees.
There's nobody else out there and it's pretty dark. They don't have a flashlight.
And as they're basically speed walking at this point in silence, at some point they hear a rustling sound kind of off to the side. And at the exact same time, the guy steps on something that he described as being soft and he stepped on it and he has no idea what he's stepping on.
No clue. It's something soft.
And he's heard this rustling sound and they're feeling anxious. And he immediately stops because he stepped on something.
And the girl, she's sensing, okay, what's going on here? And without any communication, they turned and walked out, didn't even look down. They didn't, they have no idea what's going on.
It was like, they both knew, let's get the fuck out of here. I don't know what's going on out here.
And they practically ran back to their car, totally safe. They get in their car.
And now that they're in the safety of their car, they kind of begin laughing about it. Like, yeah, I wonder what that was.
I stepped on something out there. I don't know, something moving around.
Maybe there's a big animal. I don't know.
But that was it. It was just, that was the whole date.
And actually they wound up getting married because this date was like this kind of amazing thing, but they bonded over the fear of being in this forest. And so they get married and 10 years later, they're at home and the TV is on, it's tuned to like a dateline type of show, like a true crime show.
And neither of them are really watching, but an interview comes on and it's a journalist talking to a death row inmate. It's a very famous death row inmate and he's very near his execution date.
And he's giving this of full-blown interview about you know what he did and at some point the journalist asked him was there ever a time that you almost got caught before you got caught and the serial killer is like yeah there was a time i was out in provo canyon and i just killed a girl and i was trying to dispose of her body and I dragged her across the trail and this young couple comes turning around the corner and they stepped on the body and I was maybe a foot away holding her, looking up at them in the darkness, waiting to see what they were going to do. But for some reason, the couple didn't look down.
They didn't look around. They just turned and left.
And so that was it. That the time i was got caught and so it turned out the guy or where they had come in contact with ted bundy like one of the most infamous serial killers of all time who effectively said had he investigated he would have had to kill the couple that's great so they got their first date was running into ted Bundy.
Wow. Yeah.
Oh my God. And actually I there, if you're, if you're interested, there's several other close calls with Ted Bundy that if you Google close calls with Ted Bundy, he, he came close to killing people several times.
And it's, I don't have those VW beetle. There's something in the VW beetle.
I forget what it was. Unfortunately, I don't remember all of the anecdotes, but there's's quite a few that are that one is the most startling because it's so like visceral what happened but the others were you know this girl who almost went on a date with ted bundy but then got a bad feeling about it and canceled and it like the day later he gets arrested for being ted bundy um stuff like or one person who ted bundy randomly befriended this this woman and i think they were dating for a while and he was very close with her child.
And it was, I mean, he's like in their family while he's killing other people at the same time. And then he just broke up with her and moved on.
Like he didn't do anything to her or her family while he's actively killing all these women. But for some reason, he just had this normal family, happy, wholesome relationship with this girl for like a year.
And she would find out after he was executed that she was actively dating a serial killer. So it's just Ted Bundy had all these weird interactions with people that have been documented.
But that one to me is the most startling. How can people become a morning person or learn to get up early more easily and more regularly? Yeah.
Three days of pain, the rest is easy. So it takes about three days to shift the biological mechanisms to make you a morning person.
Now, if you are a very strongly genetically determined night owl- That's a thing. That's a thing.
So there are genetic mutations, they call them polymorphisms, that make some people night owls. They feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about one, two or 3 a.m.
and waking up somewhere around 10, 11 a.m. or noon.
That exists, not just during development or teen years, but that exists, not just for social reasons. Other people are true morning people.
They feel absolutely best going to sleep around 8 p.m. or 9 p.m.
10 p.m. will be late for them and they feel great waking up at four or five or 6 a.m.
Okay, most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between 10 and midnight and waking up somewhere between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.
or so, maybe 5.30 to 8 a.m. Okay, so those are three bins of the night owl, the morning person, and then the more typical schedule, but it's heavily weighted toward that typical schedule if you look at the general population.
So if somebody wants to get up earlier, you need to stack the four primary, what are called Zeitgebers or timekeepers. So named because some of the early chronobiologists that discovered this stuff and the underlying mechanisms were German, as it were.
So the number one zeitgeber, the number one way to shift your circadian clock, which is this cluster of neurons that sits a few centimeters above the roof of your mouth, is to view bright light at a time when you want to be awake, aka the morning, okay? So that's why I say, get outside, look at the sun, toward the sun. Don't force yourself to stare at it.
Don't damage your eyes. Blink as needed.
No sunglasses. Glasses, corrective lenses and contacts are absolutely fine, even if they have UV protection, okay? However, if you combine that with another Zeitgeber, the second most powerful Zeitgeber is exercise or movement.
So if you do some jumping jacks, you skip some rope, or you even just take a walk while facing the sun, now you're starting to stack different Zeitgebers. And I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment.
If you then also add caffeine, now this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes ago, but if you were to add caffeine, you can entrain, as it's called, the circadian clock to be alert at that time a bit more. And I'll be honest, if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning, I need caffeine.
I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes. If I need to jump right into exercise, I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking, three hours after waking, or 11 hours after waking.
And a lot of people find that the same. but of course exercise when you can, because it's that important.
But if you want to quote unquote optimize your energy levels for exercise, typically people will notice that has to do with your temperature rhythm. Okay.
So we've got sunlight, we've got exercise or movement of any kind. It could be jumping jacks, could be walking.
You don't have to do a full workout and then caffeine. And in some cases food, I'm not big on eating first first thing in the morning i don't like to eat until 11 a.m or noon that's when my first meal arrives for me just naturally that's when i get hungry it's all caffeine and hydration prior to that but if you were to eat something first thing in the morning you that's part of the way you entrain your circadian clock to wake up to essentially wake up earlier.
And then the fourth one is a social rhythm. If you're interacting with other people, you are going to entrain your clock to that as well.
No way. Yes.
So there's a social component to circadian entrainment. Now, the pathways for these are from the eye, in the case of viewing light, to the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
In the case of caffeine, it's more general. In the case of exercise, there's literally a brainstem to circadian clock connection, a big superhighway of neuronal connections that then so-called entrains your circadian clock.
Remember, your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24-hour rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light, you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap. It just is what we'd call free run.
It would drift a little later each day. This is what happens when you go to Vegas.
This is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the day, the sunlight rising and setting cycle. Sunlight, exercise, caffeine and eating and social interactions bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeitgebers.
So when I said it takes three days, if tomorrow you want to start beginning the process of becoming an early riser, you'd set your alarm for 5 a.m. No matter what time you went to sleep the night before, you're going to get up and you're going to do the four things that I described.
Maybe leave out food if you don't want to eat. Maybe leave out caffeine if you want to delay by 90 minutes.
It's going to hurt. And then by the early afternoon, you'll be dragging a bit.
And you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine, which will then cause you to fall asleep later. Then you want to go to sleep at your now naturally slightly earlier sleep time.

The next day, you'll notice it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine I just described. And by the third day, you ought to be waking up with or before the alarm by a few minutes or moments because your circadian clock has phase shifted, okay? It's phase advanced, as we say.
Your circadian clock intrinsic to you generates a 24.2 or a 24.3 hour rhythm. It's not perfectly 24 hours.
And that we believe, we don't know, but the just so story is that it's, that it's such that, that you're able to then shift that clock in, in one or the other direction. You can phase advance.
You wake up earlier and

go to sleep earlier. You can phase delay.
How do you phase delay? Well, you're probably doing this already. Everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not so strict criteria of shift work, which is, are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after 9 p.m.? Are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 9.30 p.m.? Most people would say yes.
So the diabolical thing about the circadian timing system is that it requires a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, but a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person. But it requires just a little bit of bright light, even from an artificial source after the hours of about 9.30 PM till 4 AM to quash your melatonin and make it difficult to sleep or if you sleep to make that sleep not as effective.
There's a simple remedy, however, which is, and this is a beautiful study published in Science Reports in 2022. If you view sunlight in the afternoon, even for five minutes or so, could be late afternoon, could be sunset,

take off your sunglasses, look in the direction of the sun.

So now looking west, you adjust the sensitivity of your retina, the neurons in the back of

your eye, such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to

suppress melatonin.

It reduces the melatonin suppressive effects by about 50% or offsets those.

So I think of this afternoon viewing as, well, first of all, it's nice to look at a sunset. If you're indoors in an environment like this, even if there are bright lights on, get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets.
This is especially important in winter. Even if you can't see the sun as an object, get some sunlight in your eyes and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night, partially.
And I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation so that that night you can be on your phone or watch your Netflix and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much, but it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat. But let's, you know, unless like Rick Rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses, I've started doing that as well.
But if you don't do that,

well, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening.

He's very attached for good scientific reasons

to the sunlight thing.

But these are little things that take just moments, right?

They're essentially zero cost

that can really improve your sleep.

But that's how you become a morning person.

If you want to become a night person,

you do the opposite.

You view bright light between the hours of 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.

And really improve your sleep, but that's how you become a morning person. If you want to become a night person, you do the opposite.
You view bright light between the hours of 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.
and then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way your circadian clock, making you want to wake up later the next morning. I wonder if dogs count as a social interaction.
Absolutely. And they have all of the same mechanisms we just described.
So I just think, how can we stack that everything first thing in the morning, morning walk. Yeah.
If you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high north, dog, social interaction, moving around, and then caffeine if you do or if you don't want it. If you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run.
You're going to have to chase after it. If you have an English bulldog like I did, you'd be lucky if you get out of there by 10.
A little bit. Yeah, you're in tier one.
Their eyes are droopy and they don't like to move. But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun.
And people always ask, do dogs have the same mechanisms? Absolutely. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, the one that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian entrainment to sunlight are present as far as we know in every extant mammalian species, every mammalian species that's alive today.
And this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opsins, the light absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye. It's a very primordial system.
It's organized very differently anatomically in the retina. And to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in all of us.
In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat, you're never going to biohack away is circadian biology. This 24-hour fluctuation in energy and focus.
Some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms. And it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest.
Neuroplasticity occurs during sleep they push down adenosine you know it takes us through these natural ebbs and cycles of cognition i'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep you know the conscious mind obviously is not in control the unconscious mind can geyser up thoughts the brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols time and space are very uh very organized very differently in dreams and there's a lot of information to be gleaned from. It's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean, the kind of classic Freudian Jungian interpretations are certainly not going to be complete.
But I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep. And I think thanks to the great Matt Walker, we now understand that the whole thing about sleep when I'm dead is a really dumb mindset.
And my team at the Huberman Lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping. When we're in the peak of things,

we all encourage each other to get rest, get rest. We really prioritize sleep.
It's so essential.

How have you learned to have a better relationship with yourself,

the voice inside of your head to be kinder if things go badly? You're smiling. I like me.
I like me. I would buy me a drink.
I look at me now, and I see all the. OK, I see all the negatives more than anybody else does.
I see the positives and over the whole balance of stuff. I like me and I can give myself the same grace.
If you and I were friends, I can give myself the same grace I can give you because I like me. I like me in spite of my understanding and the reality of my weaknesses and my warts and my scars and everything.
But, you know, all in all, I'm a pretty good dude. And.
Man, you got to get to that point. Outside of arrogance, arrogance is pride mixed with ignorance.
right that's the definition of arrogance i'm not talking arrogance i'm talking about look as a human being i've failed at this i've succeeded at that i've wrecked this but i've built that and all in all you know i've tried and uh but i like me so i I'm going to give me some grace. And it's as simple as that.
I would buy me a cigar. I wonder how many men can say that.
Not as many as should. I wonder how many people can say that.
How many people say, I like me, they would give more grace, more care, more attention, more love to somebody else than themselves. There's a statistic around, I think on average, the likelihood that you are going to complete a course of antibiotics yourself, it's about 50%.
Right. The likelihood of your dog completing it is 95%.

Yes, yeah.

So we're literally capable of caring for a pet.

Right.

Nearly double as well as we can for ourselves.

Remembering that if you die, no one can look after the pet.

Right.

So in an odd roundabout way, serving yourself and serving others from a cup which overflows

around your own. Right.
Or the saucer that sits around your cup is is important uh without and again this sort of tension between being self-serving being narcissistic being egotistical being self-centered yeah but not meaning that right it's this delicate balance and this is what comes with growing up right i think this is why one size fits all flaming sword advice seems to die away as people get a little older yeah you listen to a joe rogan and a lot of what he's saying is hedged in some regard it's caveated it's you know it's this is what this is how everybody should do it. Right.
And, uh, yeah, there's a humility that comes with age. Right.
Right. Because there's, if you turn around and look back with open eyes at your life, you see all the scars, you know, I mean, you can't, you can't, the only way you cannot be humble in old age is when you refuse to look at the reality of your life up to today.

You know, that's the only way.

Because nobody skated through it perfectly.

But this is what drives, this is what drives my, and it sounds ludicrous in my ears, but my business endeavors today.

This is the core of what drives me. Okay.
There is no business out today. This is the core of what drives me.

Okay.

There is no business out there that I can take on. There is no monetary endeavor that I can take on that is worth the gamble of me losing me.

It took me years of a lot of grief and pain and work to get to be who I am today in spite of who I was.

And I don't want to lose that.

I don't want to lose myself in business.

I don't want to lose myself in trying to earn a better living in trying to get a name and trying to do this. It's like I have turned down.
I have turned down so much because I've looked at it and I've asked myself, who's this going to make me be? Who's just going to turn me into even a little bit? And it's like, it's just not worth it. It's just not, it's not worth it.
And so I'm right now trying to find the balance in undertaking something that's not going to alter me, that I'm not going to lose myself, and then not succeeding at something because I was too afraid to try it, which has never been an issue with me before. I've never been afraid of failure before, but now I've got something I don't want to lose.
And that's myself that I actually like, a me that I actually like. Does that make any sense? You understand? 100%.
Okay. The person that you have to spend the most time talking to in your life is yourself.
Try not to lose that respect. Right.
Right. And I think this was a lesson that I realized toward the end of my 20s where I'd accumulated a lot of success and status in maybe the way that modern society tells a young man that he should with freedom and notoriety and women and stuff like that.
And that was cool. And to look back on fun, but it was beginning to get to the stage where I didn't like me all that much.
I hadn't done anything bad, but I just felt like I was built for more. I was built for different, built for something else.
And I realized that I wasn't keeping promises to myself that if I said I was going to wake up at a certain time, the snooze button would be hit three times. Right.
If I said that I was going to stick to my diet

or go to the gym or do this thing,

maybe it would happen,

but it wouldn't happen quite the way that I'd meant it to.

And there would be some negotiating

and some cajoling and some falling short.

So imagine that you had a friend

and every time that you invited this friend out for lunch,

they showed up an hour late or they didn't show up at all. After a while, you'd stop trusting them and stop inviting them out at all.
You are that friend to yourself. How can you have faith that you're going to go and do all of the things that you want in life when you can't not hit the snooze button? Right.
Or you can't not cheat on your diet. You can't not do, you know, you are constructed by the tiny decisions that you make every single day.
And even if you think that nobody else is watching, and even if no one is, there's this little ticker in the back of your mind when you go to bed, you know, you were gentle with yourself when you got agitated right good yeah you were kind with the lady that looked like she was tired at walmart you said something uh peaceful and and encouraging to her good yeah but you did these things right it's something that makes you feel not so proud about yourself. Right.
And, you know, in some ways, it's a great correcting mechanism because there is no hiding from it. Right.
And people turn to alcohol and distraction and aggression and depersonalization in order to deal with the fact that they don't like themselves. Right.
But ultimately, you need to live with the decisions that you make. Right.
You need to live with you with you right there is this set of scales inside of your mind that's just balancing things all the time and if it you know you know yeah people and people don't know how to like themselves i mean people don't know how to like themselves but it it's not complicated. Tell me, how do you like yourself?

Find somebody that you like, that you genuinely like,

and figure out what it is about them you like.

I like that.

That's something I like.

That person is, they're understanding.

They're gentle.

They're hardworking.

They're honest. They're this.
they're hardworking, they're honest,

this is what I like about that.

And incorporate that stuff into your own life.

If that's the stuff you like, then incorporate that stuff into who you are.

And then you like yourself.

It's not rocket science.

You know, there are things that you like as a person that wouldn't mean anything to me. There are things that you like in another person that wouldn't mean anything to me.
There's things that I like in another person just because of how I'm wired, and it wouldn't mean anything to you. All right.
So that is what I like in a person. So if I work at taking on those attributes, it helps me become a person that I like.
Lots of benefits of improving VO2 max. What are, take us through the Norwegian 4x4 again, and then what else is in there? If there was a protocol or a number of protocols you were going to design, here's a program that you can take away today into your gym and do that will help to improve your VO2 max.
What would you tell people? I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is by far the best, and you're going to get the, for the people that are really determined and committed, that would be it. That would be the four minutes of the exercise intensity as hard as you can go and maintain it for that entire four minutes so obviously into that what do you mean as hard as you can go and maintain it what does that mean it means you don't want to go like all out like like 95 of your your max heart rate um because then you can only last for like a minute you know and so so then you're going to to go down, you're going to slow down, right? So what it means is like, you want to go, you know, it might, for some people, it might be like 75% max heart rate, right? So some people might be 80%, but you want to go as hard as you can for the four minutes without like really slowing down.
So you kind of have to pace yourself a little bit, but you don't want to go too slow, right? Like you definitely can't be talking. Like you should not be able to talk for sure when you're doing it.
So it's hard enough that you just absolutely can't talk, but it's not all out. So four minutes and then three minutes of totally light.
Like you're going all the way. This is like, you know, you're, you're like back to like zone one, if if you want to call it something if your heart can come come down if your heart can come down yeah you're doing that for three minutes because you want to give your you want to recover so that you can do it again and it and you repeat it it's it's a four it's a four-time protocol so you do it once and then you repeat it three times or you just call it the four by four i think that's probably one of the the best protocols to improve bo2 max now uh dr martin Martin Gabala, I've had him on my podcast, he's a real expert on these high intensity interval training protocols.
He does a lot of research on it at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. And he also says there's evidence that a one minute protocol, so like just even doing like an interval, like one minute interval, and then doing then doing that like you know a few times also can improve vo2 max so that's a little easier and also it's easier like i like i do one minute intervals um i'm trying to now incorporate the four by four into my routine um which is coaches help with that so um but i imagine it's a thing, which is probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over that just, if you've got any program in front of you that isn't the Norwegian four by four for the day, you go, maybe it's back and biceps.
Maybe I'll just go for a little jog. It's like, manana, manana, manana.
Yeah, it is. But again, like I said, you do have to do, you try to make it consistent so uh frequency per week well the norwegian four by four would be like one time a week okay and that's that's the that's the hard day that's less that's the hard day it is okay yeah is there any benefit to going twice per week probably yeah but it'd have been so much better but these 50, these 50-year-olds did it one time a week for two years, and they reversed their cardiac structure aging by 20 years.
Of course, they were also doing other vigorous intensity exercise. It wasn't the torturous Norwegian 4x4.
So if Norwegian 4x4 is gold standard at the moment for improving VO2 max, what would be some examples of other vigorous exercise workouts? What else is in that bucket? Well, people can do what they enjoy doing. So you can go for a run, like I often go for a run, and I'm doing 75, 80% my max heart rate.
Usually it's like a 20 minute run that I do that you know so like as intense as you can maintain for 20 minutes like that's what you want to do you want to kind of get that you get a feeling for that um so if you like runs because there's a lot of benefits to running you're out in nature well I guess some people do it on treadmill I'm not so big on treadmills like I I'll do them like when I go to a gym or something traveling, but I like running out in nature. I think there's just, there's lots of benefits to doing that.
Some people like to get on their bike and cycle. So like you can just get on your bike and do a 20 to 30 minute 75, 80% max heart rate cycle, right? So what we're aiming for here is 75 to 80% max heart rate for around about 20 minute exposure? You can, or you can do, you could do like a high intensity interval training.
So, so high intensity interval training would be, you're going to, you're going to go more than 85, 80%, right? You might go, you're going to do like more of like a sub maximal, perhaps, perhaps even a maximal interval. So you can go up to 90, 95% max heart rate.
So that would be, I mean, obviously you can only maintain that for like so long, right? Some people might be 30 second pushes. Like a Tabata style thing perhaps.
Tabata. I do a lot of Tabatas as well.
Oftentimes I like to do something every day, most days of the week. And it's funny, I kind of adopted this routine when I was kind of trying to do a little bit like joe rogan sober october but it was like every day october i was trying to work out every day and i noticed i was like i could do this i'm doing it for like one month and i don't i wasn't going as hard as like the this guy isn't doing the sober october where they were like competition it was like they were just like if you do something every do something every day.
So sometimes I do like a 10 minute tabata where i get on there and i just go hard for 10 minutes it's 20 you know it's most of the time i'll do a 45 second on um 15 second off so it's a three to one ratio i really like that one but sometimes i'll do 20 second on 10 10 take it off so it's like i do both but like even just 10 minutes again i time it around like around like, like I got I'm gonna go do work, I'm gonna I want to feel motivated, I want to feel better, I want to be more focused and on my game. And I just get on there for the bike for 10 minutes and do it.
You know, there's there's studies out there, these sort of exercise snacks. Now 10 minutes is longer than an exercise snack.
But there's studies out there, where people are wearing these like, wearable devices, right? And so you can track their heart rate and you can track how the heart rate's going up. And so there's large, large studies.
They're called the vigorous intensity lifestyle activity. And most people are taking advantage of everyday life.
Like they have stairs every day to work. They sprint up them.
They don't walk up them. They sprint.
They get their heart rate up to like 75% max heart rate, 80% max heart rate. They're getting intense.
And people that do this anywhere between one to three minutes a day, I mean, these guys have like a 50% lower cancer-related mortality, cardiovascular-related mortality. And this was even true for people that identified themselves as non-exercisers.
So they aren't, these are people that are not going to the gym or doing other like tennis or whatever. They don't have leisure time, physical activity.
So the benefits were also in people that identified as non-exercisers. So my point is that the vigorous intensity, these like even short bursts of it, just consistently, like every day, a little bit, like they do add up.
There's additive effects and they make a difference. So that's also, I think, really something that's very encouraging because some people, oh, I got to go and work out for 30 minutes.
It's like you need that motivation, right? Like some people don't have that motivation. And so it's a lot easier to just get up and do something for two minutes it's hard but you can do it and you can do it at your house what apart from running up and down stairs what are some other ways that people can incorporate exercise snacks to take advantage of this body weight squats um are a great one so you just you're just you know doing your squats and you do it for a minute and then rest for whatever 15 seconds and then do another minute i mean those are hard and they get your heart rate up so you can do that for like three minutes uh that's a really good one and then you're going to be really sore if you're not used to it but and then there's the high knees so you do high knees um i mean you could do chair squats you could do playing um the planks the burpees those burpees so you do like the the plank thing and then you come up and jump and like those are all i think really great examples of just like easy ways to do exercise snacks like even at your desk and um just even breaking up we're talking about improving cognition improving mood breaking up your work day with those like it makes a difference on your mood on your cognition like it it helps You're getting blood flow immediately to your brain.
So, um, yeah, you were talking, you were telling me about, um, the need for people to break up their sedentary time, that there's some very specific risks that people can encounter if they're too sedentary for too long, too frequently. What's happening there? Yeah, it's interesting.
Um, so I never identified myself as sedentary because i've always done something like running or jumping rope or something like going to the gym something i'm where i'm physically active so it's like oh i'm in the physically active group i'm not sedentary well it turns out um being sedentary is like what we've been for the past couple of hours we've been sitting here that is That is sedentary. So even when you're, even if you, you know, go to the gym or you go for runs, when you are sitting at your desk for a period of hours, you are sedentary.
And sedentary, being sedentary itself is an independent risk factor for disease like cancer. So now do I think the marathon runner that, you know, also has a, you know, desk job where they sit at their desk for eight hours is going to come down with cancer? Probably not because they're really putting a lot of effort in and they're physically active.
But I certainly am not the athlete and I am a committed exerciser, right? So I'm putting in anywhere between, you know, two to five hours of, you know, exercise in a week, depending on the week, right? So for me, like I spent a lot of time sitting. I spent a lot of time sitting.
And so that to me was like a big thing where it's like, oh, that's an independent risk factor for breast cancer, which, you know, a woman's breast cancer risk and just lifetime risk is one in eight. It's incredibly high.
And of course, there's lifestyle factors that can sort of increase or decrease that. And just sedentary ism is a independent risk factor for that.
So again, it's really, and so easy. So I have started incorporating exercise snacks.
I'll get up and I'll start doing some bodyweight squats. I think that's my go-to.
I also like doing burpees. I've been doing some burpees and high knees I'll do.
Every hour? I think every couple of hours. I've also been starting to time them around my meals.
So that's another thing. I think being aware of the postprandial glucose response and how it affects my cognitive function, my mood, and also just knowing that it's healthier.
And it's so easy to do. Like, just do like two or three minutes of- Pre-food? You can do it pre or post-food, both.
Trying to do burpees post-food might be difficult. You can do it up to like an hour after.
Right. Yeah.
So one of the things that Dr. Stu McGill, number one back pain specialist on the planet, taught me about forever ago, and then Mark Bell also popularized this 10-minute walk, 15-minute walk post-eating because insulin sensitivity, because of helping to re-adjust glucose levels within the blood.
Also, the muscles of the hips and the arms cross across the stomach. So it actually helps with digestion of food a little bit as well.
Like if you've had a really big meal and all you want to do is lie down, actually probably one of the best things that you can do to make yourself feel better is maybe go for a walk. What would you say here? We've got the post-meal walking crowd and the post-meal burpees crowd.
Is there something that you're missing from one of those,

or are you happy with either?

Well, I don't know about the whole arms movement,

aiding in digestion thing, all of that.

I do know that the more vigorous intensity,

when you're actually going to start feeling that burn,

when you start to get up to that, okay, I'm making some lactate,

that's what's actually increasing the transporters, glucose transporters. They're called GLUT4.
They're in your muscle, and they have to move their way up to the top. And lactate is what signals them to do that.
So when I'm just thinking about the glucose and improving blood glucose levels, vigorous is better. You're actually chasing that burn.
You're chasing the burn. And there's been studies that have compared walkers to interval walkers.
So these are people that are just walking versus walk, pick up the pace while they're walking, walk slower, pick up the pace while they're walking. Now they're not running, but they're just interval walking.
And it's been shown that interval walking improves a variety of metabolic parameters more than just walking. And again, it makes sense because when you're picking up the pace, you're working harder, you're making lactate, and that's one of the big signals for these glucose transporters to come up to the top of the muscle and let the glucose in.
So I do think from a mechanistic understanding that, and also data showing walking versus interval walking, interval walking is better. When you can pick up the pace, when you can go a little bit more intense, it's better.
All right. What about becoming muscled for longevity? So that's what I'm working on.
You probably don't, I'm not all jacked up, but that's been my new goal, particularly of late, but for the past year, I've become more aware of it. I've spent more time focusing on it.
I now have a coach who's great and coming to work with me to focus on that because I feel... I'll tell you when it really hit me.
I had someone on the podcast, Dr. Mark Madsen, and I have admired his work for years.
He's like the intermittent fasting king. I've known of his research since it was in my 20s.
He's also done a lot of work on hormesis. And I followed his work for so much of my scientific career.
So it was very cool to have him on the podcast and talk to him. And we were talking all about everything under the sun with respect to fasting and hormesis.
And we started talking about training. And he has been a track runner forever, big, big endurance athlete, mountain biking, everything.
And he told me, he said, you know, the one thing that I really regret in my life is that I didn't spend more time building muscle mass, because he had an accident, he had a mountain biking accident, and, you know, basically couldn't walk around and use his muscles for quite a period of time. And he said it really hit him hard.
And so that was my first kind of like, oh, wow, like, that's like, I'm and I've always focused on endurance. I never thought I really needed to focus much on muscle.
I'm not a bro. Like, I didn't have that incentive to like, you know, build the muscle.
And I knew it was important. But I didn't really, I didn't dive in deep enough and convince myself that it was as important.
So that was the first sort of eye-opener for me. And then I had Stuart Phillips on, who does a lot of research on resistance training.
He's the one that I helped identify that the RDA for protein intake is likely too low. And he has a really good way of explaining muscle mass and this what's called a disability threshold, which is what I think everyone that has an older parent or grandparent has seen in action, where they get older and they experience that take where they're out for whatever, a couple of weeks.
And then all of a sudden, of course, they can't gain their muscle back. And then it happens again.
And then again, and then all of a sudden, it's just downhill and they can't walk, you know, and the trajectory just plummets. And, you know, it's just not good.
So in order to sort of, you know, not let that disability threshold be so devastating, you really have to build up your muscle mass earlier

in life it actually it's never too late but if you can do it earlier in life it's better

so um training wise like i now am i'm i'm i used to just do i mean really it was like 30 minutes

a week or so of like resistance training you know where i'm just doing dumbbells or something and

now i'm doing two hours a week maybe a little bit more you say uh the world opens up

Thank you. you know, where I'm just doing dumbbells or something.
And now I'm doing two hours a week, maybe a little bit more. You say the world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out.
What do you mean? I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is in some ways it's like the governing example for a lot of people, maybe just kind of neurotic people like me, I don't know, but of the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that is not actually open to us as humans. So that sense of like, it takes different forms, right? But it could be, I'm going to get completely organized.
I'm going to get so productive that I never need to drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand. or it's going to be that I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of,

of like knowing what, what, what, what's going on in work, in relationships, in parenting.

There's one that you never feel like you've got a handle on. And I think I'm sort of saying like, if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out, you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future.
You actually end up doing less because there's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. And so in some ways, this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for like, okay, what happens if we just accept that you're never going to get life sorted out? Other people, it's like the news, the world is there's too many crises.
It's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I want to wait until that's all calmed down.
And it's like, what would happen if you abandoned all that and said like, no, it has to be now. It has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff because this future point of smooth sailing and control is never coming.
That's got me thinking about sort of two types of people. There's many types of but here's two a little taxonomy one being uh the people who have not an external locus of control but uh the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something that's happening out there i how can i sort myself while the climate is still such a mess or while there's these global conflicts going on or while we've got this in power I don't like, or this person trying to get in power that I don't like.
And then there's another version of a person who does the exact same thing, but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves. How can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place? How can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17, 18% body fat and I don't know what diet I'm going to follow? How can I do this before I've, you know, it's the same psychology that many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work probably chastise others for, the externalized locus of control.
And it's like you have an internalized, externalized locus of control.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's really well put.

And it's like, if you're waiting, there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to sort of wait to really really show up in life whatever that means to you until a point at which you have greater sort of yeah like greater control like you've you're you're in the driving seat of the situation and so yeah just to just to put examples on, I mean, like, absolutely, one of the things that I get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way, but slightly critically with things I write sometimes or talk about is, is like, well, it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails. But the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that puts people in these impossible work situations.
You can't just choose to ignore your emails because you have to pay the rent. And that's sort of true, but also you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human.
And that might involve neglecting some emails. And then, yeah, on the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves, which feels like a more independent way of living.

It feels like you're much less, um, you know, indentured to what political parties in power

and at what stage late capitalism is at. But actually it's still sort of giving all the power

to like future you, who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop and um uh you know um put in place all the systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it there's a sartre quote where he says i have led a toothless life a toothless life i have never bitten into anything i was waiting i was reserving myself for later on. And I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.
Amazing. I've never come across that line.
It's exactly the point. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Gwinda Bogle has a similar idea about deferred happiness syndrome that you sort of, this sense, and it's so i remember i used to i used to think this when i spent the summers uh in between school so i played cricket uh growing up like a good british boy and um the season obviously really ramps up as soon as you get into summertime especially as a youth cricket player and i always remember that i would think well summer hasn't really started yet and it would be half a week in and then it would be a week and a half in I think well summer really hasn't it still kind of hasn't started yet and then before I knew it I was getting ready to go back to school and I was thinking but summer hadn't really started yet and I think that that is a it's a microcosm for kind of how we see our life it's this sort of common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of prelude to an idyllic future it's totally right and i have you know obviously i'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a sort of archetypal sufferer of.

Sufferer of, yeah.

Otherwise it wouldn't. Right, and I have, you know, obviously I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a sort of archetypal sufferer of.

Sufferer of, yeah.

Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting to me.

But I think one other sort of point,

just to get a bit kind of self-referential and meta about it,

obviously is that it is also possible to hear all this.

And there are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines

and actually become a sort of a different kind of perfectionistic

about seizing the moment and being present, right?

I think what we're talking about here,

this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet,

is in some sense almost universal and very, very natural

because it's a protective mechanism against doing all the feeling and all the realising that comes from seeing what it really is to be a human born on the river of time en route to death. It's terrifying and I don't think anyone think anyone necessarily is fully reconciled to it.
So it's not that you can snap your fingers and decide, okay, now I'm just going to show up for my life right now. It's more a question in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to, seeing what's happening when you get really, really invested in some new habit change project or some new goal setting technique or something.
Not that any of these things are bad, but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're en route to the time when life's really going to matter, I think that is a problem. There's a life cycle thing to this too, right? It's like it's a lot easier and more reasonable to think that most of life is coming later when you're 19 and kind of a little bit absurd.
I can relate when you're in your 40s, right? It's like that's what midlife does to a lot of people. It's like, oh, hang on.
At a certain point, I can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be five to 10 years time. hang on at a certain point i can't carry on claiming

that real life is going to be yeah i mean i'm in mid-august i can't say that summer's not not started yet right right one of the other things uh for better or worse that we're both uh familiar with is low mood um what are the things that you do to pull yourself out of a funk or how would you advise people to better deal with depression and anxiety or low mood i really think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure with this so i try to prophylactically have routines in place that seem to decrease the likelihood, including cold exposure,

which for a long time was prescribed for melancholy, right?

This is, this is not new.

But like medieval times?

Like a hundred, 200 years ago.

Like it was, it was a prescription cold baths for melancholy,

AKA depression.

So this is what, what is old is now new again.

But, but certainly cold exposure, I would say without a doubt, having a consistent exercise routine and something is better than nothing.

Like the difference, the zero to one difference between no movement and some movement is black and white. So even if it is just going for a 20 minute walk twice a day, if you have a very packed day, schedule your calls around your walks.
Social time, time with friends, which is where I disagree with some of the very strong denouncements of say alcohol, in the sense that like even one drink is terrible for you. That may be true from a strictly biochemical perspective.
And I'm not advising you go out and get shit faced five nights a week. But for instance, if one night a week, I pre-schedule a group dinner on a Friday and I'm going to cook with friends.
And that means we drink wine while we're cooking. If that alcohol acts as a super loop, a social lubricant and helps me connect with my friends, I think there's something to it.
There are social effects, not just biochemical effects. I don't drink very much, but the group interactions and scheduling those in advance.
So on a yearly basis, I will block out. This is very important for me.
And again, not obsessing on the daily routine, but thinking about the weekly, which we've discussed, thinking about the annual. So I block out multiple weeks every year to take trips with family and friends.
And I have two that I'm organizing right now. These are week-long trips.
There will be, let's call it six to 10 people in each group. Some will be slightly smaller for wilderness adventures.
And those are blocked out for the year in advance. And this is really critical for a few reasons.
It's not just about the experience. You have all of the group threads and excitement and training and prep and fantasizing and stupid dick meme jokes that guys swap or whatever in the WhatsApp groups that lead up to the trip.
Then you have the trip and then you have all the memories and the shared experiences and the misadventures and the mishaps that you get so much juice out of these things. And those act for me as psychological safety nets.
You always have something to look forward to. If you have three or four of these a year.
That's in big part of the podcast. I think for me, I think we're both kind of the same with this, that the external accountability of someone being there, there is a time on the calendar.
Someone is expecting you to be there. They are a guest.
You probably respect them. You probably care about what they think about you.
You probably want to perform well for them and also put them in a great light and be a springboard for them and their message because you're interested in what they've got to do. All of those things.
It's like, you're not not showing up. I've never once I've canceled in my previous life as a

club promoter. I would not show up for events.
I would not show up for bits and pieces. I could always sort of work somebody else to go and do a thing if it was just me that had to do it.
But as soon as even one other person was involved or 2000 appearing at a nightclub, I'd be there. And I would be there because there was accountability and there was this expectation.
I have never once canceled a podcast in 750 episodes, six and a half years due to low mood, no matter how low the mood is, because it gets taken out. It gets eroded away by my excitement to go and do the thing.
And the same thing is true with a holiday. And the same thing is true with dinner with a friend at the same thing.
Like it's the same reason why a training partner just makes so much sense when you can. Like every Saturday, for instance, in Austin, I do the same session with progressive overload, the same exercises with the same guy.
We've done this for two years. It's one of my favorite days of the week.
Saturday morning, I'm full of caffeine, shoulders, biceps, and triceps, starting with calves. Best day of the week.
And I love it. And every single Saturday, no matter how shit the week's gone, no matter how bad I'm feeling, if we're available and we're both in the city, we both go and do it.
So let me build on that and say another piece of managing or mitigating or preventing low mood for me is having some identity diversification, which means you're not just doing one thing. If you have your podcast, your startup, your job as the sole barometer of your self-worth, there's so many factors outside of your control or your investment portfolio, whatever it might be.
If you were solely fixated on one thing, you're too vulnerable to black swan events or simply ups and downs due to variables that are outside of your control. So in contrast, if you have your Saturday workout or you have your deadlift, you have rock climbing, you have archery, you have whatever it might be, in addition to your primary work, in addition to drawing, in addition to your relationship that you're trying to cultivate and deepen, if any one of those things is down, just like in a stock portfolio, if they're somewhat uncorrelated, you can still have a good week.
If you have a terrible week, but then you hit a PR on your Saturday workout. We did it, baby.
We did it. Yeah.
Yeah. Pass.
You're hedging your identity. You're hedging your sort of existential investment yeah exactly and that that is very very very important to me that i have multiple tracks running at the same time so that if if one hits a roadblock that it's it's not just an existential spiral do you have a uh like break glass in case of impending low mood protocol? Something you just start to see the early warning signs? Is there a, okay, I need to pull the pin with these things.
Yeah, I would say one, I'll give some that are perhaps more easily within reach of most people and easier to recommend. Honestly, group dinners.
Three to four friends. Group dinners, long group dinners.
No alcohol. If I see low mood coming, then no alcohol.
Because of the next day? Yeah, you're borrowing happiness from tomorrow. And there isn't much.
Once. There isn't going to be much tomorrow.
Someone put it to me. And if you compromise your sleep, for me, generally low mood, if we want to call it depression, does not actually, it's not a first cause for me, I would say it's, it's typically some type of anxious rumination, worrying about something.
I compromise my sleep because I have onset insomnia. Then I consume too much caffeine, which further compromises my sleep.
And then after three or four days, that's when the low mood slash depressive symptoms show up. So anything that compromises sleep, I try to avoid in that period.
For all of me saying that people struggle to connect with their emotions, a lot of people listening to this show will be familiar with the cerebral horsepower praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing. But there's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more dour that everybody is familiar with.
Anxiety, you know, this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on. It's not full fear.
It's not gripping you, but it's, you know, anxiety, worry, concern, insufficiency, shame. So we're connecting with some emotions, one subset of them.
Is there a way, are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around? Is there a way that you think about this? Yeah, so if I think about emotional development, the end of emotional, not end, but kind of

the more mature areas of emotional development is like all those feelings. They become hard to distinguish between the two or between any of them.
And so that's an interesting piece to it. The other interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotions.
So somebody has like chronic anxiety, like I've worked with people, say, with OCD, and oftentimes there's an event that started the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported, out of control and unsupported. if they can go and feel and they couldn't feel it at the time it was not possible to feel because

mom was dying dad was dying blah blah blah something the parents were violent whatever there was some way they could not feel if we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't get felt that ocd starts dissipating as an example i know people like oftentimes people super depressed, not super like not, not depressed, like where they're having visions, but like a dysthymia level of depression where the negative self-talk is through the roof. If they really can feel the anger that they weren't allowed to feel as kids that all went inwards towards themselves, that depression starts subsiding.
so oftentimes the, those little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't joy is because an emotion is stuck. Because there's an emotion that wasn't welcome, and so joy can't hang out there.
When all the emotions are welcome, if we can go back and feel those feelings that we're not allowed to be felt, and we can welcome them, that's like the welcoming of abandonment, then the the patterns change and then we can feel the joy and that joy can be scary it i have not seen one person when that joy first fucking shows up that it's not scary for them because it's just alien it's fucking big man joy is like it's just big like that you're like we it's just big. Like that you're like,

we know ourselves by our contrast.

We know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to and enjoy like the

comparison,

the contrast starts going away.

And so it's like,

Oh,

you become like a,

like a speck of dust in the notion of joy when it,

when it's really allowed.

Yeah.

It's a very unmooring feeling. Deep levels of joy.
It sounds great. Again, people can use their intellect and rationality, as I am right now, to go, sounds fantastic.
Feel feelings. Yep, understood understood go back and hear the thing but you

know this what does it look like what does integrating emotions embracing them feeling feelings what what does the process of going from cerebral performative autist to actual fully integrated human look like?

Yeah.

So,

yeah, so

there's different levels depending on like where exactly it got stuck so if you are so we have a tool called emotional inquiry which is basically like you think about your if you're like a little kid and you pick up a a a, um, frog and you're like, what the hell is going on here? And you're like, kind of really investigating it. You're investigating your emotional experience with that same, with that same, um, level of wonder.
So it's just this guided audio that we have. And we have a course in the decisions course, because it's all about emotional understanding because that's what clarifies decision making we ask people to do that once or twice a day the transformation is like why can people go if they want to pick up this course um well the course is called art of accomplishment is the course i think we have a site for you called view.life modern wisdom slash modern wisdom but it'll be in the the links.
I'll find it. I'll get it off you and I'll put it in the link.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But it's called the great decisions course.
But, but that emotional inquiry thing we have for free, you can, you can, there's, we have a podcast where you can look at and it tells you how to use it and then you can go and download it. So that's all free.
And, but the, but with emotional, so emotional inquiry is one way to do it. Expression is really, really good and very critical to actually express your emotion.
So for instance, when people think about expressing anger, it's such a weird thing. They're so scared of it that whenever we're scared, we think about things in a binary way.
It's like this way or that way. So they're so scared of anger.
Typically, it's like, I'm either going to hold my anger back or I'm going to get angry at somebody. And they never think, oh, I can just get angry and not at anybody.
I can just like move my anger and not, not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody. Meaning that they're, you're getting angry at somebody, but they're not in the room.
They're not feeling it. They don't have to know about it.
And so, so you can actually just express the emotions that you have.

And if you can't figure out how to express them, then you can fake it till you make it.

It's a very slow way to do it.

We have things in our courses that take you through it, but that we can't give for free

because it's just, we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it.

So that's another thing that it looks like.

The other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your gut tightens

Let's go. through it.
So that's another thing that it looks like. The other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your gut tightens, and I don't want to feel that, and you push it away.
So my example of this is we got kicked out of a house at some point when our second was very young. And every time I drove by the house, which I had to do on a weekly basis, I would feel like this punch in my gut, like, we're back.
And I was like, oh. So, I started driving by the house and I'd sit there and I'd just feel the fuck out of that feeling.
Like, what is that? What's going on? And so, there's that other thing. When you feel that thing, our immediate movement is like, oh, let me move away from that.
It's like, no, let's actually attend to that. Let's actually feel what that is.
Just talk to me. I think that's a really lovely cue that people can probably quite quickly pick up on.
Just take me through that step-by-step that someone has just like the echo of a sensation that continues to come up when they see a person or whatever, a a situation that they're in just walk me through you feel that tension in your so what are you looking for in the body in the mind what do you what yeah that's fantastic so everybody will do it a little differently like i was so cerebral when i started doing this i noticed the mental reactions to fear before i actually knew what it felt like in the body but there's some great research that actually shows like through heat maps that there's very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions. Generally, the way that I think about it is, or the way that I talk about it is, is that emotions are held in the muscles.
So, if I look at somebody, I can tell you pretty quickly. And it's like when I coach people, people go, how do you do that?

It's because just by looking at somebody's face or whatever, I can tell what emotions

are being held.

So like, oh, that's the critical parent hunch, or that's the repressed anger line in the

eye or whatever it is, you know, so you can see how people are holding their emotional

experience.

So it's all held in the muscles.

So there's a physical sensation that comes along with an emotional experience. And the job is to get really curious about it.
Why am I avoiding that? So like, if you're lifting weights and you feel that burn, and you try to avoid it, you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like, ooh, how do I like really get into that burn? It's the exact same experience. So you get that kook and you go, okay, what is,

how big is that? How round is it? How thick is that? How dense is it? How is it moving? Like, what's going on here? And so you just put your attention on the somatic experience of, of the emotion that's happening. So that's like the most basic, that's like the most basic way to start getting into it.

At some point, the expression is really necessary

because you can't unhold the emotion that like the, the musculature holding can't happen until, unhappen until you've actually done some expression. So we do this like week long workshop.
It's like, it's, it's off record. It's very hard to get it.
We only do like 36 people a year and it's in groups of 12 and the, and like, they call it like they, people feel like they've had a facelift. They literally, you can take shots before and after and their face looks different because the emotional holding has changed.
And so, I only coach people who've been through that

experience, because when they've been through that experience, I don't have to justify emotional

awareness. They know it.
They know the benefits of it. They've seen the other side of it.

And so, that's another thing. But expression is really important at some point.
And if you're

expressing fear, really important to have that with loving attention, to not do that alone. When you talk about expressing, what do you mean? So anger expresses usually with like a lot of yell, anger, moving, particularly of the chest.
So it's, you know, like it's because it's closed. Held anger is held in shame.
And so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it. Similarly, fear is done with shaking.
So if you look at a deer that just has been captured by a mountain lion and then escapes, they do this like shake off thing. You can notice that like horses are kind of doing it.
Dogs are are kind of doing it consistently like they're getting that like low level anxiety off of their system on a regular basis so shrieking and shaking is a big part of the of the fear release process sadness and grief different sadnesses tears with a lot of gut shaking but the but grief is can like usually flows from all three. If you're in a full grief relief, I was in this funeral, for instance, with my friend who had passed and everybody was sad and sad and sad.
And you could just feel the energy was stagnant. It was like he wasn't actually fully being grieved.
And I was like, I'm fucking pissed. And I got really angry.
And then other people got angry. And then you could see so much move, so much of the grief moved.
And if you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals, anger is often a part of it. It's not just sobbing.
It's like, it's like hitting the wall. There's's like a there's another part of it so grief is like some sadness with some fear and some and some anger but this is expressing it it doesn't necessarily need to be to a person if you're angry does it need to be to the person that you're angry at no no definitely not i would i highly recommend not angry at somebody else is an emotional abuse it's like like, it's saying, I'm going to try to control you with my anger.
It's horrible, unless you have permission. So there'll be moments like with Tara and I, I'm like, I really would like to express some anger, you know, and she'll give me permission or not.
But like with the kids, as an example with the kids, so I'm making my Sunday pancakes. The kids are knowing, oh, this is the time when dad is like most focused and da, da, da.
So we're going to ask him like 20 questions and get in a fight, like the whole thing. And I'm like, and it's like perfect timing.
And I stop everything. I jump up and down.
I'm like, I'm angry. I'm angry.
I'm angry. I'm angry.
And my eight-year-old looks at me. She goes, that was some pretty good anger, dad.
Cause she knew that I wasn't angry at her. Like I wasn't, I was angry, but I don't need to put it on her.
I can just move that anger and then get back to, to being a good parent, you know? And, and, and she wasn't scared of it. It wasn't like I was the 200 poundpound man who was yelling at a two-foot-tall kid or three-foot-tall kid or whatever.
How do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and between those? Is there a hierarchy? Is there an interplay? Is there a... They're all part of the same system.
I make the distinction between head, heart, and gut in transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not. But I haven't found anything that makes it so that you're...
It's better to do one than the other first or anything like that the what i notice is that um people who are more one way are going to start there like i was more head related you know i thought i'd everything in my head because of the emotional abuse i was high in my head and so that's where i started um and the people people were like dancers who are like deeply

in their body the somatic work is usually like the first thing that they're going to go to but they're going to believe their stories for a lot longer than i did so it's just like it's where your inclination is people playing to their strengths almost typically yeah and it's where they get the lace bang for the buck but it's usually yeah as you said you're going from 100 to 101 as opposed to zero to one.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

The closest thing is luxury beliefs. Oh, so a friend, Rob Henderson's repopularized this.
It's not his original invention, but he says luxury beliefs are, uh, beliefs held by the upper classes that bestow status on them,

but incur costs on people of the lower class.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah.

So Defund the Police is a perfect example of this.

Another one that's kind of obvious is two-parent households

have no advantage, or getting married has no advantage

for raising a child.

So you look at the number of college graduates

and people in the upper echelons of society,

almost all of them are married in monogamous relationships with a classic nuclear family setup. And the lower classes that may believe this particular narrative that's pushed by them are the ones that suffer in the same way as you behind your gated community tweeting, yeah, we really need to, you know, these police are racist and they shouldn't be there and all the rest of it.
It's like's like yeah but you're not a black guy from inner city chicago yeah exactly i know and it looks good on paper like uh i saw in california they're doing a thing where they're lowering test standards for black kids because they're having trouble in school and i'm like i guess that's nice because moral pass but you're fucking them in the future like isn't that way worse there's a huge problem in illinois at the moment in the schooling system some huge percentage of kids can't read at grade level and then they finish uh high school and they get out and it's just there's no there's nothing there they finish like k through 12 they've maths ability is way behind where they should be reading comprehension is way behind where they should be you think what are way behind where they should be. You think, what are you learning? I know.
What are you doing in school? I know. It's scary.
Are you following the Roland Fryer? No. Oh, this is right up your anal, baby.
This is Chris all day long. I don't want to get too much into it, but he's a Harvard guy, Harvard professor, the youngest black professor at Harvard to get tenure or whatever you call it.
I don't know. Brilliant guy.
From the hood, black guy, made it to Harvard, did it, wrote a bunch of books, esteemed. Everybody loves him.
He started doing studies on police and black, you know, crime and all that. And he came out with a study that there's actually way less black death from police than we think.
And they're not actually going after black people as much as we think they are. This is his study.
He couldn't believe the numbers because of, you know, because of what we've been hearing for years and years. So he did it for a year with eight interns working under him.
He couldn't believe the numbers, so he said, let's do another year and do it again with eight different people, just to make sure we got it, and it came out the same way. And everybody at Harvard was like, don't put this out.
It'll ruin you. Which goes back to what I was saying about how I'm okay with the bullshit, but at least let me acknowledge it.
They don't even want you to acknowledge it, you know? So he's like, I'm putting this out. This is data.
It's facts. They're like, it doesn't look good.

Don't put it out.

They tried to get him fired.

They tried to ruin him.

They tried to meet to him.

They tried all these things.

He beat everything and he put it out.

And now he has an armed guard with him all day long because he's getting death threats.

So he's got his kid at the grocery store with a fucking security guard.

And the irony of like, hey, I'm just saying it's not as bad out there for black people as we think, to saying that to now needing protection from a cop. I mean, the whole thing's wacky.
And I'm not saying he's right or wrong, folks. Don't come after me.
I'm just saying this is happening in America right now. And it's fascinating.
That's wild. I've got a friend, Carol Hooven, who wrote a book about testosterone.
And she, when she did Rogan's show, she cried, I think, four times. When she did my show, she cried at least three times.
We went for breakfast in Austin. I think she cried twice at breakfast.
She's just a very emotional lady. It's in like joy and sadness and stuff too.
And like she'll talk, she'll start talking about her son and immediately start welling on she just loves loves her son anyway she uh talks about biological differences between men and women spicy she was at harvard she had i think it was one of the most popular courses of undergraduates uh in psychology i think it's like some insane number might have been 500 people that attended this particular course that she did really interesting course and after she did the rogan thing and then the book came out and then she maybe posted a couple of things as well none of her teaching assistants were prepared to work with her so these are post grads doing a PhD or something, and they'll be part of some lab. But you need your TAs.
You need the teaching assistants. Tits and ass.
Sorry, sorry. TA.
I'm listening. You need that to help you because it's a huge class, marking work, and they kind of assist during the lecturing i've got a few friends in austin here that work as tas for their professors the head of their labs and shit and that's like soft cancel that she was being pushed out yeah how can you do your course if no one will work with you of course and then uh there wasn't backup from the dean and there wasn't the rest of it and she's out now she's out being pushed out i'm pretty sure she had tenure which is supposed to be the protection yeah uh and then she was part of this bill ackman thing you know where he called out claudine gay oh right a couple of months ago but the weird thing there and i spoke to her about this she was basically used as a very fortunate political football yeah kicked around see how perfect this is shows that the woke mob are trying to push people out that say things that aren't egregious and no one this is something i haven't really thought of before no one considered what she wanted as a part of this so she's already lost her job good point but just because she's a very same with shane like Shane strikes me as a large, ruddy, robust guy.

Yeah. point but just because she's a very same with shane like shane strikes me as a large ruddy robust guy yeah and you using him as an example of somebody who went through difficulty with snl to then sort of come out the other side of it i don't i don't feel that he's taking that as oh you you know you've re-triggered my ptsd from this awful incident that occurred to me five years.
It doesn't strike me. But the woman that cried five times on a podcast maybe does.
Yeah, right? This is, you know, again, do we care about people's feelings or not? Yes. It just comes back to trying to give people a bit more grace.
Yes. There you go.
We shouldn't be boiled down to this one tweet or one thing we said or one joke we made or one thing this lady did, you know? But that's what we do. And I think we have negativity bias.
So we go, this is the thing, fuck you. And you're like, what about all the good I did? And they're like, ah.
Forget about that. Forget about it.
Shane actually has a great sketch on a fucking lounge. What do you think you've been eating? The lounge.
It's horrible food. So Shane has a great sketch where he he's a fireman he saved a bunch of people's lives and the the guy's like wow did you just save that whole burning building you know the babies the women everything yeah yeah that was me and he goes uh looks like i found some tweets from uh last year and it says this this and that you know it's gay and whatever and he's like oh yeah why are you pulling that up he's like dude what doing to me? And it's a nice, it's kind of a nice microcosm of what's going on, like this gotcha shit.
But the guy just saved a building full of people. So it's funny.
Sorry, not good enough. Yeah.
But I feel like, are we talking about this too much? I'm worried that- No, not at all. So I've got something I want to teach you about.
Okay, great. Women are loving men who embrace baby girl vibe and ditch toxic masculinity.
Delving into the new trend of baby girl, following Jacob Elordi, Timothy Chalamet, Pedro Pascal, and more. This includes men carrying purses, wearing shorts and sequins, an embracingly traditionally feminine aspect.
A man who is a baby girl comes across as sweet, charming, a bit bashful, and seemingly in touch with their feminine side, ready to talk about their feelings or carry a purse to brunch at any point. Heterosexual women, especially Gen Zers, are rusting, which means romanticizing and lusting.
I thought rusting might mean something else. After men that they consider to be baby girl.
This trend signals a sharp departure from the uber-masculine sex symbols of previous generations, a lady explained to the Post. And men outside the limelight are taking note.
I think the definition of what is masculine is changing. The director of Talkify matchmaking service told the Post, some traditional masculine norms are shifting.
Masculinity today is not about being a tough guy, but about being honest, respectful, protective, and emotionally expressive. About 31 like, what do you call that when you're kind of feminine and masculine? Like, androgynous.
Right. Androgynous.
Like, I think this is, you know you know in the 60s guys grew their hair long and every dad was like you fucking homo like look at these get a haircut pussy and i think uh that was crazy then you know having long hair or tight pants or whatever so i think it's just this is just another swing of this and masculinity is the norm so we got to go against the norm and then eventually baby girl whatever will be the norm and then being masculine will be weird so that'll be in so i think it just it all just flip everyone's attracted by whatever looks novel yes hey that's a better way to concise way to say it i've been me and my housemate have been thinking a lot about things that a bitch that you don't realize a bitch so trying to pick up a moving ping pong ball no that's a great one very bitch starting a stopped bicycle oh yeah that kind of awkward i got one yep you know when you close the door and it doesn't close the car door and it doesn't doesn't latch all the way and you got to give it that. I hate the booty bump, but you got to do it.
These are great. This could be like a TikTok running series.
Wearing as a man, wearing a towel wrapped around your upper chest rather than wrapped around your waist. Oh, I got another one.
Standing like this is very masculine, but if you just rotate it like that, it's so much gayer. What is that? It's just the same hand, same hip, but if you flip it, you look so much more feminine.
Doing that thing when you wash your hands. Oh, yeah.
The interlace of the finger from behind. Yeah.
That's pretty bitch. He has, Zach has one, which is turning around ever.
So if you walk past the entrance entrance to somewhere you're going around the block and coming back in because if you go and then turn around oh yeah that's pretty bitch that's good he had one at dinner the other evening which we were sat outside and the receipt blew off the front of the table and we've been talking about things that a bitch that you don't realize are bitch for six months now. This is gold.
We've accumulated this huge, big, long list. I could go for the rest of the podcast.
And I was watching it, and we hadn't come up with chasing a receipt blown in the wind. And I was watching it happen.
And sure enough, the wind picked up. And as he sort of, you know, you bend over and you, that, and then it goes away again.
And I was, and he came back over and he went, this is adding, this is being added to the list to the list isn't it that's a great one it's getting added to the list i would say applying chapstick can be pretty bad eating a banana banana classic oh oh a heavy door you ever have door where you're like oh it takes all the manly confidence out of you when the door's too heavy uh sleeping in a blanket with your arms all the way under as opposed to having your arms out oh interesting i think that's pretty bitch um holding a coffee mug with both hands yes that's a great one massively bitch my wife she says if i see a guy with flip-flops the vagina is just just sewn up like the those ones the tong it's the idea of that thing between the toe that really freaks her out. She's like, it slides? I'll do a slide.
But the tongue is what gets you. Which is interesting because Crocs are obviously the most sexually arousing type of footwear that are available.
You know what my favorite thing about Crocs are? That flap, that little ankle holder? Yep. If you put's called sport mode yeah which to me is like what are we getting no that's what this is did

that that look i just went sport what are you gonna go run a mile with that you gotta play football

someone's there is a croc marathon come on record really yep there's a croc mile and there's a croc

marathon record people can go and look this look this up online i will yeah i'm sure it's a elite

athlete