#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
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The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his fifth time on the podcast. He is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and is an amazing scientist, teacher, human being, and someone I'm grateful to be able to call a close friend. Also, he has a book coming out next year that you should pre-order now called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got 8sleep for naps, Element for electrolytes, AG1 for nutrition, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management software, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to alexfreedman.com contact.

And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Asleep and it's Pod 4 Ultra. First of all, Pod 4 is an improvement over the Pod 3, which was already awesome. 2X the cooling power. I always love it when stuff is just improving. When smartphones are improving,

LLAMs are improving, like jump to CLAW 3.5. It's just great. And GPT-5 might be coming out soon. It's just great. It's great to see improvement. But also there's the Ultra part, which is an extra layer that adds the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame, and the base can control the physical position of the actual mattress. So basically you can sleep in your bed and you can also read in your bed.

which is a thing that I think a lot of people like doing. I have trouble reading too much in my bed because I fall asleep. The bed is just too nice. Anyway, go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Element.

The drink that Andrew and I consume a lot of during the episode. I drink a lot of Element almost, not almost, on every single podcast episode. That's just what I drink. I put Element in the water. I take, I have one next to me right now, a Powerade Zero bottle with 28 fluid ounces. Fill it up with water. Put one packet of Element in there, usually watermelon salt. Mix it all up. Put it in the fridge overnight.

And about 30 minutes later, there's cold, refreshing deliciousness. But yeah, in the Texas heat, when I'm doing the long runs or hard training sessions, like I just did 10 rounds the other day in grappling, no drinks. I usually don't like to drink during training. So afterwards, you're just, your body is completely dehydrated. And that's such an amazing feeling to replenish it with all the electrolytes you need. So yeah.

especially when it's cold and delicious. I love it. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It's kind of hilarious how when Andrew and I hang out, how the supplementation and the diet and just our way of being is on point. There's a lot of AG1 consumed. There's a lot of element consumed.

And there's a lot of ground beef or steak consumed on a regular basis. We've been planning to run together more, but we haven't quite done that. It's mostly my fault because running has just been such a solo thing for me. I really don't remember the last time I've ever run with anybody. I get so much into my head that I just feel like I'm even more introverted now.

than I usually am, like I lose myself inside my mind. It's become such a meditative process that to do running with another person, it just feels a little bit weird. I feel like I wouldn't be able to sort of contribute to the conversation if there's a conversation. And also like pacing-wise, there's a certain pace where conversation is still possible, but it's a little uncomfortable.

So, and I can't really think at that pace that well and talk. I already struggle talking, so I don't know. We'll have to figure it out, but he's just such a great person to work out with and a great person to talk to that we'll have to figure it out. Anyway, AG1 is always part of the picture and I drink it twice a day. It's the foundation of my nutrition. It's

The thing when I consume it, I feel like I've got all my bases covered, no matter the crazy mental or the physical stuff that I'm going to do. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell stuff anywhere.

with a great looking online store. It took me a really short time to set everything up. LexRiemann.com slash store. There's a few shirts on there. I actually got a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt via Shopify recently, and I love it. I need to get more rock music, like classic rock shirts. They brought so much joy to me. I just want to celebrate it. I don't know why, but that seems like a cool way to celebrate it, especially if it's like a nice Lynyrd Skynyrd outfit

or Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd shirt. You know, a shirt I haven't quite found that's a go-to, and I'm sure one exists, is SRV, Steve Ray Vaughan. I just don't want a generic one, I want a super cool one. Him and Jimi Hendrix have a certain way about them that requires a super cool shirt, not just a generic one. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, that's all lowercase lex,

Go to shopify.com slash lux to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It is the machine inside the machine, where the company is the metamachine and society is the metametamachine. It's a collection of groups and companies. It's also a collection of nations.

in a constant state of anarchy against each other, with no centralized control. The centralized control comes from the government that does the regulation on the machine of capitalism. But within capitalism, there's a certain degree of freedom that allows you to build epic shit, to build epic stuff. And that's where NetSuite can be the thing that helps you build the epic stuff by taking care of all the messy things like

financials, HR, inventory supply, e-commerce, if that's the thing you do, and much more business related stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. I wonder how many companies there are in the world. It's kind of cool to think that there's 37,000 companies.

Each one with a person who founded or a collection of people founded that had a dream and that are working hard to bring that dream into a reality, trying to survive, trying to thrive, trying to make money, trying to put food on the table of all the families involved, all the responsibility of that. I don't know. Those are all little puzzles, little battles, sometimes big battles fought. It's cool. I love humans. This is one of the ways that humans are awesome.

Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It's kind of incredible the power of language, the power of spoken language to explore the human mind. Because in order to generate speech, you have to take an idea that's in your head,

You have to compress that idea into something that can be represented in comprehensible sequence of words, and you have to speak it within the full context of everything that's been spoken previously and everything that's been going on around. And then there's another human being on the other side that hears it. First of all, they have to hear it correctly. If it's noisy or whatever, or maybe their whole mind is focused on some aspect of

of the scene that prevents them from being able to really hear what's being said. But once they do, they have to then interpret it and decode, decompress the thing that was represented in language into an idea and visualize it, integrate it, load it in to the brain.

and make sense of that idea, again, in the full context of everything that's happened before. And in that way, back and forth, humans talk and make sense of the world together and make sense of their own mind together. It's just cool. It's cool that that's even possible. And it's cool that that's actually a powerful way to understand yourself and to understand the world. So yeah, I'm a big fan of talking, of rigorous, deep conversation and

Certainly talk therapy is rigorous and deep when done well. So if that's something that you're interested in trying, you should try BetterHelp because it's super easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

You think there's ever going to be a day when you walk away from podcasting? Definitely. I mean, I came up within and then on the periphery of skateboard culture. And for the record, I was not a great skateboarder. I always have to say that because skateboarders are relentless. If you call something you didn't do or whatever.

I mean, I could do a few things and I loved the community and I still have a lot of friends in that community. Jim Thiebaud at Deluxe, you can look him up. He's kind of the man behind the whole scene. I know Tony Hawk, Danny Whale, these guys, I got to see them come up and get big and stay big in many cases, start huge companies like Danny and call him the case or DC. Some people have a long life in something, some don't. But one thing I observed and learned a lot from in skateboarding

at the level of observing the skateboarders and then the ones that started companies. And then what I also observed in science and still observe is you do it for a while, you do it at the highest possible level for you, and then at some point you pivot and you start supporting the young talent coming in. In fact, the greatest scientists, people like Richard Axel, Catherine Duloc, there are many other labs in neuroscience, Karl Deisteroff,

They're not just known for doing great science. They're known for mentoring some of the best scientists that then go on to start their own labs. And I think in podcasting, I am very fortunate. I got in, in a fairly early wave, not the earliest wave, but thanks to your suggestion of doing a podcast, fairly early wave. And I'll continue to go as long as it feels right. And I feel like I'm doing good in the world and providing good, but I'm already starting to scout talent.

My company that I started with Rob Moore, SciComm Media, a couple other guys in there too, Mike Blayback, our photographer, Ian Mackey, Chris Ray, Martin Phobes. We are a company that produces podcasts. Right now that's Huberman Lab Podcast, but we're launching a new podcast, Perform, with Dr. Andy Galpin. And we want to do more of that kind of thing, finding a really great talent, highly qualified people, credentialed people. And I've got

a new obsession with scouring the Internet, looking for the young talent in science, in health, and related fields. Will there be a final episode of the HLP? Yeah. I mean, bullet-buster cancer,

aside, you know, someday they'll be the very last and thank you for your interest in science. And I'll clip out. Yeah. I love the idea of walking away and not be dramatic about it. Right. When it feels right, you can leave and you can come back whenever the fuck you want. Right. Jon Stewart did this well with the Daily Show. I think that was during the 2016 election when everybody wanted him to stay on and he just walked away. Dave Chappelle for different

walked away. Disappeared, came back. Gave away so much money. Didn't care. And then came back and was doing like stand up in the park in the middle of nowhere. Genius. You have Habib who undefeated walks away at the very top of a sport. Is he coming back? No. At least we don't know. Yeah. Right. You don't know. I don't know if he bears everywhere or words. Yeah. I think, you know, it's, it's always a call, you know, you know, the last person

few years have been tremendous growth. We launched in January 2021. And even this last year, 2024 has been huge growth, you know, in all sorts of ways. It's been wild. And we have some short form content planned, 30 minute shorter episodes that really distill down the critical elements. We're also thinking about moving to other venues besides podcasting. So there's always the thought and the discussion, but when it comes to like when to hang up your cleats, you know, it's like

There just comes a natural time where you can do more to mentor the next generation coming in than focusing on self. And so there will come a time for that. And I think it's critical. I mean, again, I saw this in skateboarding, like Danny and Colin and Danny's brother Damon started DC with Ken Block, the driver who unfortunately passed away a little while ago, rally car driver.

And they eventually sold it, I think, to Quicksilver or something like that. But they're all phenomenal talents in their respective areas. But they brought in the next line of amazing riders, the Plan B thing, Paul Rodriguez. For skateboarders, they know who this is. Now, in science, there are scientists like Feynman, for instance. I don't know if anyone can name one of his mentor offspring. So there are scientists who are phenomenal scientists.

like beyond world-class, right? Multi-generational world-class who don't make good mentors. I'm not saying he wasn't a good mentor, but that's not what he's known for. And then there are scientists who are known for being excellent scientists and great mentors. And I think there's no higher celebration to be had at the end of one's career. If you can look back and be like, hey, I put some really important knowledge into the world. People made use of that knowledge. And guess what? You spawned all these other people

scientific offspring or sport offspring or podcast offspring. I mean, in some ways we look to Rogan and to some of the other earlier podcasts as like they paved the way. Rhonda Patrick, first science podcast out there. So eventually the baton passes, but fortunately right now everybody's active and it feels really good. Yeah, well, you're talking about the healthy way to do it, but there's also...

A different kind of way where you have somebody like Grisha Grigori Perlman, the mathematician who refused to accept the Fields Medal. So he's one of the greatest living mathematicians and he just walked away from mathematics and rejected the Fields Medal. What did he do after he left mathematics? Life. Private. 100%. I respect that. He's become essentially a recluse. These photos of him looking very broke, like he could use the money. He turned away the money. He turned away everything.

You just have to listen to the inner voice. You have to listen to yourself and make the decisions that don't make any sense for the rest of the world and make sense to you. Bob Dylan didn't show up to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. That's punk. Yeah. Yeah. He probably grew in notoriety for that.

Maybe he just doesn't like going to Sweden, but it seemed like it would be a fun trip. I think they do it in a nice time of year. But hey, that's his right. He earned that right. I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize. They aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art. Yeah, that's the Rick Rubin thing. You got to verb it through, download your inner thing. I don't think we've talked about this, this obsession that I have about how Rick is

has this way of being very, very still in his body, but keeping his mind very active as a practice. Went and spent some time with him in Italy last June, and we would tread water in his pool in the morning and listen to History of Rock and Roll and 100 Songs. Amazing podcast, by the way. - It is. - Yeah. And then he would spend a fair amount of time during the day in this kind of meditative state where his mind is very active, body very still.

And then Carl Deisseroth, when he came on my podcast, talked about how he forces himself to sit still and think in complete sentences late at night after his kids go to sleep. And, you know, there's a state of mind, rapid eye movement sleep, where your body is completely paralyzed and the mind is extremely active. And people credit rapid eye movement sleep with some of the more elaborate emotion-filled dreams and the source of many ideas. And there are other examples Einstein

people described him as taking walks around the Princeton campus, then pausing and would ask him what was going on. And the idea that his mind was continuing to churn forward at a high rate. So, you know, this is far from controlled studies, but we're talking about some incredible minds and creatives who have a practice of stilling the body while keeping the mind deliberately very active, very similar to rapid eye movement sleep. And then there are a lot of

People who also report great ideas coming to them in the shower or while running. So it can be the opposite as well, where the body is very active and the mind is perhaps more on...

kind of like a default mode network, not really focusing on any one specific thing. - You know, interesting, there's a bunch of physicists and mathematicians I've talked to, they talk about sleep deprivation and going crazy hours through the night obsessively pursuing a thing, and then the solution to the problem comes when they finally get rest. - Right, and we know, we just did this six episode special series on sleep with Matt Walker,

We know that when you deprive yourself of sleep and then you get sleep, you get a rebound in rapid eye movement sleep. You get a higher percentage of rapid eye movement sleep. And Matt talks about this in the podcast. And he did an episode on sleep and creativity, sleep and memory. And rapid eye movement sleep comes up multiple times in that series. There's also some very interesting stuff about cannabis withdrawal and rapid eye movement sleep. People are coming off cannabis often will suffer from

insomnia but when they finally do start sleeping they like dream like crazy um cannabis is a very controversial topic right now oh yeah i saw that what happened there's a bunch of drama around uh episode you did on cannabis yeah we did a episode about cannabis talked about the health benefits and the potential risks right it's neither here nor there um depends on the person depends on the age depends on genetic background a number of other things um we

published that episode well over a year ago and it had no issues online so to speak and then a clip of it was put to x where you know the real action occurs as you know your favorite box um yeah the the four ounce gloves as opposed to the 16 ounce gloves um that is x versus instagram or youtube there was um

kind of an immediate dog pile from a few people in the cannabis research field. - The PhDs and MDs, yeah. - There were people on our side, there were people not on our side. I mean, you know. The statement that got things riled up the most was this notion that for certain individuals, there's a high potential for inducing psychosis with high THC containing cannabis. For certain individuals, not all.

That sparked some issues. There was really a split. You see this in different fields. There was one person in particular who came out swinging with language that, in my opinion, is not of the sort that you would use at a university venue, especially among colleagues. But that's fine. We're all grownups. - Well, for me, from my perspective, it was strangely rude. And it...

had an era of elitism that to me was at the source of the problem during COVID that led to the distrust of science and the popularization of disrespecting science because so many scientists spoke with an arrogance and a douchebaggery that I wish we would have a little bit less of. - Yeah, it's tough because most academics don't understand that people outside the university system

they're not familiar with the inner workings of science and the culture. And so you have to be very careful how you present when you're a university professor. And when, yeah, so he came out swinging at some four-letter word type language and he was obviously upset about it. So I simply said what I would say anywhere, which was, hey, look, come on the podcast, let's chat. And why don't you give your, tell me where I'm wrong and let's discuss and

And fortunately he agreed. And initially he said, well, no, how can I be sure you're not going to misrepresent me? And so I said, we got on a,

DM, then an email, then eventually a phone call and just said, hey, listen, like you're welcome to record the whole conversation. We've never done a gotcha on my podcast. And let's just get to the heart of the matter. I think this little controversy is perfect kindling for a really great discussion. And he had some other conditions that we worked out and I felt like, cool, like he's really interested. You get a very different person on the phone than you do on Twitter.

I will say he's been very collegial and that conversation is on the schedule. I said, we'll fly you out. We'll put you up. He said, no, he wants to fly himself. He really wants to make sure that there's like kind of a space between, I think some of the perception of science and health podcasts in the academic community is that it's all designed to sell something. No, we run ads so it can be free to everyone else. But I think, look, in the end, he agreed and I'm excited for the conversation. It was interesting because we,

In the wake of that little exchange, there's been a bunch of press from traditional press about cannabis has now surpassed alcohol in many cultures as within the United States, as when I say cultures, I mean demographics, the United States as the drug of choice. There have been people highlighting the issues of potential psychosis in high THC containing. And so it's

Kind of interesting to see how traditional media is sort of on board certain elements that I put forward. And I think there's some controversy as to whether or not the different strains, the indicas and sativas, are biologically different, et cetera. So we'll get down into the weeds, pun intended, during that one. And I'm excited. It's the first time that we've responded to a direct criticism online about scientific content in a way that really promoted like, oh, here, the idea of inviting a particular guest

And so it's great. Let's get a guest who is expert in cannabis. I believe, I could be wrong about this, that he's a behavioral neuroscientist. It's slightly different training. But look, he seems highly credentialed. It'll be fun. And we, you know, we welcome that kind of exchange. And I'm not being diplomatic. I'm just saying, like, it's cool. Like, he's coming on. And he was friendly on the phone, right? Like, he literally came out online and was, like, basically, like, kind of like F you. Yeah.

Like F this and F you. But you get someone on the phone and it's like, hey, how's it going? And they're like, oh yeah, well, you know, there was an immediate apology of like, hey, listen, I came out. Normally I'm like, not like that, but online, you know. You get a different. Okay, listen. So it's a little bit like, it's a little bit like jujitsu, right? People say all sorts of things, I guess. But if they, if you're like, all right, well, let's go. Then it's probably a different story.

It's not like jujitsu because in jujitsu people don't talk shit because they know what the consequences are. Let me just say, on mic and off mic, you have been very respectful towards this person. And I look up to you and respect you and admire the fact that you have been. That said, to me, that guy was being a dick. And when you graciously, politely invited him on the podcast, he was still talking down to you the whole time. So I really admire and look forward to listening to you talk to him. But I hope others...

don't do that. Like you are a positive, humble voice exploring all the interesting aspects of science. Like you want to learn. If you've got anything wrong, you want to learn about it. The way he was being a dick, I was just,

hurt a little bit, not because of him, but because there's some people I really, really admire, brilliant scientists that are not their best selves on Twitter, on X. Definitely. I don't understand what happens to their brain. Well, they regress. They regress. And they also are protected. When you remove the

I mean, no scientific argument should ever come to physical blows, right? But when you remove the real world thing of being right in front of somebody, people will throw all sorts of stones at a distance, you know, and over a wall. And they've got their wife or their husband or their boyfriend or their dog or their cat to go cuddle with them afterwards. But you get in a room and it's like, you know, confrontational people are

in real life are pretty rare, but hopefully if they do it, they're like willing to back it up with knowledge in this case, right? We're not talking about physical altercation. Yeah, he kept coming.

And he kept putting on conditions. How do I know you want this? And I was like, well, you can record the conversation. How do I know you want that? Listen, we'll pay for you to come out. How do you know? And eventually he just kind of relented. And to his credit, you know, he's agreed to come on. I mean, he still has to show up, but once he does, you know, we'll treat him right like we would any other guest. Yeah, you treat people really well. And I just hope that people are a little bit nicer on the internet. Yeah, well, you know, X is an interesting one because it thickens your skin.

just to go on there. I mean, you have to be ready to deal with. - Sure, but I can still criticize people for being douchebags because that's still not good inspiring behavior, especially for scientists. That should be sort of symbols of scientific thinking which requires intellectual humility. Humility is a big part of that. And Twitter is a good place to illustrate that.

Years ago, I was a student in TA, then instructor, and then directed a Cold Spring Harbor course on visual neuroscience. These are summer courses that explore different topics. And at night, we would host what we hoped were battles in front of the students.

um where you'd get two people on it you know would it be neural prosthetics or molecular tools that would first you know um restore vision to the blind kind of arguments you kind of like it's kind of a silly argument because it's gonna be a combination of both right but you get these great arguments but the arguments were always couched in data and occasionally you'd get somebody would go like or would curse or something but it was the rare very um very well-placed

you know, insult. It wasn't, you know, coming out swinging. I think ultimately, you know, Twitter's a record of people's behavior. The internet is a record of people's behavior. And here I'm not talking about news reports about people's behavior. I'm talking about how people show up online is really important. You've always carried yourself with a ton of composure and respect. And, you know, you just...

You would hope that people would grow from that example. Well, I'll tell you that the podcasters that I'm scouting, it's their energy, but it's also how they treat other people, how they respond to comments. And, you know, we're blessed to have pretty significant reach when we put out a podcast like someone else's podcast, it goes far and wide. So like a skateboard team, like a laboratory where you're selecting people to be in your lab, you want to pick people that you would enjoy working with and that are collegial.

Etiquette is lacking nowadays, but you're in the suit and tie, you're bringing it back. - Bringing it back. You said that your conversation with James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst, had a big impact on you. What do you mean? - James Hollis is a 84-year-old Jungian psychoanalyst who's written 17 books, including Under Saturn's Shadow, which is on the healing and trauma of men, the Eden Project, excuse me, which is about relationships and creating a life.

I discovered James Hollis in an online lecture that was recorded, I think, in San Diego. It's on YouTube. The audio is terrible, called Creating a Life. And this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span. I can't remember. And I was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time. I was like, I just found the most incredible lecture I've ever heard. And he talks about the shadow. He talks about

your developmental upbringing and how you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents' tendencies and values in certain areas. He talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages of life, to live a full life. So it's always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast. And he wasn't able to travel, so our team went out to D.C. and sat down with him. We rarely do that nowadays. People come to our studio. And

He came in, he had some surgeries recently, and he kind of came in with some assistance from a cane and then sat down and just blew my mind. From start to finish, he didn't miss a syllable. And every sentence that he spoke was like a quotable sentence with real potency and actionable items. I think one of the things that was most striking

to me was how he said when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response, and we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or while seated or while lying down, doesn't have to be meditation, but it could be, that we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we really want. And that if we do that practice repeatedly, 10 minutes a day here, 15 minutes a day there,

that we start to really touch into our unique gifts and the things that make us each us and the directions we need to take. But that so often we just stay in stimulus response. We just do, do, do, do, do, which is great. We have to be productive. But we miss those important messages. And interestingly, he also says,

put forward this idea of what is this? Like get up, shut up, suit up. Yeah, something like that. Like get out of bed, suit up.

and shut up and get to work. He also has that in him, kind of a Goggins type mindset. So be able to turn off all this self-reflection and self-analysis and just get shit done, but then also take dedicated time and stop and just let stuff geyser to the surface from the unconscious mind. And he quotes Shakespeare and he quotes Jung and he quotes everybody through history with incredible accuracy and

and in exactly the way needed to drive home a point. But that conversation to me was one that I really felt like, okay, you know, if I don't wake up tomorrow for whatever reason, that one's in the can and I feel really great about it. To me, it's the most important guest recording we've ever done, in particular because he has wisdom. And while I hope he lives to be 204,

Chances are he's got another, what, 20, 30 years with us, hopefully more. But I really, really wanted to capture that information and get it out there. So I'm very, very proud of that one. And he's the kind of guy that anyone listens to him, young, old, male, female, whatever, and you're going to get something of value. What do you think about this idea of the shadow, that the good and the bad that we repress

that hides from plain sight when we analyze ourselves that's there. You think there's like an ocean that we don't have direct access to? Yes. Yeah. Jung said it, we have all things inside of us, and we do. And some people are more in touch with those than others, and some people it's repressed. I mean, does that mean that we could all be horrible people or marvelous people, benevolent people? Perhaps. I think that

thankfully more often than not, people lean away from the like violent and harmful parts of their, their shadow. But I think spending time thinking about, you know, one's shadow shadows is super important. How, how else are we going to grow? Otherwise, you know, we have these unconscious blind spots of, of denial or repression or whatever, you know, the psychiatrists tell us,

But it clearly exists within all of us. I mean, we have neural circuits for rage. We all do. We have neural circuits for altruism. And no one's born without these things. And some people, they're atrophied, and some people, they're hypertrophied. But looking inward and recognizing what's there is... Or positive things like creativity. Maybe that's what Rick Rubin is accessing when he goes silent. Silent body, active mind. That's interesting. What is it for you? What...

What place do you go to that generates ideas, that helps you generate ideas? I have a lot of new practices around this. I mean, I'm always exploring for protocols. I have to. It's like in my nature. When I went and spent time with Rick, I tried to adopt his practice of staying very still and just letting stuff come to the surface or the Dicerathian way of formulating complete sentences while being still in the body. What I...

FM works better is what my good friend Tim Armstrong does to write music. He writes music every day. He's a music producer. He's obviously a singer, guitar player for Rancid. And he's helped dozens and dozens and dozens of female pop artists and punk rock artists write great songs. And many of the famous songs that you've heard from other artists, Tim helped them write.

Tim wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night and what he does is he'll start drawing or painting. So what he's done, and Joni Mitchell talks about this too, you find some creative outlet that's like 15 degrees off center from your main creative outlet and you do that thing. So for me, that's drawing. I like doing anatomical drawings.

neuroscience-based drawing, drawing neurons, that kind of thing. And if I do that for a little while, my mind starts churning on the nervous system and biology, and then I come up with areas I'd like to explore for the podcast.

ways I'd like to address certain topics. Right now, I'm very interested in autonomic control. A beautiful paper came out that shows that anyone can learn to control their pupil sizes without changing luminance through a biofeedback mechanism. And that gives them control over their so-called automatic autonomic nervous system. And I've been looking at what the circuitry is, and it's beautiful. So I'll draw the circuitry

that we know underlies autonomic function. And as I'm doing that, I'm thinking, oh, like what about autonomic control and those people that supposedly can control their pupil size? Then you go in and there's a paper published in Nature Press, one of the nature journals, and there's a recent paper on this. Like, oh, cool. And then we talk about this. And then how could this be put into a kind of a post or how could this, you know, so doing things that are about 15 degrees off center from your main thing is a great way to access, I believe, the circuits for, in Tim's case, painting goes to songwriting.

I think for Joni Mitchell, that was also the case, right? I think it was drawing and painting to singing and songwriting. For Rick, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's listening to podcasts. I don't know. That's his business. Do you have anything that you like to focus on that allows you then an easier transition into your main creative work? No, I really like to focus on emptiness and silence. So I pick the dragon I have to slay. So whatever the problem I have to work on and I just sit there.

and stare at it. I love how fucking linear you are. And it just, and if there's no, if you're tired, I'll just sit. I believe in the, in the power of just waiting. And usually I'll stop being tired or their energy rises from somewhere or an idea pops from somewhere, but there needs to be a silence and an emptiness. It's an empty room, just me and the dragon and

We wait, that's it. Like if it's a, usually with programming, you're thinking about a particular design, like how do I design this thing to solve this problem? - Any cognitive enhancers? I've got quite the gallery in front of me. - Oh, that's right, yeah. - Should we walk through this? - Yeah. - This is not a sales thing, this is just, I tend to do this bounce back and forth. Your refrigerator just happened to have a lot of different choices. So water. - This is all my refrigerator. - I know, right? There's no food in there. There's water.

There's Element, which they now have canned. And yes, they're a podcast sponsor for both of us, but that's not why I cracked one of these open. I like them provided they're cold. And that's, by the way, my least favorite flavor, as I was saying. That's the reason it's still left in the fridge. The cherry one is really good. The black cherry. There's an orange one. Yeah.

I pushed the sled this morning and pulled the sled from my workout at the gym and it was hot today here in Austin. So some salt is good. And then Matina Yerba Mate Zero Sugar. Full confession, I helped develop this. I'm a partial owner, but I love Yerba Mate. Half Argentine, been drinking mate since I was a little kid. There's actually a photo somewhere on the internet when I'm like three sitting on my grandfather's lap, sipping mate out the gourd. And then this, my fun, interesting, this is just a little bit of coffee.

with a scoop of, Brian Johnson gave me cocoa, just like pure unsweetened cocoa. So I put that in chocolate and I like it just for the taste. Well, it actually nukes my appetite. And since we're not going out to dinner tonight until later, I figure that's good.

Yeah, Brian's an interesting one, right? He's really pushing this thing. The optimization of everything. Yeah. Although he just hurt his ankle. He posted a photo that he hurt his ankle. So now he's injecting BPC, body protection compound 157, which many, many people are taking, by the way. I did an episode on peptides. I should just say, you know, BPC 157, one of the known effects in animal models is angiogenesis, like development of new vasculature, which can be great.

in some context, but also if you have a tumor, you don't really want to vascularize that tumor anymore. So I worry about people taking BPC-157 continually, and there's very little human data. I think there's like one study, and it's a lousy one. It's a lot of animal data. Some of the peptides

are interesting. However, there's one that I've experimented with a little bit called pinellin, which I find even if I've just taken it twice a week before sleep, then it seems to do something to the

circadian timekeeping mechanism because then on other days when I don't take it, I get unbelievably tired at that time that normally I would do the injection. These are things that I'll experiment with for a couple of weeks and then typically stop, maybe try something else. But I stay out of things that really stimulate any of like a major hormone pathways when it comes to peptides. That's actually a really good question of how do you experiment? Like,

Like how long do you try a thing to figure out if it works for you? - Well I'm very sensitive to these things, and I have been doing a lot of things for a long time, so if I add something in, it's always one thing at a time. And I notice right away if it does not make me feel good. Like there's a lot of excitement about some of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues

hypermorelin, testamorelin, sermorelin. I've experimented a little bit with those in the past and they've nuked my rapid eye movement sleep, but given me a lot of deep sleep, which doesn't feel good to me, but other people like them. I also just generally try and avoid

taking peptides that tap into these hormone pathways because you can run into all sorts of issues, but some people take them safely. But usually after about four or five days, I know if I like something or I don't, and then I move on. But I am not super adventurous with these things. I know people that will take cocktails of peptides with multiple things. They'll try anything. That's not me. And I do blood work. But also I'm, you know, I'm mainly

reading papers and podcasting. And I'm teaching a course next spring, Stanford. I'm going to do a big undergraduate course.

So I'm trying to develop that course and things like that. So I don't need to lift more weight or run further than I already do, which is not that much weight or far as it is. All right, you're not going to the Olympics. You're not trying to truly maximize some aspect of your performance. No, and I'm not trying to get down below whatever, 7% body fat or something. I don't have those kinds of goals.

So hydration, electrolytes, caffeine in the form of mate, and then this coffee thing. And then, and then here's one that I think I brought out for discussion. This is a piece of Nicorette. They're not a sponsor. Um, nicotine is an interesting compound. It will raise blood pressure and it, um,

It's probably not safe for everybody, but nicotine is gaining in popularity like crazy, mainly these pouches that people put in the lip. We're not talking about smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing. My interest in nicotine started, this was in 2010. I was visiting Columbia Medical School, and I was in the office of the great neurobiologist Richard Axel, won the Nobel Prize, co-recipient with Linda Buck for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction.

Brilliant guy. He's probably in his late 70s now. Probably. Yeah. And he kept popping Nicorette in his mouth. And I was like, what's this about? And he said, oh, well, this was just anecdote, right? But he said this. He said, oh, well, you know, it protects against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, it does? And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if he was kidding or not. He's known for making jokes. And then he said that when he used to smoke, it really helped his focus and creativity. But then he quit smoking because he didn't want lung cancer. And he found that he couldn't focus as well. So he would choose Nicorette.

So occasionally, like right now, I do a half a piece, but I'm not Russian. So I'm a little, you know, you have to juice pop the whole thing in your mouth. So I'll do a couple milligrams every now and again. And it definitely sharpens the mind on an empty stomach in particular, but you fast all day. You're still doing one meal a day. One meal a day. Yeah. Yeah, I did a nicotine pouch with Rogan at dinner. And I got high. Yeah, that's a lot. That's like usually six or eight milligrams. I know people that...

get a canister of Zin, take one a day. Pretty soon they're taking a canister a day. So you have to be very careful. I will only allow myself two pieces of Nicorette total per week. And you will notice that, you know, in the day after you use it, you know, sometimes your throat will feel a little bit like, like a little spasmy, like you might want to cough once or twice. And so, you know, if you're a singer or you're a podcaster or something, you have to do long podcasts. You want to just be mindful of it. But yeah, you're supposed to kind of like keep it in your cheek and

- Here we go. - But it did make me intensely focused. In a way that was a little bit scary. - The nucleus basalis is in the basal forebrain nucleus has cholinergic neurons that radiate out axons, little wires that release acetylcholine into the neocortex and elsewhere. And when you focus on one particular topic matter or one particular area of your visual field or listening to something and focusing visually,

We know that there's an elaboration of the amount of acetylcholine released there, and it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor sites there. So it's a kind of an attentional modulation by acetylcholine. So with nicotine, you're getting an exogenous or artificial heightening of that circuitry. And the time I had Tucker Carlson on the podcast, he told me that apparently it helps him, as he said publicly, keep his...

Love life. Vibrant. Really? It causes vasoconstriction. He literally said it makes his dick very hard. He said that publicly also. Okay, well, as little as I want to think about Tucker Carlson's sex life, no disrespect. The major effect of nicotine on the vasculature, my understanding is that it causes vasoconstriction, not vasodilation. Drugs like Cialis, Tadalafil,

Viagra, et cetera, vasodilators. They allow more blood flow. Nicotine does the opposite, less blood flow to the periphery, but provided dosages are kept low. And I don't recommend people use it frequently or at all. And I don't recommend young people use it, you know, 25 and younger. Brain's very plastic at that time. And certainly smoking, dipping,

vaping and snuffing aren't good because you're going to run into trouble for other reasons. But in any case, even there, vaping is a controversial topic. It's probably safer than smoking, but has its own issues. And I said something like that, and boy, did I catch a lot of heat for that. You can't say anything as a health science educator and not piss somebody off. It just depends on where the center of mass is and how far outside that you are. For me, the caffeine is the main thing.

and actually it's a really big part of my life. And one of the things you recommend that people wait a bit in the morning to consume caffeine. - If they experience a crash in the afternoon. This is one of the misconceptions I regret maybe even discussing it. For people that crash in the afternoon,

Oftentimes, if they delay their caffeine by 60 and 90 minutes in the morning, they will offset some of that. But if you eat a lunch that's too big or you didn't sleep well the night before, you're not going to avoid that afternoon crash. But I'll wake up sometimes and go straight to hydration and caffeine, especially if I'm going to work out. Here's a weird one. If I exercise before 8.30 a.m., especially if I start exercising when I'm a little bit tired, I get energy that lasts all day.

If I wait until my peak of energy, which is mid-morning, 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and I start exercising then, I'm basically exhausted all afternoon. And I don't understand why. I mean, it depends on the intensity of the workout. But so I like to be done, showered,

and heading into work by 9:00 a.m., but I don't always meet that mark. - So you're saying it doesn't affect your energy if you start with exercising? - I think you can get energy and wake yourself up with exercise if you start early, and then that fuels you all day long. I think that if you wait until you're feeling at your best to train,

Sometimes that's detrimental because then in the afternoon when you're doing like the work we get paid for, like research, podcasting, et cetera, then oftentimes, you know, your brain isn't firing as well. - That's interesting. I haven't really rigorously tried that wake up and just start running or listening. - This is the Jocko thing. And then there's this phenomenon called entrainment where if you force yourself to exercise or eat or socialize or view bright light

at a certain time of day for three to seven days in a row, pretty soon there's an anticipatory circuit that gets generated. This is why anyone in theory can become a morning person to some degree or another. And this is also...

Beautiful example of why you wake up before your alarm clock goes off. You know, people wake up and all of a sudden it goes off. It wasn't because it clicked. It was because you have this incredible timekeeping mechanism that exists in sleep. And there's some papers that have been published in the last couple of years, Nature Neuroscience and elsewhere, showing that people can answer math problems in their sleep. Simple math problems, but math problems nonetheless. This does not mean that if you ask your partner a question in sleep that they're going to answer accurately.

Like they might screw up the whole cumulative probability of 20% across multiple months. All right, listen. What happened? What happened? Here's the deal. A few years back, I did a four and a half hour, after editing, four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility. The entire recording took 11 hours. And at one point during the, and by the way, I'm very proud of that episode. There's many couples have written to me

and said they now have children as a consequence of that episode. And my first question is, what were you doing during the episode? But in all seriousness. - We should say that it's four and a half hours. And for people, and they should listen to the episode, it's an extremely technical episode. You're nonstop dropping facts and referencing a huge number of papers. It must be exhausting. I don't understand how you could possibly-- - It talks about sperm health, spermatogenesis, it talks about

The ovulatory cycle, it talks about things people can do that are considered absolutely supported by science. It talks about some of the things kind of out on the edge a little bit that are a little bit more experimental. It talks about IVF. It talks about ICSI. It talks about all of that. It talks about frequency of pregnancy as a function of age, etc.,

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

There was a clip that was cut in which I was describing cumulative probability. And by the way, we've published cumulative probability histograms in many of my laboratory's papers, including one that was a Nature article in 2018. So we run these all the time. And yes, I know the difference between independent and cumulative probability. I do. The way the clip was cut...

And what I stated, unfortunately, combined to a pretty great gaffe, where I said, you're just adding percentages, 20 to 120 to 120%. And then I made a kind of, unfortunately, my humor isn't always so good. And I made a joke. I said, 120%, but that's a different thing altogether. What I should have said was,

That's impossible, you know, and here's how it actually works. But then it continues where I then describe the cumulative probability histogram for successful pregnancy. But somewhere in the early portion, I misstated something, right? I made a math error.

which implied I didn't understand the difference between independent and cumulative probability, which I do. And it got picked up and run and people had a really good laugh with that one at my expense. And so what I did in response to it was rather than just say everything I just said now, I said, I just came out online and said, "Hey folks, in an episode dated this on fertility, I made a math error. Here's the formula for cumulative probability.

successful pregnancy at that age, here's the graph, here's the, you know, and I offered it as a teaching moment in two ways. One, for people to understand cumulative probability. It was sort of interesting too, a number of people that had come out critiquing the GAF, also like Bology and folks came out pointing out that they didn't understand cumulative probability. So there was a lot of posturing, you know, the dog pile, oftentimes people are quick to dog pile, they didn't understand, but a lot of people did understand, some smart people out there, obviously.

I called my dad and he was just laughing. He goes, oh, this is good. This is like the old school way of hammering academics. But the point being, there's a teaching moment.

gave me an opportunity to say, hey, I made a mistake. I also made a mistake in another podcast where I did a micron to millimeter conversion or centimeter conversion. And we always correct these in the show note captions. We correct them in the audio now. Unfortunately, on YouTube, it's harder to correct. You can't go and edit in segments. We put in the captions. But

That was the one teaching moment. If you make a mistake, it's substantive and relate to data. You apologize and correct the mistake. Use the teaching moment. The other one was to say, hey, you know, in all the thousands of hours of content we've put out, I'm sure I've made some small errors. I think I once said serotonin when I meant dopamine. And, you know, you're going, you're riffing. And

It's a reminder to be careful, to edit, double check, but the internet usually edits for us. And then we go make corrections, but it didn't feel good at first, but ultimately, you know, I can laugh at myself about it. Long ago at Berkeley, when I was TAing my first class, it was a biopsychology class, it must be 1998 or 1999, I was drawing the pituitary

gland, which has an anterior and a posterior lobe, actually there's a medial lobe too. I had five, 600 students in that lecture hall. And I drew, it was chalkboard, and I drew the two lobes of the pituitary. And I said, my back was to the audience. I said, you know, and so they just sort of hang there and everyone just erupted in laughter because it looked like a scrotum with two testicles. And I remember thinking like, oh my God.

I don't think I can turn around. I can face this. And I'm like, oh, I got to turn around sooner or later. So I turned around and we just all had a big laugh together. It was embarrassing. I'll tell you one thing though. They never forgot about the two lobes of the pituitary. Yeah. And you haven't forgotten about that either. Right. There's a high salience for these kinds of things. And it also was kind of fun to see

How excited people get to see people trip. It's like an elite sprinter trips and does something stupid, like runs the opposite direction out of the blocks or something like that. I recall at one World Cup match years ago, a guy scored against his own team. I think they killed the guy. Do you remember that? Some South American or Central American team. And they killed the guy. But yeah, let's look it up. I just said World Cup. Yeah, he was gunned down.

Andres Escobar. Yeah. Scored against his own team in 1994 World Cup in the United States. Just 27 years old, playing for the Columbia national team. Yeah. Last name Escobar. That's a good name. I think it would protect you. Listen, you know, so there are some gaffes that get people killed, right? So, you know,

How forgiving are we for online mistakes? You know, it's the nature of the mistakes. People were quite gracious about the gaffe and some weren't. And, you know, it's interesting that we as, you know, public health science educators, you know, we'll do long podcasts sometimes and you need to be really careful. What's great is AI allows you to check these things now more readily. So that's cool. And

There are ways that it's now going to be more self-correcting. I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of errors out there on the internet and people are finding them and it's cool. Like things are getting cleaned up. Yeah, but mistakes nevertheless will happen. Are you, do you feel the pressure not making mistakes? Sure. I mean, you know, I try and get things right to the best of, you know, to the best of my ability. I check with experts. It's kind of interesting when people really don't like something that was said in a podcast.

A lot of times I chuckle because I'm, you know, at Stanford we have some amazing scientists, but I talk to them else, people elsewhere. And it's always interesting to me how, you know, I'll get divergent information and then I'll find the overlap in the Venn diagram. And I have this like question, do I just stay with the overlap in the Venn diagram? Like I did an episode on oral health. I didn't know this until I researched that episode, but I,

Oral health is critically related to heart health and brain health. There's a bacteria that causes cavities, streptococcus, you know, that can make its way into other parts of the body through the mouth that can cause serious issues. There's the idea that some forms of dementia, some forms of heart disease start in the mouth, basically. I talked to no fewer than four dentists, dental experts, and there was a lot of convergence. I also learned that

Teeth can demineralize. That's the formation of cavities. They can also remineralize. As long as the cavity isn't too deep, it can actually fill itself back in, especially if you provide the right substrates for it. That saliva is this incredible fluid that has all this capacity to remineralize teeth, provided the milieu is right. Things like

alcohol-based mouthwashes, killing off some of the critical things you need. It was fascinating. And I put out that episode thinking, oh, I'm not a dentist. I'm not an oral health episode, but I talked to a pediatric dentist. There's a terrific one, Dr. Downscore Stacy, S-T-A-C-I on Instagram, does great content. Talked to some others. And then I just waited for the attack. I was like, here we go. And it didn't come.

And dentists were thanking me. I was like, whoa. You know, that's a rare thing. More often than not, if I do an episode about, say, psilocybin or MDMA, you get some people liking it. Or ADHD and the drugs for ADHD. We did a whole episode on the Ritalin, Vyvanse, Adderall stuff. You get people saying, thank you. You know, I prescribed this to my kid and it really helps. But they're private about the fact that they do it because they get so much attack from other people.

So I like to find the center of mass, report that, try and make it as clear as possible, and then I know that there's some stuff where I'm gonna catch shit. What's frustrating for me is when like,

I see claims that I'm like against fluoridization of water, which I'm not, right? Like we talked about the benefits of fluoride. It builds hyper strong bonds within the teeth. I went and looked at some of the, literally the crystal structure, excuse me, not the crystal structure, but essentially the like micron and submicron structure of teeth is incredible and where fluoride can get in there and form these super strong bonds.

And you can also form them with things like hydroxyapatite. And why is there fluoride in water? Well, it's the best. Okay, you say some things that are interesting, but then somehow it gets turned into like you're against fluoridization, which I'm not. Or I've been accused of being against sunscreen. I wear mineral-based sunscreen on my face.

I don't want to get skin cancer, or I use a physical barrier. There is a cohort of people out there that think that all sunscreens are bad. I'm not one of them. I'm not what's called a sunscreen truther. But then you get attacked for like, so we're talking about there are certain sunscreens that are problematic. So what, and Rhonda Patrick's now starting to get vocal about this. And so there are certain topics it's interesting for which you have to listen to

carefully to what somebody is saying, but there's a lumping as opposed to splitting of what health educators say. And so it just seems like, like with politics, there's this urgency to just put people into a camp of expert versus renegade or something. And it's not like that. It's just not like that. So the short answer is I really strive, really strive to get things right. But I know that I'm going to piss certain people off. And you've taught me

And Joe's taught me and other podcasters have taught me that if you worry too much about it, then you aren't gonna get the newest information out there. Like peptides, there's very little human data unless you're talking about Vilisi or the stuff in the alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone stuff, which are prescribed for female libido to enhance female libido, or Sirmirelin, which is for certain growth hormone deficiencies. With rare exception, there's very little human data.

But people are still super interested and a lot of people are taking and doing these things. So you want to get the information out. - Do you try to not just look at the science, but research what the communities are talking, what the various communities are talking about? Like maybe research what the conspiracy theorists are talking about, just so you know

all the armies that are going to be attacking your castle. - Yes, so like for instance, there's a community of people online that believe that like if you consume seed oils or something that like you're setting up your skin for sunburn and if you don't, you know, like there's all these like theories. But I like to, so I like to know what the theories are. I like to know what the extremes are. But I also like to know what the standard conversation is. But there's generally more agreement than disagreement. I think where,

you know, I've been kind of bullish actually as, you know, or like supplements, like people go, oh, supplements. Well, there's food supplements, like a protein powder, which is different than a vitamin. And then they are compounds. There are compounds that have real benefit, but people get very nervous about the fact that they're not regulated, but some of them are vetted with, for potency and for safety with more rigor than others, you know? And it's interesting to see

how people who take care of themselves and put a lot of work into that are often attacked. That's been interesting. Also, one of the most controversial topics nowadays is Ozempic, Monjaro. I'm very middle of the road on this. I don't understand why the...

quote unquote health wellness community is so against these things. I also don't understand why they have to be looked at as the only route. For some people, they've really helped them lose weight. And yes, there can be some muscle loss and other lean body loss, but that can be offset with resistance training. They've helped a lot of people. And other people are like, no, this stuff is terrible. I think the most interesting thing about Ozempic-Monjaro is that they are GLP-1, they're in the GLP-1 pathway, glucagon-like peptide-1 pathway.

And it was discovered in Gila monsters, which is a, uh, lizard basically. And someone, the, now the, now the entomologist will dive on me. It's a big, big lizard looking thing that doesn't eat very often. And they figured out that there's this peptide that allows it to curb its own appetite and

at the level of the brain and the gut. And it has a lot of homology to sequence homology to what we now call GLP-1. So I love anytime there's animal biology links to cool human biology links to a drug that's powerful that can help people with obesity and type two diabetes. And there's evidence that can even curb some addictions. Those are newer data. But

But I don't see it as either or. In fact, I've been a little bit disappointed at the way that the, whatever you want to call it, health wellness biohacking community has like slammed on Ozempic Monjaro. It's like, they're like, just get out and run. Listen, there are people who are carrying substantial amounts of weight that running could injure them. They get on these drugs and they can improve. And then hopefully they're also doing resistance training and eating better. And then, you know, you're bringing all the elements together. Okay.

Well, why do you think the criticism is happening? Is it that Ozempic became super popular so people are misusing it or that kind of thing? No, I think what it is is that people...

think if it's a pharmaceutical, it's bad. And then, or if it's a supplement, it's bad depending on which camp they're in. And wouldn't it be wonderful to kind of like fill in the gap between this divide? You know, what I would like to see in politics and in health is neither right nor left, but what we can just call a league of reasonable people that looks at things on an issue by issue basis

and fills in the center. Because I think most people are in the, are, I don't want to say center in a political way, but I think most people are reasonable. They want to be reasonable, but that's not what sells clicks. That's not what, that's not what drives interest.

But I'm a very, like, I look at issue by issue, person by person. I don't like in-group, out-group stuff. I never have. I've got friends from all walks of life. I said this on other podcasts and it always sounds like a political statement, but like the push towards like, you know, polarization is, it's so frustrating. If there's one thing that's discouraging to me as I get older each year, I'm like, wow, are we ever going to get out of this? Like polarization. Yeah.

Speaking of which, how are you going to vote for the presidential election? I'm still trying to figure out how to interview the people involved and do it well. What do you think the role of podcasts is going to be in this year's election? I would love long form conversations to happen with the candidates. I think it's going to be huge. I would love Trump to go on Rogan. I'm embarrassed to say this, but I would love to

I honestly would love to see Joe Biden go on Joe Rogan also. - I would imagine that both would go on, but separately. - Separately, I think it's, I think a debate, Joe does debates, but I think Joe at his best is one-on-one conversation, really intimate. I just wish that Joe Biden would actually do long-form conversations. - I thought he had done a, it was me, I think it was on Jay Shetty's podcast. - He did Jay Shetty, he did a few, but when I mean long-form, I mean,

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

political type of uh nbc cnn type of interview you get a set of questions and you don't get to really feel the human expose the human to the light in it the full we talked about the shadow the good the bad and the ugly so i think there's something magical about two three four hours but it doesn't have to be that long but it has to have that feeling to it

where there's not people standing around and everybody's nervous and you're going to be strictly sticking to the question-answer type of feel, but just shooting shit, which Rogan is the best by far in the world at that. I don't think people really appreciate how skilled he is at what he does. And the number, I mean, the three or four podcasts per week plus the UFC announcing plus...

comedy tours in stadiums plus doing comedy shows in the middle of the week plus a husband and a father and a friend in jiu-jitsu. The guy's got superhuman levels of output. I agree that long-form conversation is a whole other business, and I think that people want and deserve to know the people that are running for office in a different way and to really get to know them

Well, listen, you know, I guess you, I mean, is it clear that he's going to do jail time or maybe he gets away with a fine? No, I don't think. Because I was going to say, I mean, does that mean you're going to be podcasting from jail? In prison, yeah. We're going to, in fact, I'm going to figure out how to commit a crime so I can get in prison. Please don't. Please don't. Well, that's, I'm sure they have visitors. Right. That just doesn't feel an authentic way to get the interview. But yeah, I understand. Yeah.

you wouldn't be able to wear that suit. You'd be wearing a different suit. That's true. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. And you do, I'm not just saying this because you're my friend, but you would do a marvelous job. I think you should sit down with all of them separately to keep it civil and see what happens. Here's one thing that I found really interesting in this whole political landscape. When I'm in Los Angeles, I often get invited to these like

they're not dinners, but gatherings where, you know, a local, you know, bunch of podcasters will come together, but a lot of people from the entertainment industry, big agencies, big tech, like big, big tech. Many of the people have been on this podcast and they'll host a discussion or a debate. And what you find if you look around the room and you talk to people is that about half the people in the room

are very left-leaning and very outspoken about that. And they'll tell you exactly who they want to see win the presidential race. And the other half will tell you that they're for the other side. A lot of people that...

people assume are on one side of the aisle or the other are in the exact opposite side. Now, some people are very open about who they're for, but it's been very interesting to see how when you get people one-on-one, they're like telling you they want X candidate to win or Y candidate to win. And sometimes I'm like, really? I can't believe it. Like, you? I'm like, yep. And so it's what people think about people's political leanings is often

exactly wrong. And that's been eye-opening for me. And I've seen that in university campuses too. And so it's going to be really, really interesting to see what happens in November. In addition to that, as you said, most people are close to the center, despite what Twitter makes it seem like. Most people, whether they're center left or center right, they're kind of close to the center. Yeah. I mean, here's the, to me, the most interesting question. Who is going to be the next big candidate in years to come?

Like, who's that going to be right now? I don't, I don't, I don't see or know of that person. Who's it going to be? Yeah. The young promising candidates. We're not seeing them. We're not seeing like who, another way to ask that question, who would want to be? Well, that's the issue, right? You know, it, who wants to live in this 12 hour news cycle where you're just trying to, you know, dunk on the other team so that nobody notices like that. You're the shit that you fucked up.

That's not only not fun or interesting, it also is just like, it's gotta be psychosis-inducing at some point. And I think that, God willing, we're gonna, some young guy or woman is on this and refuses to back down and was just determined to be president and will make it happen. But I don't even know who the president

viable candidates are. Maybe you, Lex. You know? We should ask Sagar. Sagar would know. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe Sagar himself. Sagar's show is awesome. Yeah, it is. He and Crystal do a great thing. He's incredible. Especially since they have somewhat divergent opinions on things. Yeah. That's what makes it so cool. He's great. He looks great in a suit. Looks real sexy. He's taking real good care of himself. I think he's getting married soon. Congratulations, Sagar. Forgive me for not remembering your future wife's name. He won my heart by giving me...

a biography of Hitler as a present. - That's what he gave you? - Yeah. - I gave you a hatchet with a poem inscribed. - That just shows the fundamental difference between the two. - With a poem inscribed in it, which was pretty damn good. I realize everything we bring up on the screen is like really depressing, like the soccer player getting killed.

Can we bring up something happy? Sure. Let's go to Nature's Metal Instagram. Those are pretty intense. We actually did a collaborative post on a shark thing. Really? Yeah. What kind of shark thing? So to generate the fear VR stimulus for my lab, in 2016, we went down to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico. Me and a guy named Michael Muller, who's a very famous portrait photographer, but also takes photos of sharks.

And we used 360 video to build VR of great white sharks, brought it back to the lab. We published that study in Current Biology. In 2017, went back down there, and that was the year that I exited the cage.

You lower the cage with a crane. And that year I exited the cage. I had a whole mess with an air failure the day before. I was breathing from a hookah line while in the cage. I had no scuba on. Divers were out. The thing got boa constricted up and I had an air failure and I had to actually share air and it was a whole mess. Story for another time. But the next day, because I didn't want to get PTSD and it was pretty scary, the next day I cage exited with some other divers. And it turns out with these great white sharks...

In Guadalupe, the water's very clear and you can swim toward them and then they'll veer off you if you swim toward them. Otherwise, they see you as prey. Well, in the evening, you've brought all the cages up and you're hopefully all alive. And we were hanging out fishing for tuna. We had one of the crew on board had a line in the water and was fishing for tuna for dinner. And a shark took the tuna off the line. Mm-hmm.

And it's a very dramatic take. And you can see the just absolute size of these great white sharks. The waters there are filled with them. That's the one. So this video, just the Neuralink link, was shot by Matt McDougall, who is the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. There it is. Now, believe it or not, it looks like it missed, like it didn't get the fish. It actually just cut that thing like a bandsaw. So I'm up on the deck with Matt McDougall.

Yeah. And so when you look at it from the side, you really get a sense of the girth of this freaking thing. So as it comes up, if you look at the size of that thing, and they move through the water with such speed. Just a couple, so when you're in the cage and the cage is lowered down below the surface,

They're going around. You're not allowed to chum the water there. Some people do it. But, and then when you KJ exit, they're like, well, what are you doing out here? And then, you know, they, you swim toward them, they veer off. But what's interesting is that if you look at how they move through the water, all it takes for one of these great white sharks, when it sees a tuna or something it wants to eat is like two flicks of the tail and becomes like a missile. It's just unbelievable economy of effort.

And Ocean Ramsey, who is, in my opinion, the greatest of all cage exit shark divers, this woman who dove with enormous great white sharks, she really understands their behavior when they're aggressive, when they're not going to be aggressive. She and her husband, Juan, I believe his name is, they understand how the tiger sharks differ from the great white sharks. We were down there basically...

like not understanding any of this. We never should have been there. And actually the air failure the day before plus cage exiting the next day, I told myself after coming up from the cage exit, that's it. I'm no longer taking risks with my life. I want to live. Got back across the border. Um, a couple of days later, I was like, that's it. I don't take risks with my life any longer, but yeah, McDougal, Matt McDougal shot that video. And then it went quote unquote viral through, uh, nature's metal. We passed them that video. I actually, uh,

I saw a video where an instructor was explaining how to behave with a shark in the water and that you don't want to be swimming away because then you're acting like a prey. That's right. And then you want to be acting like a predator by looking at it and swimming towards it. Right towards them and they'll bank off. Now, if you don't see them, they're ambush predators. You're swimming in the surface. And apparently if they get close, you should just guide them away by grabbing them and moving them away. Some people will actually roll them.

But if they're coming in full speed, you're not going to roll the shark. But here we are back to dark stuff again. I like the shark attack map and the shark attack map shows that, you know, Northern California, there were a couple actually guys head got taken off.

Um, he was swimming north of San Francisco. There's been a couple of Northern, uh, California. That was really tragic, but most of them are in Florida and Australia, Florida. So the Surfrider foundation shark attack map, there it is. They have a great map. There you go. So they look like they have all the scars on them. So if you, if you zoom in on, um,

i mean look at this if you go to north america um look at skulls there's there's uh yeah where they're where they're deadly attacks um but in yeah northern california sadly this is really tragic if you zoom in on this one um i read about this uh this guy if you click the link 50 year old male he was in chest high water this is just tragic i feel so sad for him and his family you know he's just um three members of the party chose to go in he was you know

was in his chest high water, 25 to 50 yards from shore, great, breached the water, seized his head and that was it. So it does happen, it's very infrequent. If you don't go in the ocean, there's a very, very, very low probability. - But if it doesn't happen,

Six times in a row. 120% chance. Yeah. Who do you think wins? A saltwater crocodile or a shark? Okay. I do not like saltwater crocodiles. They scare me to no end. Muller, Michael Muller, who dove all over the world, he sent me a picture of him diving with a

saltwater crocs in Cuba. It was a smaller one, but goodness gracious. Have you seen the size of some of those saltwater crocs? Yeah. Um, I'm thinking that I'm thinking that the sharks are so agile. They're amazing. They've head cammed one or body cammed one, um, moving through the kelp bed. Um, and you look and it's just, they're so agile moving through the water and it's looking up at the surface. Like the camera's looking at the surface and you just realize if you're out there, um, you're not,

and you're swimming, and you get hit by a shark, you're not going to... I was going to talk shit and say that a salty has way more bite force, but according to the internet, recently data indicates that the shark has a stronger bite. So I was assuming that a crocodile would have a stronger bite force, and therefore agility doesn't matter, but apparently a shark... Yeah, and turning one of those big salties is probably not that... You know, turning around, it's like a battleship. I mean, those sharks are unbelievable. They can hit from all sorts... Oh, and they...

They do this thing, we saw this, you're out of the cage or in the cage, and you'll look at one, and you'll see its eye kind of like looking at you. They can't really foveate, but they'll look at you. And you're tracking it, and then you'll look down, and you'll realize that one's coming at you. They're ambush predators. They're working together. It's fascinating. I like how you know...

that they can't foveate. You're already considering the vision system there. It's a very primitive vision system. Very primitive, eyes on the side of the head. Their vision is decent enough. They're mostly, obviously, sensing things with their electro-sensing in the water, but also olfaction. Yeah, I spend far too much time thinking about and learning about the visual systems of different animals. If you get me going on this, we'll be here all night. See, this is why I have the smuggler dog, too. I saw this in a store, and I got it.

Because this is from a shark. Goodness. Yeah. I can't say I ever saw one with teeth this big, but it's beautiful. Imagine that. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's probably, you know, probably your blood pressure just goes and you don't feel a thing. Yeah. It's not good. Before we went down for the cage exit, a guy in our crew, Pat Doss, who's a very experienced diver, asked one of the South African divers, so, you know, like, what's the contingency plan if, like, somebody catches a bite? And they were like...

He was like every man for himself. And they're like, basically saying like, if somebody catches a bite, like that's it. You know? Anyway, I thought we were going to bring up something happy. Oh, that is happy. Well, we, nature is beautiful. Yeah. Nature is beautiful. We lived. But you know, there are, there are happy things that you brought up. Nature is metal. This, this is the difference between Russian Americans and Americans is like, maybe this is actually a good time to bring up your ayahuasca journey. I've never done ayahuasca.

But I'm curious about it. I'm also curious about Ibogaine, Iboga. But you told me that you did ayahuasca and...

That for you, it wasn't the dark, scary ride that it is for everybody else. Yeah, it was an incredible experience for me. I did it twice, actually. And have you done high-dose psilocybin? Never, no. I just did small-dose psilocybin a couple times. So I was nervous about it. I was very scared. Yeah, understandably so. I've done high-dose psilocybin. It's terrifying, but I've always gotten something very useful out of it. So, I mean, I was nervous about whatever demons might hide in the shadow, in the Jungian shadow, right?

I was nervous. But I think it turns out, I don't know what the lesson is to draw from that, but my experience was- Be born Russian. It must be the Russian thing. I mean, there's also something to the jungle. It strips away all the bullshit of life and you're just there. I forgot the outside civilization exists. I forgot time because when you don't have your phone-

You don't have meetings or calls or whatever. You lose the sense of time. The sun comes up, the sun comes down. That's the fundamental biological timer. You know, every mammalian species has a short wavelength. So you think like blue UV type, but like absorbing cone and a longer wavelength absorbing cone. And it does this interesting subtraction to designate when it's morning and evening, because when the sun is low in the sky, you've got short wavelength and long wavelength light.

Like when you look at a sunrise, it's got blues and yellows, orange and yellows. You look in the evening, reds, orange, and blues. And in the middle of the day, it's like full spectrum light. Now, it's always full spectrum light, but because of some atmospheric conditions,

elements and because of the low solar angle you like that difference between the the different wavelengths of light is is the fundamental signal that the neurons in your eye pay attention to and signal to your circadian timekeeping mechanism like we are at the core of our brain and the superchiasmatic nucleus we are we are like wired to be entrained to the rising and setting of the sun like that's the biological timer which makes perfect sense because you know obviously as the planets

as the planets spin and revolve. - I also wonder how that is affected by, you know, in the rainforest, the sun is not visible often, so you're under the cover of the trees. So maybe that affects-- - Well, there are social rhythms, there are feeding rhythms. Sometimes, in terms of some species will signal the timing of activity of other species, and

But yeah, getting out from the canopy is critical. Of course, even under the canopy during the daytime, there's far more photons than at night. You know, this is always what I'm telling people to get sunlight in their eyes in the morning and in the evening. People say, there's no light, no sunlight this time of year. I'm like, go outside on a really overcast day. It's far brighter than it is at night, right? So there's still lots of sunlight, even if you can't see the sun as an object. But I love time perception shifts, right?

And you mentioned that in the jungle, it's linked to the rising and setting of the sun. You also mentioned that on ayahuasca, you zoomed out from the earth. These are like, to me, the most interesting aspects of having a human brain as opposed to another brain. Of course, I've only ever had a human brain, but which is that you can consciously set your time domain window. Like we can be focused here, we can be focused on all of Austin, or we can be focused on the entire planet. You can make those choices consciously.

But in the time domain, it's hard. Like different activities bring us into fine slicing or more broad bending of time, depending on what we're doing.

programming or exercising or researching or podcasting, but just how unbelievably fluid the human brain is in terms of the aperture of the time-space window of our cognition and of our experience. And I feel like this is perhaps one of the more valuable tools that we have access to that we don't really leverage as much as we should, which is when things are really hard, you

need to zoom out and see it as one element within your whole lifespan and that there's more to come. You know, I mean, people commit suicide because they can't see beyond the time domain they're in or they think it's going to go on forever. When we're happy, we rarely think this is going to last forever, which is an interesting contrast in its own right. But I think that

psychedelics, while I have very little experience with them, I have some, and it sounds like they're just a very interesting window into the different apertures. Well, how to surf that wave is probably a skill. One of the things I was prepared for, and I think it's important, is not to resist. I think

I understand what it means to resist a thing, a powerful wave, and it's not going to be good, so you have to be able to surf it. So I was ready for that, to relax through it. And maybe because I'm quite good at that from,

knowing how to relax in all kinds of disciplines, playing piano and guitar when I was super young, and then through jiu-jitsu, knowing the value of relaxation and through all kinds of sports, should be able to relax the body fully and just accept whatever happens to you. That process is probably why it was a very positive experience for me.

- Do you have any interest in iboga? I'm very interested in Ibogaine Iboga. There's a colleague of mine and researcher at Stanford, Nolan Williams, who's been doing some transcranial magnetic stimulation and brain imaging on people who have taken Ibogaine. Ibogaine,

as I understand it, gives a 22-hour psychedelic journey where no hallucinations with eyes open, but you close your eyes and you get a very high resolution image of actual events that happened in your life, but then you have agency within those movies. I think you have to be of healthy heart to be able to do it. I think you have to be on a heart rate monitor. It's not trivial. It's not like these other psychedelics. But there's a wonderful group called Veteran Solutions

um, that has used Iboga combined with, um, some other psychedelics, um, in the veterans community to, to great success for things like PTSD. And it's a group I've, I've really tried to support in any way that I can mainly by being vocal about the great work they're doing. But, um, you hear incredible stories of people who are just like

near cratered in their life or zombied by PTSD and other things post-war, get back a lightness or achieve a lightness and a clarity that they didn't feel they had. So I'm very curious about these compounds. The state of Kentucky, we should check this, but I believe has taken money from the opioid crisis settlement for Ibogaine research.

So this is like no longer, yes, if you look here, let's see, did they do it? Oh no. - No. - Oh no, they backed away. - Kentucky backs away from the plan to fund opioid treatment research. - They were going to use the money

to treat opioid, now officials are backing off. 50 billion, what, is on its way over the coming years. $50 billion. - $50 billion is on its way to state and local government over the coming years. The pool of funding comes from multiple legal statements with pharmaceutical companies that profited from manufacturing or selling opioid painkillers. - Kentucky has some of the highest number of deaths from the opioid. So they were going to do psychedelic research with Ibogaine, supporting research on illegal folks

- Psychedelic drug called Abigan. Well, I guess they backed away from it. Well, sooner or later we'll get some happy news up on the internet during this episode. - I don't know what you're talking about. The shark and the crocodile fighting. - Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. And you survived the jungle. - Well, that's the thing. - I was writing to you on WhatsApp multiple times 'cause I was gonna put it on the internet, "Are you okay?" And if you're like, "Alive," and then I was gonna just like put it to Twitter, just like, "He's alive." But then of course you're far too classy for that, so you just came back alive.

Well, jungle or not, one of the lessons is also, you know, when you hear the call for adventure, just fucking do it. I was going to ask you, it's kind of a silly question, but like give me a small fraction of things on your bucket list. Bucket list. Yeah. Go to Mars. Yeah. What's the status of that?

I don't know. I'm being patient about the whole thing. Red Planet ran that cartoon of you guys going to Mars. That was pretty funny. That's true. That was pretty funny. The one with Goggins is already up there. Yeah. That's a funny one. Probably also true. I would love to die on Mars. I just love humanity reaching onto the stars and doing this bold adventure and taking big risks and exploring. I love exploration.

What about seeing different animal species? I'm a huge fan of this guy, Joel Sartori, where he has this photo arc project where he takes portraits of all these different animals. If people aren't already following him on Instagram, he's doing some really important work. This guy's Instagram is...

Amazing. Like portraits of animals. Well, look at these portraits. The amount of, I don't want to say personality because we don't want to project anything onto them, but like the eyes. And he'll occasionally put them moving like this. There's a little owl. I delight in things like this. I've got some content coming on animals and animal neuroscience and eyes. Dogs or all kinds? All animals. And I'm very interested in...

kids content that, that incorporates animals. So we have some things brewing there. Like I could look at this kind of stuff all day long. Look at that bat. Like bats, people think about bats as kind of like little flickering, a little annoying disease carrying things. But look how beautiful that little sucker is. How's your podcast with the cookie monster coming? Oh yeah. We've been in discussions with cookie. The, um,

- I can't say too much about that, but Cookie Monster embodies dopamine, right? Cookie Monster wants cookie, right? Wants cookie right now. It was that one tweet, "Cookie Monster, I bounce because cookies come from all directions." It's just embodying the desire for something, which is an incredible aspect of ourselves. The other one is, do you remember a little while ago, Elmo put out a tweet, "Hey, how's everyone doing out there?" And it went viral.

And, you know, the Surgeon General of the United States had been talking about the loneliness crisis. He came on the podcast. And, you know, a lot of people have been talking about problems with loneliness, mental health issues with loneliness. Elmo puts out a tweet, hey, how's everyone doing out there? And

everyone gravitates toward it you know so that the different sesame street characters really embody the different that kind of aspects of self through very like narrow neural circuit perspective um you know snuffleupagus is shy and um oscar the grouch grouchy right and the count one or two the archetypes of yeah the archetypes is very young and once again yeah and i think that um you

You know, the creators of Sesame Street clearly either understand that or it's an unconscious genius to that. So, yeah, there are some things brewing on conversations with Sesame Street characters. It's not – I know you'd like to talk to Vladimir Putin. I'd like to talk to Cookie Monster. It illustrates the differences in our, like –

like a sophistication or something. It illustrates a lot. Yeah, it illustrates a lot. But yeah, I also, I love animation. So I'm not anime. That's not my thing, but animation. So I'm very interested in the use of animation to get science content across. So there are a bunch of things brewing. But anyway, I delight in Sartori's work and there's a conservation aspect to it as well. But I think that...

Mostly want to thank you for finally putting up something where something's not being killed or some sad outcome. These are all really positive. They're really cool. And every once in a while, look at that mountain lion. But I also like to look at these and some of them remind me of certain people.

So let's just scroll through. For instance, I think when we don't try and process it too much. So like, okay, look at this cat, this civic cat. Amazing. I feel like this is like someone I met once as a young kid. Curiosity and a playfulness. Carnivore. Carnivore, frontalized eyes. Found in forced areas. Right. So then you go down, you know, it's like,

This beautiful fish. Neon pink. Right. It reminds you of some of the influencers you see on Instagram, right? Except this one's natural. Just kidding. Let's see. No filter. No filter. Yeah. Let's see. I feel like... Bears. I'm a big fan of bears. Yeah, bears are beautiful. This one kind of reminds me of you a little bit. There's like a stoic nature to it, a curiosity. So you can kind of feel like the essence of animals. You don't even have to do psychedelics to get there.

- Oh, look at that, he's like the behind the scenes of how it's actually-- - Yeah, and then there's-- - Wow. - Yeah. - Yeah, in the jungle, the diversity of life was also stark. From a scientific perspective, just the fact that most of those species are not identified was fascinating. - Right. - It was like a little, every little insect is a kind of discovery.

Right. I mean, one of the reasons I love New York City so much, despite its problems at times, is that everywhere you look, there's life. It's like a tropical reef. If you've ever done scuba diving or snorkeling, you look on a tropical reef and it's like, there's some little crab working on something. And like everywhere you look, there's life. You know, in the Bay Area, if you go scuba diving or snorkeling, it's like a kelp bed. You know, the Bay Area is like a kelp bed. Every once in a while, some big fish goes by. It's like a big IPO. Yeah.

But like most of the time, not a whole lot happens. Actually, the Bay Area, it's interesting as I've been going back there more and more recently, there are really cool little subcultures starting to pop up again. Nice. Yeah.

There's incredible skateboarding. The GX1000 guys are these guys that bomb down hills. They're nuts. Like they're just going like. So just speed, not tricks. You got to see GX1000. These guys going down hills in San Francisco. They are wild. And occasionally, unfortunately, occasionally someone will get hit by a car. But GX1000, look into intersections. They have spotters. You can see someone there.

Oh, I see. There's a, like into traffic. Yeah. Into traffic. So in San Francisco. Yeah. This is crazy. Like this is unbelievable. And, and they're, they're just wild. But in any case. What's on your bucket list that you haven't done? Well, I'm working on a book. So I'm actually going to head to a cabin for a couple of weeks and write, which I've never done. People talk about doing this, but I'm going to do that.

That's I'm excited for that. Just the mental space of really dropping into writing like Jack Nicholson, the shining cabin. Let's hope not. Okay. Let's hope not. You know, before, I mean, I only started doing public facing anything for posting on Instagram in 2019, but I used to head up to Walla Walla on the Northern coast of California. Um, sometimes by myself, um, to a little cabin there and spend a weekend by myself and just

read and write papers and things like that. I used to do that all the time. I miss that. So some of that, I'm trying to spend a bit more time with my relatives in Argentina, relatives on the East Coast. See my parents more. They're in good health, thankfully. I want to get married and have a family. That's an important priority. I'm putting a lot of work in there. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, yeah. I'm putting a lot of work into the runway on that. What's your advice for

for people about that or give advice to yourself about how to find love in this world, how to find, how to build a family and get there. And then I'll listen to it someday and see if I hit the marks. Yeah. Well, obviously pick the right partner, but also like do the work on yourself. Know, know yourself that the Oracle know thyself. And I think, listen, I have a friend, he's a new friend, but he's a friend who I met and,

for a meal. He's a very, very well-known actor overseas and his stuff has made it over here. And we become friends and we went to lunch and we were talking about work and being public facing and all this kind of thing. And then I said, you have kids, right? And he says, he has four kids. I was like, oh yeah, you know, I see your posts with the kids. You seem really happy. And he said, he just looked at me, leaned in and he said, it's the best gift you'll ever give yourself.

And he also said, and pick your partner, the mother of your kids very carefully. So, you know, that's good advice coming from excellent advice coming from somebody who's, you know, very successful in work and family. So that's the only thing I can pass along. We hear this from friends of ours as well, but, um, kids are amazing and family's amazing. And, um,

You know, that's the different people, all these people who want to like be immortal and like live to be 200 or something. You know, there's also the old fashioned way of, you know, having children that live on and evolve a new legacy, but they have, you know, half your DNA. So that's exciting. Yeah, I think you make an amazing dad. Thank you. It seems like a fun thing. And, you know, I've also gotten advice from friends who are super high performing and have a lot of kids. They'll say, just don't overthink it.

- Right, start having kids. Let's go. - Right, well the chaos of kids is kind of the, like it can either bury you or it can give you energy. But I grew up in a big pack of boys always doing like wild and crazy things and so that kind of energy is great and if it's not a big pack of wild boys, it's you know, you have daughters and they can be, you know, different form of chaos, sometimes same form of chaos. - How many kids do you think you want? - You know, it's either two or five.

Yeah. Very different dynamics. You're one of two, right? Your brother. Yeah. I mean, I'm very close with my sister. I couldn't imagine having another sibling because there's so much richness there. We talk almost every day. You know, three, four times a week, you know, sometimes just briefly, but we're, we're tight, you know, we're,

really look out for one another. She's an amazing person, like truly an amazing person. And has like raised her daughter in an amazing way. She's like, you know, my niece is like going to head to college in a year or two. And like my sister's done an amazing job. And her dad's done a great job too. They both really put a lot into

the family aspect. - I got a chance to spend time with a really amazing person in Peru, in the Amazon jungle, and he is one of 20 kids. So he's got, it's mostly guys, so it's just a lot of brothers, and I think two sisters. - I just had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, the guy who's talking about the anxious generation, coddling the American mind, he's great. But he was saying that in order to keep kids healthy, they need to not be on social media or have smartphones until they're 16.

I've actually been thinking a lot about getting a bunch of friends onto neighboring properties. You know, everyone talks about this, not creating a commune or anything like that, but I think he, I think Jonathan's right. We were more or less, our brain wiring does best when we raised in small village type environments where kids can forage the whole free range kids idea. And I grew up skateboarding and building forts and dirt clod wars and all that stuff.

it would be so strange to have a childhood without that. Yeah, and I think more and more as we wake up to the negative aspects of digital interaction, we'll put more and more value to in-person interaction. I mean, it's cool to see, for instance, kids in New York City just kind of moving around the city with so much sense of agency. It's really, really cool. The suburbs, like where I grew up,

Like as soon as we could get out, take the seven F bus up to San Francisco and hang out with, you know, wild ones like, you know, while there were dangers, I mean, we couldn't wait to get out of the suburbs. The moment that, you know, forts and dirt clod wars and stuff didn't, didn't cut it. We just like wanted into the city. So I, um, bucket list, I will probably move to a major city, not Los Angeles or San Francisco, um, in the next few years, um, New York city, um,

- Those are all such different flavors of experiences. - Yeah, so I'd love to live in New York City for a while. I've always wanted to do that and I will do that. I've always wanted to also have a place in a very rural area. So Colorado and Montana are high on my list right now. And to be able to,

pivot back and forth between the two would be great just for such different experiences. And also I like a very physical life. So the idea of getting up in the sun with the sun in a Montana or Colorado type environment. And I've been doing some, putting some effort towards finding a spot for that. And New York city to me, I know it's got its issues and people say it wasn't what it was. Okay. I get it, but listen, I've never lived there. So for me, it'd be entirely new. And you know,

Schulz seems full of life. There is an energy to that city and he represents that. I mean, there's, and the full diversity of weird that is represented in New York City is great. Yeah, you walk down the street, there's like a person with like a cat on their head and no one gives a shit. Yeah, that's great. San Francisco used to be like that. The joke was like,

you have to be naked and on fire in San Francisco before someone takes it. But now it's changed. But again, recently I've noticed that San Francisco, it's not just about the skateboarders. It's there's some community houses of people in tech that are super interesting. There's some community housing of people not in tech that I've learned about him and known people have lived there. And it's, it's cool. Like there's stuff happening. Um,

in these cities that's new and different. I mean, that's what youth is for. They're supposed to evolve things out. - So amidst all that, you still have to get shit done. I've been really obsessed with tracking time recently. Like making sure I have daily activities, I have habits that I'm maintaining.

And I'm very religious about making sure I get shit done. Do you use an app or something like that? No, just Google Sheets. So basically a spreadsheet and I'm tracking daily. And I write scripts that whenever I achieve a goal, it glows green. Yeah. Do you track your workouts and all that kind of stuff too? No. Just the fact that I got the workout done. Yeah. So I just, it's a check mark thing. So I'm really, really big on,

on making sure I do a thing, it doesn't matter how long it is. So I have a rule for myself that I do a set of tasks for at least five minutes every day. And it turns out that many of them I do way longer, but just even just doing it, I have to do it every day. And there's currently 11 of them. And it's just a thing. Like one of them is playing guitar, for example. So do you do that kind of stuff? Do you do like daily habits? Yeah, I do. My...

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

I do this non-sleep depressed yoga nidra thing that I've talked about a bunch. We actually released a few of those tracks as audio tracks on Spotify. 10 minute, 20 minute ones puts me back into a state that feels like sleep and I feel very rested. Actually, Matt Walker and I are going to run a study. He's just submitted the IRB to run a study on NSDR and what it's actually doing to the brain. There's some evidence of increases in dopamine, et cetera, but those are older studies, still cool studies. But so I'll do that, get up, hydrate. And if I've

Got my act together. I punched some caffeine down, like some Matina, some coffee, maybe another Matina and resistance train three days a week, run three days a week and then take one day off. And like to be done by 839. And then I want to get into some real work. I actually have a sticky note on my computer. It's like, just like reminding me how good it feels to accomplish some real work. And then I go into it right now. It's the book writing, researching a podcast and just fight tooth and nail to stay off of

Social media, text message, WhatsApp, YouTube, all that. Get something done. How long can you go? Can you go like three hours, just deep focus? If I hit a groove, yeah, 90 minutes to three hours if I'm really in a groove. For me, I start the day, actually. That's why I'm afraid. I really prize those morning hours. I start with the work. And it's a...

I'm trying to hit the four-hour mark of deep focus. Great. I love it. Then the off-camp. Calming the port. Yeah. I'm really, really big believer. It's often torture, actually. It's really, really difficult. Oh, yeah. The agitation. But I've sat across the table from you a couple years ago when I was out here in Austin doing some work and I was working on stuff. And I noticed you were just like stare at your notebook sometimes, just like pen at the

same position and then you'll get back into it like they're those, "Building that hydraulic pressure and then go."

Yeah, I try and get something done of value. Then the communications start. And talking to my podcast producer, my team is everything. I mean, like the magic potion in the podcast is Rob Moore, right? Who's been in the room with me every single solo. Costello used to be in there with us because that's it. People have asked, journalists have asked, can they sit in? Friends have asked. Nope, just Rob.

And for guest interviews, he's there as well. And I talk to Rob all the time.

all the time. We talk multiple times per day. And, you know, in life, I've made some errors in certain relationship domains in my life in terms of partner choice and things like that. And I certainly don't blame all of it on them, but, you know, I've played my role. But in terms of picking business partners and friends, like, you know, to work with, I mean, Rob's just, it's been bullseyes. And it's just Rob has been amazing. Mike Blayback, our photographer, and the guys I mentioned earlier, like, we just...

communicate as much as we need to, and we pour over every decision like near neuroticism before we put anything out there.

So including like even creative decisions of like topics to cover all that. Yeah. Like a, like a photo for the book jacket the other day, Mike shoots photos then. And then we look at them, we pour over them together. Logo for the perform podcast with Andy Gallop. And then we're launching like, is that the right contour? Mike's the real, he's got the aesthetic thing. Cause he was at DC so long as a portrait photographer. And he's cute with close friends with.

Ken Block, Jim Khanna, like all the car jumping in the city stuff. Like, I mean, Mike is a master. He's a true master of that stuff. And we just pour over every little decision. But even with sponsors, you know, there are dozens of ads now. By the way, that whole Jawserciser thing of me saying, oh, a guy went from a two to a seven. I never said that. That's AI.

Like I would never call a number off somebody, a two to a seven. Are you kidding me? It's crazy. So as AI, if you bought the thing, I'm sorry. Um, but like our sponsors, we list the sponsors that we have and why on our website and like the decision, do we work with this person or not? Do we still like the product? I mean, we've, we've got ways with sponsors because of like changes in the product or change, you know?

Most of the time it's amicable, all good. But you know, like just every detail and that just takes a ton of time and energy. But I try and work mostly on content and my team's constantly trying to keep me out of the other discussions. But I, cause I obsess, but yeah, you have to, you have to have a team of some sort, someone that you can run things by. For sure. But one of the challenges, the larger the team is,

- And I'd like to be involved in a lot of different kinds of stuff, including engineering stuff, robotics work, research. All of those interactions, at least for me, take away from the deep work, the deep focus. Unfortunately, I get drained by social interaction, even with the people I love and really respect and all that kind of stuff. - You're an introvert. - Yeah, like fundamentally an introvert.

To me, it's a trade-off, getting shit done versus collaborating. And I have to choose wisely because without collaboration, without a great team, which I'm fortunate enough to be a part of,

Like you wouldn't get anything really done. But as an individual contributor to get stuff done, like to do the hard work of researching or programming, all that kind of stuff, you need the hours of deep work. I used to spend a lot more time alone. That's on my bucket list, spend a bit more time dropped into work alone. I think social media causes our brain to go the other direction. I try and answer some comments and then get back to work. I'm really, after Go to the Jungle,

appreciate not using the device. I've played with the idea of like spending certainly maybe like one week a month not using social media at all. I used it so after that morning block I'll eat some lunch and I'll usually do something while I'm doing lunch or something and then a bit more work and that real work, deep work and then

Around 2:30, I do a non-sleep deep rest, take a short nap, wake up, boom, maybe a little more caffeine, and then lean into it again. And then I find if you really put in the deep work, two or three bouts per day by about 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., it's over. I was down at Jocko's place not that long ago and in the evening did a sauna session with him and some family members of his and some of their friends.

And it's really cool. They'll all work all day and train all day, and then in the evening they get together and they sauna and cold plunge. I'm really into this whole thing of gathering with other people at a specific time of day. I have a gym at my house, and Tim will come over and train. We've kind of slowed that down in recent months. But I think...

And gathering in groups once a day, being alone for part of the day. It's like very fundamental stuff. We're not saying anything that hasn't been said millions of times before, but how often do people actually do that?

And call the party, you know, like be the person to like bring people together if it's not happening. That's something I've really had to learn, even though I'm an introvert. Like, hey, I'm like gather people together. You came through town the other day and there's a lot of people at the house. It was rad. Actually, I was playing because I was getting a massage when you walked in. I don't sit around getting massages very often, but I was getting one that day. And then everyone came in and the dog came in and like everyone was piled in. It was very sweet.

Again, no devices. But choose wisely the people you gather with. Right, right. And I was close. Thank you for clarifying. I wasn't, which is very weird. Yeah, yeah, the friends you surround yourself with. That's another thing. It's like, I understood that from ayahuasca and from just the experience in the jungle. It's like, just select the people.

Just be careful how you allocate your time. I just saw on somewhere, Conor McGregor has this good line. I wrote it down about loyalty. He said, don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with. That guy's, I mean, he's being on loyalty. All the shit talk, all of that, set that aside.

To me, loyalty is really big. If you invest in certain people in your life and they stick by you and you stick by them, what else is life about? - Yeah, well, hardship will show you who your real friends are, that's for sure.

We're fortunate to have a lot of them. It'll also show you who really has put in the time to try and understand you and understand people, like people are complicated. I love that, so can you read the quote once more? "Don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with." Yeah, so in that way, a hardship is a gift. It shows you. - Definitely, and it makes you stronger. It definitely makes you stronger.

Let's go get some food. Yeah, you're a one meal a day guy. Yeah. I actually ate something earlier, but it was like a protein shake and a couple pieces of biltong. I hope we're eating a steak. I hope so too. I'm full of nicotine and caffeine. Yeah. What do you think? How do you feel? I feel good. Yeah. I was thinking you'd probably like, I only did a half a piece and I won't have more for a little while, but. A little too good. Yeah.

Thank you for talking once again, brother. Yeah. Thanks so much, Lex. It's been a great ride, this podcast thing. And you're the reason I started the podcast. You inspired me to do it. You told me to do it, did it. And you've also been an amazing friend. You showed up in some, some very challenging times and you've shown up for me publicly. You've shown up for me in my home and my life. And, you know, it's an honor to have you as a friend. Thank you. I love you, brother. Love you too.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.