Understanding Stress, Willpower & Discipline - Dr Andrew Huberman (4K)

Dr Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist, Associate Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a podcaster. It has never been so easy and also so difficult to remain healthy and perform at your best. The right tools and insights we all need to avoid pitfalls and maximise our outcomes are thankfully at our fingertips, and today we get to go through some of Dr Huberman's favourites. Expect to learn how breathing can change the shape of your face, what Andrew thinks of the “Huberman Husbands” kink, just how bad vaping actually is for you, how to actually increase your willpower using science, what everyone misunderstands about stress, his opinion on Tom Segura’s transformation, how to be more productive and much more…⁣ Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 20% discount on your Mud/Wtr subscription & freebies at https://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindset #huberman #hubermanlab - 00:00 How Mouth-Breathing Changes Face Shape 08:16 What We Misunderstand About Stress 24:56 People Are Recognising the Need to Focus on Health & Fitness 31:43 How the Mind Improves When the Body Improves 40:49 The Health Risks of Drinking Alcohol 55:18 How Our Screen Use Impacts Eye Health 1:08:07 Reacting to ‘Huberman Husbands’ 1:22:32 Should We Be Concerned About Vaping? 1:33:23 Are Phones Ruining Our Focus? 1:47:49 Why Phone Use Isn’t an Addiction 2:04:52 Strategies to Become More Productive 2:15:04 The Science Behind Procrastination 2:19:58 The Perils of Over-Optimisation 2:30:00 Why Andrew Doesn’t Comment on Current Events 2:51:20 Andrew’s Increase of Popularity & Scrutiny 2:58:28 What’s Next for Andrew? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What were you just teaching me about mouth breathing and how it changes the shape of the face?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  So I arrived carrying a copy of the book Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic. This is not Jaws, The Shark.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  This book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sondra Khan and Paul Ehrlich. And it has an introduction by Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer for Guns, Terms and Steel, and a foreword by the great Robert Sapolsky, also a colleague of mine at Stanford. So four heavy hitters on this book, just a credential at first. This book centers around a couple of core concepts, but the first being that people, and in particular, children, who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing,

• 0:47Speaker 01

  have changes in the structure of the face that, well, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe. It also discusses the chewing of foods as essential to mouth and face development. Sondra Khan is an expert in craniofacial function and structure. And the fact that if your parents and you did things right, you should be able to place your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed. Now, I can't do that. Okay, so when you were teeth closed, tongue on the roof of your mouth, I can, but I still feel the back of my teeth a bit. So, yeah.

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  But the, so that's the second point, that we want to chew hard. Chewing foods is essential to tooth and mouth and face development. These days, many children slurp their food, and many adults slurp their foods. Many adults are eating like babies. And of course, babies, before they develop their mature teeth, and even when they, before they get all of their teeth in, need to, obviously, breast milk and... You know, pudding like foods. Okay. But so that's the second point. So nasal breathing, good mouth breathing, bad for craniofacial development, chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth, great for craniofacial development, oral development, tooth development and tooth health, which by the way are correlated with a number of

• 2:14Speaker 01

  other things like cardiovascular health and metabolic health, very interesting links there. And then the third point is that the, the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia, things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers are the byproduct of poor breathing and let's just say, uh, overconsumption of soft foods in place of hard foods, uh, behavior. And so there's this guy who's from your side of the pond, uh, Mew.

• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  I like him already.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  The Mew method, um, of restoring normal craniofacial development. The book is chock a block full of impressive photos of before and afters, impressive because in some cases you'll see kids that were, um, mouth breathers or were eating a lot of soft foods and then they recovered their behavior, so to speak, and became nose breathers. Of course, we have to mouth breathe when we're exercising really hard or when we're eating or speaking, we're going to mouth breathe. But at rest, we should nasal breathe is the argument and that greatly improves craniofacial, um, aesthetics. And the good news is this stuff is modifiable across the lifespan. And, um, and so the book isn't arguing for anyone to purchase anything. You don't need a jawser sizer. I'm saying that explicitly because they took

• 3:32Speaker 01

  clips of me talking about this and, and productized it and I had nothing to do with that. So hopefully you'll keep this in the episode and they even admitted they were breaking the law and he said, we don't care. We're going to continue to do it. So.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  Sales of salesmen.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now those, those, you know, to, to the credit of, of, um, products for, um, exercising the jaw. Sure, there are muscles of the jaw that can.

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  What you're talking about is.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Aesthetic, but using food to do that.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Eat tough food is if you don't have a sufficiently tough diet, I guess you could replace it. But it's, explain to me the mechanics of how the difference in whether you breathe through your nose or breathe through your mouth, changes the shape of your face and head.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and it goes beyond that. If you breathe through your mouth as opposed to your nose, the, first of all, you bring in less oxygen. Then you would have, so you're limiting, you're effectively putting yourself into a state of apnea, right, which is bad during sleep. And guess what? It's bad during waking states also. You gain less oxygen to your brain, bad. The sinuses, you know, we hear our, my sinuses are clogged or my sinuses, wish I had brought a skull with, with me because one of the most impressive things about a skull, human skull being no exception, is that the sinuses are literally these little tubes or channels through which fluid and air can move. And the sinuses, even though they are essentially that created by the fissures between different bones. So like there's two, two or three different bones

• 4:55Speaker 01

  that are interdigitated and create these tunnels. They're actually fairly plastic in the sense that they can be modified in terms of their shape. And, and so people will say, well, I have a deviated septum. Guess what? You should try and emphasize breathing through both nostrils as a, in order to undeviate your septum. Now, if someone has a broken nose or something, it's really structurally abnormal, they may need corrective surgery. But purely through deliberate nasal breathing, so it could be mouth taping at night, but also just deliberately nasal breathing during most of your cardiovascular training, unless you need to really, you know, hit the gas, in which case, mouth breathe, is going to help dilate the sinuses and lead to better airflow, which makes nasal breathing easier. The other thing is that nasal breathing, we know, well, first of all, there's a nasal

• 5:38Speaker 01

  microbiome. There's also an oral microbiome, but the nasal microbiome is particularly well suited to scrub or capture and destroy viruses, bacteria, and even some fungal infections. So in other words, when you're breathing in through your mouth, you're more susceptible to infections. This is important heading into winter as well. So there are a number of, I mean, we could talk about this for hours, but the point is nasal breathe when you can. Kids especially, but adults as well, chewing foods that require, you know, eating foods that require some chewing and really working at it and chewing away. They have some impressive images in this book of kids that were twins that were raised separately, one by a group that eats a lot of, let's just say tougher foods that require chewing versus one that's slurping their food. And I mean, one kid is literally incredibly attractive,

• 6:23Speaker 01

  perfect dentiture with no orthodontia or debt or, you know, regular dentistry. And the other kid is teeth is like snaggle. They have the horse, like the horsey smile.

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  Even though they've got the same genetic predisposition.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Right. It's not a perfect experiment because there are other factors as well. And, you know, none of this is, for better or worse, none of this is really amenable to kind in laboratory type stuff. So these are naturally occurring experiments, as we say. There are also some very impressive images in the book, or if we could say depressing, of kids that were pretty attractive as kids. And then there's an example of a kid who got a pet hamster. He was allergic to the hamster. He switch, as a consequence, he becomes a mouth breather. And then the characteristic change in the face when one overdoes mouth breathing is that the chin start to move back.

• 7:09Chris Williamson?

  Receses, yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Toward the, toward the neck and the rest of the face was out, but also the eyes become droopy. And but as you say, why would the eyes be affected? It's not just musculature. What's happening is there's less use of literally the, the sinuses in the upper, towards the upper mandible and up towards the eyes. Because if you ever had a sinus infection, it's painful up here in your forehead and around the eyes. So again, it's pretty straightforward. No products required. Chew, chew your food well. Chew on both sides of your mouth, especially if you're a young person, but even if you're not, be a nasal breather. Really chew at your food. Try and probably also has benefits in terms of limiting unessential or low nutrient density calories. You know, slurping your food all the time. I mean, I love.

• 7:54Chris Williamson?

  Don't drink your calories, man.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love a good Greek yogurt, you know, but, but drinking in excess of calories is probably not good. And eat like an adult. I always say, you know, one of the things is I don't know, like to me, growing up snack food was something that kids indulged in. You know, once, once you hit 18 or so, you know, eat like an adult.

• 8:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm still wait, I'm still waiting to learn that lesson. You mentioned Sapolsky that I had him on the show recently.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  What do you think most people misunderstand about stress? Obviously, he's contributed an awful lot to this. I know you've thought about this too.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  What do you think people don't understand fully about stress?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, the findings that I think are overlooked tremendously are. The following experiment, there's an experiment in animals where a rat is given the opportunity to run on a treadmill and rats and rodents of all kinds love running on treadmills. You know, there are these interesting, we'll see who catches this fly first.

• 8:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm ready, man.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, I think, you know, there's even a study from Hoppy Hofstra's lab at Harvard that showed that if you put wheels, running wheels in fields, that rodents will run there in the middle of the night and run on them. That's how insanely obsessed with running.

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  They're just energetic, they want to go.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  There's something rewarding about it for them, but in any event, it lowers their blood pressure, it leads to improvements in a number of metrics that you expect. And you see the same thing in humans, right? Who run on a treadmill or run outdoors or swim in cardiovascular exercise. Okay, well, Sapolsky, and I love to talk about a, an experiment where they took two different cages with animals. One is running voluntarily, but then that running wheel is tethered to a running wheel in another cage that encloses an animal, forces it to run every time the other one runs. So forced exercise versus voluntary exercise. And the takeaway is very straightforward. Voluntary exercise leads to all sorts of improvements in health metrics, resting heart rate, blood pressure, blood

• 9:47Speaker 01

  glucose, resting blood glucose, et cetera, waking blood glucose. The animal that's forced to exercise, you see the opposite, right? So it's not exercise per se, it's something about being forced to exercise is, causes decriments in a number of health metrics. And you see the same thing in humans. So what's wild is my colleague, Dr. Ali Crum, Department of Psychology at Stanford, has done these beautiful experiments on mindset and belief. These are not placebo effects. And what she's shown in just absolutely spectacular way is that if people watch a short video about all the ways in which stress can really diminish your health. Well, then indeed, stress diminishes their health. Whereas if a separate group watches

• 10:30Speaker 01

  a factual, also five-minute, also factual tutorial on all the ways that stress can enhance performance by harnessing your ability to focus, memory formation, et cetera, all of which is true, that's indeed what you see.

• 10:43Chris Williamson?

  Can I give you my favorite one that I learned about over the last year?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:46Chris Williamson?

  So the Boston Marathon bombing, uh, 2012, about 10 years ago, 2016, maybe. Anyway, Boston Marathon bombing, a study was done comparing people who had been at the actual marathon while the bomb had gone off and people who had watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it. And the people who watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it showed a greater stress response than the people who'd literally lived through it.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, the, the, um, the, the mindset and belief effects are, are absolutely extraordinary and, and very real, right? I mean, I think, you know, recently I've been reading and researching a lot about and did a podcast on tenacity and willpower. And there was this idea early on from Baumeister and colleagues that willpower is a limited resource.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  Ego depletion?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Ego depletion.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  It was controversial. They showed that, you know, replenishing glucose in between hard tasks could restore willpower.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  They showed that, uh, was it juries or judges that were low in blood glucose were more likely to give harsher sentences, stuff like this?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it sort of wicked out to a number of naturalistic situations and it made good sense. And then my colleague Carol Dweck, also in the psychology department at Stanford, um, most famously known for her work on mind, growth mindset, did an experiment in which they, um, essentially asked whether or not tenacity and willpower are limited in terms of being some sort of resource and also whether or not it was somehow linked to glucose availability, fuel, uh, in the brain and body, and found that if people fought. Or were told that mind that, excuse me, willpower was a limited resource. That's indeed what they observed experimentally. But that if they were taught or were told that willpower is unlimited and divorced from glucose

• 12:40Speaker 01

  levels, well, then that's exactly what you saw.

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower is a limited resource is an information hazard that is self fulfilling?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Potentially. Now, now, now, Bowmeister, you know, showed himself to be, you know, pretty determined when and countered the the the Dweck counter by showing that if indeed if there's a hard task followed by a hard task, then your beliefs about willpower can impact your performance on the second task. So the aka Dweck is right. But that if you have a hard task, hard task, and then another hard task, so back to back to back tasks or more, which is a lot of what life is like, well, then it seems that the that the willpower is a limited resource and glucose supporting willpower theory holds up a bit better.

• 13:31Chris Williamson?

  What have you come to believe about the difference between willpower and motivation and discipline? How do kind of all of these fit together in your mind?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so willpower and tenacity are related to motivation, but they're not quite the same. I think we should think of motivation as a as the verb state that moves us from, let's just say, apathy to tenacity. Okay, so it's it's the verb function that moves us along that continuum. Apathy at one end, tenacity and willpower, strong exertion of willpower at the other end. One of the most interesting structures in the entire nervous system is one that gets very little coverage, unfortunately. In fact, most neuroscientists aren't aware of what its function is, and it's called the AMCC, which is the anterior mid-singulate cortex. You have one on each side of the brain.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  The name isn't really important, but we want to, you know, to the credit of the of the structure, we should name it the AMCC. The AMCC receives inputs from a lot of interesting brain areas related to reward, related to autonomic function, so how alert or sleepy we are, to prediction, to prediction error. It's a hub for many, many inputs and outputs, hormone systems, et cetera.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Beautiful experiments done by my colleague Joe Peravisi at Stanford have shown that if you stimulate this brain area, a tiny little brain area in a human, they immediately feel as if some challenge is impending and they're going to meet that challenge. It's a forward center of mass against challenge response. This has been seen in independent subjects. They do controls where they then tell them they're stimulating, but they're not actually stimulating and they're like, I don't feel anything. You can turn on and off tenacity and willpower. So there's literally a hub for this. Now here's where it gets really interesting. I'm going to list off a bunch of peer reviewed published results in rapid sequence and I'm happy to point out the substantiation for this or the references. Okay.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Individuals that are dieting or resisting some sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that, the size and activity in their AMCC goes up over time and the structure gets bigger. Dieters who fail, flat or downward trajectory of the size and activation of the AMCC. This can be taken too far. Individuals with anorexia nervosa, the most deadly of all psychiatric disorders where a self deprivation of food activates excessive reward. There's this kind of loop of reward. Their AMCCs are significantly greater size than others. So there's, you know, this can be taken too far. Super agers, which is a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are people who maintain

• 16:09Speaker 01

  healthy cognitive function, similar to people in their twenties and thirties into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Their AMCC maintains or increases in size into their later years. Typical agers, the size of, we always hear that you lose brain mass across your lifespan. Well, most of it is from the AMCC. And beautifully, and this is two of my favorite results that really bring this around to a protocol or a takeaway. If people are given an easy task, the AMCC isn't activated. If they're given a hard task, in particular a hard task, physical or cognitive that they really don't want to do, the AMCC levels of activity go through the roof. And here's what's really cool. They gave

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Aging, what's, you know, people aged 60 to 79, the task of adding three hours extra per week of cardiovascular exercise. Now, that's a lot, right? Three one-hour, they call them aerobic classes, but getting their heart rate up to about 65, 70% of maximum. So it's getting into like zone three-ish area. Yeah, people can look up zone three, but you nailed it, zone three. The size of their AMCC increased across that six-month protocol and offset the normal age-related decline in this, in this area in terms of its size. The theory that's starting to emerge is that the AMCC isn't just about tenacity and willpower to push through hard things, that it may actually be related to one's will to live,

• 17:34Speaker 01

  one's will to continue living. And I think this is, these are some of the most important results. By the way, I didn't participate in any of the research that I just described. I spent a lot of time with that literature, but I think it's so important. I mean, we hear about the amygdala, the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, all of very important brain structures. But if nothing else, hopefully this conversation will put the AMCC on the map.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  The one that literally could create your will to live is the one that's been overlooked a little bit.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And, and it can be, and what's interesting about this structure is that it's involved in generating tenacity and willpower for all things, not just for one situation. And what's really wonderful, I think, about the, the research literature on this is it's so clear what we need to do. We need to do thi- let's say, like me, you're a person who enjoys weightlifting and you love running. I love those two activities. Well, guess what? Those activities, even if they're hard, like a hard run that I'm really enjoying, or some hard sets in the gym, not going to increase the size or activity of the AMCC. People love to over-romanticize the utility of those final two reps. Sure, okay, pushing to failure, great. You know, running hard till your lungs burn, great. But if you enjoy that, you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willpower, at least according

• 18:41Speaker 01

  to the research data. What's going to do it is doing something what I call micro sucks or macro sucks, you know? And so micro sucks could be all the little things that you don't want during, to do during the day. Macro sucks could be the larger things. But of course, you don't want to do things that are going to damage you psychologically or physically, of course, of course, but. Everyone, I believe, would benefit from picking a few micro sucks.

• 19:06Chris Williamson?

  What are some of your micro sucks or macro sucks that you could sprinkle throughout the day?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so on a household maintenance level, you know, I maintain a very clean home. I'm constantly throwing things away as well, but there are a few things like, once I exceed a certain number of dishes in the sink, it becomes this, okay, I'll load the dishwasher later type thing. Like a micro suck for me would be like, especially if something's been in there for a while and it's kind of gross and then you gotta like work through it. And of course, I try and put each dish away as I, you know, dirty them up. But so little things, the things like that, I really don't want to deal with that right now. That's the kind of thing, those harder tasks where you have to breach some barrier, some resistance to put it into, you know, Steven Pressfield language or our friend David Goggins, right? You know, this idea that one has to callous the mind. I mean, David said that, right?

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  He's probably got a hypertrophied AMCC that's bigger than most people's.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Probably. And the beauty of having a, an AMCC that's highly, you know, available for activation is that, you know, through the micro and the macro sucks of the day, you, you have this thing, it's like an engine that you can devote to other things. So then you can devote the AMCC to other endeavors.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  I have this thing I call email anxiety, and it's when my unread inbox reaches three figures or more. And that's when it just, it kind of follows me around like a poltergeist throughout the day. And that, that absolutely, for me, that's probably a macro suck. You know, to get through that, it's probably three to four hours. A lot of it's scheduling. When's this guest coming on? I need to speak to this partner. We go blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I feel that. What else?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It's subjective, right? I mean, what's a, what sucks is subjective.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  Someone else might love emails.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, someone might. And, and I think that, um, you know, you've talked a lot on your show with various guests about, you know, when we're in too much comfort, we're not meeting our goals. I love deadlines for that reason. I love deadlines. I love pressure.

• 21:00Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think Parkinson's law is as close to a thermodynamic of productivity as we can get. Do you know what I mean? Like? When you have a deadline, you will meet it.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:11Chris Williamson?

  If you do not have a deadline, you will manana, manana until forever.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  That's right. And some people, I think, preload the deadline by procrastinating. And then that's what, you know, gets their activation energy to a level where they can, they can engage. So I've started thinking about this a lot lately, you know, I love running, but it's interesting. I like to finish at my driveway and I live on a hill. And actually this morning I was out for a run and the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac is my sort of designated stop point. So it actually sucked to do the last, you know, 20 meters this morning. So there I probably got a little bit of AMCC activation because everything was, the number of negotiations I went through.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  When I turned up my street at the end of this run, whether or not I was going to run this extra 20 meters was ridiculous. I mean, the human brain is struggling to not do this extra 20 meters. It was so silly. So it's gotta, it's gotta hurt a little bit. Again, you don't want to damage yourself. But I think in the context of, for instance, cognitive learning, getting to the point where you finish something and then forcing yourself to do one little extra bit there at the end.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, I, I'm not looking for any credit for it, but I, I want to be very clear that the scientific literature doesn't call these things micro sucks. I call them micro sucks. And I sort of put that out there just to make it clear as to what we're referring to.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you know Nick Baer?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

  In Austin, he's an athlete and supplement company owner.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Like a hybrid athlete. A larger guy, but he runs really fast.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  Does bodybuilding shows, does powerlifting also runs?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  To be clear, I know that large guys run fast, but typically they don't run fast for 20 miles.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  And he does.

• 22:41Chris Williamson?

  That's accurate. He, his little catchphrase is go one more. And it's interesting, what you're saying here is it's not just about the completion of the thing that you're doing. Because a lot of the time, the thing that you choose to do, even the thing that's difficult, is done under your own volition. Don't get me wrong. If you do a difficult CrossFit workout, Fran, whatever, 2159 of thrusters and pull-ups. It is awful. It's hell, right? There's literally a name for what your throat feels like once you finish called francoph that people get from having taken their heart rate as high as Spasming of the Yeah, that taste of metal in the back of your throat. But what, what people are doing that, although they're doing something that's difficult, it's like volitionally

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  difficult and it's within their domain of enjoyment. And what you're saying here is that we're, we're looking to just push ourselves a little bit past that. It's like an unnecessary amount of challenge. And I think that go one more makes quite a nice reminder for us with the micro suck or the macro suck. Let's push ourselves just a little bit beyond where we would have got our sense of satisfaction because presumably you get the dopamine, I've completed the task. Fuck yeah. And then it's like, and then I do just that tiny little bit more to, to bring in other news. This episode is brought to you by Marek Health. I wanted to get my blood work done here in America. I'd been told by people like Dr. Huberman that it's important for me to do to work out what's going on inside of my body, but I didn't know where to go. After a ton of research, I found out that Marek Health is the best and most comprehensive. When

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  I started working with them, my testosterone was 495, which is low normal, not where I wanted it to be. Now, six months later, it is 1,006 and I'm not on TRT. That is what happens when you work with a proper, comprehensive blood panel company who genuinely knows what they're doing. With Marek Health, it's like having someone in your corner that is a properly trained clinician who knows exactly what's happening inside of your body and can give you personalized diet supplementation, training and pharmaceutical recommendations. Plus organize it all. It is a one stop shop for your health. You can get the exact same medical panel and oversight that I got by going to the link in the description below or heading to marekhealth.com/mordenwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  for 10% off. That's M A R E K health.com/mordenwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. One person that I think has been really interesting from this side, you're good friends with Tom Segura. Yeah, we're, we're related. We're cousins. You're kidding me? No, no, no. We're cousins. I can see it now. Uh, his commitment to fitness has been pretty fascinating for me to see. And he's kind of treating his body like an athlete to facilitate his chosen pursuit of comedy. I think even Bert is trying to sort his sort of health and fitness out one step at a time, too. Bert's the control experiment.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  If the experiment is about willpower, tenacity and discipline, Tom is the is the is the is the active condition and Bert is the control.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  But I I'm seeing more and more people now, especially performers that aren't using that aren't within the realm of physical fitness, really starting to understand if I want to perform outside of this, I need to think like an athlete. I need to be looking at my hydration. I mean, Tom had his train and travel with him on the road for months.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, Tom's really serious about his craft, as is Bert. They just have different approaches. And when it comes to fitness, I, by the way, I noticed Bert is training, he's working out. I've been trying to get Bert to quit drinking alcohol for a while. Um, not because I'm the um arbiter of of of who should do what. I never tell people what to do, by the way. Provide information, people can do what they want. I'm a live and let live. I want to be very clear about that. But it's out of care and affection for for Bert that, um, you know, excessive alcohol consumption over long periods of time, bad. I mean, we can keep that one pretty brief. So, but Bert is working out. But Tom, I know, um, because we talk and I've spent some time with him that uh he trains, he trains hard and he sees it as integral with his

• 26:36Speaker 01

  with his writing, with his ability to show up for his family and business, et cetera. I mean, I think we're finally approaching a time in human history where we accept at the level of, you know, the scientific community all the way through to wellness and just generally that the brain and body are are intimately linked at the level of what you, you know, if you want to improve your body, um, do something for your mind. If you want to improve your mind, do something for your body. And and it's so clear now what we all need to do. I mean, we we can get into the details, but at a macro level, it's clear that we should all be getting that hundred fifty to two hundred minutes of zone two per week or walking a lot. If you live in a big city, you're probably getting that. But then also getting your heart rate up to, you know, max heart rate once a week, doing some sprint type stuff on in whatever

• 27:18Speaker 01

  format is safe for your body. Some people it's swimming, some people it's rowing, some people it's running. For me, it's running, but you know, not everyone enjoys running or can do it. And then everyone should be doing at least six sets of resistance training per muscle group, per week, minimum, hard sets. To failure, okay, maybe, maybe not close to failure. Yeah, probably. And it's especially the groups that have been, um, let's just say averse to weight training, right? Typically, women, older folks, although now more women weight train because they understand that in the absence of a lot of injected or prescription anabolic hormones, they're not going to get, um, enormous.

• 27:54Chris Williamson?

  That's the funniest thing for me.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  That's when we died, I think, right? That, that concept that, you know, if, if you one lifts weights, that they're going to be get.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  Become bulky. Do you realize to all of the women who are out there that are concerned about lifting weights because they're going to get too bulky? Do you know how hard I've worked to try and desperately become bulky for 15 years? Like I've worked really, really difficult, hoping that one day I'll become bulky. And there is, I think it's dissipating a lot now, but there was for a long time, this fear that I'll do a couple of bicep curls and you're going to look like the Incredible Hulk. It's like, me and my friends have really, really prayed for that to happen forever. Uh, you do not need to be concerned. It, it's not going to creep up on you and one day you're going to wake up and be the sort of vascular beast.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Right. Um, a couple of things about that. I mean, from a longevity standpoint, we know that maintaining healthy nerve to muscle function, neuromuscular junctions is one of the things that resistance exercise does. And it's highly correlated with cognitive function into older age. Um, and for those people, I guess, going back to our earlier conversation, we'll probably do this a few times in the course of, of this episode, but, um, the thing you want to do the least, that's actually the thing that where you stand to build up your AMCC the most. So for me, that would be language learning or learning of musical instruments, two, two things that I love music and I, um, but I, I just, it's just so hard for me. So it sits there on the shelf as a possible way to activate the AMCC. But in terms of actual, uh, resistance training, resistance training has an interesting property

• 29:20Speaker 01

  that I haven't heard discussed before, um, that pertains to men and women who do it, um, which is unlike cardiovascular training.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  During a resistance training bout, because of the blood flow to the muscle, so-called pump, you get a little window into what the potential progress would look like. That pump dissipates post-workout and then if you allow sufficient rest and nutrition, et cetera, you'll get a hypertrophy response. But it's so unlike other forms of exercise. Like if I go to a yoga class and I stretch or I'm doing some movement, I get to that limit where I'm quaking and I fall over. It's very different than getting a picture of just how flexible I will be the next time and then losing that until I adapt. With running, your lungs, sometimes your throat burns, as you pointed out, and that's showing you your limit. And of course, then there's an adaptation response that then allows you to perform at that level without the burning in the next time, right?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  If you allow sufficient recovery. But with weight training, it's kind of interesting. The whole pump thing was never something that I really drew me to weight training very much, but it's interesting because you get a glimpse into what the progress might look like. And so for, I would say for anyone who's worried about getting too big, unless your pump is bigger than you want to be, you're not gonna get that, right? And so you actually get a window into how much potential size increase you're going to create. But it's so different than other forms of exercise in that way. It's like, what other thing in life, like if you took a language class and you're like, oh, I'm gonna learn Japanese and you go and during the class, you actually become fluent for a moment, then it's taken away and then you adapt and become fluent. So it's a very special form of exercise that that offers some unique gifts to us as incentives for going back.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But look, as I say this, I realize some people hate resistance training, they love running. Some people hate running, they love resistance training. Some people, I realize, hate exercise. But if you hate exercise, you should do it anyway.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  AMCC.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  And you're getting the AMCC.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  So going back to what you think might be happening to someone like Tom, who is a, like a cognitive athlete, right? But largely the physical realm. Comedians, apart from, I guess, Until Joe, which is part of the beginning of like the comedian bro, bro lifter revolution. Before him, it wasn't exactly like, I wasn't looking to comedians as being the vanguard of health and fitness and stuff like that.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  No, it was like Belushi. I mean, look at Belushi, right? I mean, he was the, he was the epitome of lack of health and sadly died, right?

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about what would be happening to the brain of somebody like Tom who pivots from being maybe 40 pounds overweight. I don't know how big he got at his, at his biggest, but lost a good bit of weight and it wasn't just losing weight, it was then gaining muscle. So Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, world of like muscle centered medicine, he's going to benefit from that, the insulin sensitivity, there'll be like some physiological changes. But talk to me for the people who are cognitive athletes, what's going to happen in someone like Tom's mind when he changes his body?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So improved blood flow to the brain. I mean, the brain is most metabolically demanding organ in the entire body. It consumes a ton of glucose. If you eat carbohydrates, yes, it can run on ketones, but blood flow through arteries, veins and capillaries to the neurons of the brain is, is it's inseparable from cognitive function. So when you improve blood flow to the brain, you improve cognitive function, period. When you restrict blood flow to the brain, even at a, at a micro level, you impair cognitive function. In addition to that, we know that several forms of age-related cognitive decline and dementia are considered nowadays. Some people will even call it type three diabetes, although that's a controversial term, diabetes of the brain. This is why a number of people who have Alzheimer's go

• 32:54Speaker 01

  on ketogenic diets and get some degree of relief. It's not that, by the way, it's not a cure for Alzheimer's, but some people do better when they switch the major fuel source for the brain. But in the case of Tom as an example, but someone who gets into exercising regularly, both resistance training and cardiovascular training, you're getting improved blood flow, you're getting far less inflammation of the brain. Inflammation is cognitive depleting, reducing inflammation cognitive enhancing. We all, that's absolutely true across the board, right? In animal studies and in humans. In addition to that, There are a lot of bloodborne factors, two of which I'll just highlight now, just for sake of time only, too. First of all, when we do cardio, that positively impact brain health and memory in particular.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  So when we do load-bearing cardiovascular exercise, so running as opposed to swimming, anything where the skeletal system is under some load, there's a hormone that's literally secreted from bone. I know we don't normally think of bones as endocrine organs, called osteocalcin. Osteocalcin is released from the bones under these load-bearing conditions. It can cross the blood-brain barrier, and we know that it plays an active role in promoting not just new cell production, but because that's a more minor component of neuroplasticity, but enhancement of nerve health and function in the hippocampus, which is an area that's instrumental for the formation of new memories.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So there's something about movement of the body that signals to the brain, ah, we're, you know, we're moving, you actually need to maintain or perhaps even enhance your ability to remember things. And this probably is an evolutionary conserve circuit that exists, we know it exists in mice as well. So that's one example. The other is that my colleague at Stanford, Tony Weiss-Cory, is best known for these young blood experiments where they'll take the blood or plasma from a young rodent and put it into an aged or demented rodent and see improvements in cognitive function. And outside the United States, there are some clinics, by the way, I'm not recommending people do this, that have shown improvements in cognitive function or even offsetting of Alzheimer's and age-related cognitive decline. This has led to the idea of like vampires and baby blood and this whole thing.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Adrenochrome. Yeah, which is all crazy and conspiracy. I go on record saying that, but there's a recent paper that, also from Tony's lab, showing that if in animals that exercise regularly, if you take their blood or plasma and you supply that blood or plasma to aged or cognitively deficient animals, they, their cognition or their cognitive abilities improve. So there's something about blood of the exercised body that enriches the brain. It could be many different growth factors. It could be BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It could be things like IGF-1, insulin-like growth factors, probably give me a cocktail of different things. As well as osteocalcin. And so what we want to think about is that when we exercise,

• 35:47Speaker 01

  and that's a broad statement, exercise or word, rather, cardiovascular resistance training, it creates like a cocktail that then crosses into the blood brain barrier that then creates a milieu of general growth, health, or at least maintenance of cognitive tissue that's there. So Tom's incredibly sharp. And of course, comedy requires not just memory, but also writing of new jokes, right? He's, he's got to do Netflix specials for a long time. And I actually went and saw him in Aspen, a small venue. I flew out there to see him because I wanted to see him in a small venue. Because in small venues is where comics often work out their new material. And I mean, just, you know, to me, it was just astonishing, like to see the number of different thought threads. And one thing that makes Tom's comedy so wonderful, and other people like Richard Pryor did this

• 36:30Speaker 01

  exceptionally well, too, is that he can switch personas very fast. So he's doing his voice, then he switches to his son's voice, then switches back. And the speed and precision with which he does that.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  Very agile.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Makes it seem, we forget that they're very agile. And then we, we've, he creates a panel of characters, and then wipes that board away, right? He's the only guy up there, wipes that board away, and then creates a panel of new characters. And so, I mean, that requires a lot of like cognitive dexterity. So, exercise is absolutely one of the best ways to improve brain function over time. And in addition to that, you know, there's been so much interest in, you know, should we do crossword puzzles? Should we, you know, why is it that some people maintain cognitive function? I think what's very clear to me, based on all that literature, is that it's not one specific thing, crossword puzzles, or social engagement, or exercises, all of those things. But let's not forget the

• 37:21Speaker 01

  super agers, the people who are constantly trying things that are difficult, that are pressuring themselves a bit to do things that are difficult. Those people are offsetting, as far as we know, all of the major. Shrinkage of these brain structures that normally would shrink as people age. So we have a lot of control, but it does require effort. And I'll tell you, there's never going to be a pillar injection. Whether or not it's Ozempic or something like it, but for the brain, there's just no, there's no way. There's no way that you're ever going to recapitulate learning and effort. And yes, it requires time, but it's so clear. I mean, I don't know how many more papers in preclinical models and in humans, one needs to see before they finally just, you know, bite the bullet and.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Go and lift weights.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Lift weights and run and do cardiovascular training. It can't be one or the other. You know, the stereotype of like the, the big, let's just say a big guy who's dumb. You know, I don't think it's entirely, I mean, you meet some big, big folks that are smart, right? But there is something in the kind of broad correlations of people who, you know, people who tend to only do cardiovascular training. You know, maybe it's, it's a selection bias, like they're the people who are already avid readers or more kind of intellectual leanings. Maybe get more involved in tennis, swimming, running type sports, rowing because of the schools they went to or whatever.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  But people who just lift weights, it does seem as if over time, I don't know, maybe Derek would tell us their neck is getting too big. They have sleep apnea. They, they don't seem as sharp and they're often mouth breathers. Look at the really big guys in the gym. They're often.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  Not strong.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Not just between sets, not just after hard sets. They're, I think they're also, they're asphyxiating themselves in sleep. We know this.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  And then you look at runners and the people that have the kind of like the really svelte and, and they, and sure, they might maintain cognitive function, but their bodies are very vulnerable to injury. And they always seem to be complaining about what hurts. You know, is it like my friends who do a lot of extended training, unless it's David Goggins, who doesn't seem to have the circuit for complaining. At least certainly not online. Yeah, they always seem to be complaining about, about injuries. So I think a combination of resistance training, cardiovascular training is, let's just face it, like you can't do one and not the other. If you want to be healthy all around, healthy of heart, healthy of body, healthy of mind. Cognition improved or at least maintained as we age, you gotta do both.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

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• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  Head to the link in the description below or go to drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavours with your first box. That's drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. Coming back to the discussion about alcohol, which is one that you tried to interject with Burton, I think your episode that you released last year, back end of last summer. I think that really opened a lot of people's eyes to some of the risks of alcohol. I've been kind of flying the flag of it as a tool for productivity for quite a while.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  To avoid alcohol.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that I think when you-

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Entirely or do you drink at all?

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  I've brought it back into my life now, but I did six months sober three times and then a thousand days without alcohol too. But yeah, I'm seeing right now a huge pushback against unseen, unintentional drinking. And I think that, yeah, your episode last year opened a lot of people's eyes to it.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Thanks. I mean, again, I don't tell people what to do. I give them the facts so they can make the best decisions for them. I mean, it's very clear that unless you're an alcoholic. And provided you're an adult, that, you know, two drinks per week maximum is about the upper threshold beyond which you're going to start getting some health.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  That's called, that's called a warm up to a warm up in England.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, you know, I've never been a big drinker. I don't drink. Um, I'm lucky that it's not something that's, that's a strong draw for me.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  Me too.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  You know, I have friends that are recovered alcoholics. Um, and you know, their lives are so much better as a function of being sober. But for non alcoholics, I mean, I think everyone should just know the, uh, the health risks, especially women where the risks for breast cancer and other types of cancers are, are elevated so very much. And what was interesting to me about the response to that episode is that I think many people took it, my, the impression I got was that many people took it as permission to finally stop drinking or drink less because they didn't enjoy drinking. And as you so, you know, beautifully put out on social media, you know, drinking is one of the few activities that if you don't partake, people assume or accuse you of having a problem. And it's just wild. I mean, like,

• 42:47Speaker 01

  why would that be? And I think that, I think it'd also make, once, actually, I was out to dinner with a colleague years ago, and I declined drinking that evening. I was just talking to the, the visiting speaker. And, um, she said, God, that's so boring. And I, well, first of all, I don't have a problem saying what's on my mind without alcohol, right? I don't have, I don't have a excessive gabbergic inhibition. Um, so I'll say what I want to say, um, you know, as, uh, as best I can. But, you know, I think drinkers don't like people who don't drink because it takes the fun out of it for them. Because there's this idea that's, you know, prolific on college campuses. Like if everyone's drunk, that somehow like the entire like vibe of the party is going to take on a new, new flavor.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And frankly, I remember I went to a college, U C Santa Barbara, where at the time people drank a ton, a ton, discovered alcoholics, right? Um, and I used to go to parties. Sometimes I'd look around, I was thinking like, everyone here is just blasted. Like if anything happened.

• 43:49Chris Williamson?

  Drinking? Did you drink?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I drank in college, but not that often. I, I had a habit, and I don't recommend this. I had a habit of going out about once a month and I would tie one on, you know, absolutely.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  Infrequent, but binge.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never, you know, I, my tolerance to alcohol was always such that I would get drunk quickly and then sober up really fast. So I was drinking late into the night. But then I'd sober up really fast. Now, of course, we know the sleep you get after even one drink is vastly diminished.

• 44:16Chris Williamson?

  Every single person that's got an aura or a whoop strap or something is feeling you right now.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  And I think that alcohol, to me, never felt good. I never liked it. And it was a recipe for, you know, there was a lot of fights, there was a lot of, you know, there were a lot of bad stuff happens when people are drinking too much.

• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I've run-

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Drunk driving, to say nothing of poor decision making. I mean, to me, it just feels like there's so, there are so many better ways to have a good time that, that, that alcohol isn't necessary. But I do understand that it's a big part of many cultures. And I do understand that for many people, it's so part and parcel with relaxing and with festivities and with feeling comfortable and withdrawing a boundary between the normal day and the rest of the day.

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. There's a ritualistic aspect to it.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's this sort of divides the day in an interesting way. So I'm not judgmental of it. I, but for me, I mean, I've, I'll go to a party where people are drinking and just hang out. I'm perfectly good.

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I've stood on the door of a thousand club nights in my career, right, as a club promoter? And I can promise you, for the people that are thinking, I like the sound of this justification, this excuse, that I don't need to drink anymore. Dr. Huberman has said that, you know, maybe it's not for you, maybe it's not as enjoyable. Nothing good happens in nightclubs after one in the morning. I am patient zero. I have the, I am the doctor of late night parties. Okay? Like, that's one of my expertise. Nothing good happens in a nightclub. It's this sort of messy, sloppy fights and kissing people you shouldn't and, and stumbling all over the place and stuff. If you go out and you don't drink and you go home at one in the morning,

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  I think you probably get to capture about eighty percent of the enjoyment of the event that you would have done had you have drank, pre-drinks, gone out, done the whole thing. And I got a bit of push, I got quite a bit of pushback from a sobriety community a few years ago. I did this thousand day sober as a club promoter, which was, I guess, like a kind of a big deal in some regards for like pushing the sobriety community forward. But I was never doing it because I had a problem. I was doing it because it gave me more consistency and more time and more money to spend on things that I cared about. So it was a productivity tool, like the Pomodoro technique, right? Or going to bed on time or something. And they had a little bit of a problem. They had a big problem with the fact that I said, there is something to

• 46:42Chris Williamson?

  the enjoyment of drinking on a night out. I think anybody that says alcohol has no role in improving the quality of a night out ever, just hasn't been on enough good nights out, right? There are ways that it can improve, kind of loosens people up, it can reduce their inhibitions. If you want to go and dance, you know, you're dancing at a rave or at a festival, which I think there's one going on quite close to here. If you're there, it's really great. But if alcohol wasn't so widely distributed, I think people would ask a lot more questions. It's like you can't see the wood for the trees, right? You don't question it. It's such a, it's baked into the fabric of just

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  human life. Every single time that I take a, like a macro dose, but low of psilocybin, one where I can still function.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  What is, what is?

• 47:31Chris Williamson?

  Point seven five, point seven five to one gram.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  So that's about, it's a little less than half of the macro therapeutic dose for intractable depression, which is something like 2.2 grams or so.

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  So you can still hold a conversation, depending on what strain you've got. But every single time that I do it, without fail, a thought comes into my mind, which is, why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does anybody do it? Because I'll go to bed, my HRV, my recovery's fine. The next day, maybe I'm a little bit tired. Like I've had a lot of like activation. I've been super energetic, very little hangover. On the evening, I don't do stupid things. It makes me want to say nice things to all of my friends. My thoughts are sharper than they were before. Sometimes they're silly, but they're sharper. And then you compare it with alcohol and it's this kind of sloppy, muddy, very unagile. It's just, I, I totally get what you mean. When you've taken a little bit of time away from

• 48:26Chris Williamson?

  it and you look at it in the harsh light of day, the effects that alcohol gives you just aren't that enjoyable. And it's been folded into people's lives through tradition and through just anchoring bias and continuation.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And marketing, you know, the idea that like someone can quote unquote, hold their liquor is such like a, it's been made synonymous with, you know, masculine ideals. It's like, I mean, it's, it's kind of crazy because we know it also crushes testosterone levels. What's interesting is that. You know, I forget who said this, but you know, there's a very different picture of a young drunk versus an old drunk. You know, someone who's been just drinking for too many years, it's not a pretty picture.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  It's sad.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  They become infantile. They become really infantile. And, um, you know, again, I'm not the anti-alcohol crusader. We did, I did that episode not expecting much of a response, actually. That shows just how out of, uh, out of touch sometimes I can be.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  I think, just to reiterate it, man, I think it gave people the excuse. What you did is you gave people the justification, you legitimized them. It's like the best books tell you something that you already know. It was like they, everyone always, lots of people always had an idea. I probably shouldn't be drinking. Maybe I don't enjoy it that much. Maybe these aren't my friends. They're just my drinking partners. Maybe I don't like the way that I feel the next day. Maybe my life could be better if I stopped drinking.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  There's the justification.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Well, I'm happy to hear that for those folks, you know, now that the information is out there. I've, um, I was accused several times, uh, on Twitter slash X of, um, taking all the fun out of parties in the, at least in the Bay area. But I'll tell you, I grew up in the Bay area. The good parties ended a long time ago. But they still exist, you know? I mean, I think they're, you know? And when I say other ways to have fun, I don't mean like, oh, everyone should sit around and do math or read neuroscience, although for me that's fun.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  You know, I think, I think in a broader sense, I think there's a shift nowadays that people really think about, you know, how to engage socially in ways that are interesting. I mean, perhaps it's a, again, a sampling bias because of the topics that I cover and who talks to me. But like in the Bay area, there are these Russian banias in New York. They're spy 88. By the way, they don't pay me to say this, but I like to go this, uh, Russian banya down in Wall Street. You go there and, you know, got hot saunas and cold plunge and people are, you know, young people are there enjoying themselves. And they actually serve alcohol. So they'll have, sometimes they'll do like little gimlets of vodka or something there. And so, you know, people, sometimes that's part of the tradition.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

  Most Russian thing that I can think of, shot of vodka whilst hot.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Right. So that, and you know, and they've got theories as to how that can help. And listen, I think some of those traditions can really be wonderful. But, you know, people are starting to combine socializing with health promoting protocols. And, you know, going out and eating good food together, like eating really wonderful food, um, with the social component, the, you know, I. I'll go into the grave talking about getting morning sunlight, something that maybe we should talk a little bit more about. And as people like roll their eyes, I'll just say there's this incredible study now just out in nature, mental health published about eighty, that has eighty five thousand, eighty five thousand subjects showing that the ratio of getting a lot of sunlight during the day to getting minimal artificial light exposure at night, it really sets the tone of your overall

• 51:37Speaker 01

  system and is and is associated with brain and body, that is, and is associated with better mental health outcomes across the board. And the inverse, right? If you're getting too much artificial light at night, or not enough sunlight or both, is associated with everything bad, elevate depression, anxiety, etc. Now, I do believe people should get out and have a good time. Don't avoid the bright lights of a city or a club. Have a great time, like dancing, socializing. Those are great reasons to stay up too late and get minimal sleep or sleep in the next day. Great reasons. So every once in a while, sure, ten, twenty percent of your life, you're gonna do that. And you're probably some percentage of time is also gonna be raising kids. So you're up because you have to to keep them alive, which is important to our species. So thank you. But I think people, you know, forget that, yes, you can go outside and get morning sunlight and which I highly recommend. People do that as, as most people know. But I mean,

• 52:22Speaker 01

  so many benefits on mood and mental health and improved sleep that it just, and it's completely zero cost, you know. But I often get accused of, okay, well, but what if you have kids? Like, how do you do this? Well, you take the kids with you because guess what? They need it too. You, you take them outside, you eat breakfast outside, or at least facing a window indoors. It's not gonna be as good as having the window open or being outdoors. But even if the sun's on the other side of your apartment building, I mean, these things have an outsized positive effect on health. And I'll wager both upper limbs, anyway, that many, many, many of the mental health issues that we see nowadays in young people and in adults is the consequence of disrupted circadian rhythms because of a lot of time in a two dimensional screen space,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  which I'm not condemning. I spend time on and put out most of my content on social media and YouTube, Apple, Spotify, right? And in addition to that, to the lights are too bright at night, and they're not getting enough sunlight during the day. And an important thing to understand about our circadian slash health, you know, circadian system and health is that Throughout in the morning and throughout the day, your eyes are less sensitive to light and you need more of it in order to get what you need. Okay, broadly speaking, and at night, your eyes are far more sensitive to artificial lighting and you need far less of it in order to disrupt your circadian system in bad ways, disrupt your mental health. Now, does that mean you have to walk around with sunglasses at night and you know, dim all the lights in your house?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Well, no, but you could afford to dim them a little bit. You could afford to switch to the red light function on your phone. There's actually a triple click red light function on every phone that maybe I'll pass the throughput of what to do to your phone. It's which allows you to eliminate the blues.

• 54:04Chris Williamson?

  Accessibility functions on iPhone. I think mine goes to mine goes to grayscale when I do that.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can. Yeah, so you can have it switch to grayscale or to purely red. You know, eliminate the blues, a trick that my friend Rick Rubin taught me. I was like, oh, this is great. You know, you don't, you know, you don't necessarily have to purchase blue blocker glasses or anything like that.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative that tastes like chai and cacao had a baby. It's got four functional mushrooms and with only a fraction the caffeine as a cup of coffee, you will get all of the natural energy without the jitters or crash. Each ingredient was added for a purpose. Cacao and chai for a hint of coffee and hot chocolate like flavor. Lion's mane for focus, cordyceps to promote natural energy and both chaga and reishi to support a healthy immune system. Plus, it's Whole30 approved, 100% USDA organic certified, non-GMO, gluten free, vegan and kosher. So if you are looking for a delicious alternative to your morning coffee, this is a great place to start. Right now, you can get $20 off your first order plus a whole box of good stuff, including

• 55:04Chris Williamson?

  creamer and a free frother by going to the link in the description below or heading to mudwtr.com/mordenwisdom. That's mudwtr.com/mordenwisdom.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  So there are a bunch of little things that we can do that make a vast improvement in the way that our biology and psychology function. And it's amazing when you start to think about how most people exist now. It's too dim, not enough light for them during the day, especially not enough sunlight. And that's too bright for them at night. And they're also living mostly in a two dimensional world of screens.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's the problem with the two dimensional thing?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we have an epidemic of myopia, of nearsightedness, and it's been shown in a bunch of different clinical trials now. The first couple of them that were attacked, like most studies, something comes out, then it gets attacked, then there's a retaliation study, et cetera. That kids that spend two hours or more out of doors per day have a far lower incidence of myopia, nearsightedness. And even if they're on iPads and books and computers, there's something about far viewing, about viewing things further than three or four feet away from us on a frequent, for a significant portion of our day. Doesn't mean you have to be staring off into the horizon, but as opposed to near viewing where you're looking at something within about four feet of oneself. This distance that we're sitting across from one another is about, probably about four and a half, five feet.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  It's not quite far viewing, but you think about, watch people's behavior, look at how they go through the day. They're spending most of their time looking at things about a foot to a foot and a half away. And as a consequence, the eyeball gets longer. This is a well-established fact in animal models and humans. And then the visual image isn't focused onto the retina, the light sensing portion at the back of the eye. The image falls in front of the retina, so-called nearsightedness, right? It's falling too near to the lens, okay? There are other, some people claim that nearsightedness has to do with the actual perceptual changes, but in any event. So fortunately, that the eyeball actually can change in length. So viewing things further away can actually, especially early in life, allow the eyeball to adjust its shape. Amazing, just like the sinuses, there's plasticity of a lot of different organs.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  And so the point is that we need to get out and view things at a distance. If you're walking down the street looking at your phone, you're degrading the functioning of your visual system.

• 57:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, I told you, I think I texted you before I did it, I got laser eye surgery a month ago.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, so you got the Lasik?

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Great. And that's, so the Lasik, just to, you know, educate people, is to actually change the shape of the eyeball somewhat in order to make it more perfect optically, in a way that for many people allows them to not have to wear corrective lenses of any kind.

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I can see everything. I can see your ancestral trauma and full works now at 100 yards.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Amazing. Your vision is super sharp now?

• 57:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's 2015.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  What was the, was the surgery painful?

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  It's very interesting. So I actually videoed it. I haven't put it up because it's kind of, it's probably pretty uncomfortable for people to watch.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  That's never stopped you before.

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  That's true, that's true. So they numb both of your eyes using numbing drops.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  And then they Come over the top with a kind of a large box on an arm. They rest the valve of the front of this box on the eyeball itself. And then suck the eyeball onto the actual valve so that it can't move. They then use one laser to create a flap in the cornea, which is at the precise distance based on all of the tests that they did in the days prior to that. They then take it off.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  You're still lying back. You have to keep looking at a green light that's above you. The surgeon will lift the flap, the front flap of the cornea up.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  Using a kind of a soft pair of tweezers.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:45Chris Williamson?

  The laser will then come in behind now the opened part of the cornea and do the corrective surgery. The flap will then get replaced and it needs to be very, very, very precise. So that any slight nudge, I actually had to go and get the, I had to get my flap relifted. A couple of days later on my left eye because a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of oil from the top of my eyelid had been caught underneath the flap and it was causing a flaring of bright lights. And so I had to go back and actually get the flap relifted. Get this, the flap that they make can still be relifted up to three years later.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating. And yeah, had it done on both eyes. Couple of, one day of recovery, it feels very gritty for the people that are concerned about whether or not it's going to like hurt them. And my recovery period was one day and I was able to, I recorded a podcast 48 hours in bright lights, 48 hours afterward.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Was it an expensive procedure?

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  Four grand GBP, so five grand USD.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Not a trivial sum.

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  Not a trivial sum, but also given that it's literally how you navigate the world.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 59:49Chris Williamson?

  And I was squinting a lot. I was squinting at screens to have read the text. I was using really large text. The only reason I found out about this is because I went in for a checkup and they got me to do my eye test and the lady turned and said, yeah, you, um, you legally can't drive without glasses. I was like, what are you talking about? My vision's, my vision's great. Like my vision's always been like this, but she got me to do the thing and I thought. Yeah, it shouldn't be, I should be able to read those huge letters that are only 20 feet away from me, shouldn't I? And sure enough, after this corrective surgery, 2015 vision, everything's razor sharp. The only considerations that I would say are nighttime

• 1:00:31Chris Williamson?

  viewing of bright lights, specifically, streetlights, cars coming towards you, you get a little bit of flaring around them. And that's because it's now passing through not just one piece of material, but there is a second cut. That supposedly dissipates a little bit over time. But I am flying the flag for laser eye treatment, man. It's it's been a complete game changer. My pickleball game's improved, which is obviously what was most important. Everything's, it's really, really good. And I'm very, very impressed. And thank you to my surgeon for doing it.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that this little flap, do they tell you how big the flap is?

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  I can just show you the video. I can show you the video once we finish up.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I think it's an interesting procedure. And we did an episode with our Chair of Ophthalmology, Jeff Goldberg, and he was a proponent of it for people that are, you know,

• 1:01:22Chris Williamson?

  I texted you, I texted you to make sure that, like, the ophthalmologist guy with all of the dudes that know it, like, am I all right to do this?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Jeff's amazing. Actually, we trained in the same lab. He was a graduate student, I was a postdoc, then he ended up in Miami, and then we converted in San Diego. Then he moved to Stanford, I moved to Stanford. So I said, we sort of, he'll argue I was tracking him, I'll argue he was tracking me. But he's my chairman, so I'll just say I was tracking him. But a very, very smart guy. And I think, yeah, getting, keeping your eyes healthy is key. This actually comes back to light. So there's some really beautiful data of Glenn Jeffries Laboratory at University College London. I've known Glenn for more than 20 years. He's a spectacular vision scientist, showing that exposure to artificial red light, you know, there's a lot of the, you know, like the juve and these other red lights that are out there cozy in these other red light systems, which by the way, I don't have any financial relationship to.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  You know, the idea that red light could somehow enhance different functions of our tissues or preserve different functions of our tissues, people think is really biohacky. Like, oh, this is, you know, people under red lights. But, you know, there was a Nobel Prize given for the use of long wavelength light for the treatment of lupus, like, almost 100 years ago. So the idea of phototherapy is not a new concept, but people love to, to kind of push it into the realm of, of biohacking slash neuroscience, but it's not. Um, the red light therapy has been shown to have some positive outcomes for the treatment of acne, for scar healing and wound healing. Uh, red light is long wavelength light, which can penetrate further through tissues than short wavelength light.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  So that's sort of the argument there is that when you look at red light or red, red light is placed on, or is shown on the skin, some of it is actually getting into the deeper layers of the dermis. How deep is questionable? Some people argue they can even get into the, the blood supply if, you know, it's like on the wrist or something. In any event, Glenn's lab has shown two really important findings. And the first one they've shown twice in separate studies, and this is all in humans. The first result is that if people look at red light for two or three minutes, once or twice a week, in particular, early in the day, it can offset some age-related vision loss. How? Well, the photoreceptors at the back of the eye are some of the most metabolically, uh, consume metabolically active and, um, let's just say, energy-consuming cells of the entire

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  nervous system, which is saying a lot because the nervous system is the most metabolically consuming or metabolically, excuse me, active organ. And so as a consequence, these really active cells create a lot of so-called reactive oxygen species. And that impacts the, negatively impacts the functions of mitochondria. So viewing red light seems to restore some of the mitochondrial function by limiting reactive oxygen species in the photoreceptors and offsetting, and they've shown this, some, not all, but some age-related vision loss.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  Presumably you're not talking about looking at one of these red light panels because these things are like a, a fucking like flat, like it's huge, so bright.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I am, I actually am referring to that. But you want to do it at a distance that's comfortable, so several feet, right?

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Those panels, for the people that don't know, these things- Uh, instead, they even provide you with uh,

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Eye protection.

• 1:04:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're like the stuff for the, for the sunbed.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  That goes with them.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you don't want to do this for more than a couple of minutes and you do want to blink and you do, and probably through eyelids closed, if your eyelids are thin enough and it's bright enough, it can probably get in nonetheless. But let, let me be very, very clear. Uh, well, I'll tell you the other result and then I'll tell you why you don't need, necessarily need a red light. Um, the other result, which is more recent and is still under review. So I want to be very clear, but the, the data look interesting, um, to say the least, is that there's this old theory, like old theory that the French have really expounded that, you know, eating food outdoors is metabolized differently than eating food indoors, which sounds crazy, right? I mean, at some level, and yet this study shows that if people do this red light viewing

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  while eating or in the minutes just after eating for just a few minutes, that the post meal blood glucose level severe is significantly dampened, which is a good thing, right? You don't want big elevations in blood glucose or excessive elevations in blood glucose. Now, that all sounds a little bit at the edge of what we consider, you know, valid uh, or reasonable. And yet, if you think about sunlight, sunlight is full spectrum light. So this isn't saying you need to run out and buy a red light. This is, if you get outside and get your morning sunlight, yes, it's going to set your circadian rhythm for elevated mood, focus and alertness during the day, improve sleep at night. But in addition to that, you're getting red light to your eyes early in the day. You're, you're absolutely, you're getting red light to your eyes.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Now, in very densely overcast days, say in the UK or elsewhere, if it's not, you're going to really filter out the, the clouds are going to

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  Everything, the joy, the, the will to live.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  And, um, and as a consequence, some people choose to supplement their light with these red light, uh, devices. But this idea that the French and others have, have argued, and I'm sure as I say, the French said it, then, you know, the French will nod and everyone else will say, no, it's like, it was us first or us also. It's probably multiple, uh, people throughout history, groups throughout history. But it does seem that there's something different about the way that food is metabolized. If under different lighting conditions, which sounds crazy and I can already hear Lane Norton stomping in with his, you know, they basically, yeah, Lane's, Lane's brain sort of has like PubMed ideas. I, I, I think it's great, by the way, Lane, we, we love you. Um, and I love his, his, um, his, uh, sort of, um, adherence to PubMed IDs.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  But you know, uh, these are published studies I'll send along. You can tell me what you think, Lane. But, um, the point being that there still needs to be more work on this, right? But it's always nice when some nicely controlled studies done by well-established laboratories that people in a field trust, like Glenn's lab, um, start seeing things once or twice over in multiple studies, um, that really work well with what we know from kind of naturalistic conditions. For instance, there are hunters, people that are adventurers, that are, whose job depends on them being able to see into the distance.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  Cameron Haynes.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cam Haynes. These people maintain vision well into their older age. But just like me, who spend too much time in front of a book or a screen, who spend most of their time and have for many years, looking at things down, I mean, for years, I looked at things down a microscope. That was where most of my life was down, looking down the microscope, but also reading things at close distance. Well, you, you know, it makes sense that the eyeball would lengthen. You end up with nearsightedness. I do wear corrective lenses, um, at night, especially if I'm driving at night. I've really worked hard to try to not succumb to the need for corrective lenses because I'm trying to keep my vision health good.

• 1:08:01Chris Williamson?

  Because you become reliant.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  I don't want to become reliant on it, but, but you know, at night I have to wear corrective lenses. Yeah.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  Talking about the red light stuff, have you heard of Huberman husbands? Do you know what this is?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, unfortunately, well, I, I should say that the, the most unfortunate thing about the Huberman husbands post is that it was about, is that it was taken by certain media outlets to amplify the idea that.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  The audience of my podcast is just male, when in fact it's 50% male female, at least in the listenership. YouTube skews male, but we knew that anyway. But the listenership is 50% male, 50% female. The Huberman husbands thing was really about how a woman was saying that she thinks she's the Huberman husband, because she does all these different things that

• 1:08:46Chris Williamson?

  But they got taken from that. For the people that don't know, the meta meme around Huberman husbands, which you can search on TikTok right now, is that the hot new thing that all of the wives want out there is a husband who's into red light therapy, and he does cold plunges, and he does sauna treatments and stuff. So I wondered-

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  See, guys, I'm trying to help you out.

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Look, dude, I wondered how you feel of a bunch of guys potentially cosplaying as Andrew Huberman in the bedroom. Like, the price of long-sleeved black shirts has gone through the roof. You now have people fully larping as you. Maybe they're telling their wife that they didn't get enough sunlight in their eyes. There's dirty talk in the bedroom. I'm not sure. I wondered how it feels to have this army of Andrew Hubermans from Wish now existing on the internet.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  So we covered the AMCC, it means anterior mid-singulate cortex. But I confess, even though I know that, I don't know what cosplay is, and I don't know what larping is.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  Cosplay is dressing up. It happens at a lot of conventions. Someone will go as Anakin Skywalker, or Pikachu, or whatever, and larping is live-

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  For sexual titillation?

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes, but not always.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  So this is sort of like, this is like the action hero variation on furries?

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  Kind of, yeah.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Okay, but it's not- Furries is more Lex's domain.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Yeah, we know that well. And then larping is-

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  We know that, but we don't know it well, fortunately.

• 1:10:11Chris Williamson?

  Live action role-playing, larping. So that, again, is this kind of, I'm saying there are potentially, there is potentially a market out there, if a guy is struggling in the dating world, to take the aesthetic, get fully Huberman-pilled, and then there is a huge potential demand amongst the wives out there.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is news to me. One thing that's come up recently in discussions with some traditional media outlets, but but also just generally, right, is, you know, to what extent is all this focus on health? You know, does that change something about masculine feminine dynamics? Like, like the traditional stereotype of men was that they're tough enough to not need to engage in any self-care, right? They don't need sleep, they can drink a lot of liquor, they'll eat when there's food, they'll eat whatever, they don't like going to the doctor, right? This is like runs very counter current to the kinds of things I talk about on my podcast, like, hey, get up in the morning, get some sunlight, right? Lift weights, run.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  And I should point out that none, none of what I've talked about with exercise ever, of course, there's an aesthetic component, right? Limiting body fat to some extent, right? Not having excessive body fat. You know, resistance training, as we know, is an incredible way to adjust one's aesthetics if they feel like their proportions aren't where they want, or, you know, by the way, guys, train your neck, clearly Chris does. I mean, nothing looks more ridiculous than like wide shoulders and a little head with a little neck.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Handsel neck.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, well, it's just, it's crazy, because this is proportionally, you see it and you're like, this is.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  It's the, it's the male equivalent of the BBL. If you have like a, I'm teaching you, I'm so happy that I get to teach you.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  This is sort of like class for me. I've got cosplay.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Make sure that you've got your notes. So this is the Brazilian butt lift. It's kind of like the bum equivalent of a boob job.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And they have an implants for the glutes?

• 1:12:07Chris Williamson?

  I think that they actually take fat from elsewhere in the body and then put it into the, it's the risk, the surgery risk of this is really quite high.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  They just do like hip thrusters or something?

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Isn't there that there's?

• 1:12:19Chris Williamson?

  That takes too long.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  There's the Brett Contreras glute guy?

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's very popular because he puts glutes on people, but they actually put them on themselves because they're the ones doing the work.

• 1:12:28Chris Williamson?

  I think the doctor technically puts it on them, but yeah. And it kind of looks, because there's no associated leg development with the glute development, it's kind of like if you put two basketballs on upturned baseball bats. So you have like a, the leg, and then you have like the.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Ridiculous.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  It's, I've seen some, I went to Miami for the first time a few months ago, and I saw one that kind of terrified me. It looked like a bag of cats from behind in a set of leggings. You know, like you could kind of see sort of pores coming out like this.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Moose.

• 1:12:57Chris Williamson?

  Pearly. Poorly finished, I would say.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  The implant moves.

• 1:13:01Chris Williamson?

  I just, it wasn't, it wasn't good. Anyway, my point being, uh, neck for guys need to have it proportional to the shoulders.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, I mean, yeah, so I'm sort of taking digs at people that don't train their neck. It's also life insurance, right? Um, I had an accident a few years ago where I fell off a second story roof and I walked away from it because I've long done neck training because I injured my neck when I was younger. And, um, even if you don't do fight sports, I don't do fight sports, but, um, wouldn't be, uh, aligned with my, my role and needing my brain. Um, I got nothing against people that do fight sports, but that's a choice that I've, I've actively made, uh, not to do them anymore. Um, but neck training is, is really important for just.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  What's the 80/20 of neck training? What, what's the biggest movers for improving your neck?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Oh, well, first of all, I'll, I'll tell you in a moment. Um, but I think that, you know, remember that your neck is your upper spine. So people are big on training their abs, you know, for, for spine stability and lower back, hopefully as well for spine stability, the mid thoracic regions as well. But, you know, it's your upper spine and you want it strong and you, um, you'll get much stronger in other things as well. Everything's better, people's posture is far better when they train their neck. It actually changes the, the tone of people's voice. And I had a guest on my podcast, Dr. Eddie Chang, who's our chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. I've known him since we were kids. Um, he's a phenomenally smart and creative guy. And I've asked him about this offline, you know, why is it that neck training does that? Well, you know, the voice change that occurs in boys when they, um, when they develop and go through puberty is a thickening of the vocal cords

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  that's androgen dependent. I have this weird mutation. I've talked about this a little bit, but maybe not, um, that on a program as broad as this, that I actually have the same voice I always had from when I was a little kid. My voice never actually changed. I have a, so I have an androgen receptor, uh, alteration.

• 1:14:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Um, so fortunately for me, like, doesn't cause any other issues, but. This was my voice when I was five years old.

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  How terrifying.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they called me Froggy. Yeah, it was kind of a joke. I go like the kid on the Little Rascals that was Froggy. In any case, but for most people, they hit puberty and then their voice changes because of the thickening of the vocal cords. But obviously, I had some early androgen exposure. That was clear because I also had hair on my Adam's apple when I was like four years old. So there was some early androgen exposure.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  You're not gonna fuck with that four year old.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  No, I was a, I was a kind kid until I was a teenager and then I eventually.

• 1:15:18Chris Williamson?

  Angry teenager.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  I went through it, but you know, I was, I was kind nonetheless. But in any event, when you train your neck, actually, it, it does improve posture and it actually changes the timbre of your voice somewhat. But for people who speak a lot for a living, podcasters, singers, actors, etc., lawyers and lawyers seem to talk a lot.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  You don't want to do a lot of really heavy neck training because it actually changes the way that your jaw moves and the way that you speak. And you know, you and I, especially like my solo podcast, sometimes it take me 11 hours to record. And so you want to maintain healthy airflow through, through this region, right? But the best way to develop a strong neck safely is to unfortunately stay away from bridges, which you know, wrestling coaches love to give. Again, the, the discs can, can be injured. You can, you can cause dysfunction of the discs and then the pain comes on in a moment and then you're, you're, you're hosed. Best thing to do is take a plate and start really light, lie on a bench, stabilize yourself by putting one arm down. Okay. So you want to close the chain, so to speak, if you can

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  get a foot down as well. And then put that plate, you know, probably start with a five or a 10 pound plate wrapped in a towel. So you don't end up with an imprint of the five or 10 on the side of your head or face. And then you're, you're just going to go from neutral position, which is your head, you know, essentially straight up and down, but you're lying on your side to just, you know, about maybe 30 or 45 degrees. You don't have to like really cinch into it. And you want to keep, this is important, keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth, your jaw shut, so that your jaw are moving around. Because some people do neck work and then they'll get clicking of the jaw, they'll get pain in the ear. There's, I've spent a lot of time with skulls and I can tell you, human skulls and other skulls, by virtue of my work in neuroscience and dissecting stuff, and I have kind of obsession with craniofacial stuff as well. And, you know, there's a lot of musculature

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  and ligaments of the, the skull that have to be contended with. So tongue on the roof of your mouth and you're just gonna, you know, nasal breathe and you're not going to failure. You're not training really heavy, higher reps in the, you know, 10 to 25 repetition range.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

  Three sets?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, three sets and then the other side. And then, you know, rather than doing a lot of forward neck work, which people are already doing because they're doing a lot of phone reading and shaping themselves like a C, you want to lie on your stomach and put a plate on the back of your head and get into that, you know, the neck extension straight back.

• 1:17:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  But not pinching or wrenching your head back. Movements like where you're creating some torsion up into the sides like this is a little more dangerous. I don't recommend. The person who has great tutorials on this and many other things as well as Jeff Cavalier, AthleanX, has a great neck tutorial, maybe you could link to. That's where I learned it. Over time, I worked up from a 10 pound plate. I can do five or six reps on each side with a 45 pound plate.

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me. You put a 45, that's 20 kilos for the Anglicans.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll do that. And I don't say that to be tough or anything, but the idea for me is to just have a really strong neck so that also for pressing movements and pulling movements, you'll get much stronger there.

• 1:18:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, listen, the bar has now been set for the fledgling Huberman husbands out there. They know that the neck training is a important part. Black shirt, neck training, bit of a beard.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Well, the black, well, to be clear, and women should probably train their neck as well, but lighter, you know, for aesthetic reasons. And if they want to have a bigger neck, they can do that. But I think most women don't want their neck. This is one muscle group that does tend to grow pretty quickly.

• 1:18:38Chris Williamson?

  Is that right?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  It does, it does. And then the other thing, and this looks ridiculous, but that fighters know is very useful, is that there's the kiss the sky thing where they'll actually look up and, you know, and you'll feel it in the deeper muscles of the neck. So that kind of thing is, again, you know, some people use a towel for this stuff and they don't have access to weights. But neck work is really key, just like ab work is key, just like lower back work is key, just like tib work is key, knees over toes guy, you know, love his content. Ben's amazing. So the smaller muscle groups are not going to be the mainstay of any workout, but they become so important when you're thinking about longevity. Because they are the muscle groups that tend to cause, if not train, shin splints, kink in the neck, the kink in the neck is obviously as not a technical term, but pain

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  in the neck, the turning in the shower after doing heavy pressing and then like you're out, your neck, you can't turn your head, the lower back pain sciatica, often lower spine stabilization issues. I really think Jeff Cavalier has some of the best zero cost content on this, that I followed his content for years. And, you know, if you put in, for instance, sciatica, low back pain, he has diagnostic tools there that really help you establish whether or not it's truly lower back pain, or it's a medial glute issue, and gives you the proper things to do. And neck is just one piece of the equation. Getting back to Huberman husbands, that, yeah, I chuckled the first time I saw it. I, I think it was a little frustrating to me because I thought, wait, there are a lot of women that do these protocols too. Our protocols are, we have had some male hormone health

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  episodes, some female hormone health episodes, but in general, we're just talking about stuff that's applicable to everybody. But, listen, I don't control the internet. I don't make the rules out there. And, you know, and then traditional media amplified the Huberman husbands piece through a couple of

• 1:20:21Chris Williamson?

  Rightly so, rightly so.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  And the next thing you know, that's where, the black shirt, I should just say, is because I try and, as we've talked about before, I don't want my tattoos to distract, and I got a lot of them. I want to focus on content and teaching and people hearing the content. And, and the black shirt is something I did long before I had a podcast, and that's because the great Joe Strummer, singer for The Clash and my scaleros, wore a black button down shirt while he would do full shows, and he would be soaking wet. It was like the punkest thing I ever saw, that he was like doing full shows, like belting it out, and

• 1:20:54Chris Williamson?

  Long sleeve shirt.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  In long sleeve, black shirt. And he was just, literally, the shirt was like stuck to his body. And I was just thinking, like, not only is he an amazing humanitarian, writer, poet, singer for The Clash, creative, we miss him, he's gone, but he's still here through music, right, as they say. And he, you know, he's just so punk, he's just up there in his 40s or late 40s, and soaking wet. And I'm thinking like, that guy, like, he's got, he's got it figured out.

• 1:21:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna do it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  You know, so, anyway, and I like the black shirt, what can I say?

• 1:21:23Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute, but first- I need to tell you about AG1. AG1 is a product that I've been using every single day for over three years now. Dr Huberman himself is a massive fan because it is the most comprehensive foundational daily nutrition supplement on the market. My digestion is so much better since I've started using AG1 and I genuinely can't remember what life used to be like, but when I stop using it, I do not like the way that my body feels. Since 2010, AG1 has led the foundational nutrition revolution, continually refining their formula to create better, smarter ways to elevate your health. AG1 is the supplement I trust to provide the support that my body needs every single day, and that's why they've been a partner for so long. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1.

• 1:22:08Chris Williamson?

  You can get all of this with your first purchase, a free year's supply of vitamin D, five free travel packs, free pots, shakers, and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/wisdom.

• 1:22:31Chris Williamson?

  How concerned do you think we should be about vaping? Spoke about alcohol. It seems like there's this big vape is on Netflix at the moment. It's a documentary about the rise of Juul. And I'm only one episode in, but it seems like vaping is now catching an awful lot of attention. What, how concerned do you think we should be about vaping?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry, I'm just taking a note here. I take notes during our podcasts.

• 1:22:58Chris Williamson?

  Highly intense. It totally makes sense.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Just the things I can go back to. We should be very concerned. So when it comes to smoking or vaping, there's the thing that's being consumed, the thing that people are trying to put in their bloodstream, nicotine, cannabis, et cetera. And let's just set those aside. I've done episodes on nicotine and cannabis and they have their application. They also have their problems. Vaping is terrible because of the other chemicals that delivers to the lungs. It's also very clear, and we haven't released this episode yet, but I talked to a female hormone doc from Austin, Natalie Crawford, so OBGYN. You know, vaping is associated with disruptions in egg health and what they call egg quality can create certain mutations in eggs. And

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Serious endocrine issues in women. Okay. Personally, I find it disgusting. Like, I just find it like I don't do it, but when I see people vaping, like to me, and listen, I used to, when growing up, I quit smoking a long time ago, but I used to smoke a bit of nicotine growing up. Remember, I was a wild one, but that's not why I did it. I just, you know, nicotine works for me as a drug and I don't do it anymore.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  But vaping is so addictive. It's a mutagen. It mutates the genes of cells. It mutates the genes of rapidly dividing cells most. So breast cancers, ovarian cancers, egg quality, you know, sperm are constantly turning over. So, you know, people always say, no, I vape all the time and I got so and so pregnant or whatever, you know, when they have a perfectly healthy kid, that kid might have been much healthier. And also, the kid's not grown up yet. Like, introduce me to the kid later. I wish for that kid. I pray for them, but that they're healthy as can be. But it is so clear that you're introducing a laundry list of toxins to the lungs and they're getting into the bloodstream and there are a number of them that cross the blood brain barrier. And once they cross the blood brain barrier,

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  those neurons, by virtue of the fact that neurons don't turn over across the lifespan, you're born with the ones you're going to die with. You might add a few across your lifespan, but you're mostly born with the ones that you're going to die with. Well, they're going to harbor those chemicals and those particulates. And, you know, yes, our, we have grandparents that smoked and lived to be 90, but you know, those are generally the outliers. So I can't find one good reason why people should vape. If they, if people want nicotine in their system that badly, and here I'm not recommending that, they would be much better off relying on a Trosch or a Patch.

• 1:25:27Chris Williamson?

  Because they know whatever.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Or even toothpicks or, you know, or injectable. I know people, I'm not going to out anyone.

• 1:25:33Chris Williamson?

  Inject nicotine.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm not going to out anyone here, but I know people in our podcast community that rely on nicotine injections for mental clarity.

• 1:25:42Chris Williamson?

  That is so hardcore.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't. It causes elevation in blood pressure. It causes vasoconstriction, but it also will robustly increase focus and attention as any smoker will tell you.

• 1:25:53Chris Williamson?

  Name lining nicotine into my vein.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  You're starting to see some companies that offer things like NAD infusions also offer subcutaneous or nicotine injections.

• 1:26:02Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Or patch or gum. Yeah.

• 1:26:05Chris Williamson?

  Smoking for a very long time, everyone knows, huge campaign, which I think was pretty effective, actually, it's kind of discouraging people from smoking, or at least making them aware about the

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Do you remember how they got kids to stop smoking? They told them for years it was bad for their health, that didn't work. They told them that it was putting money in the pockets of these like, of like these old cackling white guys that were like rubbing their hands in the

• 1:26:34Chris Williamson?

  The capitalistic system.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Boardroom and making a ton of money, and then it became the rebellious thing to quit smoking. That was the effective campaign.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  I think about this all the time, that there was a big push to both disincentivize and make more different smoke, make more difficult smoking, you've got to go outside, there's the smoking area. I remember I worked in clubs for one year before the smoking ban came in.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  In the UK, and then people had to go outside, you know, just friction, friction, friction all the way down. And then vaping came in. And vaping is way more enjoyable of an experience than smoking ever was. You can have a higher dose of nicotine that tastes, you know, enjoyable, bubblegum flavor and raspberry unicorn dust and whatever, whatever. I don't know. And it's not going to stink the house out. You know, you don't have any of the externalities of that. So I wonder whether we have ended up in a net benefit or net cost for public health from switching from smoking to vaping.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an analog here with, you know, kratom and opioids. If you really want to, we just got to put ourselves under attack by even bringing up the topic, but I did it intentionally.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  You know, there are things like smoking and opioid addiction, which are, it's unequivocal, it's just terrible, right? It crushes lives, destroys lives.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Yes, there are those rare individuals who smoked their whole life, lived into their 90s and okay, but they are outliers.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  So the question is, did, is vaping allowing fewer people to smoke and therefore improving their health? Maybe if they're hell bent on getting that nicotine or cannabis into their system and they're opting not to smoke and they're going to vape instead. Then maybe we have to be objective and say, okay, if they're absolutely intent on getting it in through some inhalation device, vaping is probably better, but we don't know that for sure. We actually don't know that. And then, since I brought it up, and I really put the target on myself with this one, you know, I did a post about kratom, which is over the counter. People will say, it's not an opioid. It taps the opioid system. It taps other systems as well. And a number of people have indeed managed to get themselves off

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  of opioids using kratom as a bit of a bridge, kind of like the methadone heroin thing. But the kratom advocacy groups are really growing strong right now because there is the possibility that kratom will be made illegal in the not too distant future. And there is the reality that some people who were never opioid addicts have taken kratom and then get addicted to kratom. And then people start arguing, is it real addiction? Is it habit forming, et cetera? So I think the next year or so is going to be an interesting time for dialogue about kratom. I have a couple of guests coming on my podcast. Maybe you'll do it as well. And I'd love that if you would. There's one thing, by the way, folks, that's so great about the podcast space, unlike other professions, we love it when one topic or one guest shows up on multiple podcasts because it actually doesn't hurt any of us.

• 1:29:33Chris Williamson?

  You've sent me, in the last few months, you've sent me Paul Conti, you've sent me Rick Rubin. It's, and everyone's got a different flex, right? The conversation you're going to have with Rick or Paul is going to be way different to the one that I'm going to have, which is going to be way different to the one that Joe's going to have.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a very different thing than academic science, than journalism of other kinds.

• 1:29:52Chris Williamson?

  Zero sum.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  The idea, it's a no scoop. They, you know, like in academia or in journalism, they say, oh, you know, who got the scoop? You know, or you got scooped, someone else put it out first. And you know, in, in podcasting, it's quite the opposite. So I think the kratom versus, I mean, the kratom topics can be really interesting and important to cover. But I think, look, my vote is to not vape. I think, I'm just shocked at how many people vape. And first of all, it's actually not unlike cigarette smoking. It's expensive. That's not the main reason people avoid it, but it's a significant expense when you add it up across the year. It's clearly addictive. There's no question about it. It's clearly detrimental to lung

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  function. And then people like how it makes their brain feel. And they think that if they're already pretty active, physically active, then they can offset some of that. And they probably can. But I think in the next five years or so, we're just going to see a slew of studies showing that vaping is just bad for us, especially for the developing brain, because it's bringing in at a very rapid rate, high potency nicotine and high potency cannabis. And you know, from Montalimki's work, and we know, my colleague at Stanford, that the slope of that increase in dopamine and epinephrine adrenaline and acetylcholine is so important, the sharper that slope, the faster the rise, the more addictive potential these compounds have. And so it's so far and away different than the kind of dopamine or epinephrine or acetylcholine increase that

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  one sees with exercise, or with cold plunges, or with sex, or with these other things, or dancing and things, you know. So, and you know, one of course could be addicted to any of the other things I just mentioned too. But the potential for it is far less than something like vaping.

• 1:31:32Chris Williamson?

  Here's my stance on it, that I understand, maybe of the two evils, vaping is less of an evil than traditional smoking would be. But I think the enjoyability, the accessibility, the fact that it isn't as stigmatized, all of that, I think that it wouldn't surprise me if more people are now going to vape than ever previously smoked. And even if the difference between the two is, is that vaping is better, that the total area under the curve of public health degradation, I think that, I think that we've netted a loss overall for vaping. And, you know, I see, dude, I go to a comedy show, and I find myself going and getting an Esco bar before. And I'm like, what? Like, why is it? It's just habit.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 1:32:14Chris Williamson?

  It's like a, like a just a disposable.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  So you vape?

• 1:32:16Chris Williamson?

  I do it if I go to a comedy show, and I'm not drinking, and I'm tired. So there's like a certain little decision tree that I go through. I'll do it maybe once a month, something like

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  What do you vape?

• 1:32:27Chris Williamson?

  Whatever, whatever disposable, unpronounceable horse shit is available, whatever's in my friend's

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  nicotine or cannabis?

• 1:32:34Chris Williamson?

  Nicotine.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Nicotine. We're in California, so people talk about cannabis use pretty openly here. Interesting. Yeah, I think.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Rapid onset of these neuromodulators in the brain concerns me. It's just, it's just so different. Also with, with behaviors, you can titrate, right? You know, people say, well, video games cause a huge increase in dopamine. Okay, fine, but you can limit the total amount of time that you engage. You, I think with, with substances, even though you can control dose or number of, of, what do they call it on the, it's not gonna be like a toke on the vape pen. What is it? It's gonna be like a, like a draw?

• 1:33:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we got the language.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Vaping, LARPing, cosplay, I've got that.

• 1:33:16Chris Williamson?

  Good. I'm teaching you everything today.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Everything I need to know. This is good because I'm gonna be able to navigate the internet.

• 1:33:21Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Talking about the internet, how worried are you about how technology is impacting people's ability to focus?

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Adult ADHD is clearly upon us. It's just clear and so very, I'm very concerned.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  You think that that's induced or facilitated or worsened by technology? Like, tell me, tell me what's going on in the brain. If, how is technology able to make such a dramatic change?

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if we, let's turn it on its head. I'm not changing your question because I don't like it when people do that to me.

• 1:33:50Chris Williamson?

  Answer what you want.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  No, it's always the last question on my podcast and people will flip, they're like, I'm gonna give you a different question. Answer that one. And I was like, okay, like, I'm gonna answer your question a different way. The, the circuits in the brain that are required for setting and maintaining focus

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  are inhibited by the process of deliberately shifting one's focus over and over and over throughout the day. In other words, if ever there was a physical activity that could undermine your cardiovascular exercise, you know, like, I mean, it turns out not to be the case, but, you know, there was this idea a few years ago that if you sit a lot during the day, it doesn't matter how much you exercise, it's not gonna make a difference. That's not true, right? Exercise still helps. But we also know that moving and standing, standing and sit, you know, standing up and sitting down quite a lot throughout the day, getting as much, you know, little walks and things like that is extremely beneficial and can amplify the already known positive effects of exercise. Okay, well. When it comes to focus, I mean, much of what our schooling is about growing up is not

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  just the content that we're taught, but our ability to sit still and pay attention, to keep the body still and to focus to some extent, keep the body still. Some people gesticulate more of the Italians and the, you know, in certain Arab countries and things like that. And other people are far more still. And we get back to this about body stillness a little bit later because there's some emerging ideas on that that are worth touching on. But the point is that if one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next, it undermines the stability of all the circuitry in the brain that's responsible for prolonged focus. Now, I partake in social media, so do you, but the scroll function is a practice of

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  shifting focus while maintaining gaze in one location, right? Normally, we would shift focus by looking here, by looking there. I mean, just for, try this for 30 minutes tomorrow. For the folks listening to this, take 30 minutes of your day and decide that you're only going to exist in the three dimensional world, meaning you're not going to look at screens for 30 minutes. Okay, obviously, screens, your phone has a depth to it, but you know what I'm talking about. You'll notice that your attention is shifting all the time. You're looking at a brick wall, then there's this, and there's you, but, but it's all harnessed by some sort of conceptual goal or physical goal, trying to get here, finish a conversation, complete an answer to a question. It's all within a tunnel of motivation.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  When you're on your phone and scrolling, and I think scrolling itself is the major issue, when you're scrolling, you're essentially putting yourself into new context after new context after new context, and the brain has to adjust to all of that. And the way that the brain works, in addition to controlling heartbeat and autonomic function, et cetera, is, think about it, sort of like a, like a, I don't want to diss it, but I went, I took my sister to see the Harry Potter play recently in New York. And while I wasn't a big fan of the script at all.

• 1:36:47Chris Williamson?

  Was this the Half Blood something, what was it called?

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the, what is it, the like, the cursed child?

• 1:36:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray got thrown out, nearly got thrown out of that during COVID. I've got to tell you the story once you're done. It's one of the phenomenal thing that I saw. So you went to go and see it.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  My sister likes theater and we go to New York each year for her birthday and I took her to this show. And I wasn't a big fan of the script, to be honest. I only read one of the Harry Potter books, liked it, but then abandoned it. But she really likes the Harry Potter stories. I wasn't a fan of the script. That's just my uninformed opinion. But the effects were spectacular. Okay. And one of the things that occurred to me, they had this library there where the books are alive. And as I was watching this, I realized that's very much how the brain works. That, for instance, when you walk into a room, it's a new context. And it would be the same as if you were walking through a library. And let's say you go to a soccer, European football game.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  And you sit down and all of a sudden that your brain calls up all these books about European soccer. And your favorite team is right there. And then you open that. And then all of a sudden, you're looking at that, something about your favorite team. What was your favorite team? Newcastle. Newcastle, okay. And then with unbeknownst to you, unbeknownst to you, this is the important part. The books all around you, not the one you're looking at, are now changing to the competitors and the history of that team. But also, who's the directly antagonistic rival team? Sunderland. Sunderland. Sunderland. Yeah, there it is, baby. Okay. So that's the way the brain works. It's calling up context so that it makes it very easy to flit to a discussion about a particular rivalry in a particular year, in a particular match, in a particular point in player. That's focus.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Focus is not about maintaining a single tunnel of cognition. Focus is about calling to mind all these additional contextually relevant batches of information that you might need. And, you know, the reason I use the analogy of the Harry Potter library is that it's a dynamic library. So the moment we're done here and we walk out, yes, some of the books, so to speak, of this conversation will linger with us. But whatever we're focused on next, whatever goal directed behavior we have, making it to dinner or through traffic or wherever we're going, will call up a new library. Now, some people might say, oh, duh, of course it works that way. But it's not duh, because it's very dynamic. Now, social media is the opposite of that. It's one library.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Next account, another library. Next account, another library. Next account, another library, another library, another library. And the brain is calling up all these different libraries in rapid succession. So when I look like, I'll be honest, the selected choice of things to click on tells me a lot about what I've been clicking on, right? That, I mean, obviously, the algorithm

• 1:39:38Chris Williamson?

  Train yourself.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  I confess, and I'm really embarrassed to say, but not so embarrassed that I won't reveal, that what I find now on that gallery of things to select are street fights. So beat downs.

• 1:39:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  And really adorable, strange animals or cute animals. I love the flora and fauna

• 1:39:57Chris Williamson?

  The duality of Andrew Huberman.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And not the capybara. Like, if ever there was an uninteresting animal, it's the capybara. However, yes, the raccoon accounts are delightful to me. The, the, the nature is metal account is very cool.

• 1:40:12Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal, yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  There's an extensive community of capybara enthusiasts on Instagram.

• 1:40:17Chris Williamson?

  Which you're a member of?

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  No, I've actively avoided capybara accounts.

• 1:40:21Chris Williamson?

  You're a big octopus guy, though.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  I like cephalopods. I like cuttlefish. My lab used to work on cuttlefish and octopuses.

• 1:40:29Chris Williamson?

  Octopi, Andrew.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  It's octopuses. It's octopuses.

• 1:40:33Chris Williamson?

  I've been taught for so long that it's octopus.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  It's octopuses. And actually.

• 1:40:36Chris Williamson?

  This is the most, hang on, this is the most.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Lex is gonna kill me because there was a meme about this because we did a live. Okay, so I know too much about this because I used to, my lab used to work on cephalopods, which are one, they're, which are in the category mollusks, include cuttlefish and octopuses. And so it's octopuses is the correct plural. And.

• 1:40:57Chris Williamson?

  This is the most, like, groundbreaking piece of information that we've got so far today.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Moreover, the great Oliver Sacks, who's now unfortunately dead, is a neurologist and popular writer about the brain function, the man who mistook his wife for his hat, et cetera, a real hero of mine, talked about this, that, you know, it's also platypuses. And that he wrote about, you can look this up, he wrote about traveling to Australia and then going to the far north where they have a breeding program to reestablish the platypuses and that the location of the breeding, the breeding program, excuse me, is literally the platypusery.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Oliver Sacks wrote about this. So I've long been interested in the platypus as an interesting animal. They're very interesting.

• 1:41:45Chris Williamson?

  Octopuses.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, yeah, that's okay. You know, many good things.

• 1:41:49Chris Williamson?

  I'll get that. It's a revolution.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  So does that mean that the plural is the, or that the location where they breed octopuses is the octopusery?

• 1:41:57Chris Williamson?

  I hope so. I want to go there.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, according to Oliver Sacks, this is the correct nomenclature and he's the neurologist expert in cephalopods. So we can return to this at some point.

• 1:42:08Chris Williamson?

  I want to show you.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  I'm sure people will put in the comments where we're right, where we're wrong.

• 1:42:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm absolutely certain.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  But either way, they will have gone out and researched and learned. And that's what

• 1:42:16Chris Williamson?

  That's what we're here for. I want to show you, I want to show you this video. Um, we can put it up on the screen. Just press play on the middle of that and, uh, and let me know what you think.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  Right. So the, for those listening who aren't watching, this is an image of a kid flipping back and forth between an iPad and a phone. Um, with incredible dexterity. This is a family out to dinner and the kids are watching screens. There's another kid without any phone in his hands, crying, um, attempting to swipe the phone that is not in his hand as if, um, as if scratching at a, an itch, but not successfully. And a kid actually tapping a screen in their sleep. Yeah. Yes. This, indeed, we are in the, uh, thank you. Um.

• 1:43:03Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on there?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, and thanks for getting me out of the animal fights conversation. Um, the,

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  what's happening is very clear, which is that, you know, the, the brain, the human brain is an incredible organ because it's a map of our experience. It has certain parts that are hardwired that govern our heart rate and control of our heart rate or control of our breathing, um, immune, uh, certain immune functions and on and on. But then a vast percentage of our, of the human brain is, is open real estate.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  That is designated as one function or another, depending on what happens to you during development. So we know this for sure. My scientific great grandparents won the Nobel Prize for this, David Hubel and Torrance Weasel, that what you see during development, really between the ages of birth and about age 14 mainly, but certainly extending longer, creates a set of modules or maps within the brain that allow you to predict what's going to happen in the future. So if kids are growing up doing a lot of swiping behavior, this, remember, we're in the first time in human history where people have written with their thumbs also, right? Texting.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  There are entirely different maps of how language is encoded, motor, I should say, how motor functions and language interact. You know, in the past, meaning for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, gesticulating accord and speech and grunting and shouting and pointing is one of the primary modes of communication. It's not surprising, therefore, that the representation of the hands and the digits, which is nerd speak for fingers, is

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  right next to the areas of the brain that are responsible for generating language and speech and language. So we now have the ability to speak with our thumbs, so to speak, no pun intended, by texting. We now have the ability to see many different contextual landscapes, as we talked about before, by swiping, typically up, sometimes down, typically up, right? So the up swipe is become, you know, as, perhaps as hard, as mapped into the brain as the wave. Hi, you see, what do you say to babies, you know? Hi, people try and get their attention, get them to go wide eyed, smile, you know, they do peekaboo, these guys. People have been doing this for a very long time.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Now, the swipe function is one of the ways in which human beings. Engage in the world. It's almost, it's not as fundamental as opening one's mouth to eat, but it's pretty close. So the, the brain has just adapted to this. But there's real estate set aside for whatever your experience was. And so what you're seeing there is just kids very adept at doing this because it's always a trade off. Hubel Wiesel, in part, won the Nobel Prize for showing that plasticity of the brain, mapping of the brain for one particular sensory experience or function, say swiping or the ability to switch back and forth between multiple screens, is always, always at the expense of some other potential function. You can't do everything.

• 1:46:06Chris Williamson?

  So when children are inculcating that particular habit, there is the Thomas Sowell quote, like, there are no solutions, only trade offs.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I think I've got written on my whiteboard on my fridge at the moment, the five most common deathbed regrets. And it's things like, I wish that I'd not worked as much. I wish I'd let myself be happy. I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.

• 1:46:34Chris Williamson?

  It will be unbelievably surprising to me if in 40 years' time, I wish I'd spent less time on my phone isn't on there. I would bet pretty much everything that I have, that that, that would probably appear on average on people's five top deathbed regrets. I wish I'd spent less time on my phone. And we can see this happening in front of us. And the best way that you can tell that this is going to continue to happen is that you can reflect on what you did over the last week. And one of the most common things that you wish that you'd done less of over the last week was, shouldn't I, I got, I got captured. I, I did a couple of YouTube holes or TikTok scrolls or Instagram whatevers. And you know that this is happening in the micro, spread that across a lifetime, you know? I think that

• 1:47:18Chris Williamson?

  very much we're going to look back at this and hopefully there is some kind of solution. Maybe it's Neuralink. Maybe, you know, we have a way that we can kind of ethically engage with technology and get the communication and the stimulation and the exploration of different ideas and communities. But yeah, right now, kind of feels a little bit like,

• 1:47:37Chris Williamson?

  Maybe a little bit like when cigarettes first came out, like your doctor smokes camels. You know, like we didn't, nobody knew what the bad effects of this were. They didn't know long term what it was going to cause. And dude, that video, I really wanted to show it to you because you taught me, I was, I think correctly, incorrectly categorizing people's phone use as an addiction. And I think that you said it's much more like a compulsion.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  And that is a child that's asleep or nearly asleep, like compulsively scrolling through their phone.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, because a compulsion does not, the, an obsession is mental. This is a classic definition. A compulsion is a behavior, but the compulsion in classic OCD doesn't relieve the obsession. It actually exacerbates it.

• 1:48:30Chris Williamson?

  The payoff.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Right. So you're not, it's sort of like an itch that you scratch and it just it itches more. Right. And there is something like that with social, I don't want to say social media, but with phone scrolling. Now that said, I mean, you know, of my waking hours, most of it is spent foraging for organizing or dispersing information. And much of that is done on the phone or computer.

• 1:48:54Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  But I do read books, you know, hard books, meaning physical books. I brought you one today.

• 1:49:00Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  I like audiobooks too. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I watch your YouTube videos. So I learn when I'm on the internet. But yeah, occasionally it's the, you know, well, I learned from nature is metal, but I haven't learned anything from the raccoon posts. Nothing of substance, anyway.

• 1:49:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, here's the thing.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Except that they're very, like, they're very, like, cute and very.

• 1:49:23Chris Williamson?

  They do that thing when they scoop scoop food up like this.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  They wash, they wash food in my pool now. I moved to a place, I'm renting a place as a pool. I've never had a pool before. I've skateboarded in a lot of empty pools, but I've never had one that had water in it. So, and they come through in the nights, raccoon Olympics in the middle of the night. And they're coming through, they make a ton of noise and then they're washing their food. And it's pretty cute the first time you see it, but once they wake you up the third or fourth time.

• 1:49:46Chris Williamson?

  Goddamn raccoons.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  You're trying to, yeah. So, you know, I haven't learned much from that, uh, from the raccoon videos. Certainly the fight videos haven't really taught me anything about self-defense or, or anything useful, except how, you know, just kind of cruel people can be. So I'm trying to change the algorithm by, by clicking on other things, but it seems pretty slow to change.

• 1:50:05Chris Williamson?

  I gotta tell you this, it's got me on, I've never been into Star Wars. I've seen some of the movies or whatever, but I've never been into it. For some reason it started delivering me short content about Star Wars lore. Like who would have won between Darth Vader and Darth Maul and all it like, who was more powerful as a Jedi master and all this stuff?

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:50:23Chris Williamson?

  And I've never been interested in this and yet it's created in me the desire to actually be like, well, yeah, like would Master Yoda have won, however many eons ago, if he was at full power when the, the Sith was, and I don't even know what I'm talking about, but it's like created in me this thing. The interesting thing that you're talking about there is that there's a, when you're foraging, you spend enough time on the internet and you do find something that gives you that, oh, wow, I never knew about that before. And it's that, um, sort of needle in a haystack that you're looking through and that trigger of wow, I found so I can talk about it on a podcast. This is really interesting to me. That is the carrot, I think that gets dangled for, for very many people who want to feel

• 1:51:08Chris Williamson?

  better about their social media use and think, well, okay, yeah, you know, I wasted 90 minutes, but I did get that thing out of it. I read that Substack post, all right, I found this new person that I really care about. Uh, you know, the variable schedule reward of, uh, intellectual satisfaction is also in there, right? It's not just the shock.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:51:25Chris Williamson?

  It's not just the cute.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. PubMed for me is that, you know, PubMed, Library of Congress.

• 1:51:29Chris Williamson?

  The only guy.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  You know, they.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  Who thinks that PubMed is variable schedule reward.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  I remember when PubMed first came out as, as a, like a very searchable database and, and some of the journals later became electronic and now they're all available electronic. And I. Could not believe, I was so excited because I used to go to the library and I have to pay with, put money on the card and Xerox copy and stuff, but also in the library, I love libraries and I'd spend so much time when I was a student and graduate student and you'd find something. And it's like, I'd look around, like, did anyone, like, did you see that? Did you see that? But since I was a little kid, I was discovering stuff in books and then talking about it to everybody, even if they didn't want to hear. And so I was professing from a young age in class on Mondays and things. So, so for me, it's hardwired into my system by now.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  And I think that, I, I do think that social media holds certain gems. I think we're thinking about, talking about like mining for gems of social interaction too. You know, I've gotten to know some people through social media where it's really enriched my life. I've reconnected with some people. Yep. And it's really enriched my life. It's allowed me to connect the dots, um, going backward in ways I hadn't anticipated. And I think going forward, if you're asking about the kids in the video that you showed me, or you're talking about adults or anyone, it's the, the, the success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self-discipline. I really do it. Now, it's always been the case, but I don't think it's ever been the case to the extent that it is now.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  So this is why I'm such a fan of taking some space from all action. This is actually something I learned from Rick Rubin. You know, I'm fortunate to call him a close friend. We communicate pretty much every day. And I went and spent a week with him abroad this summer. It was the worst time to travel. And I decided to go over to where he was in Europe and just spend the week with him. We had no plan. And, um, first of all, on the way over there, there was nothing to watch on the plane, but there was this Tom Petty documentary. And I turn it on. I'm not a huge Tom Petty fan, but it was interesting enough. And then Rick, Rick is in the documentary and he's in the documentary lying down doing the interview.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Typical, like typical meaning unusual for most people, typical because it's unusual for Rick to be lying down.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  And I thought, okay, so get there. I know his family well and I love them and it was really wonderful. It was beautiful. It's a beautiful part of Europe. But you know, I noticed, so we had this habit of we would tread water in the pool and listen to podcasts in the morning.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  And there's a wonderful podcast, by the way, that we should all be aware of. I think it's a history of rock and roll in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. Super nerdy. It's like getting like a graduate degree in rock and roll. It talks about the music, but also what's happening in like organized crime, how it impacted record sales, very contextual, very cool. I'm very into that lately. And I'm into, and in this show on Netflix, have you seen Spy Ops?

• 1:54:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Very good, right? Because it's not just like shoot them up type stuff. It's really about how spy operations. Let me put it this way, it can teach you a lot about history, international history and geopolitical history. So I go over there and we do some treading water, listening to podcasts. I learned about this history of rock and roll 500 songs podcasts. We talked about a little bit. And then I noticed that, you know, Rick has a practice. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this because I'm about to.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  You know, Rick has a practice. He has many practices, but one of them is he'll spend a good amount of time, you know, just sitting and thinking or lying down and thinking. And it didn't occur to me at the time, but later, after I returned, I thought back to our first guest episode of my podcast. I hosted a guy named Carl Dyseroth, who's probably the finest bioengineer on the planet. He's also a fully active clinician psychiatrist. He's got five children. He's one of these phenoms, you know, that seems to be able to do everything. And he's a true genius. He went to school with, uh, medical school with Peter T and Paul Conti. They were all in the same class. Yeah. And I know him very well. And he's a colleague of mine at Stanford and, um, and everyone knows he's, he's a super, he's a super, he's like the Michael Jordan of neuroscience.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Except he's still active.

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  And that is not a statement about personality, just in terms of, of successful hit rate. Carl described a practice that he does after he puts his kids to sleep of where he sits deliberately, sits completely still and forces himself to think in complete sentences. And this set off a light in my head when I realized Rick does a form of this and Carl does a form of this. If you read the new Elon Musk book, they talk about Elon doing a form of this. The great Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel Prize winner, talked about going into flotation tanks and doing a form of this. Einstein did a form of this. So what are we talking about? So I'm a neuroscientist, but I'm certainly not as smart as any of those

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  guys. What we're talking about is body still, mind active. Now, I've become increasingly curious about psychedelic therapies, one of which is, and by the way, only in a clinical context, et cetera, legality, et cetera, not in kids, et cetera. But the practice is essentially macrodose psilocybin, but with the eye mask on, completely still, mind very active. Okay. Contrast that to a different behavior slash protocol that I'm very familiar with, which is I like to do long runs or rucks on Sunday. Body very active, mind not directed at anything in particular. Sometimes I'll do it without a book or podcast. Sometimes

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  I do it with a combination of both. Many people talk about swimming or in the shower or cycling, some sort of rhythmic movement, drumming. The great Joe Strummer was really big on campfires. He, you know, I was gonna mention this earlier, but I'll mention it now, that as an alternative to alcohol consumption, get your friends together around a fire. By the way, the fire light, this light from fire does not disrupt the circadian system. This has actually been shown. Candlelight, moonlight, firelight, as bright as it is, it's just very low lux. So that's where great things happen, independent of alcohol, right? Around a campfire. That goes way back in our lineage. So there are these two states of mind and body that I find fascinating to the point of being intriguing, to the point

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  of having modified what I do now, because they're the inverse of one another. Body completely still or close to completely still, mind very active. Could be with psilocybin, but that's not the protocol I'm recommending. I'm talking about some very, very smart, extremely accomplished people who all did the same thing. The other is body very active, mind isn't still, but is not deliberately channeled to any particular linear kind of story or something like that. There's a state in sleep where our body is literally paralyzed and the brain is extremely active. It's called rapid eye movement sleep. So I'm raising a flag for this potential protocol slash practice. I don't have any peer reviewed science to support what I'm

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  about to say, but I have enough examples of extremely accomplished people now in front of me to realize that there's something special about divorcing mind and body function temporarily, deliberately, sitting there and just thinking. And recently I had a conversation with the great Paul Conti and the addition of the words, the great in front of him are appropriate here. He's, I, I believe, based on my observation of his clinical work and, and intellectual acumen that he's the finest psychiatrist of our age, clearly integrating from so many backgrounds, has worked with a ton of interesting people. Coming on the podcast in December. Amazing. And he's just phenomenal, right? Um, not just about trauma, but about everything,

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  personality types, narcissism, gaslighting. I mean, people throw those terms around like crazy. Paul will tell you what it actually means. Okay. What those terms actually mean. But the ability to think and to access the unconscious, Paul refers to the unconscious as the supercomputer of the brain. For the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are always in a dialogue. But here's the theory, here's the hypothesis, that when we bring our body into states of stillness in REM sleep, in these deliberate states that I just described, that these other people actively engage in and have for a long time, that the unconscious mind can start to take over a larger percentage of that conversation. And we have access to new ideas, new ways of structuring thought, et cetera. And I don't think one requires psilocybin to do it, but I do think that is one avenue into it.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Reliable. Um, that's reliable. It also carries certain hazards, right? Uh, because it's, it's like being put on a mental rocket ship. To some extent, it's not like DMT, but very little control over where one's cognition goes, although there is some in there. Anyway, I just wanted to throw this up on the wall because it's always fun to talk about new things and kind of what's coming, what I think is coming next. I think if I were to make a prediction, I think in the next two years, you're not just going to hear about meditation, non-sleep deep rest, something I'm a big fan of, yoga nidra, hypnosis, but also whatever we want to call this, you'll probably come up with a better name than I can, body still, mind active states to access different aspects

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  of our unconscious and cognition. And I must say that we do this with the phone. Sorry, I just, because I realized you were about to say something. And when you speak, you say interesting things. And I learned cosplay, LARPing.

• 2:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Don't put those ones as the most interesting.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you say many interesting.

• 2:00:55Chris Williamson?

  Other stuff.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  There's, in terms of new terms.

• 2:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  New terms.

• 2:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  Newcastle.

• 2:01:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Chris Williamson?

  Sunderland.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Sorry. Those weren't the most interesting concepts, but I'm learning is the point. I wasn't, I wasn't being sarcastic. That when we sit and we're just scrolling, yeah, we're more or less body still, mind active, but guess what? None of it's coming from within. It's all coming from the outside. So whether or not it's psilocybin in the eye mask, or Carl sitting there, eyes closed deliberately still thinking, or Feynman in the, in the salt equilibration chamber, you know, the float, flotation tank, or, or Rick lying there thinking, whatever it is he happens to be thinking, whatever amazing album he's going to now, you know, help produce, or Einstein, I mean, you know, we can think

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  of the phone and the scrolling as lending itself to less ability to focus and ADH, but just the real crime, the real insult to humanity, for me, the real cost is what about all the creative imagination of things that come from inside that could be generated by, by people in that time. So I'm, I've started doing a practice of 20 minutes a day of just sitting and. Eyes closed typically, sometimes it's right as I wake up, but usually it's not. And just trying to think about certain topics and hold those topics in a kind of a linear way, or sometimes just letting stuff geyser up. Anyway, some people might think of this as like completely wacko woo, new agey stuff.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  But the list of names I I read off there are people that do that and have been doing this for a long time and attribute this practice as one of the major sources of their best ideas is a non-trivial list.

• 2:02:41Chris Williamson?

  When I think about that, there's a few different ways that are slightly similar. The number of people who've had great ideas whilst walking and attribute an awful lot of their success to walking and thinking. Right. I'm aware that you're talking body still, mind active, but it's like body mostly still. It's not exactly like.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Or perhaps there is a unique way to access this too. Maybe it's a different channel to a different brain state. Maybe it's a different channel to the same brain state. Like, I love doing long rucks and long runs on Sunday. That's my goal on Sunday. Get out as much as possible into the nature and just move in some sort of repetitive way. Like I'm you all throw on a rucksack because Peter Attia got me into that. Sometimes it's with other people, sometimes alone. Sometimes I listen to a podcast, sometimes I don't. Sometimes an audiobook, sometimes I don't. But something about about motor repetition. So this is not sets and reps. This is not restacking the plate. This is, you know, minimum amount of cognition required, freeing up mental space to do other things. Yeah, could be on the rower. So again, I think different people will do it differently. I've been hanging around with a lot of musicians lately.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  I've become good friends with one of my favorite musicians, songwriters, Tim Armstrong, lead singer for Rancid Transplants. He and Travis Barker did transplants. And, you know, it's it. And, you know, it's clear that musicians, especially drummers, but other musicians, well, they're always in a rhythm in their head. They're actually, Tim and I, the other day, we went someplace and we walked out. He's like, did you hear that? Like, do you hear what? He's like, you didn't hear that? I was like, what? He's like, you know, they had the news on and the radio on and, you know, he's so tuned into the audio environment. I'm not, right? I'm not that audio oriented, more visually oriented. But, you know, people who have an internal rhythm. That they're noodling on something in their head. I mean, this is the substrate of creative work, right? And again, the phone isn't evil, but the moment you're taking in sensory input from

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  that includes things that have already been creative, excuse me, created. You're, yeah, you could argue that those are the macronutrients that you're going to combine for your own creative thing, the gems in the internet. So studies, scientific studies for me are interesting things on YouTube. But there's also just the raw materials of creative work that come from limiting sensory input and just going inside.

• 2:04:50Chris Williamson?

  Self generating it. Yes, I've been thinking, one of the things that people want a lot more of, I think, is focus, attention, productivity. As someone who values the work output that you do, productivity as a word is quite nefarious, quite nebulous, quite sort of ephemeral. How have you come to think about the concept of productivity and its constituent parts? Have you got any tools, any strategies, tactics that you use to kind of drop yourself into a productive state and stay there?

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I do all the things that I profess. You know, at the level of the basics, morning sunlight, non-sleep deep rest if I didn't get enough sleep, physiological size when I need to bring my level of autonomic arousal, AKA stressed down. These are all things I've talked about. Three days a week of cardiovascular training, three days a week of resistance training, one day a week of deliberate cold, deliberate heat minimum, usually on the day after leg day. I do all that stuff. And it creates a structure and yes, it takes some time and a lot of that stuff can be combined with consumption of podcasts and audiobooks at the same time and social time. But for me, the process of writing, and I'm working on a book now.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  But also just the creative process has been greatly enhanced and productivity overall by setting in this 20 minute period where I force myself to just stop and have deliberate thoughts that are within a single context. I don't let my mind wander. So it's very different than maybe the psilocybin journey where it can

• 2:06:24Chris Williamson?

  It feels, it sounds to me a little bit like active meditation or kind of like narrative meditation in a way. You know, you're forcing your mind to come back to the, you're not just allowing yourself to branch off onto a current, onto a new thought. Okay, here I am. This is the trunk of the tree and I'm going to try and follow this trunk as high as I can. What about, you know, you're, you're sitting down at the desk, you have the research to do, the emails to write, the whatever. What have you got tactically in terms of a priming or a, a structure for that specific situation?

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used handwritten sticky notes and I'll put the thing that I'm supposed to do and I'll keep looking at it because I'm amazed at how often my mind will flip to other things. So it's like, oh, I have to transfer some money to somebody that I owe them or I have to pay that bill or have to, I mean, the number of excuses that leap to mind is outrageous for everybody unless we're under deadline, fear, or extremely rare, but you know, high motivational states because we just simply love it. So I give myself five minutes or so to break into the work or five to 10 minutes. I don't expect full focus in that first five to 10 minutes. But here's what I tell myself, because I know from 30 plus years of experience, the feeling that I'm going to get after I complete something, having like really had to push against the grain to force my attention back

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  to that thing. The feeling of having accomplished even a, you know, one hour bout of work is so incredibly rewarding for me. And the feeling of having done basically nothing is such an incredible sense of disappointment and lack of life, like such a like vitality drain for me.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  I'm not as hard on myself as I gather some people out there are like David Goggins talks about his self-talk and how he can be very hard on himself at times. But mine isn't like that, but I know how great it's going to feel when I get to the.

• 2:08:15Chris Williamson?

  So you're projecting forward the reward that you're going to feel and trying to bring that into the now. That's very smart. I've got written on my other, I've got two, uh, two fridge whiteboards. The other is what would you tomorrow want you today to do?

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:27Chris Williamson?

  And that to me is the it, it's like a panacea for avoiding bad decisions. You know, cause you live with the story that you tell yourself about the decision for way longer than the enjoyment or lack of, of the decision. There is a cookie on the table. I promised myself I wouldn't eat it and I make a decision about whether or not I eat the cookie. There is either enjoyment or reward, enjoyment in eating it or reward of satisfaction of discipline for not eating it. That happens now, but what's really important is the story that I tell myself tomorrow about being the sort of person that is a cookie eater or is not a cookie eater. And I think that that framing that we place around the present moment largely determines our experience of it.

• 2:09:12Chris Williamson?

  And I find myself trying to live for future Chris more. And the more that I do that, the better that my life seems to get. There are very few situations in which I make a decision today that I tomorrow would have wanted me to that turn out to be the wrong decision. And that projecting forward, how am I going to feel in future? This is difficult now.

• 2:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Rick Hansen, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together, like, can you sit with some of the satisfaction? After you've done something that's good, can you maybe even bring that forward a little bit, give yourself a little, oh yeah, that's how it's gonna do. Yeah. One other thing that I've just been so fascinated by recently. You have been a big proponent and I think have really helped people in getting sunlight in the eyes early on. Let's get ourselves outside, walk. I think you taught me about the lateral eye movement can down-regulate the amygdala response. All stuff that I'd found on my own, just through doing a morning walk. And then again, like with the alcohol thing gets legitimated through the science, you know, it's something that I did, found it myself. And then I'm like, ah, this wasn't just bro science or some weird quirk of my physiology. This was actually something that can be shown up in the literature too.

• 2:10:22Chris Williamson?

  Rian Doris from the Flow Research Collective has the flow morning routine. Have you seen this from him?

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  I haven't, but I know Rian.

• 2:10:30Chris Williamson?

  Rian's an absolute monster. His morning routine, developed with Steven Kotler, to get yourself into flow specifically for deep work and writing, is to begin working within 90 seconds of waking. Because the state of flow and the state of sleep are not far away from each other in terms of brain frequency, delta and theta, I think.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  They're sort of liminal state. Yeah, I haven't seen that yet, but I'll check it out.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  I am a big believer in the moment you wake up, if you were dreaming, keep your eyes closed and keep your body completely still. Also, similarly, if you wake up from a nightmare and you don't, and you want to forget about that nightmare, you need to move your body. There's something about body movement that discards the prior cognitive map. It's like it clears the library. We're talking about the dynamic, a Harry Potter-ish library. I don't want to give too much credit to Harry Potter, certainly not to that play. But one thing that I'll just, about the productivity piece before reflect on this further, because something you said really, really struck a chord with me. You know, I can project to the future me, but that's not exactly how I do it. What I'm, I just know, because I'm so familiar with it, the feeling that I get having actually

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  accomplished some small percentage to large percentage of what I was set out to do, feels so unbelievably rewarding to me. And I know that it also enhances the social interactions I'll have. It's like a feeling of self-satisfaction that transcends to an ability to show up with more clarity of mind. I'm, one of the, the problems for me in terms of productivity is I'm very strongly affiliative. I'm very fortunate to have a lot of close friends. So if I get a text message from someone, I feel compelled to write them back, not out of responsibility, because if it's someone I'm close with, I love that person. Like, I love my family, but I, I love my friends. I love my coworkers, colleagues at the podcast. I mean, it's, it extends, and this has to do with my upbringing, the fact that my

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  non-biological family became my family before I sort of reconnected with my actual family in a really deep way. But the one exception, my sister and I were, were, you know, tight, tight the whole time. But.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  For me, you know, a text coming isn't a distraction. Like, that's the, that's the good stuff in life. That's one of the reasons I'm there. So I have this practice sometimes of imagining that my, my crew, right? As the kids say, we're, I'm pretty crewed up these days. Which is great, because it wasn't always the case. They want me to like forage off to where I need to go and collect the gems and come up with the ideas that are going to be the next post, the next podcast, the next scientific study. They want that. I tell myself they want that for me, like they're cheering me on. Because I know I'm cheering them on. Some are musicians, some do other things. I'm cheering them on. I want them to know, like, I'm here and I want you to go get the stuff and do your thing.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  And so I imagine that they're doing that for me and I turn my phones off. And there's some anxiety in doing that. I'll put it in the car sometimes because it's not that I'm, I need to neurotically check the phone because I don't feel safe if I don't hear from them. Like, I love these people and I don't want them to feel as if I'm not available. That's really how it is for me. But I know that, and I think someone said it and I forget the quote, so forgive me. But, you know, if you're going to create anything of value in this life, you're going, even if it's with other people, you're going to have to be willing to be on your own for a bit, to forage on your own, to take walks alone and then return to people, to your tribe, so to speak, and share with them what you've learned or maybe even just show up with whatever energy shift has occurred while you were off doing your thing.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  And so, you know, the phones, the phones are a wonderful tool, but I think over the years I, I lost the ability to be truly on my own and dropped into work. And it's something I've recovered a lot in the last few years by telling myself that indeed they want me to do that. And indeed, I show up so much better to all the relationships in my life if I've done some real-

• 2:14:26Chris Williamson?

  Satisfied with a good day's work.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, satisfied, you know, or just that, you know, got over that, that barrier of resistance, you know, the, the Steven Pressfield thing of resistance that you, I wrestled with resistance and won. I think we should all want people to win. And I also, and I confess, I'm going to lose some friends with this, but- I have variable latency in terms of my text replies. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's an hour, sometimes a minute, sometimes it's a month. I love being on a plane and scrolling through old texts and be like, hey, how's it going? Missed this and people were like, that was a month ago. Yeah, it was. And, you know, I've been busy, you know, and, and, you know, emergencies are dealt with, but it happens.

• 2:15:01Chris Williamson?

  What's happening in the brain and body when we procrastinate?

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  Oh, um, yeah, so procrastination is super interesting. There are actually some data that Adam Grant shared with me recently that people who procrastinate actually have, tend to be, have access to certain creative states that non procrastinators don't.

• 2:15:19Chris Williamson?

  Don't, don't start justifying the procrastination crowd. That's a dangerous line to go down.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Procrastination, I mean, I mean, what, the origins of procrastination are complicated and varied. To, to really say a single concise statement as to what procrastination is. But the way to overcome procrastination is to do something harder than the hard thing that you're putting off. That's very clear. Do something harder. Don't go clean your, like suddenly if you want to do their, their taxes, clean their room, clean the garage, organize the gym, whatever, when they don't want to write a chapter in their book. But you have to pick something that's worse than writing the chapter in your book and do that for five minutes. That's the way that the, the dopamine reward system works and some of these stress systems work.

• 2:16:03Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example? Give me, give me a tactical example of this.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Okay, I need to write a chapter on focus and, and tools for focus for my book. I'm finding I'm doing everything but doing that. Let's just set it kind of a fun example.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  I'll do anything but that. Okay. So then you have to find something worse than that. So for me, worse than that is anything involving a spreadsheet. Just the idea of a spreadsheet gives me hives. So I would force myself to do five to 10 minutes of like, like real, like establishing a spreadsheet of my expenses and taxes related to, I don't know, some segment of my work life. I mean, I can't think of anything worse in that moment that doesn't involve physical or psychological damage. So doing that, and then you'll see it will make writing that book chapter very accessible. It's a down, it's a downhill cruise from there. But people find themselves doing all these things that they would normally want to put off.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  As a way to avoid doing the harder thing. So it's it's about understanding that what is difficult and what you want to put off or do is a dynamic hierarchy. I think you can think of it as dynamic subordination.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know if that's bothered borrowed from cosplay or from military or BDSM. I don't know. I heard it someplace. But

• 2:17:18Chris Williamson?

  All the places that you mine for information most frequently.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  No, it's raccoons and street. No, none of those. None of those communities are communities that I I know very much about. But I was saying it facetiously, but but the point being do something harder than the thing you're trying to avoid. Now, some people really like deliberate cold exposure for that reason. Because in and here I'm going to really, if I've taken heat for, no pun intended, for the deliberate cold exposure thing. Now I'm really going to get behind it for the following reason. People who are really into exercise of various kinds, but not deliberate cold exposure. Love to push back on people that do posts about deliberate cold. Oh, that's not doing anything. It's not much metabolic lift. Okay, but let's really step back and be honest with ourselves.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  The adrenaline, the the the pattern of adrenaline release over time from deliberate cold exposure is something that's very hard to recreate safely with other endeavors. You know, sure, a hard workout is going to spike your adrenaline and dopamine also. But is it going to spike it the way that deliberate cold exposure is? No. Also, the amount of a of a mental barrier that one has to get over in a moment. Not isn't like three warm up sets, like walk on the treadmill.

• 2:18:29Chris Williamson?

  Zero to one hundred.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Pre workout. Show me the pre cold plunge drink that makes it easier. Okay, it's called willpower. Okay, and now some people come to love deliberate cold exposure, but that's usually for how they feel afterwards. So I think there is so much utility to deliberate cold exposure. Now, do people have to do it? No, but deliberate cold shower, deliberate ice bath, deliberate cold plunge. Is it is a world apart from all the other self imposed stressors because of the speed of onset of the stress.

• 2:18:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's even even more so than a sauna.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:19:02Chris Williamson?

  You get into a sauna and it takes time for you to heat up. It takes time for you to get uncomfortable.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so it's a very potent tool because of the amplitude and the timing of adrenaline that it creates.

• 2:19:15Chris Williamson?

  What else, what else in the procrastination dissolving toolkit? So we've got do something that is harder than the thing that you're trying to get away from. If you can do cold exposure, that's kind of cool. If you like, I gotta sit down and do this. I find myself for 10 minutes kind of fluffing about trying to do stuff. I go upstairs, I have a cold shower. Okay, that was way more miserable than this is going to be.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  If it's miserable, if you like it, then no. But if it's way more miserable, then that's the thing to do. Pick the miserable thing. I mean, sometimes it'll leave me like hard conversation you didn't want to have. Some people are, you know, certain hard conversations are harder than others, easier than others. But, you know, in business, I've never had a hard time having hard conversations.

• 2:19:52Chris Williamson?

  People slaying all sorts of demons in an attempt to get away from their procrastination.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:19:57Chris Williamson?

  Here, one of the things that I really wanted to talk about was the peril of over-optimization. I think that before we knew about all of these science-based tools, everyone had an excuse not to be optimized, right? And now we're all educated about this stuff. And I think that a lot of people feel guilt. They can feel guilt because the gap between how effective they are and how effective they could be is felt between them. So given that you spend an awful lot of time thinking about the tools that people can use, how can someone get over this, this guilt of lack of not being where they should be with getting all of their things dialed in?

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Well, guilt is rarely an effective emotion, although sometimes guilt and shame can really help us make significant change. You know, the word optimization and optimize, I think, needs clear definition. And I'm not suggesting that you, you are the one that said this, but a lot of people think it means being perfect all the time. Optimization is something that we need to look at in the context of the moment, the hour, the day, the week, right? If you have a viral infection, or you're sick, or you're tired, or jet lagged, optimization is whatever you can do to manage the basic five of, you know, sunlight, sleep, nutrition, exercise, relationships, work productivity that you can. So it's about, it's a, it's a verb function.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  It's not a state to be in, like floating around optimized.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  It's optimization, the verb is a process that we're continually in. I mean, people who are raising kids are exceedingly busy raising kids and they're trying to optimize raising the kids and hopefully taking care of their health as well. So I think people see or hear the long list of science-informed protocols that I talk about and think, oh, my goodness, how am I supposed to do all of that? That's why I keep coming back to the basics, right? And look, a little bit of sunlight is better than none. A little bit, dimming the lights a little bit is better than, you know, keeping them on a full blast at night. You know, making, you know, eating a few fewer

• 2:22:02Speaker 01

  heavily processed foods that are highly palatable is better than, you know, than not doing that, right? But, and there are certain people who have immense amounts of self-discipline. I mean, one thing that's, and they're going to do all the things. I mean, one thing that's absolutely clear is that there's a pattern of people discovering things that make them feel much better and then a need to tell everyone about it. And that's, that creates a bit of a divide for people. One thing that I've tried to do is to say, yes, I do these tools, I do these protocols, but I'm not just sympathetic, but I, you know, empathize with the fact that sometimes things happen. Travel, kids, illness, you get into an argument with a, with a significant other, you know, or at work, or you're just feeling off, you know?

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it's important to try and do these things on average is my belief and to be, you know, gentle with oneself when the time calls for it. And then there's other times when you need to scruff yourself and say like enough of this. Like enough Huberman, like it's time to sit down and write this thing. I don't care if your phone is ringing or not, I don't care if you want to or not. And you build up your AMCC while you're doing it, right? You know, that if ever there was a carrot for the hard, for doing the hard thing, it's that AMCC activation that makes your AMCC larger, which makes your willpower more accessible in the future. So it's not that I'm unsympathetic to people who are like, wow, this just feels like a lot. But we also have to remember that. We should all, I think, as a species, be individual and as individuals, excuse me,

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  be striving to do better each day, better than yesterday, on the backdrop of what we happen to be dealing with today. I really, really do. I mean, last week I had a great week up until Thursday, and then something happened Thursday. It was a purely professional thing. And it was like, everything got derailed. I literally didn't sleep that night. Very rare for me. Very rare. And I was, and it's interesting, the pattern that emerged, I did some reflecting on later, after this event passed, which was, there's always this moment where we're like, where we don't want to do damage control, where we're thinking, gosh, if I just hadn't done that, or with that person, just hadn't done that. You're trying to control the past. So there's that moment, and I've learned you have to let

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  that process take place. Unless you have the amazing abilities of a, you know, of a special, tier one special operations person who seems to be able to just live in the moment. By the way, those guys, I know a lot of them, very close to them, tremendous respect for them, but a lot of them have trouble when they return from that kind of landscape where, well, that's done, you got to focus on the next thing. Because real life involves sometimes ruminating over the thing that happened and just living in that space of, I wish that hadn't happened.

• 2:24:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  Now, you try and compress that to be a limited amount of time, and then you get to, okay, damage control. And damage control sucks because there's the opportunity cost of all the other things that you're not doing while you're doing damage control. So, you know, the human animal, including me, needs to accept that there are certain things that we just aren't going to get perfect. And I hate doing damage control, like everybody does, but I probably hate it a little bit more. And under those conditions, I just think, okay, you know what? This isn't 72 hours lost. This is an opportunity to learn. And indeed, we came out of this situation better had we not gone into it. But I'll tell you, that realization didn't arrive until Sunday, and I was pretty upset on Friday. And I'm not a bad mood guy. I'm not a moody guy. I don't get headaches. I don't

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  get stomach. I'm not moody. People don't grade on me, even people with very different opinions and things. I'm like, live and let live. Kind of like caught my bulldog Costello. So I guess to answer your question very directly here at the end, I think.

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  Optimization is not about removing all negative emotion or physical states. Optimization is about working with what's right in front of you with the understanding that the human brain and its capacity to think about the past, the present, or the future, in some combination sometimes. Occasionally, the anchor is still stuck in the sand a few hours or days back, or years back. And we have to accept that as part of our normal neural functioning and psychological functioning and try and get, you know, and try and get on word and move forward. But that when we're in those moments, you know, we have to know that we're in them. And one of the most useful tools that for this was given to me by a podcast guest, the episode hasn't come out yet, Dr.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's done a lot on the neurobiology of emotions and psychology of emotions. And, you know, she said, and it's so powerful, anytime you feel a high activation state of any kind, you should stop. Because what it's, what's happening is it's revealing to you something very important. And if you don't stop to think about why I'm so upset, or why I'm so happy, you're going to miss an important lesson. So this can be positive states too. Anytime you feel like you're getting above eight out of 10, or seven and a half out of 10, on some scale of internal arousal for good or bad reasons, you want to reflect. What is the lesson? Do I, gosh, I really love this person. I love this interaction. I love this aspect of my job.

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  So that's going to inform the next job I take because I don't love the rest of the job. Or this really sucks. And there's a lesson, and I learned a very important lesson in that last Thursday, but I didn't realize it until late Saturday. But I remember on Thursday, this thing hit and I was pissed. I don't get pissed very often, but I was pissed. And I remember hearing Lisa's voice in my head and thinking, okay, what is this revealing to me?

• 2:27:21Chris Williamson?

  Strategic learning opportunity.

• 2:27:22Speaker 01

  Three days later, I had in my journal, and I still have in my journal, I have many journals, but I have one that's permanent, that kind of is the distilled out things that kind of rise to the top as truths for me. And it revealed to me that I care oh so very much about certain things to the point where they're not about my career, they're really about my, my life, my quality of life. And that small cluster of things is something that now I protect inside, I'm stealing Paul Conti's language here, but inside the castle walls of what I consider important. Like I brought some things in that I think before I wasn't reckless with, but I didn't realize it would be like if you have a prized horse or child and you're letting them play outside the castle walls and you know they're marauders out there,

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  but all of a sudden one takes a, you know, an arrow through the heart and you're like, and it's a huge loss. Well, what do you do with your other horses or children? You bring them inside the castle walls, right? But you, it would be a shame to have to have that experience in order to recognize how important they are to you. But there were certain things that I was just not protecting. And now I feel so secure. I also feel like I gained a huge lesson. So, so the, the short list here is when, when the shitstorm hits, to put it in scientific nomenclature, know that you're going to be focused on this for a while. Accept that as quickly as you can, but understand that accepting that itself is its own hard process. B, pay attention to those states of high arousal. There are

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  lessons there, even if this is good stuff, even if this is great stuff, the love of your life, you're now getting engaged. There's a lesson there. There's things to be gleaned that you'll want to go back to later. And then three or four days later, go back to those things and examine them from some different perspectives because I think they're huge lessons in these high arousal states, whether or not it's high arousal because of terrible things or high arousal because of good things. And I think having a process for moving through that is something I didn't have, and I'm still learning to cultivate. And, you know, gosh, if you wish that you hadn't spent as much time on the phone or other people's wish they haven't spent as much time on the phone, I wish I had known or had a process for dealing with things that happened to me or that I created that were unfortunate

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  for myself or others, they created for me, a process of moving through that, that semi structure that accepts that you're giving up some degree of control, but that there's the opportunity to regain control and establish lessons that you never, ever would be able to access purely retroactively.

• 2:29:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's kind of like alchemy. Like taking something which is, you know, objectively a pretty crap situation and turning it into something which is really, really useful. There was a quote that stuck with me that you tweeted last year. Or maybe you just taught it to me. I can't remember. Advice I got early in my career. Don't over engage in any controversy unless you are willing to stake your entire reputation on it. Rather, keep focused on discovering new things and creating, or else you become known for the controversy and nothing else. There is no going back.

• 2:30:18Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, this isn't about avoiding being canceled. Because I think some people might translate it to mean that, which is why I say it's not about that. It's about, you know, we're given this enormous privilege to communicate our thoughts very fast now through social media. And whether or not you have a big following, small following, or no following, it is still a privilege. And it's something that I've learned to really think through and guard and protect as an asset. Right, that we have. And I've thought about this from the beginning of posting on things online. And set up certain rules for myself.

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  For instance, I try to ensure that 90% of my posts are really for the pure benefit of the the audience and not for my own entertainment. Occasionally I'll see something and I'll have a one of these like, you know, I'll see something, an animal post or something like, oh, that's so cool. Or the other day I saw something on a on an X account about, you know, bumblebees that sleep inside of flowers. And it was really cool about how they look at polarized light and stuff. But I just was really tickled by this fact. I thought other people might be as well. But it was more for my own entertainment, frankly. But 90% of what I put out there, I'm really trying to think, will people benefit from this? Will they learn from it? Not are they going to be interested in it, but are they going to learn from it? Will it get them thinking or doing something beneficial to their mental health or physical health?

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Lord knows I've been attacked for, you know, saying, hey, this is an interesting study about deliberate cold exposure. And then people were like, oh, it's underpowered and, you know, it's a marginal effect. And, you know, and I love this because I come from the field of science. It's sort of funny to turn people loose on a paper. Why? Because you know, you're going to get a range of opinions because no two people read the same paper the same way. And everyone would like to say that they are the arbiter of truth and how to read papers, which just makes me chuckle. Normally those people have not published very many papers themselves. It's sort of this inverse relationship. But nonetheless, I like to put things out there that stimulate thinking. Uh, positive thinking. I don't like controversy for sake of controversy, but you and I have colleagues in the podcast space and there are many people in who are public facing who see a current event

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  and they just say what they think. And you know what? More power to them. But it is, and I will say it is a distractor from a larger message that they likely have, if they have one at all. But, and, and you see this and it's not that they go down. What happens is they, they take their audience that has been built around a certain set of topics and suddenly they're talking about current events. I guess what I'm basically saying is I don't talk about current events.

• 2:32:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You've never, as far as I'm aware, you've never commented on politics? You've never made any?

• 2:32:56Speaker 01

  No, I actually, this is, I've, um, politics came to around to me in an interesting way. I'll just share this because it's, it's exactly how it happened. Rogan had Robert Kennedy Jr. on his podcast.

• 2:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:33:10Speaker 01

  And I, um, liked the post and I commented and the comment was the following. I said, I hope all,

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  um, I, I hope all presidential candidates, uh, go on long form podcasts because I happen to believe that it's a great way to get to know candidates.

• 2:33:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck. No. So didn't someone edit your Wikipedia page?

• 2:33:31Speaker 01

  So in this, so this is interesting. So I got calls from colleagues of mine at Stanford. I got literally calls and texts. I got calls from major media outlets asking whether or not I'm a RFK supporter slash anti-vaxxer, to which I said, I don't know how you concluded that. Okay. That's certainly not my stance, right? My politics are my politics, but, but there was a huge leap from, and I said, and I, in my comment, I said, you know, I, I look forward to listening and I hope all the candidates go on long form podcasts. I also see Robert in the gym and it always looks like he's training hard. He trains hard.

• 2:34:05Chris Williamson?

  He's in good condition.

• 2:34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. He wears jeans, which I don't understand when he trains, but anyway, but he trains hard.

• 2:34:10Chris Williamson?

  Odd choice.

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  Odd choice, but it free, free country.

• 2:34:13Chris Williamson?

  So be it.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  So, so be it. So was I commenting on the content of the, of his podcast? No. Was I commenting on?

• 2:34:20Chris Williamson?

  You probably hadn't even listened to it yet.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  I hadn't listened to it yet. So, but what was interesting was in the subsequent days, I got an onslaught of kind of assumptions or presumptions, really what they were. And then, yes, my, I mean, this isn't about, maybe this is the time I, I've published over 70 peer reviewed articles that are indexed on PubMed. You know, many of which had secondary sources in time and, and other major outlets that covered the, the findings for the relevance to the general public at the time. This is around 2016 mostly, but in the subsequent years as well. That was scraped from my Wikipedia, scraped from Wikipedia.

• 2:34:54Chris Williamson?

  You mean like scrubbed, like removed from Wikipedia?

• 2:34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. All my research contributions are not there on Wikipedia.

• 2:34:59Chris Williamson?

  Still?

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  Still. And, um, and then it was, there were assertions that I was an anti-vaxxer. There were assertions that, um, that I was supporting certain, uh, political agendas and, and so on. And then the, the page was locked by the editorial staff. I've had communications with the founders of Wikipedia who, the page has been adjusted somewhat. But not, none of my research has been put back. I, I actually am, at this point, I, I think it's sort of interesting because it's such, it's more actually, uh, it's kind of fortunate that it happened in the sense that it's more telling about how the kind of editorializing around Wikipedia exists than this is really not about me. I'm, I'm telling this, this anecdote, um, as a way to sort of reveal

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  what was my experience makes very clear that, um, you know, now it includes some, some positives, some negatives about the podcast. That's fine. We, we cover supplements. Some people are, and promote supplements in certain contexts, mostly behavioral tools, but supplements too. And so I'm perfectly fine with that being included because that's true. But it is very interesting to see how, um, when I.

• 2:36:06Speaker 01

  The way that sort of people will pick up the ball and run with things.

• 2:36:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  And it's been super useful for me to understand this because what it's allowed me to do. At first it was like, hey, like, what's this about? Then I tried to figure it out. Then I went, you know, straight to the top in terms of trying to understand. And I realized, it's like, okay, what do I really love doing? I love forging for information that can benefit people's mental health and physical health. I love organizing that information. I love dispersing that information to the best of my abilities. And those are the things that make me happy. And those are the things that seem to resonate with a certain number of people. Those are also some of the same things that seem to irritate a certain number of people. And I love doing it. And so what I'm going to do is just return to doing that. And I learned a lot about the landscape of online information in the process.

• 2:36:55Chris Williamson?

  Very formative experience, it seems.

• 2:36:57Speaker 01

  Very formative. And as an academic, you know, all the my papers are on PubMed. There's no, unless a paper is retracted or corrected, there's no removing things from the library.

• 2:37:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so your Google Scholar will just be kind of like, no one's going in there.

• 2:37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, my H-index is fixed. And it's not, to be very clear, I want to be very clear, because I don't want to contradict the very thing that I opened up the question, which is this is not, this is not something I want to like die on the sword of.

• 2:37:20Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 2:37:21Speaker 01

  But it really alerted me to the fact that so much of the information that's on the internet has been massaged in a particular direction based on presumptions. So one of the reasons I'm taking this opportunity to talk about this is not to counter major media news outlets. They're just trying to make a living. It's kind of interesting. They have a lot of the same advertisers that my podcast does. You know, I don't advertise Fendi bags, but, but, you know, they use advertisers. We use them. It makes it free to everybody as a consequence. But I think that it's really important for people to realize that this question of like, what can we, who can we trust? What can we trust? We all have to learn to be good scientists and foragers of information. And the macro for me is that hopefully people are learning to forage for information better

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  as a consequence of understanding that like, yet no one person holds the truth. This is not Mount Olympus, right?

• 2:38:12Chris Williamson?

  So I think the interesting thing, or one of the reasons why you might have seen an outsized response to this is people aren't used to you being in anything, right? Like, the biggest conspiracy that Andrew Huberman is going to be a part of is like some new study on sunlight in the eyes or something. It's like, where's the P-value and stuff? It's like, it's not. Accessible to the normal person.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  Cold plunge mafia.

• 2:38:37Chris Williamson?

  Precisely, yeah.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  There is, by the way, a cold plunge mafia.

• 2:38:40Chris Williamson?

  Who are they?

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna talk about it.

• 2:38:42Chris Williamson?

  It's like, what's it called? The Sicaros, you've got the Brotherhood, you've made a blood

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I probably shouldn't have said that. You can keep it in, but it's, it's a pretty, it's, it's a strong group, let's just say, politically, socially, financially.

• 2:38:55Chris Williamson?

  Very powerful, very cold.

• 2:38:57Speaker 01

  I understand why people are nervous about the cold plunge.

• 2:38:59Chris Williamson?

  It's me too. So lots and lots of people online

• 2:39:06Chris Williamson?

  get known for their expertise within one area and then start to think to themselves, well, why, why shouldn't the world know about my opinion on the Ukraine conflict? Like, I've got lots of things to say and everybody thinks that it's very, very valuable. So maybe I should contribute to what we should do about climate change or what we, what we think should happen in the next election. And I think that, you know, to your credit, you've done a really good job because you will have opinions. You've just chosen not to share them, presumably, right?

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  And I vote.

• 2:39:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So, but you've chosen not to do that. And I think that it's almost like the sensitivity dial was turned up so much. It's like, where's the first ever, so it's like, we, we knew, we knew that it was the tattoos and the beard. We always knew that that guy was like a, like an RFK or, do you know what I mean? And any opportunity for somebody to jump on this, right? So this is something that I've been kind of noticing in myself. Somebody asked me this. I'm doing these live shows at the moment. So I know that you do live shows too.

• 2:40:04Speaker 01

  I want to come to one of your live shows.

• 2:40:06Chris Williamson?

  We're, we're, we're not doing LA. I'll find you a date.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  Live shows are so different than podcasts and I, I learned, I can't wait.

• 2:40:13Chris Williamson?

  What is your arousal state before you step on stage?

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I have a whole proto, set of protocols we could talk about.

• 2:40:21Chris Williamson?

  Would you, would you send me them?

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:40:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I would love.

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  I spend the whole day basically in a rhythm and I talk to only a limited number of people and I've got a rhythm in my head and I'm, I'm in an SDR hypnosis part of the day. I send and receive a few texts of Rick, my friend, Tim Armstrong, my friend, Jim Thebow. I touch base with my team. I do prayer. I'm, I'm like, I'm in an altered state and I need all the help.

• 2:40:48Chris Williamson?

  Looking forward. I'm looking forward to the protocol. I've got my tour, my first UK and Ireland tour is happening in November and then I'm going to Dubai. We've got a huge 2,000 person show in Dubai. Then we're going to do Canada and the US. Anyway.

• 2:41:01Chris Williamson?

  I got asked recently, I'm doing work in progress shows like a comedian for these. So I'm doing 40 person shows at East Austin Comedy Club. All of the profits go to charity. I wanted to work out my material, right? Before I went on stage, even though it's not, it's not comedy stuff. But I wanted to do it and it's been really, really useful because I've been able to watch. I shouldn't really open with that story. It's not so we can move that a bit later. It's a bit heavy, it's a whatever, whatever.

• 2:41:24Speaker 01

  I got a lot of thoughts about this, yeah.

• 2:41:26Chris Williamson?

  So somebody asked me at one of these shows, what some of the unseen prices are that you pay for building a platform of this size? And what I realized was,

• 2:41:42Chris Williamson?

  both you and I just like doing the shows that we do. Like I love, there is nothing that I would prefer to do at 4:23 PM on a Friday afternoon than sit down and have this conversation. There is nothing that I would rather do, right? And if you do that for long enough, you end up accumulating the size of an audience that carries with it responsibility that you didn't ask for. And didn't ask to have my like and comment on my friend Joe's Instagram post scrutinized by mainstream media and trended across of Twitter.

• 2:42:15Speaker 01

  Not only that, I had colleagues calling the saying not what is happening to you, but literally what happened to you.

• 2:42:22Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  Isn't that awesome? But the same week that we published a clinical trial. So it was not as if like my scientific career. So it was pretty interesting. Actually, I had very fruitful conversations with those people. I know what, I eventually figured out what the answer is to the question you asked before, which is still in this vein, which is here's the thing. There's a certain segment, in fact, a very large segment of listenership, viewership and media that want to see you and me and other people do what they would do in a given circumstance. For instance, why didn't you counter so and so when they said blank?

• 2:43:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  Why didn't you stand up for this group when you had the opportunity on that situation? What they're basically saying is they wish they had had the opportunity and they're angry that you're not.

• 2:43:19Speaker 01

  Tip of the spear for them in circumstances that they don't have access to. I get it, but one, one thing that I learned early on by observation is that a sense of justice and a sense of strong opinion about certain things is incredibly important. I mean, that runs in my family, but you have to know when justice needs to line up with action or when justice is time to walk away. When you're not the best suited for something. The other thing that, and I have to say, Joe Rogan is the best at what I'm about to describe and I admire it so much. First of all, I'll go on record saying that I think Joe Rogan has been clearly net positive for science, bringing about lots of different conversations about tons of topics.

• 2:44:05Speaker 01

  Let's just leave the vaccine thing aside for the moment, but sleep, the, the, the Cosmo. Matthew Walker. On a lemke, right? Peter Attia and on and on. Okay.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  It's very clear whether or not he's aware of it or not, that he's not going to be leveraged by anybody. No one's going to come on to show it. He's, he can't, he doesn't allow himself to be used, right? So when someone gets upset that you're not taking a stand that they would take, they're upset that they can't use you to reach their ends. And, you know, I have many flaws like anybody, but maybe a few extra. I really do. And, um, but one, but, but included in that extensive list of flaws is not the capacity to be used. It just is not. I have strong opinions and there's time for justice and action along particular lines. And I prefer to do that, not using my social media platform or podcast platform in part

• 2:45:01Speaker 01

  because there's a tremendous number of things that I want to learn about and teach about, guests I want to have on to educate as many people as possible. So I'm not being political or diplomatic. I'm being extremely strategic. I'm saying, I'm not going to be used to achieve somebody else's end. I want to. That's basically what it is. And so I'm, I think very hard about like the things I want to take on and they're mostly about helping people regulate your circadian rhythm, stress, sleep, eating disorders, depression, understanding of self through a mental health series, addiction, sleep. You know, I said sleep multiple times. And on and on. And the other stuff is really barbed wire. You can get snagged on it and stuck there. And then you're tossed up against the barbed wire and you're fighting and you're bleeding

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  out. And guess what? A bunch of really great stuff is happening so that you could be focusing.

• 2:45:50Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I often, I always think.

• 2:45:51Speaker 01

  That's really what it is.

• 2:45:52Chris Williamson?

  I always think about how much of some of the smartest minds of our generation's time has been taken up arguing over pick your topical issue headline of the moment. Like, what else could have been achieved if these people who outside of the myopia and like catastrophe that is most of pop culture headline stuff are phenomenal thinkers and yet they have a, it's like the kryptonite that there's something that pulls them away. I want, I want to rip them back in.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  Well, my thumbs start buzzing. You know, there's the pre motor circuits that get me wanting to put something at times.

• 2:46:31Chris Williamson?

  How often do you, how often do you type and delete? Does that happen much?

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  Three times a day.

• 2:46:36Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding?

• 2:46:36Speaker 01

  No, but not because of political reasons, but more sensitivity issues. But yeah, about three times a day. There are a lot of posts that just don't go up because I'm like, it's not going to land right. I don't touch on current events. I mean, our friend Lex Friedman covers a lot of current events and gets right in the middle. I mean, he likes to, he'll travel to current events.

• 2:46:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:54Speaker 01

  You know, he'll land himself in, in, in dangerous territories. I think also something that's really helped me. I had great scientific advisors and mentors coming up. I also, I understand the limits of having one brain and one personality and one history. And I have a council of people that I refer to often. It's funny, I brought my notebook today, which I'm always carrying around one of these little notebooks. I'm writing on cards and things. And in the front of this notebook is a list of names. I didn't think we'd get into this at all today, but yeah, a list of names of people that I, I look at this list.

• 2:47:26Chris Williamson?

  Is that the council of Huberman right there?

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:47:28Chris Williamson?

  Who's, who's in the, who's?

• 2:47:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not, I'll give you a non exhaustive but accurate list. I mean, it includes Rick Rubin, close friend, Peter Attia, close friend.

• 2:47:38Speaker 01

  It includes Joe Strummer, Oliver Sacks, both of whom are dead and who I never met, but I've consumed their writings and I know people close to them and I have stories about them. It's got a couple of people whose names I'm not going to disclose. There are a few others here that may be my dead advisors, all three of them. My dog Costello had a, he couldn't be, he was so stubborn. You could not get him to do something he didn't want to do. It was like he would, you couldn't move him. And he always was right about the things he didn't want to do. He had an incredible sense of, of understanding about his, his environment. Uh, my sister's on here. And then, you know, my team, who isn't, aren't just my team, but Rob, Mike, Ian, Chris, Martin, Gary, Greg, like Sarah, they're,

• 2:48:21Speaker 01

  they're here, right? So these are like, anytime I'm going to put something into the world, I look at this list and I think like, okay, I don't need unanimity, but like, what would they say about this? And because I don't need to text them. Most times, nine times out of 10, I know.

• 2:48:39Chris Williamson?

  Infer it just by knowing them.

• 2:48:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:48:41Chris Williamson?

  So this is, this is something I really, I really wanted to kind of touch on because you've gone.

• 2:48:44Speaker 01

  And there are others on that list. So for those that I didn't include, it's like a, um, I want to be.

• 2:48:48Chris Williamson?

  They know.

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  Jim Thebow, right?

• 2:48:50Chris Williamson?

  They know.

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Joe's on here.

• 2:48:52Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it's like you're doing an awards ceremony.

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lex is on here. I mean, you know, so, I mean, it's just so clear to me that my brain can't do it right all the time. And I need to call on people alive and dead, like known and that I haven't known to, to help me. And, you know, it feels sort of corny to talk about, but if there's one thing I've tried to do with the podcast, it's to normalize some of the conversations around things like anxiety, stress, sexual health. We've been doing a lot about hormone, sexual health for women and men, communication, um, you know, normalize some of the discussion around these practices that, that to some people might seem kind of hokey, but to me, I mean, this list isn't like three out of 10 in terms of the potency scale of like my productivity and feelings of, of safety in life so that I can go do my best work. It's like 11 out of 10.

• 2:49:40Speaker 01

  Eleven out of ten. And it's the kind of thing where most of these people don't even know that, no one knows they're on their list until, on this list until now.

• 2:49:50Speaker 01

  But I've always had this list in different forms and it's updated over the years. When I was a kid, I mean, growing up, I had a hero, listened to him every day of my life from thirteen on, Tim Armstrong, lead singer for Rancid, Operation Ivy, Transplants, like literally every day. And through some magical stroke of luck, we become very close friends. So he was guiding me all along, but he's about, he's ten years older than I am. He has deep, he's extremely smart, extremely smart. And he has deep understanding of human dynamics and how to be in the world while trying to do creative work. Now, he's a musician, not a scientist, but his level of curiosity, intellect, memory.

• 2:50:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it like, it doesn't just, for years it inspired me, but now, like, I'll text or call to him. I did that last week, like, hey, this is a tough situation, really helped me. I called a few other people too. But he's on this list and he has been since I was thirteen. How wild is that? It turns out, you know, never meet your heroes, right? Well, it turns out this hero ended up like wildly exceeding my expectations in the positive direction.

• 2:50:54Chris Williamson?

  You do know that there's someone listening to this, there's probably millions of people listening to this, at least not thousands, to whom you're that person, right? That they have this parasocial relationship with you, even if you didn't ask for it.

• 2:51:08Speaker 01

  Parasocial, I like that. It's almost like paranormal.

• 2:51:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, parasocial, that's the term. Get it in there along with whatever it was, cosplay.

• 2:51:15Speaker 01

  We've got a good list.

• 2:51:16Chris Williamson?

  And Huber husbands, Huber daddies.

• 2:51:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm really fascinated by what's, what it's been like to be a relatively unknown academic working in the annals, just doing your thing, doing your research, to now, as a byproduct of a passion to share science-based tools for people, now being sort of thrust out into the public. What's the felt sense of this rapid increase in exposure and scrutiny and fame being like?

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  So I'd love to tell you that it's disorienting, but truly by virtue of feeling very aligned with the work and purpose of the work that I'm doing, I feel like I'm, at least in terms of my daily activities and where my mind is at, I'm exactly where I, for the first time, I'm like, exactly where I, I feel like I'm exactly where I belong. Not because I'm known and that the podcast has achieved this recognition, for which I'm very grateful and humbled by, but because I love foraging for organizing and dispensing information. So 95% of my cognitive powers are set toward like the episode I'm preparing

• 2:52:27Speaker 01

  for next week or the week after. And I have to like literally pull in my impulse to now take off on a tangent about my use of toe spacers to fix this like imbalance because of like foot health and like, I'll go there. That's the thing. But like, it's all getting teed up. I'll, I prepare for podcasts. Someone asked how long it takes me. And I realize in total, because I start so many months ahead, somewhere between very low end, the lowest ever would have been 12, but it's typically more like 150 to two hours of preparation. And I love every frigging second of it. And so for me, it feels great because it allows me to do what I'm doing. Now, in terms of being public facing, I mean, I'm a pretty

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

  introverted person. I love close dynamics. You know, if I think for a second about meeting one-on-one dynamics and small group dynamics, small parties at my house and things, I'm comfortable in crowds, but I'm not interested in, in being in them per se. But if I think for a second about how many people are going to listen to something, I'll just, I don't know, I don't think about it.

• 2:53:28Chris Williamson?

  Best not to do it.

• 2:53:29Speaker 01

  Best not to do it. Um, you know, it's changed my life dramatically and mostly for the positive, um, in positive ways. You know, getting filmed while you're in the gym is funny because you know, I always have like, if ever I need to use perfect form, like now I really need to, you know, I'm the guy on the Tib raise machine.

• 2:53:46Chris Williamson?

  That's the real, that's the real scandal. It's not that you liked a Joe and RFK post. It's the fact that you can't do preacher curls with perfect tempo.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm, I'm a full range of motion guy. I'm a full range of motion guy. Um, but I am the guy on the Tib machine every day. Um, not every day, but any day I'm in the gym.

• 2:54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, getting filmed when you're not aware that you're getting filmed, some security breaches and that it not directly towards me, but towards members of my family and community that those have been annoying, but that goes with the territory and have been mostly lucky. Ninety nine percent of interactions are immensely positive. When people come over and say hello, I enjoyed it. It's, you know, I don't always have a lot of time. So there are those kinds of things, but I'm somebody who's genuinely curious about other people. So in those interactions, like I want to learn about them. Um, I already know about me. I want to learn about them.

• 2:54:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  I I've always been genuinely curious about other people. This isn't a line like I've been friends with the garbage man, the janitor, the, um, you know, my dentist, like, you know, there I've got stuff in my mouth. So I can't, it's a one way conversation, but, um, you know, learning about people, I think allows one to also deliver information in a way that's more accessible to people.

• 2:54:55Chris Williamson?

  This is something that I'm at, I would guess, I would go as far as to say that the level of fame and recognition that I have now is about as like Goldilocks zone as it's, as it's possible to get. It's maybe once every 10 to 15 minutes. If I'm walking in a crowded area somewhere and it'll be a 10 minute conversation, a 10 second conversation of hi mate, really love the podcast now. Or like the Amazon Prime delivery driver shouted out of the window the other day.

• 2:55:20Speaker 01

  And those are the people that, that, that allow us to do what we do. Right? Like, like I'm so grateful that people are interested in the kinds of information that you put out and that I put out. I mean, I look at them. I look at anyone I interact with as the students in my classroom, the same way I would, the way I manage my comment section on social media, classroom rules. You can say whatever you want to me, but don't be, don't be uncool to other people and or I'm gonna block you. Why? It's not like I can't take it. Listen, I grew up in skateboarding. I grew up in academia. The hazing process in those communities, very different, was intense. It was physical, psychological, emotional torture at times. And so you develop a very thick skin. I mean, skateboarding, if you do something and you

• 2:56:03Speaker 01

  don't make it look right, or something is a little off, like you're gonna own that reputation for years. And so

• 2:56:11Chris Williamson?

  That's your new nickname.

• 2:56:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you have to have your, I don't know, I'm not gonna say it the way I'd say it back then, but like, I mean, you have to have.

• 2:56:21Speaker 01

  Every, your kit has to be right. Everything has to be right. And yet you have to try things. And so it's, you know, learning to work through the narrow constraints of, of social media is nothing compared to trying to come up through academia where people say, oh, nice, nice. Great to see you. And then they kill your papers or grants behind your back. It's a game of backstabbing. Now they put reviewers on, on names on paper. So it conditioned me for it. I will say this, I'm very grateful that all of this happened in my 40s, my mid 40s. I started the podcast when I was 45, I'm 48 now. It's been three years.

• 2:56:52Chris Williamson?

  Why, why, why that timing?

• 2:56:53Speaker 01

  I just think about the young brain, the twenties, thirties. You know, so much of, of our identity is formed earlier in life, but we're still trying to figure out who we are. I know exactly who I am. So you've got your. I'm the guy that since age five has been gathering, organizing and disseminating information. I like lots of different kinds of people. I like misfits and runts and winner in like, and, you know, and jocks and punkers and hippies. And I have gay friends and straight friends, like live and let live. I love it all. And so I oriented towards skateboarding and punk rock because it was like all the styles, all the hairstyles. So, I mean, people think of like, just like bullet belts and mohawks. No, then you got your peace punks, you know, your vegan punks, and you got all this like, and I have my thing, what I liked, but I love the variety because I love the flora and fauna of life.

• 2:57:37Speaker 01

  I don't love raccoons or capybaras per se, but I love how they fit into the animal kingdom. And I, I have an obsession with animals and weird animals and cephalopods and the octopuses and the, you know, uh, the platypuses and, and all of it. And so for me, like being on social media, I get to step back and look at all of it. But I'm not going to let anyone decide who I am or who I'm not. Like, I'm the guy who was wearing black shirts before. My colleague, David Feldheim will tell you this, he's a professor at UC Santa Cruz. He once tweeted, he was like, he always wore the black shirt. And I was like, yes, it's true. I didn't change at all. I didn't feel like I had to modify myself. I know, you know, I always tried to hold the door for people. I, I tried. Am I perfect? No. Um, so it's changed things a lot.

• 2:58:22Speaker 01

  Um, and yet it hasn't changed me at all.

• 2:58:27Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Dr. Andrew Huberman, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I really appreciate you. Very much appreciate the support you've given me over the last year when I've needed to text you, when I've needed little bits and pieces. It really does mean a lot to me. So what can people expect? Remaining of 2023, what have you got coming up?

• 2:58:42Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I can tell you, but first, can I just please just take a moment and say, thank you for this opportunity. Thanks for the kind words. I will say something very important about you, which is that, you know, coming up in the various sports I did, skateboarding and science, I have a really good eye for the person like, I'm gonna put my money on that person to be at the top at some point down the line. It's interesting because I'm not talented at many things. I'm proficient at certain things. I work really hard, truly. If I have any inborn abilities, it's my memory has always been sharp. But loving the thing you're learning helps.

• 2:59:25Speaker 01

  Early on, when I saw your content, it created some sense in me based on how you were delivering it, the passion, the honesty behind it, and the ways in which you were like moving through and trying to figure it out, that I was like, this guy's gonna be like at the top. And I was, I was right in that your ascent trajectory predicts that. Like, I mean, okay, there's still room for upward trajectory, great. But, you know, every once in a while, someone comes along where like, he just loves what he does. It's so clear that he's meant to do this, like you love. And I think it has a lot to do with the genuineness with which you invite on and meet your guests. Like, you're not gonna put someone on because they're gonna get clicks.

• 3:00:08Speaker 01

  You're, you're gonna invite people on because you really wanna talk to them, and that, that's very clear. And I think, I know that resonates with people. So I've been truly an avid consumer of your content from go. And it's been awesome to see your ascent. And I'm sure that this is just the beginning. So I wanna say, thank you.

• 3:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 3:00:26Speaker 01

  You know, thank you. And, and I, I look forward to deepening our friendship. And that's a real thing, because early on, when Lex and I became friends through podcasting, at some point I realized, I was like, we need to hang out without these microphones in front of us. I went out to Austin for two weeks, and we just hung out. We just hung out. It's also where he did the jujitsu thing, where he choked you out.

• 3:00:44Chris Williamson?

  Choked you out.

• 3:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So got me there. I'll get you back, Lex, but not with jujitsu. Psychological jujitsu.

• 3:00:52Speaker 01

  But I hope we get the chance to spend time. And I really just want to say, whatever you're doing, keep going because it's awesome. And it's clear that you're really working hard on your craft and I'm really excited about the lives. And we can talk about that.

• 3:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 3:01:05Speaker 01

  Rest of 2023, I'm going to try and finish this book that I've been procrastinating on for a few years now. It's mainly going to be a book of protocols. So it's very straightforward as to what to do. It's kind of the what to do stuff, not so much story. I think there's a need for that.

• 3:01:19Chris Williamson?

  You know, that's going to, that's going to break the world. And that thing comes out.

• 3:01:22Speaker 01

  I'm putting my heart and soul into it.

• 3:01:25Chris Williamson?

  You got an idea of completion date and then publication date?

• 3:01:27Speaker 01

  Pre-sales should probably be February and it should come out end of 24.

• 3:01:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 3:01:32Speaker 01

  So, and I'm putting everything I've got into that book. While still podcasting, we're going to do a series. We've done these guest series. We did one with Dr. Andy Galpin on fitness. We did one on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. We're going to do one with Dr. Matthew Walker on sleep and one with Dr. Anilemki on addiction and dopamine soon. So that the guest series are that going forward. And then, you know, there were times when we thought, okay, we need to do something else. Like, do we need an app? And we've really taken a step back and we're just like, we're just going to keep searching for, organizing and dispensing information, mainly in the form of the Monday podcast, occasion of these guest series. We do have a premium channel that generates revenue that is directed towards scientific studies.

• 3:02:17Speaker 01

  I've been talking too much about this, but a significant portion of that has been put to philanthropy, to laboratories, working on eating disorders, on mind body states, on intermittent fasting.

• 3:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you recently redo your website?

• 3:02:29Speaker 01

  You redid the website.

• 3:02:30Chris Williamson?

  More searchable or something?

• 3:02:31Speaker 01

  So if you go to hubermanlab.com, the engineers have done a great job where it's highly searchable now. It'll take you to specific timestamps. You could even say like dopamine procrastination will take you to that particular timestamp. And I think as the AI tools get better, there'll be more things like that. But really it's going to just be more of the same.

• 3:02:47Chris Williamson?

  Live shows, any more live shows this year?

• 3:02:48Speaker 01

  We've got live shows coming up in Australia. So the first one in Sydney sold out, the Opera House one sold out, but there's another one being announced soon. And then there's a Melbourne and Brisbane.

• 3:02:58Chris Williamson?

  Why should people go if they want to sign up for that?

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's hubermanlab.com/tour to get tickets.

• 3:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:04Speaker 01

  And those are fun and they're very different than the podcast. And, but you know, I'm not, I joked a few months back with traditional media, I wasn't joking that, you know, I might run for office someday. Like, from what I've seen of the experience of politics, like, I want to retract that statement. I have zero minus one interest in running for office. But I have every interest in just continuing to indulge this obsession slash delight that I get from learning and teaching and sharing information. So, like, yeah, that's the plan. And

• 3:03:37Chris Williamson?

  Keep the main thing the main thing, man.

• 3:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing, you know, and I never know, like, I come from a long line of academic advisors that all died early. Like, I hope I'll live a long time, but I don't know if it's gonna be a cancer, a bullet, or a bus that's gonna take me out, or old age. I have no idea. So I'm just, you know, I'm just leaning into this as hard as I can.

• 3:03:54Chris Williamson?

  Hell, yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for today.

• 3:03:56Speaker 01

  I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Chris.

• 3:03:58Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 3:04:09Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 3:04:15Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what?

• 3:04:19Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 3:04:22Speaker 02

  I'm not the first, Danny.

• 3:04:24Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 a minute without parent.