Breakups, Sadness, Focus & Rebuilding Yourself - Andrew Huberman (4K)

Dr Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist, Associate Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a podcaster. The mind and the body are intimately linked. Trying to improve your mental outcomes without thinking of your physical inputs is a losing battle, but the question of which inputs to use, and when is a huge challenge. Thankfully, Dr Huberman is one of the best communicators of high performance advice on the planet and has a lot of answers. Expect to learn the neuroscience of getting over your ex, how David Goggins trained himself to lean into fear, whether dopamine detoxing really works, the most important things to avoid doing during your morning routine, just how worried we should be about men's testosterone levels dropping, what everyone can learn about endurance from Lex Fridman, why Andrew doesn't show his tattoos and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Impossible’s sleep powder at https://impossible.co/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out the Huberman Lab Podcast - https://hubermanlab.com/ Follow Dr Huberman on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab/ 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 #hubermanlab #highperformance #mindset - 00:00 Intro 00:27 Control the Mind with the Body 08:32 Is There a Universal Fear? 24:16 Studying Fear in David Goggins 29:24 The Neuroscience of Heartbreak 49:47 How Triggering Are Our Phones? 1:00:31 Effectiveness of Dopamine Detoxing 1:12:22 The Expectation Effect 1:21:40 Discussing Lex Fridman 1:32:25 Andrew’s Morning Routine 1:51:41 Exposure to Cold & Heat 2:03:05 Should We Be Worried About Decreasing Testosterone Levels? 2:10:50 Derek from More Plates More Dates 2:19:54 The Ability to Make Serious Life Changes 2:30:21 Why Andrew Hides His Tattoos 2:36:55 Where to Find Andrew - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - 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?

  Dr. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Great to be here. It's been a long time coming.

• 0:04Chris Williamson?

  Very long time coming. What do you mean when you say you cannot control the mind with the mind?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that statement really emerges from the fact that if we are in a pretty relaxed state, or if we are happy, we generally feel like we can do what we want to do. We can maneuver through our environment. We can make choices that are reasonable. But oftentimes, we're not in relaxed and happy states. That's just part of the human experience, obviously. And there is a fundamental feature to the nervous system, which is this thing they call the autonomic nervous system, which is just fancy nerd speak for the components of your nervous system that raise your levels of alertness or bring them way down. Sometimes we hear fight or flight, rest and digest, but this

• 0:51Speaker 01

  system governs all that, but a lot more. And basically, what happens is when we are at the extremes of the autonomic, what I call seesaw, of very, very alert to the point of being really stressed or panicked or concerned, or if we are very close to sleep and we're drowsy and we're exhausted. At those points along the autonomic nervous system, our thoughts become a bit like a runaway train. You know, if you're very upset, it's hard to talk yourself out of it. If you're stressed, it's hard to think yourself out of it. In fact, you can start doing all sorts of third personing and rationalization. You can call someone, you can text somebody. It's very

• 1:33Speaker 01

  hard to get yourself out of those states with thinking alone. But the beauty of the autonomic nervous system is that it traverses the brain and the body, and it connects to essentially all the organs of the body. And it's a two-way street, such that certain behaviors, even certain patterns of breathing, Et cetera, allow us to shift where we are on the autonomic continuum between very, very alert and stressed and very calm and thereby give our mind a shift also in terms of the kinds of thoughts that we can entertain, the sorts of actions that we can engage in.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  To make this concrete, if you're very, very stressed, you're very, very upset, two things happen. One, it's very hard to take your focus off whatever it is that's upsetting you. And if you don't know what's upsetting you, you know, pure anxiety, but you don't know why, it's very hard to take your mind off of the feelings of anxiety.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  In those states of mind, there's another component, which is that for whatever reason, and no one really understands why this is, it feels as if the state that you're in will go on forever. Now, when we're in happy, relaxed states, rarely do we think, gosh, this is going to go on forever. And yet, when we are in these unfortunate states of mind, we get the idea somehow, it sort of hijacks our perception of time and we feel like this is never going to stop. If we turn to the body and certain behaviors, let me talk about what those are, we are able to move ourselves along the autonomic continuum. And at that point, when we've done that successfully, and it's actually quite straightforward

• 3:14Speaker 01

  to do, we are able to think about things differently. We start to get a sense that the way we feel might not be the way we're going to feel forever. And it's in those shifts that we start to realize, ah, my mind actually is not my best friend at these extremes, but there's a lot more to it. You're only getting the tip of the iceberg in those states. So that's why I say, if you can't control the mind with the mind, look to the body to control the mind.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  How would that be adaptive? How would it be adaptive for us to focus all of our attention on to the anxiety? Is that something that you could see a use for?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So let's take stress as an example, and this could be stress, panic, anxiety, you know, each one of those has a definition in medical terms, psychological terms, but to be fair, no one really knows how to draw the line in the brain between fear and stress and anxiety. But we can say with certainty that all of those states involve high levels of alertness, high levels of awareness, sometimes for things in our environment, and sometimes just for what's going on internally. When we are stressed, anxious, afraid, waking up in the middle of the night, doesn't matter what triggered it, there are a couple of basic things that happen to all of us. First of all, our heart rate quickens, that's kind of an obvious one.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Fuel from our muscles and our liver is shuttled to particular organs of the body and away from others. In particular, fuel is shuttled towards the big muscles of the body to generate large movements. This is why we quake a bit when we're stressed, the hands will shake, it's preparing us, we are prepared for movement. How does that prepare us for movement? The shaking actually is the consequence of trying to not move when we are stressed. Basically, this is why taking a walk or a run, you actually feel like you can kind of dispel the stress. You're not actually dispelling the stress, what's happened is, it's like the RPM are getting cranked up. It's like idling it, right? It's, you know, you could sit there in a parked car and do that, but basically you take the thing out of park and it just wants to go.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And so a lot of the times when we're stressed, it's in conditions in which we're trying to remain still, public speaking and a tough argument, you know, at the doctor's office about to get an injection, you know, it depends on what stresses people, obviously. But that readiness for action is a second component, so heart rate readiness for action by way of shuttling glucose and other fuels to the muscles, and then away from the reproductive organs, from digestive organs, et cetera, because that is just not the right time for that.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Another very, very powerful feature of this response is that our pupils of our eyes, the dark parts of our eyes, get big. Now, you might think that that expands your visual field, but actually the way the optics of the eye work, that narrows the aperture of your visual field. So when you are stressed, you literally are seeing things through a small aperture, so to straw view of the world, as they say. And under those conditions, you cannot see things in your periphery. As well as you could prior to being stressed. But you become exquisitely good at measuring small detail changes in whatever it is that you happen to be looking at. Now, there's a internal process too, which is that the aperture on your thinking also becomes very, very narrow.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  So that if, for instance, well, I had this happen the other day. I, I heard something very stressful. I couldn't think about anything else. Right? And that might just seem logical. Like, of course, you can't think about anything else. It's very stressful. You're concerned about this. But my mind wasn't thinking about this particular incident. It was thinking, if this, then this, then if that, then that, and that, then that. And so you start, you know, dropping into the future. You start dropping into the past like, ah, God, why did we do that? Why, you know, and you start doing all that kind of cycling through things. And of course, there are so many things that can help relax us. Meditation, exercise, a nice, healthy meal, social connection.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  But the fifth column of the stress response is that your aperture of vision, your aperture of thinking gets very narrow and it becomes harder and harder to do the very things that would keep you out of stress. And so this is kind of the, the double edged sword that is stress. And so all the more reason why in those moments, if the stress is not desired, because there are moments when stress is desired, you know, you're navigating an emergency, et cetera. But if you don't want to be in that narrow aperture of thinking and vision, et cetera, then you need to find some way to bring your level of autonomic arousal, as it's called, down slightly so that you can start thinking about other possibilities. Or, you know, there are instances, I think everyone's been in this kind of situation

• 7:51Speaker 01

  where the thing that's stressing out is not going to get resolved today and you need to sleep. And of course, you know, you need to sleep and then you can't sleep. And then, of course, that creates a compounding stress and now you're stressed about not being able to sleep. And then over the course of the next few days, you, you know, dissolve into a puddle of tears. But fortunately, there are ways out of that kind of self destruction.

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  You've done a lot of work on fear. That was one of the things that you mentioned before. Is there something that everybody is scared of? Cause I've heard the story, the wives tale, babies are born with, is it fears of heights and loud noises or something? Is there any truth in that? Or is there something everyone's scared of?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  There is. I think the one that everybody who has a healthy nervous system will react quite robustly to is if you start increasing the amount of carbon dioxide. That they're breathing and reduce the amount of oxygen that they're taking in. That's terrifying.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  Am I right in thinking there's a experiment you can do where it's a single breath? And that is pretty reliable at bringing on an anxiety attack?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you have people, please don't do this because you need the right proper medical staff around. But they're they're great experiments of having people breathe carbon dioxide directly. And it you basically panic. It's terrifying. Yeah, one big gulp of carbon dioxide will make make you very afraid. It turns out that there are a little group of neurons, of course, neurons are just nerve cells, that little group of neurons in the brain stem that respond to levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. Turns out the reason we breathe is of course to bring in oxygen and then offload carbon dioxide. But we don't have neurons that stimulate breathing for oxygen. We have neurons that sense when carbon dioxide levels get too high. So if you hold your breath, eventually carbon dioxide levels go up.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And then at the moment that they reach a certain threshold, these neurons fire and trigger the gas reflex. So in that moment, you bring in oxygen and then of course you offload some carbon dioxide.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  That's why it's so important to work on CO2 tolerance, right? For breath work.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so freedivers, a sport I actually don't recommend because there's only one way out of that sport, as they say. I have some friends who are freedivers and and obviously you can do it safely with the right guide and training, etc. But it is a very dangerous sport because for most people, when carbon dioxide levels increase in the bloodstream and brain triggers this gas reflex. What freedivers train is carbon dioxide tolerance. So they do that a couple of different ways. And again, please don't do this because you actually, people have died doing this, which so one way is you can do what's called cyclic hyperventilation.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Right, you do that 25 times or so and you think, oh, you're bringing in a lot of oxygen. You are, but you're also offloading a lot of carbon dioxide, especially if you use forceful exhales. Normally, humans breathe through active inhales and passive exhales. You just they just sort of dump their air passively. But if you do cyclic hyperventilation, you're dumping a lot of carbon dioxide. And then if you were to hold your breath, what you would find is you could hold your breath for a lot longer. Why? Because your carbon dioxide levels are reduced, so you don't have the same impulse to breathe. Now on land, that's a more or less safe thing to do, provided that you can get a good gulp of air once the gas reflex hits. If you do that before going underwater cyclic hyperventilation, they call it air packing,

• 11:06Speaker 01

  and then you go underwater, you're going to be able to, excuse me, cyclic hyperventilation to air pack and then go underwater, but your carbon dioxide is then lower, you're going to be able to stay under longer. But this is very dangerous because normally when that carbon dioxide threshold hits, you would pop up to the surface, you sort of panic and want to go to the top. Free divers learn to tolerate high levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream and stay very, very calm. The way they die is very interesting because it speaks to the physiology. The way they they die is they'll just be swimming, feeling completely calm because they're very used to, they've trained up the CO2 tolerance, carbon dioxide tolerance. And when they die, they don't suddenly feel like,

• 11:52Speaker 01

  oh, my goodness, I'm running out of air. It's just lights go black. That's it. They're just blackout. And so they're alive and then they're gone. And so this is why they use spotters, they, you know, they have a line, etc. Anytime you hear about somebody dying doing freediving, it's rarely because they weren't comfortable at a given depth or because they've never been to that depth.

• 12:13Chris Williamson?

  Their gas reflex has kicked in. It's because their gas reflex has been so desensitized that it's after the point at which they die.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Precisely. And this, you know, it's sort of like when you hear that skilled parachuters die. Why? Well, because they're so comfortable with so many jumps, they actually forget to pull. There's sometimes, there are many instances in which they're, they're videoing the first time jumpers, right? And they're getting the video for them and they themselves forget to pull because they're so comfortable jumping out of planes. And so as people get more and more advanced in something, there's a, there's a new risk that that surfaces because unless it's very reflexive and they built all, all the protocols in, oftentimes they can overlook the very thing that allowed them to become expert in the first place.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  Why do my palms get sweaty when I watch videos of people climbing up cranes and stuff like that? You know, the ones that I mean, the guy's got a GoPro, it's a dude called James Kingston from the UK that's a psychopath. He goes up to the highest towers of Dubai illegally in the middle of the night. And then I watch it on a screen that's only this big and. I get this visceral response.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, two things. First of all, I can relate. You know, I saw the Free Solo movie with Alex Honnold. And you know, he lives. And it's still scary to watch, right? You actually know the outcome at the beginning. They sort of make it clear that he manages to do this. And you're, it's still terrifying. And I think it's for the same reason that those YouTube videos are terrifying. Which is that we are so visual as animals. We are so visual. I mean, rodents, even a lot of carnivore predators are extremely olfactory smell driven. Humans are incredibly visual. I mean, more than forty percent of the human brain has something to do with vision. Visual navigation, eye movements, um, visual perception, color perception, face perception.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  We have dedicated areas of the brain that are just for perceiving human faces and the micro expressions of human faces. So it's so highly evolved for us.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  When we see depth of field, that's not um, parallel to the ground. It is terrifying with good reason because, you know, what's the universal force that we all experience from the time we're born is gravity. The first thing you learn is that things fall down, not up, right? They, you know, it's like the fundamental rule that we come into the world with. It's like day one, even though the baby is kind of flopping around like a potato, but can't even hold its head up. Eyes are often, you know, the ocular muscles of the eyes are often not very good. So babies, they'll kind of their eyes are rolling back in their head. That generally corrects itself over the next few weeks or so. But the feeling of gravity of them, you know, if they feel like they're being dropped, even the tiniest bit, right?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  They will go wide eyed. So there's a built in vestibulo ocular reflex. So when you see depth of field in the direction of the gravitational pull, you actually get a little bit of activity. In your cerebellum, which literally means mini brain, a little area of the brain in the back that actually looks like a little mini brain, if you were looking at the brain. And that area of the brain is responsible for all the reflexes associated with the falling reflex. It does a lot of other things, too. So when you see that depth of field and the direction of gravity, you have a little microactivity in your brain that you might fall. And if you've ever been to a tall bridge or a dam and you go to the edge and you know, people love to play with this, there's that also that tower in Toronto. They have that big.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Sia's Tower?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Well, the big, no, the big, um, the big tower, I forget what it is. Maybe it's in Calgary. Goodness, Canadians are gonna hate me.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  I love Canadians, but for some reason, I can't remember this. They have one of those glass floors there where you can walk and it's terrifying. And you know, you're not gonna fall through it, right? They tell you, you're not gonna fall through it, but it's terrifying. Because your body and brain are preparing for this immense fall. So when you see this in video, it's the same thing. I always say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video is worth 10 million pictures. I mean, this is the reason why we're so drawn to things like Instagram scrolling. It's like text, text, text, video, you know, or the enormous popularity of TikTok. It's video. Now, the enormous popularity of Twitter still escapes me because that's a different, different sort of cultural gravitational pull.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  But video and in particular, action that gets us in a kind of a primitive mode, that is an extremely alluring visual image.

• 16:32Chris Williamson?

  What about emotional fears, like fear of failure or social disapproval or something? Do they work in a, in a similar way? Or is there a different part of the brain that's using that?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. So a few years ago, a postdoc in my lab, who's now a staff scientist, Melis Yilman, excuse me, Melis, Dr. Melis Yilmez Balbon, she has a long name. Excellent researcher, studies fear, did a very broad scale survey of the general public, thousands and thousands of entries, created this kind of a cloud of bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the more, the greater number of people that had that fear. You saw some, we saw some interesting things. So heights, certainly, public speaking, certainly, doctor's office and syringes, certainly. Public speaking fear is very common. Social isolation fear is very common, but we also saw some things like dogs. You know, there are a number of people who are afraid of dogs, which is inconceivable to me because I love dogs so much.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  Exactly the same.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yep, but people, you know, people form these associations, whether or not through experience or through indirect experience, observing others. I think public speaking is one of the greatest fear of dying. Yeah, I don't, it's not funny, but figure of speech. I never think about dying and being afraid of dying. I think about all the scary things that could happen while I'm living. But there are many people who are just intrinsically afraid of dying. And so that's, that's a big one.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  For people that don't swim, fear of drowning, for people that swim, less so.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  For people that have some sort of psychiatric disorder, genuine psychiatric disorder, like obsessive compulsive disorder, which is not just obsessive compulsive personality, but obsessive compulsive disorder, fear of being discovered and the shame that they have around their obsessions and compulsions. These are, true OCD is very common.

• 18:17Chris Williamson?

  Do they all live in the same place? All of these different fears that are all existing in the same place?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  So I was rattling off and I didn't answer your question to the more important point. So forgive me. The short answer is they have a final common pathway, which is increased autonomic arousal, and that is funneled through a couple, what we call limbic structures, among others. So there's certainly involvement of the, of the now famous amygdala. This, which means almond is this almond shaped structure on the two sides of the brain. There's also area of the brain called the striaterminalis is also involved in fear. And then the hypothalamus, this small collection of neurons just above the roof of your mouth, which is really, to me, one of the more fascinating areas of the brain harbors neurons

• 19:00Speaker 01

  that create a body wide and brain wide response to something that the higher order areas of the brain, like the forebrain, see and perceive as dangerous, as threatening. So the short answer is yes, it all funnels through hypothalamus, amygdala, striaterminalis, and autonomic nervous system. That's the final common pathway. But in terms of the variety of different things that can stimulate fear and the ways that they can do that, that is highly contextual. So the forebrain, this real estate in the brain right behind, behind the forehead is incredible because it's sort of free real estate for you to customize for your life according to what happens to you early on. So for instance, you might not be at all afraid of heights.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  And you say, well, why is that so? Well, maybe when you were a kid, you were one of those maniacs that like, you know, doing within the States, we call them cherry drops, the kids that could swing on their feet and then jump off the bar. And then other kids are timidly crawling to the top of the thing, don't even want to go up the ladder to the slide. There's a ton of variation and that variation does not exist in the kind of deeper circuitry, the final common path circuitry. It exists in the learning that we experienced early in life. One bad fall can do it. I mean, I was bitten very badly by a German shepherd when I was a kid. Head almost got my eye, but you know, for whatever reason, I've always liked dogs anyway. But there are other things that I've experienced that have left long-term negative imprints.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  So I, it's highly contextual and a lot of it has to do with what happens immediately after the bad experience. This is why nowadays there's a lot of legal use of the drug ketamine after traumas. You know, this is all very dark stuff, unfortunately. But if you, you know, you just imagine the family member that was just in a car crash and saw their, the driver, their loved one, impaled onto the steering column. I mean, what could be more horrible than that? Nowadays, if they come into the emergency room, they will often give them an injection of ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic to get them to dissociate from this extreme emotional state. So there are ways now to treat this. And ketamine is used clinically at later periods, too.

• 21:05Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you, you, you did an experiment where you went diving with sharks? And I think that there was a complication and you went back the next day to redo it. I'm going to guess that this is for the exact same reason, to sort of conquer and integrate the experience.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, to make a long story short, we went two years in a row out to Guadalupe Island, where there are a lot of great white sharks. Some of the more expert shark divers were cage exiting, they were leaving the cage. The first year I did not, the second year I decided I would, but the day before I did, I went down into the cage, just get comfortable again down there. And I had air failure and the safety tanks were out also. And obviously I experienced extreme carbon dioxide overload and panic. I didn't full-blown panic, I kept enough awareness that I was able to, obviously I'm here. I survived doing a share air protocol, et cetera, but it was a very bad situation. I don't like to say I nearly died because that's actually sort of letting the bug in my brain. I like to joke that the reaper came in and, you know, offered me a fist bump

• 22:06Speaker 01

  and I offered him a different gesture instead. So I survived. But the next day I woke up very, very distraught because I had this bug in this loop in my brain. I, you know, this notion I came so close to, to the end. And so I did go back down and I did cage exit and I don't say that to suggest that it was the smartest decision. Obviously you're safer on the boat or on land. I don't say it to sound, you know, again, tough or anything. I did it deliberately because I did not want to return home with this loop of fear. And so I went back into the traumatic circumstance and obviously made it out. And if you look at all the successful treatments

• 22:48Speaker 01

  for trauma, they all involve getting close to the trauma inducing mindset. Exposure therapy gradual and assisted by a clinician, but rarely if ever are people with serious trauma encouraged to get as far away from the feeling of at least not in the clinical setting. This has a lot of implications for things like trigger warnings. Colleagues of mine in psychiatry, I've asked them directly, what do you think of trigger warnings? And they said, you know, I mean, there's some logic to it on the, on the surface. But if you really think about true trauma and we can define trauma. Dr. Paul Conti was on my podcast, is amazing trauma psychiatrist. He said, trauma is an experience is not just a bad experience. Trauma is an experience that changes your

• 23:32Speaker 01

  nervous system such that it behaves differently in the future, that in a way that's maladaptive for you. So if you look at all the trauma treatments, they're all about learning to talk about the trauma, even experiencing some of the same feelings. So things like trigger warnings and all these things that buffer us against feeling our true feelings do nothing but prolong the trauma and prolong and exacerbate fear.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  You had David Goggins in the lab to study him for fear. What did you learn from looking at that guy?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, David's, David's great. I always chuckle with David because, you know, the one thing about David is what you see on social media is actually what you get when you interact with David. We worked long hours one day and I was, everyone was ready to tap out. This was a bunch of people in Silicon Valley for a day, you know, doing some workshop type thing. And he just, he was changing into his Running shorts midway, he was gonna run to the airport and he ran to the airport as far as I know.

• 24:25Chris Williamson?

  To get his flight?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  I believe so, you know, but there was this moment of should we continue? Should we take a break? And he was like, no, let's keep going, keep going. Everything you see and read and hear about David is exactly how he shows up. It's really wonderful. He came to the lab and he did, you know, we have a virtual version of the shark thing, which of course is not the same as the real experience, but for people who are afraid of sharks, it's quite scary for them and allows us to study fear. David was, he's very afraid of sharks, which was sort of amusing to me, given that as a seal, he had to spend a lot of time in water. But he was first one in, wanted to do the VR, talked about how he didn't like it, but, um, but that's why he did it, you know, constant testing himself.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  In fact, I think even though David's quite successful, I think, and has many, many options of how to spend his time. I believe this is correct, that I think right now he's doing fire jumping. He's fighting fires in the wilderness by zip lining in or fast lining in or jumping out of planes. So he's constantly pushing that, uh, that friction lever to create or build or further build this thing about leaning into friction. And this is a term that isn't really scientific, but that I decided to coin because this idea of limbic friction, that when we're very tired and we need to be in action, or when we're very stressed and we need to perform in a more calm and controlled way, there's friction on both sides. Getting out of bed when we're exhausted, hard, very hard often.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Leaning into action in a calm and deliberate way when we're freaking out, like going to give a public lecture if one has fear of public speaking, also hard. So this limbic friction and David just seems to seek what I call limbic friction in every domain of life.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Is that like exposure therapy for limbic friction then?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Essentially, yeah. I mean, what you're training and improving when you're getting better at dealing with stress is this ability to tolerate high amounts of adrenaline in your body and to think clearly and function well. I mean, adrenaline is epinephrine and just a little bit of physiology, it's released from the adrenals, obviously above the kidneys. That gets your body organs amped up and energized. It can't cross the so-called blood brain barrier. You have a high restriction fence that we call the blood brain barrier around the brain, keep bad molecules out. Adrenaline therefore is released also within the brain from a little cluster of neurons called locus ceruleus, the name doesn't matter.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  So when you are stressed, your brain and your body both wake up and that adrenaline hijacks certain systems, narrows your visual focus, et cetera, et cetera. If you look at almost all stress inoculation protocols, cold water, ice bath, cold shower, cyclic hyperventilation, those all do the same thing. They generate a lot of adrenaline release in the brain and a lot of adrenaline release in the body. But it's different if the adrenaline in the brain and body is evoked by you, that you did it. Because under conditions under which you did the ice bath deliberately and now you're wide awake and really, really alert, there's this feeling that you have options.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  It wasn't done to you, but you can train up an ability to, for instance, think clearly and calmly, maybe even do some simple math problems in your head, or maybe try and relax while there's all this adrenaline in your system. And that carries over so that when you, you know, we've all done it, you're driving along, the person in front of you stops short and you're almost in the accident, right? There's that moment where you could panic or that moment where you could, you know, road rage or that moment where you could freak out. But if you are familiar with the feeling of adrenaline in your brain and body, you navigate that in a calmer way. How? Well, because adrenaline is generic. There's no adrenaline for the car crash, adrenaline for the heights, adrenaline for

• 28:13Speaker 01

  the relationship situation. It's all the same. So we can get better, we can raise our stress threshold, as I like to refer to it. And that can be done through cold water or cyclic hyperventilation, ideally not at the same time. But cold water, you know, is a universal stimulus for creating adrenaline release. And there's a big range of cold, not infinite, but a big range of cold. In which you can generate adrenaline without harming your tissue. Whereas with heat, you get into a very hot environment or very low oxygen environment. You'll also get a lot of adrenaline, but you can also suffocate and burn yourself. So this is why cold is used in Navy SEAL screening and training. And this is why I think so many people really like the ice bath and cold showers.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Has a bunch of other positive effects, but it is a great trigger for adrenaline.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about relationships, one of the most common traumas probably that people are going to go through is heartbreak. Right? You're going to be in a relationship that you imagine is going to continue forever. Maybe when you're 18 or sometimes when you're 48 and then it's going to stop. Have you thought about the neuroscience of what's happening during heartbreak?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Now, we did, so I've done episodes of our podcast on love attachment in relationships, which is a fascinating literature, mostly from psychology, but also biological literature. And that's mostly about people's orientation toward attachment. So there, just very quickly, there's the so-called secure attached style. This typically emerges in childhood when there's a very predictable care caregiver care relationship between child and most often mother, but it can be father too, or other caregiver. Just so happens that the classic experiments were done on mothers because this was in the 1970s and there weren't as many reversed role, you know, homes, et cetera. There were some, but not as many as there are now.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  So that's one style of attachment. The parent leaves, the child gets a little distraught, but then can distract itself doing other things or just simply do other things because they have a high degree of intrinsic knowledge. Not the thought, but intrinsic calm. The autonomic nervous system doesn't feel any need to ramp up because the mom returns. Then there's the so-called insecure attachment styles and there are a bunch of different ones. But those are the ones where. It's really stressful when the parent leaves. It's not clear they're going to come back. And when they come back, it's not clear that there's they're going to reestablish the bond, that child will feel supported, et cetera. Here's what's fascinating. Those same neural circuits are repurposed for romantic attachment in adult life. The same circuits, which shouldn't surprise us. I mean, why would the brain throw away valuable circuitry?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  But this whole Freudian notion that, you know, childhood attachment styles map on to adult attachment styles? That's real. That's physiological. Now, one important point, it's not one for one in the sense that, let's say you had a secure attachment to your father. Let's say it's a young, a young girl. And as a baby and a young child, she had a secure attachment to her father and an insecure attachment to her mother. In adulthood, and let's say she's heterosexual. So in adulthood, she prefers men as romantic partners. This girl grows up and you might say, well, she had a good relationship to her dad. So she's going to have a good, secure attachment style in her adult heterosexual relationships. Ah, often it's not the case. They will transplant or superimpose the insecure attachment style to the, to the

• 31:38Speaker 01

  mother on to male relationships, but have great relationships to female friends, for instance. So we have to be a little careful to not map one for one. That's important. So all of that is in us. And then you were talking about breakups and we did an episode on grief. And the way that grief works in the brain and nervous system is that there are three sort of factors that are mapped in our consciousness and our subconscious. And these are space, time, and this notion of closeness, which is attachment. Space and time is very simple. It's where is the person that I love? And when will I see them next? Right? I mean, if you have a relative that lives overseas and you know they're alive, you're not going to grieve them. You might really miss them, but you're not going to grieve them the same way you would if suddenly you get the note, unfortunately, that they passed away.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  And then attachment is how close you are to them, like how critically you rely on them for internal control and support. And that doesn't mean they have to be an immediate caregiver. It could just be like a really good friend. You call them mates over in the UK, right? Like a really good friend that just your knowledge of him just makes you feel good. You feel better in the world, you know, as a guy who mostly grew up with kind of a big pack of male friends. I mean, I feel strongest and happiest and most secure in life when I see something about one of my friends doing well in life. It just makes me feel good. If one of them dies, and unfortunately I'm getting to the age where a number of them have died, then

• 32:59Speaker 01

  You feel like all of a sudden like goodness, like there's a loss internally, right? Okay, that's all sort of obvious. But what's interesting is that the grief process itself is about restructuring this map, this map. Think of it like a tripod. It's got three pieces, space, time, and closeness. When someone dies, it's very confusing for the brain because where are they in space? Well, the body is put someplace. Maybe it's cremated, maybe it's not. We have notions of a spirit, and that depends on one's orientation, a soul or a spirit. Okay. Or if you don't, then you don't. Then where do they go? Right? And then time, when will you see them again? There's the never, you'll never see them again. And the closeness component remains. And so there's an untethering of this map. And

• 33:42Speaker 01

  so there's been brain imaging studies, beautiful work by Mary Frances O'Connor, University of Arizona, showing that if you look in the brain in people that are in grief from loss of a really strong attachment, the state of brain and body that gets flipped on is a motivational state. It's exactly the same circuitry in the brain that one sees active. If someone very hungry is put just outside the wall of some delicious food, or if an animal that really wants to mate, I guess mate with animals, you call it copulate, they really want to copulate with another animal, is put just beyond the wall of that animal, but they can smell them. I mean, these are highly motivated, desiring states.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  So grief is a motivated state to to bridge the distance in time and space. And yet it's impossible. And so the process of grief is a gradual waning of that motivation, and a gradual shift of the memory of the person into some concept, whether or not it's a soul, whether or not it's just the past, whether or not it's their energy. And again, it depends on what the forebrain of that particular person believes, shifts that concept of that person into a place where the brain is comfortable. There's no more autonomic arousal. There's no motivation. And we've all experienced this. If you've had a loss, and I've had a loss, for instance, where my graduate advisor died, and I adored her. And every once in a while, her daughter will call me from her cellphone, and she kept the same number on that phone and the name and everything. So every once in a while,

• 35:09Speaker 01

  it'll ring Barbara Chapman, and I'll reach for the phone. And then there's this moment where I'm like, oh, goodness. So anyway, I'm going on and on just to color this with example, but When there's a breakup, it's exceedingly hard, especially if the person is young. You know, if you look at suicides after breakups, those are far more common in younger people than they are in older people. Why? Because the relationship represents the whole future. They have no concept that they're, they know there are other people, but it sort of feels like the whole world is shutting down. So in breakups, what's happened is the person is no longer available in time and space. This is why when someone breaks up, you literally have to let them go, right? You know, constant pursuing of them is out of context is not healthy. They have a name for that. It's called a stalker.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Don't do it. But it's almost as if you have to, the brain has to think that the person is gone in time and space. This has become much harder with social media, right? Because people can check up on people, they can hear from people. In the old days, like when I was growing up, you just like took the phone off the hook or you diverted your attention. Now we are constantly renewing that the person is still there. And so love and the loss of love and the death grief are virtually identical. It's that motivational state. And this is why it's so hard to not reach out to somebody that you really miss and want back.

• 36:27Chris Williamson?

  I saw a study last week that had researchers asking participants to rate emotional and physical pain of a breakup. They found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, reporting high levels of both physical and emotional pain. But while breakups hit women the hardest, they tended to recover more fully. Men, on the other hand, rarely fully recovered. I thought that was very interesting. I wasn't too sure what that meant.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. It also rings true with my, my experience and my observations. I think, I mean, this could relate to a number of things. And here I'm painting with a broad brush, right? But you know, how comfortable one is feeling their feelings is male or female, is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief. This is the same thing as trauma. The more willing someone is to feel the full depth and intensity of the feelings that they associate with that trauma, the more quickly they're going to move through the trauma. Again, I'm lifting from Paul Conti's words, so these aren't mine, but you know, people use a number of strategies. They use distraction. They use states like, they sublimate to things like anger and avoidance of various kinds

• 37:33Speaker 01

  in order to not feel the traumatic feelings or not feel the breakup. People will, you know, try and self soothe with alcohol or try and self soothe with multiple new partners or whatever it happens to be. Doesn't work. Just extends it because this map of space, time and closeness needs to be fractured. And the only way to do that is for the brain to have to confront the reality, which is that whether by death or by breakup, they are no longer available. It's like the food on the other side of that wall is gone. It's just not there anymore. Uh, or that the food that was accessible, now there's a wall in between and you will not get through it. And you know, you can see this actually in animal studies that are kind of hard. They're actually very hard to watch. You'll see the animal perseverate, literally damage his own body, trying to get through a barrier

• 38:18Speaker 01

  to something it's highly motivated to see. People do that post breakup. They usually do that by talking to everybody about the breakup, um, which is its own form of perseverating on the motivation. What did I do? What did I do wrong? This and that. And some of that analysis is healthy, some of it's not. Now, why would one group be more, let's just say effective at dealing with breakups? It's probably the ability to really feel the full intensity of how sad it is and be able to confront that. And here I'm, you know, I'm a male. I've only ever lived in a male body. So all I can tell you is that I think from a very early age, um, there's a, an ability that at least I'm sure it transcends to women too, um, or extends to women too, but learning to pack down feelings, right?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  And so when are we really talking about, when we're talking about pack down feelings? I'm not a psychologist, but what we learn is top down control, forebrain to autonomic control. It's the same thing like, I don't want to jump off the high dive, or I don't want to do this public speaking, but I'm going to, I'm going to kind of like, I'm just going to force myself, I'm going to David Goggins it, right? Grief is, is an autonomic state. Uh, we say it has valence, has negative valence, but it's high levels of autonomic arousal with a negative connotation. Cause you can be high levels of autonomic arousal with happiness, right? You can be very alert and aroused and happy, very alert and aroused and sad. It's very alert and aroused and sad. And yet we learn how to tamp that down. What is tamping down? It's reducing our heart rate.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  It's going to work each day, being a functional human being. You know, there's a lot of that rather than allowing ourselves to, you know, sob uncontrollably into a pillow. Um, some people are better at this. I mean, the late Steve Jobs was a big proponent of scream therapies. He used to go up into the hills behind Stanford. He actually owns, still owns a property back there. He was really into. You know, catharsis, cathartic release of internal state that he felt would allow him to like return as a happier, nicer person. He was also kind of well-known for screaming at people in the office. So he obviously had a lot pent up inside. So I think the better that we can lean into the emotional states that we fear the most, but in a controlled

• 40:30Speaker 01

  way where we're not harming ourselves or other people, the better. The more that we try and avoid that and we try and sublimate or just, you know, and I've done this, so I'm speaking from experience, you know, I would use the anger or the sadness from an experience to just work 10, 10 times longer, 10 times harder, to just get that much more focused. You're taking that autonomic arousal, that narrow aperture and that energy, and you're putting it onto something that moves your life forward. So in some cases, that's good because you still need to function. And it give, but it can give you the, here, I'll just say, it gave me the illusion that I was working through something because you get all the accoutrements and rewards of hard work. But what you don't do is re-map that space-time closeness map. And then you find, I guarantee, you find yourself five

• 41:14Speaker 01

  or 10 years later, wondering why you're so exhausted, or why certain things in life aren't going well. And it's because when they say you haven't dealt with the loss, you never actually allowed yourself to feel the feelings. But once you do, it's like a valve, it releases.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  You hear musicians say that the most recent album was shit because I didn't have any heartbreak to work through.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:36Chris Williamson?

  And it is strange how people, it's a difficult thing to pass because a little bit of it is kind of like alchemy, right? A little bit of it is kind of like turning something that's terrible into something that's useful and beautiful. It's fuel. But you're right, it is a, it's a hiding away from what it is that you actually need to do, from the work that you need to do. And in a world which is a meritocracy, where people want success and status and accolade and fame, and you go, well, enemies and revenge and bitterness, resentment.

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  Pretty good motivators. Maybe I could use some of that. Maybe I should go out of my way to try and put myself into positions where this motivates me. And working out where that falls on the ledger is a difficult one.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  It is. And I think it depends on life stage and it depends on how one is going to work it out. I mean, the narrative around the shark dive, I mean, even as I say it now, that was 2017 was the second dive. When I think about all that, that was crazy. I was out there studying fear and I almost was the professor who died studying fear. It would have been a terrible end to the story. What was I doing? Don't do this. Don't do this. But you know, there are times in our life where we feel compelled to take on certain challenges for whatever reason. There's a phrase that doesn't exist in the scientific literature, but it captures two components of physiology that are absolutely factual. Earlier, we talked about limbic friction as it relates to creative process and sublimation of anger and sadness and creating things from bad events, books, music, et cetera.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  The words that come to mind are limbic resonance. The human beings resonate with these extreme states. You know, there aren't many great albums written about a good day, walking on a Sunday in the park. Like, it's kind of boring. I mean, there's the beautiful painting, Sunday in the Park with George, but I'll be honest, it's beautiful, but it's also kind of boring. You can look at the details of it for a while. People like intensity. The scream is that, you know, people can look at that for a long time and speaks to the psychosis of the artist, et cetera. You know, people don't generally bond through passive, relaxed states unless they've also been through a lot together, right? I mean, even think about the, we could talk about this separately if you want, but all of us

• 43:51Speaker 01

  are here because of the autonomic seesawing that is the reproductive act. It goes from highly aroused-

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that how you refer to it in your lab?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, a scientist-

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  Autonomic seesawing.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  It is. It's very interesting that the arousal process is one of increase in autonomic arousal. In order to get true arousal, but then not so much that it inhibits arousal, then mating behavior and then the orgasm response in males and females is highly what we call sympathetic, not emotionally sympathetic, it can be, I suppose, emotionally sympathetic, but from a pure physiology standpoint, it's a activation, hyperactivation of the stress system, even though it has positive valence. And then there's a very quick rebound to the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, this deep relaxation, which we don't really know why. I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but we think that that post-coital bliss

• 44:40Speaker 01

  and is and the kind of relaxing, the desire to not run around a bunch more for most people, was to exchange odorant molecules to increase pair bonding. And even if people aren't trying to pair bond, because people don't always just mate to reproduce, but that some of the molecules that are released in each of the two individuals, oxytocin being the main one, give people a sense of kind of post-coital bliss and it's a very calm one that creates opportunity for bonding and discussion. There's all like pillow talk, there are other forms of pillow talk.

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  Post-nut clarity, Andrew.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  But for women, it might be something different, right? Of course, a different, different name. I only speak in the language of physiology. But for both men and women, this happens. It creates this little orb of closeness that is both physiological and but neurochemical too. So what we can say for sure is that whether or not it was in vivo or in a dish, we are all here because two parents, right? A male and a female. Unless you're a condor where two females can produce a baby. This has now been shown, right? But as far as we know, where a male and a female reproduce, because they each went through this arc of arousal, not too high arousal, extreme stress, relaxation, that happened separately or together, because in vitro fertilization can be separate.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  So the test of whether or not we get to reproduce is actually the ability to Assuming that people are doing this together and not through in vitro fertilization, is a test of whether or not people can coordinate their autonomic nervous systems. Now, there are ways around that and to override it, but by and large, that's the way humans evolved and the way all other animals evolved. Now, limbic resonance is a good way, I think, to describe that process, but that carries over to other things, too. An album about an extreme loss, a song or a poem about extreme loss, brings the reader, the listener, into a limbic state that's very similar or approximates what the creator experienced, right?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  The person who created that art or that poetry. And in the same way, if something is about a lot of anger, you know, if you like loud, fast music or something like that, it's an extreme state, it has a gravitational pull to it. There's, again, I'm using this language limbic resonance. Rarely, if ever, do human beings bond through nothing. They bond through shared experience. And you think of what makes people feel close? Well, there are a couple of things. And this has everything to do with time perception. Typically, when there's a high degree of limbic resonance, it means that the molecule dopamine was increased substantially over baseline at some point. Dopamine is almost always discussed in terms of pleasure, but it's the molecule of motivation, drive, and to some extent, reward. It tends to narrow our visual focus.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And believe it or not, dopamine is the molecule from which adrenaline is manufactured. Biochemically, you get adrenaline from dopamine. So these two act as close cousins to put us into these states of motivation and have energy to pursue things.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  When dopamine is very present in our system, or if you're in the company of someone else and there's a lot of dopamine, two things happen. First of all, you're very motivated, narrowing your focus, that's one. The other is that the way that you perceive time is quite a bit different. For instance, if you ever had an amazingly exciting day, just tons of things, maybe you meet someone new, you're having the best time. I mean, just think falling in love and the most incredible date that you can imagine how it begins and how it ends. It just feels incredible. It all feels like it went by very, very fast. And yet, when you look back on that day, it seems like so much happened. Now, think about an opposite situation. You go to the doctor's office and you're sitting in the doctor's lobby and you're waiting

• 48:23Speaker 01

  and you're waiting and there's no phone reception. So you can't scroll Instagram. You're waiting and you're waiting. It's incredibly boring. It's a very low dopamine state. It feels like it goes on forever. And yet, when you look back, nothing really happened. So dopamine changes our perception of time. And in terms of developing human bonds, this has been well established that if two people, for instance, go three different places in a given day, they tend to feel like they know each other far better than if they stayed in one place even for a longer period of time.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  Did you know that pickup artists were weaponizing this about 15 years ago?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no. It doesn't surprise me, but I'm sorry to hear it.

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  It was common held wisdom in the pickup artist community that you were supposed to have a three-location date to manipulate precisely this, to make the girl feel like you had progressed further down the maturation process of spending time together.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Surely there have to be female pickup artists, too.

• 49:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, although I feel like their job's probably easier.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  I can't comment. I don't know. I've never been one.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  Going back to dopamine, how, just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Okay, great question. We often hear that, you know, that social media getting dopamine hit after dopamine hit. When we first get on social media after, for the first time or after a long period of time, the amount of dopamine that's released, we think, is quite substantial. It's novel. Remember, dopamine is about novelty, surprise, and the sense that we are on some exciting track. That's what dopamine is really about. It puts us into states of readiness, anticipation, looking, seeking, et cetera, almost always for things outside the confines of our skin. Just to contrast it, maybe for a bit more of a future discussion. Serotonin does the opposite. When there's a lot of serotonin in our brain and body, typically it makes us feel satisfied, sated, and more quiescent, comfortable with what we have in our

• 50:13Speaker 01

  own immediate sphere and within us, right? The comfort of a good meal, the food you have, dopamine is about go, go, go. If you look at somebody who's high on cocaine or methamphetamine, it's all about pursuit because that's a very dopaminergic drug. You look at somebody who's taken a drug, and I'm not suggesting people do this, but it really ramps up serotonin. Let's say a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, Prozac, Zoloft, et cetera. The side effects of those drugs, if the dosages are too high, lack of appetite, lack of libido, kind of meh about life, you know? Then so they'll adjust the dose down. That's because those are serotonergic drugs. So in, in general, when we are in pursuit of things, dopamine is, is quite high.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  So now you have to remind me of your question because I've set up the dopamine serotonin. Cell phones. Cell phones, yes. Forgive me. So the thing about cell phones is when you first get on there and you have, let's say you're no wifi on the flight or something and you land, it can actually be quite stimulating. You get a lot of dopamine. Oh, there's this. Oh, there's that. But very quickly, when you're scrolling on social media, you're no longer getting the novelty, but you're continuing to do it. You almost don't know why you're doing it. At that point, it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive compulsive behavior, where we can define an obsessive compulsive behavior where the obsession leads to a compulsion. So the obsession is a thought, the compulsion is a behavior.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  But the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession. Right? This is very different than being obsessed with food or obsessed with cleanliness. There's no payoff. Right, exactly. There's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion. With OCD behaviors, like scrolling social media, the dopamine quickly wanes and then you find that you're just sort of, and we've all been there, you're scrolling, like, why am I doing this? This isn't that interesting. That isn't, this isn't that interesting. Now, the algorithms for social media are very clever and I don't want to demonize it. I, you know, provide a lot of, a lot of my life is spent on, you know, on social media now, but. In the algorithms that they've incorporated, function on the the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior,

• 52:23Speaker 01

  or an animal for that matter, is intermittent random reward, or random intermittent reward, that you don't know when you're gonna hit the jackpot. So you're scrolling, you're scrolling, and then you see something. Typically, it's very high, what, you know, in nerd speak, we'd say signal to noise. So if you're reading some interesting things, this came out in the news, this came out, and then it's all of a sudden a riot, or a person that is jump is base jumping off a building. Or, um, you know, for people that are scrolling, looking at bodies, or something like that, uh, live bodies, hopefully people aren't looking at dead bodies. But look, if something's very tragic, then that has this gravitational pull. And then you, what happens is you start getting the system working for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's gonna come. It's just like gambling.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  So I look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic, driving rewards, surprises, and excitement, but very quickly transitioning to something more like OCD. And the kinds of behaviors where it looks, if you, if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment, like we would an animal experiment, we think that animal is sick. If you saw an animal digging in the corner, looking, looking, looking, looking for a bone, the dog is looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, you'd think, that's really sad. That's us, right? That's us. I'm pointing at myself intentionally. That's us. So we have to learn to self-regulate the amount of time. But that doesn't have to be a process of, you know, scruffing ourselves and saying, don't do it, don't do it. Think about it in terms of the positive.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  The more time away from something, the more positively reinforcing it will be when you return. And that, just to sort of superimpose this on to the relationship conversation, you know, many of us are fortunate to have partners that we love spending a lot of time with. It's also good to miss that person every once in a while. Now, that might be an hour for some people, a part of no communication. It might be a week. Everyone varies on this, on the spectrum. But the idea of missing someone is that positive anticipation, that kind of pain, right? It's a motivational state, and then when you see them, it's all the richer. So you can Imagine that the dopamine circuits can be used to more successfully navigate a number of different things. And you know, a lot of couples completely quash the excitement and

• 54:34Speaker 01

  the pleasure of being together, not just physical pleasure, but just pleasure of being together because they just spend too much damn time together.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Too much familiarity.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Or they're texting all the time, right? Or they're, you know, and this whole thing around texting has become a really interesting test of dopamine expectation. There's a thing called dopamine reward prediction error. If you think the reward is coming and it doesn't, you drop below baseline levels of dopamine.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  That's why you should never tell someone that this restaurant's going to be the best restaurant you've ever been to in your life.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend on the way here, I want her to read this book. I'm like, this is an amazing book. You should read it. And I caught myself and I thought, damn it, I'm actually detracting from how good she's going to experience the book as.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  Tell her it was terrible.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's really good, though. This is the problem. It's hard to do. So I think the key is to, to leverage dopamine reward prediction error in the best way. It's the surprise that, you know, if you take kids, you're driving home from school and suddenly you pull into the ice cream shop, they're going to be so ecstatic. But if you tell them you're going to go to the ice cream shop and it's closed, huge drop below baseline.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean if you tell them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's open, that's less than not telling them you're going to the ice cream shop and it's surprise?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Correct. It's, they literally tear out into maximum, surprise is the maximum dopamine release, then successful completion of the mission, as it were, is the next, and then unsuccessful.

• 55:57Chris Williamson?

  Is there not an argument to be made that you would be able to drag out the amount of time that dopamine is released for because of the anticipation?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, well, and people do this in relationship quite a lot, right? Anticipation is the kind of ultimate fuel of the courting dance, right? I mean, this is also, but one has to be very careful because whether or not it's from the male side or the female side or whatever variation thereof, there's a, you only get so many reward prediction errors before people start to predict or associate.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Low dopamine with somebody or some experience. In other words, if you, you know, I'll use an example, not for my own life. But if you say, you know, we're going to Costa Rica on vacation. And then you say, listen, I have to work. They might understand, but that's a letdown. It's a dopamine reward prediction error in the direction of lower dopamine. They might recover from it, they might not, but most people recover from it. If you do that two or three times, what ends up happening, you can model this beautifully. And they've seen this experimentally in animals and humans. Then you say, okay, we're really going to Costa Rica this time. And you think, well, the surprise is going to be that you actually go. The amount of dopamine that's released for positive, for a successful completion of the initial goal is far lower than it ever would have been. So you can only cry wolf. I suppose that's not the right way to put it.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  You can only create positive anticipation so many times and then create a letdown before completion that the delivery of the promise has very little impact. And so you have to be very careful with one's words. Better to say nothing than to let somebody down for sure in the context of human relationship. And you know, this plays out in some less perhaps amusing ways where, you know, you look at people who are successful in life and you always hear success builds success. And it's absolutely true. Like when students come to my lab and they do a PhD thesis, it's very important for me to get them onto a research track quickly that they're going to experience some success. Because if they spend four years and then it fails, that's devastating.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  And then they have to start over again. Same thing with kids. I mean, getting some success early on, even if it's low bar success, really does build up one's positive anticipation, an ability to perform well in the future. Because dopamine gives energy, remember it's the precursor to adrenaline, and the sense that the world is predictable. Now, this can go a wrong way too. And I see this a lot with the idea that everyone gets a blue ribbon. This is terrible too, because if everyone is rewarded, every child is rewarded, regardless of how well they performed. If they're all rewarded to the same level, you actually flatten the dopamine curve. And so in that sense, yes, everyone might feel.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  You know, celebrated, but you actually are lowering motivation for the given activity. This has a whole landscape of research in back of it relate to intrinsic versus extrinsic reward. The strongest motivation is always going to be intrinsic motivation. If you reward kids or adults for something too many times, even if they like that activity, the propensity to do that activity will be reduced. But if you reward without effort or without success, that is devastating for a nervous system. In fact, I've gone on record and I'll say it again and again and again, which is that dopamine that arrives without prior effort destroys people. This is, this is drugs.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  This is, you know, this is things like cocaine and amphetamine. It's high levels of dopamine with no effort. Okay, they had to buy it, they had to find it, they did whatever it, but that's no, there's no physical effort or mental effort involved in getting the dopamine peak. This is why hard work followed by reward, great. Working hard on a relationship and then it gets better, there's a breakthrough, whatever it is, that is powerfully positive. Dopamine that just arrives because you say, oh, you're here, so you get reward, terrible. And this is why rewarding every little positive thing that a child does with, you know, their favorite thing eventually diminishes the value of that thing and diminishes their ability to get motivated on their own. So very, very powerful system. One has to be very, very careful how one leverages it.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  What are your thoughts on dopamine detoxing? Is that legit? Does it work?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Well, up until about six months ago, I would have said no, but my colleague Anna Lemke.

• 1:00:17Chris Williamson?

  She's been on the show.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Oh, fantastic. I have such admiration and respect.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  She's great.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I just a brief anecdote. I was, I direct a neuroanatomy course for the medical students at Stanford. I should have known who Anna was. And then one day she came in to give a lecture on dopamine and addiction. And my first thought was, oh my goodness, you know, have to get her on the podcast and have to, I want her talking to the world because it's such powerful knowledge. So if people haven't heard that episode already, go listen to Chris talking to Dr. Anna Lemke. I'm going to listen to it. I've listened to all her podcasts that I was aware of, but again, we were talking about it's hard, sometimes hard to find podcasts. So I'm going to listen to that. Cannot listen to her enough times. You know, the The dopamine, you asked earlier about the arc of dopamine and how long it lasts. That the, one of the key takeaways from that book, Dopamine Nation,

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  that I've incorporated in my own life is that there are certain activities like cold water that create long lasting arcs of dopamine. Those can be very useful for putting us into long lasting motivational states. So, um, these are not big peaks and troughs. These are the pain of the cold water, followed by this long, long arc of dopamine. Wonderful, it's kind of an antidepressant, positive motivator, natural stimulus. I always say, if you don't have access to an ice bath, cold showers, yes, will work if you have a shower that doesn't get cold enough. Keep in mind that the original studies showing this dopamine increase had people get into 60 degree water, which is not that cold, 60 degree Fahrenheit, for 45 minutes to an hour. So your water bill might go up, but you could just draw a kind of cool bath and get in that up to the neck.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  So, cause I realize there are sometimes some cost barriers to people. They, not everyone has an ice bath.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  No. Dopamine detoxing.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So dopamine detoxing is something that apparently today, my, uh, short-term working memory is off. I, I swear I can't.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, you have to say, get that in you.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  I can't think of any, I'm caffeinated, I can't think of any, um, uh, pharmacologic reason for it, but, uh, no excuses. So dopamine detox, I would have thought was not something real. It seemed kind of silly to me, actually. Um, and I'll tell you why it seems silly and why it still seems silly, but why it may have some utility. But then Anna, Dr. Anna Lemke, told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media, certainly from any addictive drugs. That's the treatment for addiction and restore those dopamine levels to baseline. Now, the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the Bay Area, where it seemed to a lot of tech types were talking about it, was in terms of, I heard something like, oh, people aren't even looking at other people's faces.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  You know, they're really kind of living in this like monkish lifestyle and like no food of, that they really enjoy, no anything. That to me seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme. I mean, I can understand not ingesting a lot of highly palatable foods, you know, eating some blander foods. I can understand not, um, certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine. Caffeine increases dopamine receptors, which makes the calf, the dopamine that's available more powerful at evoking the dopamine response.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  I can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors, but the idea that you weren't going to look people in the eye because there was going to be too much dopamine. I mean, I guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much their look positively arouses you, but the fact of the matter is that that's not, that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox. But staying out of, you know, high intensity, highly rewarding activities, I think could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance. And everything we know from Anna's work is that dopamine, you know, if you drive those dopaminergic states too long, addictive drugs, et cetera, people can do this with sex, food, drugs, gambling, social media, all sorts of things, pornography, you know, what ends

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and down and pretty much is traversing into the territory of pain. And then people, again, are back to this thing where, you know, they're scrolling internet porn eight, nine, 10 times or hours a day, and then they're wondering like, why this isn't effective for them anymore, whereas it was before. And there's additional issue with pornography, which is not often discussed, which is that, remember, guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine. And if, I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  one-on-one with somebody else, right? Especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography, the brain is learning sexual arousal to other people having sex.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Or, yeah, or just create challenges in, in sexual interactions with, you know, with, with peer, with a, with a real partner.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics, and the second law of porno dynamics is the law of FAP entropy. And it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time. And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology, right? I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in it in any way, at least not I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the, but the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good. What I'm saying is it, in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And Anna will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline. So again, it's not, these things aren't good or bad, they just have to be controlled in a way. Because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over, and they aren't getting them, typically it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and there may be an ability for yourself, your system to reset?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be superposed onto real sex, right? That one also has to be cautious there, right? But the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states, dopamine fasting, as it were, but maybe just low dopamine states, these are natural rhythms that existed in the nervous system. We have to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but we know as a, as a generic form of motivation and pursuit, you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty. It needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true, but you need energy in order to get the thing to eat.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  So our nervous system has energy also, that's dopamine and epinephrine. Yes, we use glucose and glycogen, et cetera, when we're pursuing things. But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track. So you go down that track and then ah, there it is. You know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this, or you get to kill. The prey and eat it. And then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every, every species, but certainly humans, have two innate desires built into them. Whether or not they decide to actualize this or not is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Even if people don't have children, in general, people care about children that because they of what they represent. Very few people dislike children. I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children, but you always worry about those kinds of people.

• 1:08:29Chris Williamson?

  You were talking earlier on about the fact that dopamine can be released when you set yourself a little goal and then achieve it. And one of the ways that you encourage your grad students is to give them a little bit of reward earlier on so that it keeps them motivated. Is this the same mentality that works during an endurance event? When you want to say, I'm just going to get myself to the next lamppost. So I've just got to get myself to that hill over there. Is that the same dynamic?

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can call it milestone-ing. You just set some milestone. And the key thing here is that, and this is the beauty of the dopamine system. Just like the stress system is generic, the fear system is generic. It's designed for a bunch of different scenarios. The motivation system is also generic. It can be to achieve the next lamppost as a milestone, or it can be five miles is the next milestone. You get to control that. And it's so it's completely arbitrary, right? I mean, and that one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me by an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple. And yet I do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself is that it's all internal, right? If you finish a marathon in first place, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  You self-generate that. It's all internal. It's all about your internal representation. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life, but the fact of the matter is that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there. If you allow yourself a moment to register that win, you get energy to do to then set the next milestone and achieve it. That energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine, into adrenaline. And this is why you hear these incredible heroic stories. Like, I mean, I think the movie, sorry, I hate to say it, but the movie was less good than the book. But like Lone Survivor, the Marcus Luttrell story.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  And the, actually, I think today or yesterday might be the anniversary of Operation Red Wing. So all those guys sadly died, except Marcus. And, you know, in the movie, he's sort of, it's like fast forward to where he, I don't want to give it away, but where he basically is the lone survivor. But in the book, it's crazy. I mean, the guy dragged himself on elbows and knees for miles and miles and miles. Right? You know, that kind of ability where you hear about people walking on stubs to, you know, these incredible feats of human endurance and willingness to persist. Those people were able to do that, not because of glycogen or they drank their goo or whatever the triathletes are always using.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  It's because of nervous system energy, the ability to continue to manufacture adrenaline and keep going. And the, and the extent to which that can continue is no one will ever know. I do believe that humans have a tremendous capacity to endure and persist, but that few human beings actually know how to tap into that system, except under conditions of extreme survival. And you also hear from really good physicians, ones that aren't into woo biology or woo psychology at all, that to some extent, yes, there are people that unfortunately die in their battle against cancer, no matter what, but that the desire to continue living is a powerful force in of itself.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  There may be spiritual components, there may be, that's not the business I'm in, you know, and how, I don't know the experiment I would do to test it. But almost certainly, setting of milestones and the ability to generate dopamine and adrenaline is what allows people to persist and live longer. There's no question about that.

• 1:12:00Chris Williamson?

  One of the best books I've read this year is The Expectation Effect by David Robson. I need to. So he is a science writer from the UK and he looked at a whole bunch of studies. The placebo effect, which everybody is familiar with, right? There is a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication. And lo and behold, that outcome manifests. He found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about. So my two favorite studies from this, so, so interesting. He realized that gluten intolerance, self-reported gluten intolerance has increased from 3% to 30% in 10 years. This is the, why there's so many gluten-free options on the menu? Presumably they've got 30% of the population to serve, yeah, so people need it. And he was wondering, well, what is it?

• 1:12:45Chris Williamson?

  Human biology hasn't changed that much. Is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that? Or is it maybe some sort of expectation? Because the type of news stories that are hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us and inflammation and all this sort of stuff. Maybe it's that and people are expecting it. So they brought people into a lab and they sit them down. These people do and do not have self-reported gluten intolerances. And they give everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that it's got gluten in it. It's got no gluten in it. After a while, people who don't have a gluten intolerance biologically, who haven't eaten gluten, have diarrhea, they have hives, they're breaking out in inflammation, they're having to run to the bathroom. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  They did another, another story that he spoke about. VO2 max tests that they were looking at. Apparently there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off CO2 and up-regulate oxygen in a better way. They brought people in, even numbers of people that did and did not have this genetic trait. Split them into two random groups. So there was a mix of both do and do not have the trait in each. First group was told, you've got the right genetic trait. You should be really, really good at this. Second group was told, oh, sorry, you don't have it. You shouldn't be too good. No surprise perhaps of the group that was told that they did. They ended up performing better. But when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people. They found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation but were told that

• 1:14:14Chris Williamson?

  they did had a lower overall lactate threshold, they had a lower overall heart rate, they were blowing off CO2 more effectively and upregulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't. So he coined this term that said, "Your expectations are even more powerful than your genes."

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I love that. I'm gonna read the book. That's a remarkable example. And I think that, you know, a lot these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things, but this is almost in the different direction. This is a psychophysiological response. I find this kind of thing, to be honest, among the more fascinating and interesting aspects of neuroscience, if not the most interesting lately, those examples are tremendous, so I can't counter those at all with anything more spectacular. But the work of Dr. Aaliyah Crum at Stanford, she runs the Stanford Mind Body Lab, and she's done simple experiments, but they're really elegant, instructing people, one group all about the terrible effects

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  of stress, destroys your immune system, et cetera, et cetera. Other people telling them also true things, but all the positive effects of stress. It sharpens your ability of function, you can remember things better, et cetera, et cetera. You see exactly what you are told, basically. Now, you can't lie to people. You can't tell them things that aren't true. It's just about the subset of information that you get dictates the response you get. And perhaps the most dramatic was they gave two different groups of people, and then they actually each got the opposite condition to, a milkshake. One group is told, "This milkshake is very high calorie, it contains a lot of fat and sugar, et cetera." Another group is told, "The milkshake they're getting is very low calorie, it's very nutrient

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  sparse, et cetera." Then they measure hunger, so how long it takes for them to get hungry again after ingesting it. They also look at insulin, and they also look at ghrelin, this hormone that is secreted as you get, essentially makes you hungry, it's associated with hunger. There are other things too, but... You see exactly what you would expect, which is that people that get the nutrient dense milkshake are satisfied for longer, their ghrelin is suppressed and their insulin is higher. You see the opposite in the group that had the so-called low calorie shake. Turns out it's the exact same milkshake. This is remarkable, right? Because this is not simply the placebo effect. I think it's the placebo effect plus the expectation effect plus a real physiological effect because that's what you describe as well.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  And the way that Ali, Dr. Ali Crum, as she goes by, the way she describes it is that any event causes a real physiological response, but that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding of what the response ought to be to create the actual response. So it's sort of real plus perceived equals your reality.

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so I love this kind of thing, as you can tell, I'm eating up the example that you gave. I think it's spectacular because what it means is that, no, we can't lie to ourselves. We can't tell ourselves that, you know, drinking water is going to sustain us just as food would for five days. We're not going to be hungry. But to some extent, if one understands that, well, you can survive a long time on just water.

• 1:17:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  And you don't need to eat, then you might experience less hunger. That's the way the nervous system works.

• 1:17:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, you can definitely survive longer on just water if you believe that you can survive longer on just water. There is no reason not to believe this. So I was really, really averse to the whole Rhonda Byrne, the secret woo, sending out messages to the universe. And David positions himself very anti that as well in the book. But you can't deny the fact that the positive thinking has a real physiological impact on what you do. He was talking about, they did a study with Older people that were past retirement and they asked them to use, what sort of words do you associate with getting older? And they split these people into two different groups. And the sort of words that people used perfectly mapped on to how long they were going to live.

• 1:18:21Chris Williamson?

  So the people that used the sort of words alone, frail, fragile, injury, death, they were the ones that lived the shortest. The people that said, um, happiness, freedom, liberty, connection, maturity, those sorts of words were the ones that lived the longest. So your expectations can literally impact your longevity.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  There's, I, I'm yet to read the book in detail, but I've talked to a guy named Ethan Cross. He wrote a book called.

• 1:18:48Chris Williamson?

  He's been on the show.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Oh, fantastic. Okay. I think that internal chatter world is a very interesting one that neuroscience will eventually have something to, to say about. I think the most powerful mindset, uh, at least to me is one that, again, I, I learned from Ali Crumb. Um, this is a mindset that in her peer reviewed studies of different populations, it's clear exists universally in people in the SEAL teams, but, um, less so, or is perhaps even absent from the general population sadly. The idea that stress grows you, that challenge grows you, but isn't the only way that you can grow, I think is a very powerful mindset. So.

• 1:19:30Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  So they, she, what they did is she surveyed a bunch of different, um, people with different professions and asked, you know, what's your view of stress? Do you think it grows you? It diminishes your ability, et cetera. So this isn't giving people information. This is asking them for information. And the only group that said, stress grows you, the more challenged, the better you get, et cetera. The more stress you experience, the more likely you are to, to succeed was the, this group from the SEAL teams. I don't know if they were new recruits or if they'd been in a long time, but that was the, the group. I would add to that, that yes, if you adopt the mindset that stress grows you, you're going to be much better off, but also that stress is not the only way to grow in life. Right? There's this, you know, we have this, and again, there's sort of

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  a gravitational pull of this, like, stress grows you, you know, forward center of mass, or, you know, always be in friction, limbic friction, limbic friction. How about a more expansive or nuanced version of that might be? Stress grows you. So if you're under stress, you're back on your heels from something you think, okay, how can I get flat footed or even forward center mass? You tell yourself, stress grows me, stress grows me, stress grows me. But that doesn't mean stress is the only thing that will grow you, right? Learning to cycle between periods of hard work and deep, what I call non-destructive, deliberate reset, right? That's what really works over time. I can attest to that. You know, people who just really go out and tie one on in order to to recover,

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  you can only get away with that for a few years before your body and mind start to give out, right? So find non-destructive ways to reset and also adopt the mindset that stress grows you and adopt the mindset that, you know, there are other ways to grow that don't involve stress. And I think you're set up to have a pretty fantastic life. That's my, you know, simple view of of the way these things work.

• 1:21:18Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of endurance and suffering, what have you learned from Lex Fridman since you've been friends with him?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  The guy works a lot. You can text him, recall him at pretty much any hour, except the early morning hours that he happens to be in because he's likely to be asleep. You know, Lex is a really interesting one. Because, you know, like a lot of scientists and engineers, he has that ability to really drop into the trench, which is certainly not unique to scientists and engineers, but is really helpful. I think Lex comes at things from a, from at once a very engineering physics perspective, which, you know, obviously computer science, robots and all AI and all that. He loves that stuff. But, you know, there's a phrase that he's used over and over again in our conversations, and he's talked about this publicly, that I've started to pay a bit more attention to,

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  because he says it so many times, which is, you know, approach life with love in your heart. You know, which is weird, right? You think about an engineer who's thinking like this goes there, and this is what's going to predict the best outcome. And then you think like approach things with love in your heart. And I think he's right, because, and I think that is very powerful, because there are so many pitfalls.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  And by pitfalls, what I mean are energy sinks. There, you know, across the day from the time you wake up until you go to sleep at night, there's so many places for you to put your energy. It can go into online battles, it can go into, uh, you know, texting five different people. It can be investing in one person. It can be, there's so many things. And so much of success in any domain is about, yes, maintaining focus. We hear about that a lot. Focus, focus, focus. But what is focus? Focus is really about not allowing energy to dissipate into these kind of meaningless trails. So I think about Lex and I, as I do for all people, I think, you know, what animal does he best represent? Or what animal best represents him? I think of all people like this. I have this kind of weird process where after I spend some time with somebody, it just pops to mind.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Like, I can't tell you what animal comes to mind yet.

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  You might see that after the ice bath later on. We'll see how long it's staying.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  You might be, you might be a polar bear. Um, super comfortable in the water, um, the cold water. But I think that, you know, at some point I realized that, that Lex is, gets very fixated on things. Very, very fixated, but he also knows how to disengage. And he really avoids energy sinks through this and losses through this kind of love thing that he's really into. Um, because anger is very energetically demanding. It's great fuel, but it's not efficient fuel overall. Right? It's, it's like having a gas tank full of fuel, but there are a lot of leaks in it. Whereas I do think that doing things out of genuine desire, there's a calm sort of energized balance that comes with that. And you feel like you can go forever. So this is starting to sound a little bit woo.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  It sounds like, oh, you know, the heart is more powerful than the adrenals. And like, they're both powerful. The adrenals can keep you alive and enduring for a long, long time. But if you do things out of anger and friction for too long, your immune system will crash. We know this. But it is. Essentially infinite, how much energy you can derive out of genuine desire to engage with something or somebody.

• 1:24:25Chris Williamson?

  What animal is he then?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  You know, Lex, well, his hair makes me think he's some spiky thing. He's sort of like, he's some, he sort of has the, like, the persistence of the porcupine, but he has, he's definitely has, I think he, as much as I don't want to admit it because I wish it were me, not him, but I think the animal that best captures Lex, because he's also a bit of a loner, is the Wolverine. I've spent a lot of time thinking about actual Wolverines, not the Hugh Jackman version of Wolverines, but the actual Wolverine. They're very solo animals, unless they pair up to mate. They're incredibly strong. He is freakishly strong. I've done jujitsu with him. I'm not good at jujitsu. He is, he's a black belt jujitsu, but he is freakishly strong. So if I had to pick an animal, I'd say probably the Wolverine.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  What's interesting about him, I went to Thanksgiving with him last year, which was my first time of enjoying that holiday here, which is a fantastic holiday, I actually think. We don't have something in the UK where people sit back and do that gratitude reflection period, except for Christmas, you know, people do their end of year review, but I really think, and especially the time of year, it's in, it's perfect. So we were talking and he was talking about the fact that he was working hard, but he feels this gap between where he is and where he could be, which I

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Sounds like Lex.

• 1:25:39Chris Williamson?

  sense is a common pattern, yeah. And he was saying that a lot of the friends that he speaks to will say, you know, you're doing well, you're working hard. And he looked me in the eyes and he's like, I don't want them to say that. I want them to tell me to suck it up. I want them to tell me that I need to stop being such a pussy and keep going. I was like, it takes an unbelievably singular person to work as hard as he does. I don't think that the internet, whatever people know about how hard he works, is only a small sliver of just how obsessive and committed he is. And for him to say that he wants to be around more people that push him in that way, it made me realise that.

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps I could be offering more to my friends as well, that offering them just sort of support in the form of acceptance and presence and I'm hearing you and dude, you're doing great or whatever reassurance in that way, maybe isn't always the best way to go about things. So yeah, that was, it's just something that stuck in my mind. It's something, it's a little model that I've kept with me where I'm thinking, look, does my friend need me to tell him that he's doing good? Or does he need me to tell him to suck it up and get his nose down because I know that he can do it?

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Sounds very much like Lex. I'm learning about your, your internal workings a bit too. There are three kinds of reward. Two of them are often discussed. One is rarely discussed, but is pretty powerful. And I think it's useful to think about toggling between these different rewards, whether or not for ourselves or whether or not in trying to stimulate and motivate other people. One of course is reward. You did great. Congratulations. That was awesome. Loved that podcast. Great that you got an A plus on your report card or B plus because last year you got a C, whatever it is, reward. Then there's punishment, right? This is obvious. You screwed up, like you take something away or you take the anticipation of reward away, whatever it is. You screwed up, you're punished, you're grounded, et cetera. You're not watching

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  TV for a month or whatever it is, no screens for a month. Then there's the third kind of reward, which is the reward that you hang out in front of somebody at a distance, like a carrot on a stick out in front of them, which is not reward for what they've accomplished, but reward that they can anticipate if they accomplish something. I think this could be very effective in the context that we're talking about it, which is how would I do this with Lex? I'd say, you know, I really loved this particular interview. If only the next time you have that person on, you also ask them this, right? That's not a punishment. You're not saying it sucked because it didn't include this. You're not saying it wasn't great. You're saying if

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  next time you were to do that, I think it would be even better. So you're hanging a potential reward out in front. And I think that can be a very powerful motivator. So you can, you know, we could build up a number of different examples around this, but this is not often talked about in sort of reward punishment schedules and motivation. We always think reward and punishment, but we think immediate reward, immediate punishment. Now, in terms of building habits and goal setting and goal seeking, we know that visualizing failure is

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  For better or for worse, is a far better motivator than visualizing success if you want to get people motivated to start, right? To start. Now, getting people to continue involves regular rewards for reaching milestones. However, and I should have said this earlier, I want to make sure that we do emphasize that the best schedule really is random intermittent reinforcement. So if you're setting milestones on this run, or in your intellectual pursuits, or business pursuits, or relationship pursuits, if you set a milestone and you get there, you do want to have a little bit of an internal celebration. Remember, it's all internal. So internal celebration, not extrinsic celebration and reward. But every once in a while, it's good to just not reward yourself.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Now, at what ratio should you do that? Well, the computer modeling data say that the optimal ratio of success, successful trials and unsuccessful trials for learning and motivation is going to be about 85% of the time to reward yourself, and about 15% of the time to not reward yourself. So random intermittent lack of reward is another way to think about it. And I talked about this with Jaco a little bit, and he thought, oh yeah, probably what we should do is have workouts where it's a big fishbowl full of ping pong balls, and about 15% of them are marked with reward. But the other ones is you do something and you get to go take a ping pong ball out, and if you take that out, then you get some reward if it's marked, and if it's not, then you don't. And rather than every time you accomplish something, you go reward yourself.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  So here we're talking, we're getting kind of into the weeds of reward schedules. But I think if you really want to support a friend, punishment you should use very judiciously, although if they really screw up, a good friend, as they say, will put the friendship ahead of the friend, or the friend ahead of the friendship, excuse me. The friend, like you're going to tell them what they really need to hear, even if it compromises the friendship, if you really believe they need to hear that. Other times reward like that was awesome. Congratulations. And then occasionally if it's warranted, that was great ish, but it would be so much better if the next time you did this. Or that was great, but you know, honestly, I think it was a mixture of good and not so good. So I think those are three powerful ways to reward and they can be mixed up and toggled

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  back and forth according to whatever schedule allows that person to continue.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  What does your morning routine look like at the moment?

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Morning routine is wake up. If I.

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  Around about what time?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  I'm waking up these days around six AM, six thirty AM. I'm trying to go to sleep by about ten thirty PM. Sometimes it's eleven, sometimes it's ten. I wake up and I have to be careful here because whenever I've described my routine in a little bit of detail, people always say, I can't believe you don't go to the bathroom. And it's like, well, of course I so I want to.

• 1:31:33Chris Williamson?

  My pants.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right foot, left foot. So I want to be clear. I take care of my basic functions. But when I wake up, I make a beeline for sunlight. So I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes for the, you know, I'll probably go into the grave saying this. So forgive me if people have heard me say this before, but the single best thing you can do for your sleep, your energy, your mood, your wakefulness, your metabolism is to get natural light in your eyes early in the day. Don't wear sunglasses to do it. Takes about 10 minutes or so. If you live in a cloudy area, if you're in the UK in the winter, yes.

• 1:32:06Chris Williamson?

  Or the summer.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Or the summer, maybe you resort to some artificial light as a replacement, but as much as one can get bright, natural, and if not natural, artificial light in your eyes early in the day without sunglasses, contacts and eyeglasses are fine. Don't try and do it through a window or windshield. It's going to take far too long. This sets in motion a huge number of different neurobiological and hormonal cascades that are good for you, reduces stress late at night, offsets cortisol, a million different things really that are good for you. So I get that. And yes, sometimes.

• 1:32:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that walk, doing a little walk?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Ideally, that would be a walk, but sometimes we'll just go into the yard and have some coffee and, and you know, soak in whatever sunlight through, through the clouds. If it's a cloudy overcast day, it might be twenty, thirty minutes. If it's a. It's a very bright day. It might just be a few minutes, but really the the quality studies on humans that have looked at this say, try and get as much natural light as you can in the morning hours, whenever it is that that is for you, especially the first three hours after waking. If you can work outside, great. If you can get near a window, because as opposed to just in a dark conference room, that's better. But if you can get outside, that would be fantastic. So I get sunlight, I hydrate, I drink water, and then yerba mate is my favorite form of coffee, excuse me, caffeine.

• 1:33:21Chris Williamson?

  Are you waiting? How long are you waiting?

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes.

• 1:33:24Chris Williamson?

  Are you doing any salts during that time? Are you taking any electrolytes in?

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  I am a fan of water with Element. Before I had Element packets, I would just take a little bit of sea salt or pink salt.

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  What's your favorite Element flavor?

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  I like them all. There's one I don't like. I'm not a fan of the chocolate one, but I like the, yeah, some people love it. My podcast producer, his wife loves that. So I give it to her, the chocolate mint one. But I like the raspberry, the citrus one. I love that stuff.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  Mango chili is, if you open the mango chili and breathed in shortly afterwards, it's like being pepper sprayed. It's absolutely insane. It's like, it's like being blasted in the face. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's just the best way, that cold glass of water and that first thing in the morning. And I mean, it was you who reassured me of the, what I thought was bro science about your adenosine system not being active for the first ninety minutes. And if you're going to pump, pump caffeine onto that, you're not really actually acting on that. Your adrenal system is the one that you need to be looking at, optimal U hydration, all that sort of stuff. It's just such a good way to start the day. So, okay, we've got ninety minutes deep. What have you been doing in that? You've had your light in the eyes. What have you been doing between that and the yerba mate ninety minutes?

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  I do everything I can to not do email, not do social media, and to take care of a few critical tasks. These days, I'm, I have this obsession with trying to do one cognitively hard thing a day. One.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  And one physically hard thing a day. Now, does it not extreme physical, not David Goggins level workouts or anything, but in that 90 minutes, I'll typically try and read a research article start to finish, or I'll work on a document that I might be doing a grant or research paper or planning a podcast or researching a podcast. I try and get my brain into kind of a linear mode. I try and narrow that aperture. So if I don't, the distraction that's created by social media and interactions with others can kind of wick out into the rest of the day. So I'm not necessarily trying to finish something in that time, but I try and do something challenging. I experience great pleasure from battling through something mentally challenging, but that's something that I built up since my university years when I was about, you know,

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  19 or so, got serious about school and really started to experience the, the deep pleasure of like, ah, I figured that out or like, that was really tough. I don't always succeed, but that's what I'm doing in that hour to 90 minutes. But I confess sometimes we'll take a walk during that time and maybe talk through some things that are, that are challenging, you know, or, or sometimes I get lazy and, and I'm, I'll miss a day of that cognitive challenge. Then I do caffeine about 90 to 120 minutes after waking. And even though I prefer to work out earlier, I generally will then do some sort of physical workout. I have a very consistent routine I've done over 30 years where I weight train for 45 or minutes to an hour every other day.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  And occasionally I take an extra day off and occasionally due to travel or other commitments, I'll occasionally double up two days and then take two days off.

• 1:36:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  So it's really boring, you know, talk about workout schedules, but it's really simple. It's like, you know, I'll do a, a kind of pushing day, rest, pulling day, upper body push up, rest, upper body pull, rest, and then legs, take two days off, something like that.

• 1:36:41Chris Williamson?

  Are you doing on the off days, are you doing some sort of zone three?

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Always jogging or skipping rope. Those are my favorite forms of cardio, sometimes swimming, but typically I'll go running for 30 to 45 minutes. Or if I'm feeling a little bit lazier, because I always find the high intensity stuff to be easier than the long drawn out stuff. I'll sometimes throw on a weight vest, a thirty or fifty pound weight vest and I'll go out for a shorter run or I'll, I'm a big fan of knees over toes Ben Patrick, I know you had him on.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, great guy.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  We were down in Costa Rica with him and his wife who had the best time and learned so much. I'll occasionally do a backwards, you know, hill walk or throw on the weight vest for that. We sometimes will get bands and we'll, so there's a great way to combine this. We will sometimes get two people in one of these thick bands, do hill walks in the morning while getting our sunlight. But that I don't really consider a workout, I consider that just kind of rehabilitative movement. So on the off days I'm doing cardio and sometimes that's in the morning, sometimes that's in the evening. I do not like to weight train in the second half of the day because I like to be really caffeinated when I weight train. I like to listen to loud, fast music, most of the time, not always. I keep my phone out or off of, for most workouts.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Podcasts maybe if I'm running, but I really try hard when I'm working out to just focus on the workout. And those workouts, the weight training workouts are always ten minutes or so of warm up and then no more than forty to fifty minutes of really hard work. If I do train hard any longer, I don't recover enough to be able to come in a few days later. And when I train that way, I generally make pretty consistent progress.

• 1:38:16Chris Williamson?

  And you're taking yourself up until what's that, probably maybe ten, thirty, eleven AM, something like that?

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I'll eat my first real meal. Now occasionally I'll wake up really hungry if I didn't eat that well the night before. But typically the, after I train, I, yeah, I'll eat, I like oatmeal after I train, oatmeal fruit, some fish oil, protein drink, and then maybe ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes after that, I'll have a real lunch. My lunch is pretty much the biggest meal of the day. If I have my way, it'll be a steak, a salad, maybe a little more starch, although I sort of got it earlier.

• 1:38:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Brazil nuts, that meal sometimes can extend longer.

• 1:38:50Chris Williamson?

  It just sets up being a feeding fast.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  I love to eat, yeah, so I'll eat and then I confess I usually will work a little bit more for about thirty minutes or an hour typically email and then I'll take a. 10 to 30 minute yoga nidra nap or a nap and then come back refreshed.

• 1:39:08Chris Williamson?

  I really struggle with the naps, man. I come back after that and my emotions are all over the place. I'm disoriented. Maybe it's because I struggle to fall asleep super quickly. And therefore I'm extending that period out for a little bit longer than I need. I probably need to try the yoga nidra thing, but for me, it's, I'm absolutely all over. If I do that, I wake up and I don't know what day it is and my emotions always feel a little bit out of whack as well.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  I wake up grumpy from naps. Sometimes I'm told.

• 1:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  There are a few times when I've woken up just really angry. I have no idea what that's about. I don't know any of the neurochemistry associated with that. Sometimes I wake up from naps. It's really pleasant. I'll occasionally do, if the nap is early enough in the day afterwards, I'll have a, you know, a nice double espresso and get back into work. That's the hardest part of the day. Actually, if I was well structured in the early part of the day, it's that two or three P M. The key is then to try and get something really useful done cognitively again. So some people might look at this and say, wait, you're working for an hour in the morning and 30 minutes here and an hour in the afternoon. When are you actually working? But it's really about the depth of the trench when you're working. And so if I'm going to drop into something again for a few hours in the afternoon, I'm really going to drop into it. And that's typically phone off and out of the room.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  And my goal is to get to the evening time so that I can do the things that I want in the evening.

• 1:40:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  I can enjoy, like, I'm always setting a goal of the next time block. So this is something I've been doing for a long time, but even more so lately. I don't think my goal in the next hour is to do blank. I think this is dopamine reward predictions in action. I think, okay, if I get this workout done, then I'll be able to eat at more or less the same time, which I enjoy. And then something else will happen. So I'm very focused on what I'm doing, but I'm doing it for the purposes of like opening up the next door to the next thing. So if I can get that afternoon work block done, I'm thinking, ah, if I can just really get this podcast recorded.

• 1:40:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Which I enjoy.

• 1:40:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that your usual time to record? Middle day afternoon?

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  It used to be in the morning, but I'm getting, I'm putting more and more preparation into them all the time. My poor podcast producer, he's like, you know, I always joke that the one thing these podcasts probably will succeed in doing, meaning my podcast is they're going to cure insomnia. Cause some of them are so damn long, but I experience so much pleasure from spending a week or two researching something and then putting some structure on. And as you know, I mean, podcasting is its own, its own sort of natural drug. It just feels good if you enjoy doing this sort of thing. So typically, we're starting late in the day now and going till pretty late.

• 1:41:31Chris Williamson?

  For me, the problem that I have, so I'm fasted right now, or what? One minute to 4pm.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  You haven't eaten anything today?

• 1:41:37Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Goodness gracious.

• 1:41:38Chris Williamson?

  So but that's the only way, if I eat, I've my thoughts become slower. I'm not as verbally articulate. I'm nowhere near as agile. Now, I could push this super, super late, I'm sure, and it would be probably a pretty bad idea.

• 1:41:49Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I could avoid, maybe I could go protein and fat or just mostly protein earlier on, and that would have avoided. But I just find that my thoughts and my verbal articulation just goes through the toilet.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  It's adrenaline. I mean, I think that, sorry to interrupt you, but if you ingest a bunch of glucose or, you know, I think you're getting that. I mean, you've got to have a nice, I'm guessing that if we were to tap your vein right now, if we could do microdialysis on your brain, that you have a nice, low, but steady level of adrenaline. And listen, this adrenaline thing, this dopamine thing is no joke. This is the stuff of human evolution, right? This is the, these are the same neurochemicals. This is, this is the energy drink of human evolution. This is not the rock star, Red Bull, et cetera. That stuff just hijacks this very system. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just feeding this very same system. So if you find an eating schedule or a fasting schedule that allows you to tap into that as a resource,

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  I don't care what anyone says about whether or not fasting will make you live longer or not, who knows, right? If you're in the control group, you know what's going to happen. So, but everyone, presumably, everyone dies eventually. So pick your, pick your mode of eating, be my guest. But if you've figured out a way to tap into this in a way that works for you, by all means, leverage that. Because until somebody comes along and says that intermittent fasting is unhealthy, well, then to me, it seems, at least for me, eating between 11pm, excuse me, 11am-ish and 8pm-ish.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  Is great. And what I can also tell you is that having a consistent meal schedule, meaning a feeding window, we absolutely know, I don't know why this isn't discussed more, we absolutely know that that helps anchor your sleep schedule. And having a anchored sleep schedule helps anchor your light viewing schedule. And a light viewing, so it all starts to piece together. I think that what's lost in the discussion about nutrition, except for the fact that most online discussions about nutrition are carried out by-

• 1:43:42Chris Williamson?

  They're religious.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Well, they're religious, but they also seem to be carried out by people that have like, I don't know, like, like, real feelings of powerlessness in themselves. Like, it comes through, like, because they're quibbling over, like, whether or not you should eat a cracker or not, or whether or not, you know, inhaling oxygen, you know, westward is going to break your fast or not. I'm sorry, I'm obviously joking.

• 1:44:03Chris Williamson?

  I once, I said, David Sinclair came on my show twice, and he's a fantastic human. I know you're friends with him. And he talked about the fact that his resveratrol goes into a small amount of fatty yogurt, I think, because it's like brick dust, right? So you need to mix it in, and it's homemade yogurt, and something else, and something else. And it's like, it's a shot of yogurt, right? It's enough for him to put his little capsule of resveratrol in. And the comments were alight with people-

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:30Chris Williamson?

  Saying that's not a real fast-

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  This is hilarious.

• 1:44:32Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got-

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  It's so sad. You know, it's so sad that we can't have a nuanced conversation about nutrition online. That, well, let's, let's be fair, calories in, calories out applies, right? I don't think the laws of thermodynamics have disappeared. And yet you have people who would argue that it doesn't. And, okay, like, we'll let them have their, their arguments. I think that the key thing is, when you find an eating schedule that works for the other things that you need to do in life, it's really beautiful. Because then you really start to exert some control over these energy systems. What we're talking about is focus and defocus. We're talking about focus and deliberate decompression, whether or not it's yoga nidra, or a nap, or simply a walk. And food, as you point out, is a wonderful source of caloric energy. We need it at some

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  point. But it also can create this parasympathetic response, where we feel very tired, especially carb-, if you don't eat for long periods of time, and then you eat substantial amount of starches, you will feel like calmer and more relaxed. So- And maybe sleepy and maybe brain foggy. So I I've been, you know, of course assaulted by this for this online. I do tend to eat some more starches in the evenings and fewer proteins. And sure, you can show me 20 double-blind placebo-controlled or randomized controlled trials saying that if you're going to eat starches, you should eat them in the early part of the day. Well, I do that too after I train. But ultimately, what I'm interested in doing is maintaining the kind of bodily health and aesthetic that I'm looking for. My blood lipids that I'm looking for. But I want to accomplish things in life.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  So I think if one gets too distracted by what's possible with nutrition, it can be, it can really take somebody off target. No one ever succeeded in creating anything useful in terms of worker relationships by overly focusing on changing their dietary intake. But so once it works, so what, once something works for you, I say just stick with it. Just lean into it and that can change over time. So that can really change over time.

• 1:46:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you know Alex Hormozi? You're familiar with him?

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Sounds familiar.

• 1:46:32Chris Williamson?

  Really hot shit on the internet at the moment. This sort of gym bro who has founded this company and is now moving on to bigger and better things. He's eaten, I'm pretty sure he's eaten the same lunch for 10 years or something. He always has the same lunch and he's got the exact same thought process around this that you do. If you were to, going back to the morning routine thing, if you were to design or if you were to instruct someone to do the worst possible things in the morning to set their day up for failure, what would they be?

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Wake up and stay in bed. Well, wait, there are good reasons to stay in bed in the morning. But once those are completed, then staying in bed is

• 1:47:14Chris Williamson?

  Curtains drawn.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, curtains drawn, just using your passively scrolling on social media.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Like there are, there are neurobiological data showing that when you are upright, you actually are stimulating this area of the brain called locus ceruleus. Whereas when you recline, you actually are less alert. Literally, the position of your body dictates some of your levels of alertness.

• 1:47:36Chris Williamson?

  That's why you suggest people to not sit like this at their work desk, right?

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  Yes. And if you're looking and If you're looking down while working, you're actually less alert than you could be if your eyes are averted slightly over.

• 1:47:50Chris Williamson?

  Most people that are on their phone.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Including me and the postural stuff is really bad, too. I mean, I'm getting, I'm trying to really combat that internal rotation, you know, that the C shaped human kind of thing, you know, um, it's really not good. I'm really trying. In fact, one, this is so common now, the C shaped human thing that um, it almost feels strange to be upright, you know, like people, they get exactly the open, uh, the, the, uh, sort of external rotation is, is good for us. We know this, but.

• 1:48:18Chris Williamson?

  In bed.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  I would say in bed. So people are on their phone. They're in bed. They're, they're not getting enough light or they just artificial light, or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window. Terrible. Um, they are then going and sitting and getting into like hip, you know, hip flexor contraction. Um, they're drinking coffee too early in the day. Uh, they aren't getting into any kind of movement, but it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities, sort of making a cup of coffee while texting, um, not getting sunlight, you know, then they're scattering that in with like a little bit of work, but then something hits that's stressful and they're diverting their attention. They're sort of building in this eight attention deficit like disorder through.

• 1:48:59Chris Williamson?

  So they're doing, they're not single tasking, they're not monotasking and they're not being deliberate or intentional with the things that they're doing. They're just allowing the morning to kind of come and take them wherever the wind blows.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  That's right. And I have to say, even though I described my routine accurate, my morning routine accurately, if I were to really optimize it, and I, I've done this from time to time, I would get up, I would hydrate and I would immediately exercise. I would use that early, you know, peaking of the cortisol response that comes with waking to get the body into action, sort of Jaco Willink style, right? The four thirty, I always see his posts, but I see them at seven AM.

• 1:49:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, precisely.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  So, you know.

• 1:49:39Chris Williamson?

  So Jaco was up before me again today.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, he seems to always, uh, beat me by a few minutes unless I wake up in the middle of the night for a moment, but, uh, to really get into action, because that's going to generate its own dopamine and adrenaline response. Anytime I've worked out really early, like if I have a flight and then, you know, and then moved into the other components of my day. I find that I feel better all day long. I I also will say if I work out really early, maybe between seven and eight AM. Well, then my first meal might land at nine AM. So you you know, you need to be flexible with some of these things, but the general principles of apply.

• 1:50:14Chris Williamson?

  I noticed that you haven't put cold exposure into your morning routine. I'm going to guess you must have a cold tub of some kind.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  You have a cold tub and a sauna. I've been less good about that lately. The best time to do that for me is on my cardio days. I do it after.

• 1:50:25Chris Williamson?

  Because you don't want to do it post hypertrophy because you're going to blunt some of the responses that are actually you're trying to get by the the workout itself.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  That's right. And I have one, I should say, I have one rest day per week where I don't do any cardio or weight training. I really like doing, having a complete rest day, but on that complete rest day. If I can, I'll do 20 minutes of sauna and then cold for three minutes, 20 minutes of sauna and then cold. I'll make the rest day reparative.

• 1:50:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  And generally we make that social where we're talking about things and and we're very social in our working out. Like we we talk, my partner and I talk while we work out. I, you know, when it's set, when it's time to do a set, I become a little bit of like the drill sergeant. So let's do your set, do your set. But then occasionally I'm the guy doing a set and I'm like, all right, so this afternoon we're going to, you know. But I try and I try and really focus and I enjoy training by myself too. But generally we train together and then. And then typically if we're doing ice bath or sauna, we try and coordinate those things.

• 1:51:18Chris Williamson?

  So I've seen a bunch of research about sauna. I've seen a bunch of research about cold exposure. Contrast therapy, which is huge here in Austin, going from sauna to cold. And it seems like 20 and three, three rounds is very typical. Is there something that we're gaining or something that we're losing by doing that cycle rather than doing a block of heat and a block of cold separately?

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of, but you know, the, we finally have some good science to put to this. And unfortunately, it wasn't from my lab. This is the beautiful work of Susanna Soberg, who's over in Scandinavia, published a paper in Cell Reports Medicine, showing that the threshold you're trying to hit each week is at least, you can do more, but at least 11 minutes of uncomfortable but safe cold exposure per week total. So that could be three minutes Monday, three minutes Wednesday, so on, to 11 minutes and 57 minutes per week minimum.

• 1:52:12Chris Williamson?

  So precise.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  That's what they found. What did they find? Increases brown fat thermogenesis, thereby metabolism, thereby comfort being, you know, in cold, et cetera.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  Clearly, there's a resilience effect. Clearly, there's a dopamine increasing effect. And clearly, you can do more. You could do all that in one day, or you could spread it out throughout the week, or you could do more. It kind of depends on what you're shooting for. How cold? People always say, how cold? How hot? Well, for heat is generally between 187 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhere in that range. And for cold, it's cold enough that you really want to get the hell out, but that you can stay in safely because I don't want anyone to kill themselves with doing this stuff.

• 1:52:53Chris Williamson?

  Did I see you say that evening time heat exposure increases growth hormone release by 16 times or something insane? But subsequent sessions of the same only increase it by a very small margin.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:10Chris Williamson?

  Am I talking out of my ass?

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  No, you're absolutely right. So we can, we can delineate some protocols. If you want to get better, more resilient, cold exposure is going to be great anytime. Post cold exposure, your body is going to heat up. Think of your body heating up as waking up. So if you are concerned about not being able to sleep, then I would suggest you do your cold exposure earlier in the day. Right? Heat does the opposite. So I'm laying out some parameters here. Heat does the opposite. You're going to heat up while you're in the deliberate heat exposure. But afterwards, there's a post-heating dip in temperature. We talk, this was all covered in an episode I did with Dr. Craig Heller on Thermogenesis. Gets a little bit down in the weeds, but take my word for it. If you want to get the science, you can go there to find the science behind this.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  So sauna at night is great as well. Now let's think about how to combine these things. So let's say you, you know, you're on, it's a Tuesday. You've done your weight training on Monday and you want to do your heat and cold. You don't have time to optimize everything perfectly. You could say, okay, I'm going to do my heat and cold at 10 a.m. or 8 a.m. You get in the sauna for 20 minutes or so, and then you get into the cold for three minutes. And then you might get into the sauna again for 10 minutes and you get in the cold for another minute or so. You end on cold.

• 1:54:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  Why? Because it'll wake you up and presumably you're not, you want to be woken up for the day.

• 1:54:30Chris Williamson?

  That also means don't then, if you're doing it in a facility, don't then go and have a warm shower.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:36Chris Williamson?

  Once you've finished.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Right. Coolest shower is fine because you want to clean off often. I mean, the ice bath is cleanish, but it's, you know.

• 1:54:42Chris Williamson?

  Depends where you're going.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  In laboratories, you're absolutely right. In laboratories, if we want to preserve something, in particular a virus, we put it in the freezer. If you want to kill a virus, you heat it up. This is

• 1:54:53Chris Williamson?

  You can have as dirty of a sauna as you want, but the cold

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's, yeah, that sauna sort of its own autoclave if it gets hot enough, right? And the cold, cold stuff needs to be cleaned out now and again. You get mold growing in a freezer, which is kind of freaky to think about, but you really can't.

• 1:55:07Chris Williamson?

  It's never going to grow in a sauna.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  Never going to grow if it gets hot enough. Now, there is what I call the Soberg principle, which is if you are using deliberate cold exposure to increase metabolism, end on cold. So finish on the cold, not just because it wakes you up more, but because then you have to heat your body up naturally, which is a thermogenic metabolic response. So end with cold. And if you really want to push it, you can do things like, don't use a towel, use evaporation, spread out your limbs and don't huddle so that you have to shiver more, et cetera. I mean, a lot of little games you can play. But let's say you want to reduce post-exercise inflammation. You're not concerned with hypertrophy gains, of muscle size gains or strength gains. Well, then get in the cold after your workout. Do that for one to, some people can do 10 minutes, reduce inflammation.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Let's say you really want to hit growth hormone, which is what you asked. The biggest effects of sauna on growth hormone, and they are big effects, are when the sauna is only done once per week, but it's done in four cycles or sets, we could say, of 30 minutes each. So that means 30 minutes in the sauna at the temperatures I described before, then a five-minute break, just air cooling off, or 10-minute break, then back into the sauna for 30 minutes.

• 1:56:18Chris Williamson?

  This is brutal.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Then again, in the afternoon, 30 minutes in the sauna, then 10 minutes just air cooling off, and then back into the sauna for 30 minutes. So that's two hours at 187 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 1:56:31Chris Williamson?

  In one day.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  In one day.

• 1:56:32Chris Williamson?

  With a maximum of what, less than sort of 20 minutes of rest in between those little sessions, then the big rest in between.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  So you have to be very careful, right? Heat can kill you. You got to hydrate. You need to make sure you get enough salt. Like, I mean, this is, this is work, right? But you get, you see in these human studies, up to 16-fold increases in growth hormone. So you could imagine this could exert some very strong reparative effect if you're training for a big event or endurance event, or maybe you're just really wiped out from the week. This is a stressor, but it's a stressor that delivers a potent growth hormone response. Now, if you do sauna more often than that, you're not going to want to do two hours a day in the sauna because presumably you're doing other things.

• 1:57:11Chris Williamson?

  You have a life.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  You have a life. And in addition to that, the growth hormone effect starts to diminish if you become too heat-adapted. And that raises a more interesting question perhaps, which is why is it that this two hour protocol really works if you do it once a week to increase growth hormone? It's because it's a stressor and certain stressors increase growth hormone. Does it have to be heat? No, you probably also do four really long rounds of ice bath. And I'm guessing you'd probably see a similar effect. No one's ever really looked, probably see a similar effect because it's all about the stress stimulus. Now, those that work on exercise science and weight training would probably say, yeah, you could also do a, this has been shown, you know, a 90 minute, 10 sets of 10,

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  multiple exercises for 10 sets of 10, high volume, German volume training, work out and get the same growth hormone effects. There's so many studies like this. I personally like to do the sauna two or three days a week. And if I'm traveling off and don't get the opportunity, if I'm in Austin, it's great because there are all these sauna places. But if I'm traveling abroad, I don't have the time, then I might do, I might take a day. I'm thinking, wow, I did three podcasts, I'm exhausted. When I'm in New York, I like to go to a place, I have no relation to them, but I think it's called Spa 88. It's a Russian banya and I'll just go for the whole day. If I've been working really, really hard, they serve food there, they serve borscht and all this other kind of like pickled vegetables and.

• 1:58:34Chris Williamson?

  They must think that you're Russian, you must, you must walk through the doors and they go, hello, brother.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  Sometimes I usually just don't, the best way to appear Russian, Lex, I hope you're listening, is to just not say anything, just, just to not.

• 1:58:43Chris Williamson?

  That's the most Russian thing that you can say is nothing.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. Very stoic. That place is great and they have different saunas, steam sauna, they have cold dunk. And sometimes I'll just spend three, four hours there. There's one in San Francisco called Archimedes Banya. So sometimes that's an occasional thing. Now, most people are trying to incorporate this into their daily life. And just like, as we said, for ice bath, if you don't have access to ice or ice bath or cold tub, you do cold shower or longer cool baths. With heat, I realize not everyone has access to a sauna. Hot baths do work. Now, one thing about hot baths and hot sauna is they will nuke your sperm. It's not nuke, a nuke is a, you know, slang. They will reduce viable sperm count. So for males that are trying to reproduce, you know, trying to create children, you want to be careful about hot baths and hot sauna too often.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Some people will bring a cold pack in and put it in their groin. You can't do that in a bath. But it's, I mean, sperm are maintained outside the body, the testicles are maintained outside the body. For a reason. Right, the scrotum has varying elasticity in order to maintain temperature of the sperm. That's why that, that's the, the various effects that have been described are there on purpose. So, why human evolution designed this way? I don't know, someone will say, but in any case, unless you're trying to, you know, and again, the ice pack approach is interesting. Some people do that. Actually, there's a kind of interesting relationship between cold and testosterone thermogen- and spermatogenesis. There is a little cottage industry out there.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  I think on Amazon, people will buy these gel pack underwear of, I think they're called snowballs. This is cooling the scrotum in order to try and increase spermatogenesis. Okay. Now, I'm not aware of any data on this, but people report ANICA data and have shown their blood work and stuff, that it, it actually works to increase testosterone levels. I have not aware of any peer reviewed studies. I am not, I'm not, I would not be sitting as comfortably as I am right now. But, but I find this sort of amusing on the one hand, and then on the other hand, I think what we're arriving at is some general principles of physiology, which are that light, exercise,

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  temperature, both heat and cold, are all very powerful stimuli for creating hormonal and neuromodulator dopamine epinephrine effects. And when you start to dig beneath the surface of all these protocols, Wim Hof breathing, ice baths, sauna, snowballs, what you are finding is that these are all different stimuli to tap into these different neuromodulator systems, right? You know, sunlight on our skin and on, and into our eyes organizes all these hormone cycles. There's a beautiful study out of Israel, just this last year, peer reviewed studies showing that if men and women are told to go outside and get a lot of sunlight exposure on their skin for 20 minutes a day, three times a week, testosterone and estrogen levels go up substantially, feelings of desire and sexual passion go up.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  You know, there's a real effect of the summer months. For people and it's hormonal and that's because the skin is an endocrine organ. These effects shouldn't surprise us. And some people hear these and they go, oh, so basically you're just telling us to like, get sunlight and exercise and eat well and, you know, and avoid bright lights at night so that you can see it. Yeah, that's basically what we're saying. We're saying that because there's now substantial physiology to support that. There's nothing new in terms of the mechanisms. The mechanisms haven't evolved in, we believe, hundreds of thousands of years, if not more. The ways to tap into these systems are many. High intensity interval training, you're going to get increase in adrenaline. Yoga nidra, meditation, a nap, you're going to get increases in serotonin. So it's not trivial, though.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  I want to be really clear. These sorts of things are not trivial. They are exceedingly powerful because they tap into systems that we all harbor. So the beautiful thing is they work the first time and they work every time. And there are very few things you can say that about. They work the first time and they work every time. And the reasons they work are now becoming clear to us through these more high quality studies.

• 2:02:43Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of conversations at the moment around concerns for the average amount of testosterone that men have got, estrogens in the water and stuff like that. Should we be worried? How worried should we be?

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just recently came back from Copenhagen. I was there to give a talk for the Lundbeck Foundation and there was another talk that the Lundbeck Foundation put on. They do a great popular science series called Coffee and Cocktails. I'm not a drinker, but people, it's so European. It's so different than over here in the States.

• 2:03:13Chris Williamson?

  Was everybody smoking outside?

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  No one was smoking, but people would bring, were allowed to bring in real glasses with ice in them and yet the auditorium was silent. This was a big concert, it's in the concert hall in Copenhagen, it's a very beautiful venue and you couldn't hear an ice cube chink the entire night. No clink, clink, clink, no, no chinking of the ice cubes. People were in there with their cocktails and enjoying, enjoying science. And earlier that week, there was a talk by Dr. Shayna Swan. She wrote a book called Countdown. She went on Joe Rogan's podcast, I believe, earlier last year. She talked about the decline of sperm counts from the 1930s until now and ties it in a very, she's a serious researcher with National Institutes of Health Grants, et cetera, ties

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  this to the increasing presence of phthalates, the most difficult word to pronounce in the English language besides ophthalmology.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Phthalates that are present mainly in pesticides. If you look at sperm counts and testosterone levels in males in different areas of the United States, they are significantly lower in areas where there's a lot of pesticide use in rural areas where there's a lot of farming and pesticides. Very serious issue. And in the offspring of mothers that ingest phthalates, there's this, the anal genital distance is what they study in the lab.

• 2:04:32Chris Williamson?

  A lot.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  The anal genital distance, literally the distance between the base of the scrotum and the anus in males is much greater than it is in females.

• 2:04:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a word for that.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Females don't have a scrotum, obviously. So they measure from the base of the genitals to the base of the vagina to the anus. In males, they go from the base of the scrotum. Depends on the study, sometimes it's the top of the scrotum. You know, I always say, you know, you always have to be careful when people are measuring anything related to genital, because somebody's going to cheat in the measurement. So, so in any event, I don't know how they controlled for that. But she shows these remarkable pictures in mice and in humans of people that are exposed or mice that are exposed to phthalates. And basically males are showing the more female like pattern of anal genital distance when they're exposed to these phthalates in utero. Okay, this is not post-birth. This is in utero, the mother's being exposed. It crosses the blood placental barrier. What's happening?

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Well, this is reducing sperm counts. Now, what can people do about this? Well, first of all, there is this question of whether or not phthalates are having a similar effect after a child is brought into the world. One doesn't know, but we do know, and this is, goes back to my early graduate work was on the effects of androgens like testosterone and DHT on different traits of brain and body. We know that, for instance, it just very briefly, that during pregnancy, the brain is organized male by way of, believe it or not, testosterone converted to estrogen through a process called aromatization. But the growth of the penis, the fact that there even will be a penis, et cetera, is set by a testosterone called DHT, dihydrotestosterone.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Testosterone converted to DHT through five alpha ductase. And that's an organizing effect on the system, as they call it. But then there's an activating effect where during puberty, the testes just start producing testosterone, some is converted to DHT, and the DHT is what creates the growth of the penis. Okay? In people that inject thalates during puberty and in the post puberty years, it's conceivable that those thalates could inhibit the activating effects of androgens, not just what we call the organizing effects of androgens early in life. Okay, why is this interesting and important? Well, sperm counts are definitely going down. Are they going down so much so that people are incapable of reproducing?

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Probably not, because, you know, as they told us in school, it just takes one. And indeed, it just takes one sperm, but it is a probability. It's a numbers game, right? The reason, you know, people that take anabolic steroids, unless they do things to offset the effect on their own testosterone and sperm production, sperm counts are down. So the probability of of successful insemination is of of the egg is reduced also. It's a numbers game. It just takes one, but having many improves the probability that the one will be able to fertilize. So the short answer is yes, I think it is very concerning. Now, which things should we be concerned about? My understanding of the literature, and here I'm not in a, I'm now venturing into territory for which I'm certainly not an expert, is that things like plastics that

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  have BPAs may be a concern. Drinking water may be a concern, but the most serious or enriched source of BPAs are things like printed receipts.

• 2:07:52Chris Williamson?

  I was out for dinner the other night. It was probably about a month and a half ago, and the server came over and I reached for the receipt. And as I was going for it like this, one of the girls who I'd never met before, she's a creator online, hit my hand away. I was like, are you really going to touch that? And this is the first time I've ever heard about this. This is legit.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, printed receipts are are a a rich source of BPAs.

• 2:08:16Chris Williamson?

  And topically, that could come through the skin.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  It could go transdermally. I mean, now, you'd probably have to handle a lot of receipts. I mean, I don't think you're.

• 2:08:23Chris Williamson?

  If you were a checkout cashier, perhaps, this would be the sort of thing.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  Definitely checkout cashiers. And listen, it's going to vary. Some people are operating with a testosterone level and sperm count that's already back on its heels, so to speak. Some people have abundant testosterone and sperm. So. It is really going to depend on the individual. I don't think people should get paranoid or delusional about any of this.

• 2:08:45Chris Williamson?

  Just don't start sleeping in a bed of receipts.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Don't start sleeping in a bed of receipts. That's an interesting, there are all sorts of jokes that could be made about that one that I won't make. But there are also some other things like, you know, do a little bit of online research about phthalates and don't go to fringe sites. Go to Dr. Shanish Swan's website, right? I believe she's out Mount Sinai or one of the other larger medical schools in New York. Go to her website. She's a legitimate researcher and see what's there. See what the sources of phthalates are. Pesticides. Does that mean you should only eat organic fruits and vegetables? Maybe. I don't know which pesticides people are using on which fruits and vegetables, right? So there's some research that needs to be done. But the moment we start talking this way and people start saying, oh, wow, this is really like hippie science. This isn't hippie science.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  This is serious NIH funded researcher saying phthalates before birth can dramatically alter the trajectory of the male stability and make sperm and testosterone. Phthalates in puberty may be able to do that, but we know that androgens, in particular DHT and testosterone converted to estrogen have a powerful role in masculinizing the brain and body during those years. Why wouldn't people be, you know, do half an hour of research online? Or for instance, the abundant data that melatonin suppresses pregnant, excuse me, suppresses puberty, and yet people will take melatonin like it was, you know,

• 2:10:08Chris Williamson?

  Insane physiological levels.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Am I saying melatonin is going to suppress your puberty if you took it as a kid? You're messed up? No. And yet it's very easy to replace it with some of the healthier alternatives that are out there. So I think that one can have a thoughtfulness about this stuff and it's action oriented without having to really freak out about it.

• 2:10:28Chris Williamson?

  How do you think that creators like Derek from More Plates More Dates or Greg Doucette are someone who's changed the way that the internet understands hormonal profiles and supplementation? Because since watching a lot of Derek's stuff, since he's become big on YouTube, I have been much more considering the balance that's inside of my body. But I don't, I don't think that that was super common before guys like him were around.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, Derek's not a scientist by training, but he's done an immense service to the world because no one was talking about this stuff. It was talked about in bodybuilding circles where they talk very openly.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  It was starting to emerge in testosterone replacement therapy clinics. And then mostly guys were doing this stuff and lying about it. Right. They're doing it, but then they don't want to talk about it. Actually, kudos to Joe Rogan, who years ago came out and said, yeah, he decided to start doing TRT and low dose of testosterone. He's already successfully reproduced in this. So he, you know, he brought it up and, and, you know, it's clear that this is becoming more common. Here, here are some of the general principles that I think, forgive me, Derek, if I get this wrong in terms of what you believe, because I never want to speak for anybody else. But my read of the science and the actual protocols speak to the idea that many people do not need testosterone replacement. Young guys should really avoid doing anabolic steroids.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  It can really mess up their system, not just physically, not just for the ability to have kids later, but lead to all sorts of sexual issues and sexual performance issues. Like, there needs to be some medical incentive, right? Hypogonadism, for instance. But at the point where someone either has bank sperm or decides they don't want any more kids or is willing to do something like take HCG to maintain testicular and function and spermatogenesis, it's very clear that going with the lowest, you know, doctor described, right? I'm not talking about illicit use, that the lowest possible dosage of testosterone therapy is going to be better than, for instance, taking 200 milligrams in a one milli-injection every two weeks.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  Right. Because you get these huge increases and then these troughs. So people are-

• 2:12:33Chris Williamson?

  Is this something that you've learned from Derek?

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Yes, and in talking with other people. And I, I'm no longer doing this, but I, I did a run of it from 45 to, to 46 years old and nothing before that. And I did it because I'm working on a, on a book really that has a whole section on hormone therapies. I wanted to see what it was like. I'll tell you, basically testosterone gives you more energy to work more. If it's done appropriately, right?

• 2:12:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe that's the, the secret for Lex. Maybe homeboy is just brimming.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Maze brimming. And I'll say when I went into it, my, my levels were mid-range. They were fine. High to mid-range. They were kind of like sevens, eights, but I was doing some supplementation to support that. I've since gone back to that. It was funny. When you say something on the internet, people think that means it's forever, right? It is possible to start and come off, right? So, so what I've done. And, and so here's what's, what's relevant here. People are now spacing out, you know, 30 milligrams on Monday, 30 milligrams on Wednesday, 30 milligrams on Friday. It's like I have a low reasonable dose. Again, talk to your doctor. These aren't recommended dosages. That's more typical. Another thing that's really important is that people have traditionally blocked estrogen by increases while doing this, by taking an aromatase inhibitor,

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Novodax, Arimidex, these kinds of things. That almost often is a bad idea, almost often, because having enough estrogen around allows you to maintain cognitive function and libido. A lot of guys think it's just, you know, and it is true. If estrogen is very high and testosterone is very low, libido can suffer. But if testosterone is very high and estrogen is very low, libido can really suffer. So a lot of people who are crushing their estrogen realize that by coming off some of those drugs, they feel far better, far better, far better. So, most people I know that are doing this are taking low doses of testosterone semi-frequently throughout the week, 20 to 30 milligrams every other day or so. There's a lot of variation around this.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  And then not doing anything to reduce aromatase, or if they are taking very low doses, not one milligram of Arimidex, but maybe something like 0.1 milligrams of Arimidex every third day or so. Again, not a recommendation. Talk to your doctor. The, the smarter clinics are starting to think about this. And actually, I don't have any financial relationship to Derek or to Merrick Health, which is his clinic, but from what I understand, they do a very good job. I did help them design a herbal, mostly herbal supplement for testosterone support for people who are not on TRT. I have things like Tonga Ali Fadoja. But unbeknownst to most people, I, I've not made one penny on that. That was just based on a conversation of the research with him and Dr. Kyle Gillette and a few other people. So.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Estrogen can help maintain libido also, can increase libido. Now, here's something I learned that's really interesting from Peter Attia recently. Women, as we know, make both testosterone and estrogen, and of course, a bunch of other hormones too. If they get their blood work back and you were to adjust the units that those hormones are measured in, nanograms per deciliter in some cases, picograms per deciliter in other cases. If you normalize them all to the same nanograms per deciliter, you would find that a healthy woman has more testosterone than she does estrogen. That's right.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  I asked him this three times. I'm like, you're telling me that women have more testosterone circulating in them than estrogen? He said, absolutely. Now, this, maybe there's a, there's a caveat to that during some phase of the menstrual cycle, but that does not mean that their testosterone levels are higher than that of men. But this is remarkable, right? This means that these androgens, testosterone and, and are doing interesting things in men and in women, and estrogen, as we just described, are doing really interesting things, certainly in women and in men. So this idea of more testosterone, less estrogen, good is always the case. That's simply false. You have to think about whether or not it's a man, whether or not it's a woman, whether or not the goal is more or less, typically people aren't going for less libido, but I suppose it's possible.

• 2:16:34Chris Williamson?

  Some people out there with that.

• 2:16:35Speaker 01

  Some people might be highly distracted by an excessive libido. I thought it's a different story. But, and then of course, DHT. So I think one of the things that Derek has really contributed to the world, and I think is important for people to know, that a lot of the drugs that are used to treat hair loss, finasteride, propecia, things like that, block DHT receptors, dihydrotestosterone. DHT is responsible for beard growth in the face and for balding, male pattern baldness. People, because they want their hair. We'll take these drugs. If they take them in pill form, they're blocking DHT everywhere and they can experience severe defects in libido and sexual performance. Now, before that- The choice between your hair and your erection. For a lot of people it is, right? I mean, for now, there are now topical things and Derek

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  talks about all this kind of thing. They're topical- He went really, really deep- He goes really deep into all this. And what's interesting is, you know, we also can take a step back and say like, what's the landscape of health information that created this opportunity for a kid in his twenties? By the way, no one knows his last name. Very clever. No one knows his last name. Well played, Derek. It's kind of an avatar of a human, right? Although he's real. What created this landscape for this guy to be able to get this information out there, even though he's not a physician, he's not a scientist? And I think what it is, is that he saw that there was all this information nested in these very niche communities that no, most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder, right? And yet what he did was he sort of normalized the discussion about

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  hormones. He normalized the discussion about other things like dopamine and cortisol, et cetera. And what's interesting is that science now is kind of following suit. You know, 10 years ago, a discussion about hormone therapies would never come up in the hallways of discussions with my colleagues. Since doing an episode of the podcast on optimizing testosterone and estrogen, no fewer than 10 of like, I'm not going to name names, but these are serious scientists, and it's a mixture of men and women, have approached me about like, hey, like, what can one do in order to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels? Is estrogen therapy for menopause a useful thing? When should one start? Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, so all I can do is point them in the way of information, but this is an important area,

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  and here's why. Hormones control neuromodulators like dopamine, estrogen, and so on, and those neuromodulators powerfully influence our states of mind. So if your hormones are out of whack, your neuromodulator is going to be out of whack. Typically, the treatment for depression would be to go in and just give a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or well, but you're in type dopamine thing. Now, that has its use. But I love this trend now, not towards hormone therapy necessarily, but just toward a thinking, a mindset of how deep in the layers of my biology can I go to create these sort of waves of health that rise up to the level of ability to focus and et cetera. For so many years, it's all been attacked at the surface, kind of the waves on the surface of the ocean. And yet

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  there's this like, we're now talking about the deep tectonic plates movements that are affecting all that, in any case.

• 2:19:31Chris Williamson?

  Around about 30 years ago, you took a real hard turn in life. It seemed like you drastically altered the trajectory that you were moving on for quite a while. And I'm very interested in how anybody manages to make severe life changes like that. I think that many people can, they believe that they have control over maybe their daily habits and little things here and there, but they don't have huge global control over their life direction, certainly not in the way that they want. Reflecting on that now, does it almost surprise you, sort of the ability that you have to be able to change that direction? It seems so unbelievably rare.

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  Right, so I don't know. I like to think everybody harbors it inside themselves. I can say, without going into the whole backstory, because I've done it before. I mean, at 19, I basically just looked at myself and decided that I was a loser, right? I mean, I was able-bodied, which is helpful. I had a mind that could remember things, which was helpful. I was interested in a few things, but none of those things were setting me up for career or ongoing progress. And I had a lot of maladaptive behaviors, right? At the time, I was getting involved in fighting. I just, I just didn't, I wasn't completing my schoolwork. I was just really in a bad place.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  And it was really fear and desperation, mostly fear, that inspired the switch.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  Along the way, I haven't talked about this publicly, you know, to any great extent, but along the way, I hit numerous roadblocks again and again. Sometimes they were situational, like people close to me dying and the grief that came with that. Sometimes it was my own kind of feeling like I was getting pulled back toward a state of mind that wasn't healthy for me and so on. But I think what I've been good at, at least good at, not great at, but at least good at, is finding really good mentors that would allow me to get to the next node, the next milestone. And I should say that some of those mentors were real people that I, I didn't say, can you be my mentor?

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Not that that would be a bad thing, but really tried to model my behavior after people that I respected. And sometimes those mentors were people that I didn't know at all. I mean, I'll just say this right now, I mean, I'm going to embarrass him by saying it, but you know, I was a junior professor, meaning before I got tenure, running a lab. I had a bulldog puppy, a laboratory and a home for the first time in my life and feeling very, very overwhelmed and distraught. And I made many of the things that I heard Tim Ferriss say, sort of central to my way of doing things. I didn't go four hours of work a week, but I did start to get extreme about organizing my schedule.

• 2:22:24Chris Williamson?

  So he was a big influence on you, Tim?

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  Huge, huge. And I know Tim a little bit. We have some common friends and I feel very fortunate that now we're in touch because gone on his podcast and gotten to know one another, but just huge. I mean, like, there were no organizational forces in my life for me at that time that could help me navigate through this landscape of, you know, I'd never been a professor before. I had taught it. Now, this is many years ago now, but I knew how to do science. I felt confident in my ability to take an empty room and a budget and create, buy the right equipment and do the experiments, hire the people. I had no problem with that. But how to regulate my time and my energy and how to communicate with people. I mean, he had these like little things that I don't like the word hacks. I hate it because hacks

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  are implies that you're using something for a purpose that it wasn't intended for. That's a hack. But he had things like, instead of asking people, you know, like, what's up when they come in your office, asking them, you know, what specifically, you know, what can I do for you? Like, what do you need? Right? Really cutting to the chase because time became a valuable resource. Little things like that, tiny things on the on the surface that translate into huge conversion in terms of time and energy. And even just setting aside some savings and things. I it's not that I'm not dumb about money, but I wasn't. I've never really taken the time to think about how I was going to invest money or do anything. So Tim did a tremendous service for for me without realizing it. And I've thanked him now a million times. I'm gonna thank him a million times. I'm thinking, thank you, Tim. I'm thanking

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  you again. Things like that. So selecting mentors, then eventually, when it came time to start podcasting, I mean, Lex, whether or not he knows or not, you know, just thinking, oh, here's another guy who's a he's a scientist, he's MIT, the fact he always wore that suit. I'm gonna copy him and just always wear the same thing because I don't have to take guesswork. I can take the guesswork out of it. There were little things that were super deliberate that just saved me time and energy. And I think that that's helped me along the way. And then the other thing is, I have really tried to adopt this idea that

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  When it's inevitable and it will inevitably arrive, that stress grows us, that it really sharpens decision making, it really sharpens decision making. And you know, if you have a very stressful event and then you recover from it, the worst thing to do is just go and keep going. You need to take some time and reflect about what led into that. So I think I'm very good at leveraging fear into positive change. If I really think about most of the major shifts in my life, it was, I'm scared as hell to remain in this situation and I'm very good at broadcasting fear into my future. Uh, you know, if I've ever been in a bad relationship, it was clearly if I stayed in, it couldn't have been so bad that I felt like I had to leave.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  So I would broadcast and project, you know, how horrible it would be for my future children. And I might even build that up a little bit in my system. Now, one could say, well, maybe you could have navigated successfully. I'm better at projecting fear into my future. And that has led me to make, I think, better and better decisions over time. That's it.

• 2:25:20Chris Williamson?

  How much of the old Andrew still rises to the surface today? I know that the music that you'd send to listen to when you're training is still pretty punky.

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  And when I work, yeah, I mean, I have two very polarized versions of music. I do love, you know, I love Bob Dylan, I love Joe Strummer acoustic. I like, I like, you know, I like melodic music too. But yeah, I'm listening to Rancid's Stiff Little Fingers. I mean, I'm, I mean, I own-

• 2:25:44Chris Williamson?

  That was the first ever gig I went to. Stiff Little Fingers.

• 2:25:46Speaker 01

  I'm just, I've never actually seen them play live. I'm a huge Stiff Little Fingers fan, huge Stiff Little Fingers fan. Um, huge Against Me fan, huge Rancid fan. I mean, you know, for people that, um, of my generation, they probably remember it. People who are younger probably think, oh, that's all 90s stuff. But a lot, to me, I mean, I have huge collections of like 80s and 90s music, 70s music, second wave punk, third wave punk. I collect a ton of that stuff. I love it. I mean, how much of me still exists? I believe that- We are all born fundamentally with some gift and it's our job to reveal that gift to ourselves. And you know, here I'm, I want to thoroughly acknowledge someone else who's been a great mentor without ever meeting him is like Robert Green, I think is a, is a wonderful-

• 2:26:27Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic guy.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  Fantastic. I've never met you, Robert, but I'd love to meet. I mean, it's one of these things where-

• 2:26:32Chris Williamson?

  I can put you in touch. He's been on the show twice.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Amazing. I used to suggest the book Mastery to graduate students and to undergraduates, like, you know, learn this process of finding a mentor. And in science, we have natural mentors, graduate advisors and postdoc advisors. And I, I made sure, I will say this, I should have said this earlier, when a mentor has sort of arrived in my life, either virtually or in reality, I make the most of that relationship. I really nurture those relationships. I mean, I still go to visit the children of my dead graduate advisor kids, you know, because I care. I mean, these are like, these people are like family to me. How much of it still exists? Well, the energy has always been the same. The energy is I have an absolute obsession from day one, this maybe was what I was kind of born with, to I like to learn

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  things and share them with the world. I was six years old, giving lectures on Monday after reading about medieval weapons or, you know, goldfish biology in class. I mean, my parents thought I was crazy and they took me to psychiatry. I was like, no, he just really likes learning and really likes telling people about that, about what he learns. So, and I had a little bit of an underlying Tourette's when I was younger. I had a grunting tick. And when I'm tired, it sometimes emerges a little bit. And for me, learning and kind of seeking kind of calms that somehow, as does training, as does skateboarding. I did boxing, of course, head damage isn't good, so I stopped boxing. But that's always been in me. That's how I'm, that's how my nervous system kind of tilts left in that way. The

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  energy, I would say I'm able to turn the dial. I'm able to tap into kind of some old hurts and angers as fuel, but I really try and orient towards things in a very Lex Friedman-ish way, from a place of like-

• 2:28:16Chris Williamson?

  Show them love.

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  Show them, show them, do things from a place of love because it's a more continual resource. Really believe it's this dopamine, epinephrine cycle, positive feedback cycle. I really do. And so that's all there. You know, I have pretty much eaten the same way I have since college. I've really, I haven't really changed the way I eat that much. I mean, I probably ate more junk every once in a while, ice cream and pizza and stuff. And now I have less of an appetite for, but I still am the same. I still train every other day. I I love music. I love movies. I love nature. I love the flora and fauna of life. I mean, I have this kind of obsession with fish tanks, freshwater fish tanks. I love.

• 2:28:56Speaker 01

  And listen, I, my ex-girlfriend is a, she's a florist. I, I developed a love of flowers, you know, in those years. I love, you know, I, I'm probably the one guy who was like wandering around in college. I would go to these like orchid festivals and some of them look like aliens and I just, I just love learning and I love digesting novel information. And, and now, you know, I have to say I'm in a place where the people that I'm closest to, I mean, thankfully really kind of support that and I can indulge it through podcasting.

• 2:29:28Chris Williamson?

  It's so lovely now that the environment of curiosity, I think that podcasts and YouTube and creators have engendered. So cool. You know, the, the fact that you get to find out about something that you really, that you would have done, right? You would have done it for free without anybody else knowing about it.

• 2:29:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:29:46Chris Williamson?

  And then somehow telling other people the thing that you found out in this version of the simulation is called a, a job or a pursuit or something. It's, it's wild. Another thing that has carried over from your youth are your tattoos, which I've heard you talk about, but never seen. What's your relationship with your tattoos and why has no one ever seen them?

• 2:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually it was Tim Ferriss that outed me on this one. He was like, I found a picture on the internet with you in full sleeves. Yeah, you know, I believe that, you know, tattoos are, I mean, this has come as no surprise, are a literal expression of what we feel on the inside. And you know, I, and I'm not recommending this. Kids, don't do this. I started getting tattooed really young.

• 2:30:31Chris Williamson?

  How young?

• 2:30:31Speaker 01

  About 14, I got my first tattoo.

• 2:30:33Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  We did them ourselves with India.

• 2:30:35Chris Williamson?

  Your first one was yourself?

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  Please don't, no, please no one do this. India ink and a needle. And, um, we used to do these, it's really bad. They're called knickknack tattoos or we kind of would do this at home. Don't do it. It's really bad. You get bad infections. They're ugly. They, they, they. Blur, they bleed, that's not good. Yeah, I started getting tattooed. I, when I was a kid and growing up skateboarding in the punk rock scene, there were these guys in the town where I lived, they called themselves the Yahtzee guys. I don't know why. I don't know what that was about. They all had full sleeves and they were super nice guys. And they were all into skateboarding and, you know, and vehicles. And I just looked up to these guys. I thought, oh, like someday I want full sleeves. I, yeah, I've, I've got full sleeves. I'm basically like neck to, neck to wrists.

• 2:31:18Chris Williamson?

  So chest pieces?

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah. Vax covered, yeah. Nothing on my legs, nothing on my stomach, ribs. Yeah, yeah. Tops of my, tops of my shoulders. And I got a big picture of Costello, my dog back there. I've got a picture of his paw back there. I've got a picture of another dog I used to have. There's still some space for a few things. There's some things very personal to me.

• 2:31:37Chris Williamson?

  Is that the reason that you prefer not to show them?

• 2:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think that there are a couple of reasons. I'll just be clear as to why. First of all, when I show up to podcast, it's the same way I show up to lecture in the classroom auditorium. And I swear on my life, this is my mindset and this is my mantra when I do it. I'm there to teach. It's not about me. It's about the student. It's about the people learning. I don't want it ever to be about me. I don't want the focus to be on me. I mean, obviously I'm the voice and the person talking. But I really want people to internalize the information. And I do think that the tattoos, because they have nothing to do with the information, are a distraction. They're just a distraction. I, I don't know. It would sort of like be wearing like a bright yellow shirt or something. It's not my style. I prefer to kind of make myself disappear as much as I can.

• 2:32:23Speaker 01

  And let the information come forward. That's, you know, even when I gave scientific lectures, which I still do, of course, for my, my professor job, I generally liked the room to be pretty dark and I wanted the light to be on the data on the slides. I was happy to be the voice, but I want people thinking about the data. So podcasting is a little different. You come through as a voice, not, we're on YouTube, a voice and an image, but. I really prefer that it not be about me. Now, there's a human element too. And I think things have changed a lot. When I was growing up, tattoos were not accepted. There are many work environments where if you have, for instance, where people prefer that their surgeon or their doctor not have tattoos. Some people might prefer their surgeon or doctor have tattoos. When I was growing up, if you had a, I never had one, but if someone had a nose ring, they had to cover it up with a Band-Aid

• 2:33:08Speaker 01

  or take it out if they worked at the coffee shop. Remember that? You probably don't, you're probably young enough.

• 2:33:12Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  Or eyebrow ring. Things, trends have changed, right? Things have changed. And I'm kind of old school because I'm kind of old now, 46. And the etiquette for me has always been to, you know, and this is Lex does this too, is I, I personally find that if I can just show up as formal and consistent as possible, that people will at least know that I'm taking them seriously. So I don't really do it for me. I pretty much do it for the audience.

• 2:33:38Speaker 01

  And also, none of the tattoos are like that interesting. It's my dog. I really like raptors. I've got a bunch of birds. I've got, I mean, I have all sorts of different things.

• 2:33:46Chris Williamson?

  Raptors like the dinosaur?

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  No, raptors like red-tailed hawks and blue, you know, I like birds and things.

• 2:33:52Chris Williamson?

  I had either dinosaurs or trucks. That you really need to love Ford Raptors.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  No, no, no Ford Raptor. I drive, I drive a Toyota 4Runner and I love it. I've got one truck and I love that thing. Although with gas right now, I mean, it's, you kind of got to wonder about having a gas-driven vehicle like a 4Runner. In any case, yeah, the tattoo thing, I would say for, for younger people coming up, just be aware that you can't control other people's perceptions either. And so, you know, I always made it a point that I didn't want things on my knuckles. I didn't want them on my hands. I didn't want them on my neck. I didn't want them on my face. Do I judge people when they have them? No. But do I want them for me? No. I also think that, and this is very neurosciency, as a neuroscientist, that we have dedicated brain areas called fusiform gyrus. It's a face area that's dedicated to the processing of faces. Even if I just put two dots and a line in between them on a piece of paper, you see that as a face.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  When one puts a tattoo on their throat or on their face, it actually changes the way that the face is perceived, right? I mean, it almost looks like another mouth there, right? It's a very different look. It's, it can be a little bit jarring. I'm not saying one shouldn't have it, but it can be a little bit jarring. It's, it changes the look of the person forever. It's not just that it's above the neckline. It's that it kind of competes with the processing of their face in its normal way. And so for me, whenever I see somebody with a throat tattoo or a face tattoo, sort of like it's hard to orient around that. And I think there's some biology to, uh, to, that relates to that. But like, when it comes down to it, I mean, you, people need to be individuals and live their life the way they want to live their life.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  I've also never been that much of an iconoclast. I've not, you know, I'm, I grew up in the punk rock thing. You know, I hate in-group, out-group stuff. I always had friends from a lot of different, you know, friends that are jocks and hippies and punk rockers and, you know, straight and gay. And like, I don't care as long as people are living their best life and they're not harming anybody. Like, I'm like, great, go for it. I, I'm very laid back in that way. Of course, if people are harming other people, then I believe that like liberty and independent freedom, I mean, liberty is, you know, one of the highest things that, you know, for me. So, but I don't tend to, I don't consider myself a very judgmental person, but you can't always control the perceptions of others.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  So I was just thinking people should be thoughtful about what they want to accomplish in life in terms of a life mission and just ask whether or not some of the permanent cosmetic changes they might make, might, might align with, compete with, or be neutral for those life missions. My life mission is very simple. I want to teach people the beauty and the utility of biology. I'm going to do that today. I'm going to do that until I take my last breath in one form or another. Cause that's what excites me and that's like what keeps the dopamine cranking.

• 2:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Dudes, let's bring this one home. Look, I really, really appreciate you, uh, the work that you've done. The fact that I feel like I have a lot more agency over my life because. I understand that my internal processes are something that I can influence. You know, the first time that I heard you say that you cannot control the mind with the mind, a lot of different things clicked for me. So I'm very glad that Lex bullied you or convinced you to start doing your show. And yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing a lot more of what you've got to do in the future.

• 2:37:01Speaker 01

  Well, thanks so much and thanks for bringing me on today. Obviously, we've been in touch and I align with you and I feel resonance along the life as a podcaster. Right. But also we've had a chance to interact a few times. I'm looking forward to more because I think what you're doing, bringing knowledge to the world is so important. And I so appreciate your, your questions and learning from you. I'm also going to get these resources about the expectation effect and the rest. I've been taking notes here because I am obsessed with learning.

• 2:37:27Chris Williamson?

  So why should people go? People want to make sure that they, they listen to more, watch more, follow more of your stuff. Why should they go?

• 2:37:32Speaker 01

  Thanks for asking. Yeah, it's very straightforward. It's Huberman Lab is the podcast and it's all the standard places, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, et cetera. Huberman Lab on Twitter, Huberman Lab on Instagram. And the Twitter and Instagram mainly are short content. I used to do a lot more hand drawings and kind of.

• 2:37:46Chris Williamson?

  I think you're doing Instagram pretty much as well as any science communicator that I've seen. I don't think there's anyone else that's optimized it better than that.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:37:53Chris Williamson?

  Right now.

• 2:37:54Speaker 01

  Thanks. Yeah, I try and answer comments and respond to things and any of those three places. And we have a website, which is hubermanlab.com, where all the podcast episodes are, links to all things in all formats. We have a newsletter and you know, people can peruse that if they want. It's all, I should say, zero cost to access. So that's been a major goal that we've stuck to, which is to just, we don't put anything behind a paywall. The information that's there is the information that anyone can access.

• 2:38:17Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I appreciate you. Let's go and get hot and cold.

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Let's do it. Thank you.