“This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman #1150

Dr Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist, Associate Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, podcaster and author. What does it take to live a healthy, thriving life? In his upcoming book, Dr Andrew Huberman brings together his defining work on health and wellness, covering everything from exercise and supplements to sleep and morning sunlight. So which protocols make the biggest difference, and how can we put them into a daily practice? Expect to learn how to detox from microplastics, how to get rid of your brain fog, the tips and tricks to help focus better, what the best ways to feel present are without meditation, the 4 steps to break any bad habit, Andrew’s thoughts on nicotine and its pros and cons, if we are in the midst of an overoptimisation wave and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) The Cortisol Hack to Unlock Your Day (07:16) Can You Actually Train Your Willpower? (18:21) The Hidden Formula for Better Learning and Focus (30:47) What Are the Best Protocols to Manage Stress? (39:06) The Optimal Mindset for Learning (42:34) Is Presence the Secret to Happiness? (53:21) Why Men Reevaluate Everything in Their Late 20s (58:20) How to Make Sense of Life’s Contradictions (01:15:14) Do We Already Have the Tools to Be Healthy? (01:20:11) Is This the Ultimate Detox Protocol for Microplastics? (01:29:45) The Devastating Toxin Exposure on 9/11 (01:33:51) How Dangerous Are Nicotine Pouches? (01:42:45) The Spiciest Protocols That Didn’t Make the Book (01:44:14) Can These Protocols Be Scientifically Proven? (01:54:54) Are Golden Retrievers the Ultimate Life Hack? (02:02:58) Why Being Admired by Your Heroes Hits Different (02:08:53) VO2 Max vs Zone 2: Which Matters More? (02:25:26) What Happened to Andrew’s iPad Octopus? (02:29:34) The Section Andrew Doesn’t Want You to Extra Stuff: See me live in the UK & Ireland this October: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  People of the UK and Ireland, if you've listened to Modern Wisdom for a while but haven't seen me live, it isn't just a podcast on stage where you can finally see my legs. It's a show that I've spent over a year building specifically for a live audience. There are stories I've never told before, ideas I've deliberately saved for the stage, audience confessions and a Q and A where I try to solve your biggest problems. Dublin has already sold out and all of the other cities aren't far behind. So if you want to see me live, head to chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live. Lots of people deal with brain fog and low energy throughout the day. What's your advice for combating that?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny, I'll probably end up saying this 20 times in today's conversation, but if I were to really, if I had two minutes with somebody and they said, what's the thing I can do for my health? I'd say make the first hour of your day, high cortisol and the last hour of your day, low cortisol. High cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated mood, focus and alertness all day long, allows you to buffer stress better and it makes sure that your nighttime cortisol is going to be low. If you don't, you know, spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day, you're gonna have a high, flat cortisol curve. Not good. Makes you less resilient to stress, brain fog, less amenable to learning and on and on. So then you just say, well, what can you do? And we make this very simple.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Bright light, especially from sunlight or 10,000 lux artificial light, and especially in the first 30 minutes after waking, hydration, caffeine, if you like caffeine, exercise in the first three hours of your day, if you can, right? Some people can't. And then roll into your day. At night, in that final hour, you do everything you can to reverse that. You dim the lights, especially overhead lights, dim your screen. You could do the red light thing or the candlelight thing, you know? Limit caffeine, obviously, exercise in the final hour before sleep, only if that's the only time you can do it. Some people, that's the only time.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  And actually eating in the first three hours of your day, even though I'm a fan of, I personally fast in the first three hours of the day, but that actually can also spike cortisol. People say, why would eating spike cortisol? Well, I mean, basically anything that you do that's a pro arousal, that's about activity is gonna spike cortisol. So bookending your day with things that spike your cortisol at the beginning and lower your cortisol at the end is really, it really is the, if there is a cheat code to life. Now, why do I say to life? I mean, is it gonna make you completely stress resilient? No. Is it going to make you able to learn anything you want with ease? No. But what it does is it sets you up for the best possible sleep, which makes you more alert the next day, of course.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  It also, it anchors this process that I haven't talked about before on any podcast. And frankly, that I didn't touch on directly in the book, which is so much of life is about balancing what we call bottom up and top down influences. Bottom up influences would be, you know, you want the cookie, you're gonna just eat the cookie. You, you know, you shouldn't be scrolling as much as you're scrolling, you just keep scrolling. That's, those are bottom up influences. These are impulses that are driven by hypothalamic and other deep brain structures. Then we have, thankfully, we have top down influences. This is your prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Okay, this is the two marshmallow test in kids, which by the way, a lot of people say was debunked. The debunk was debunked, by the way. Yeah. So the ability to suppress action, it's what I taught my bulldog, Pit Mix Strummer, the day I brought him home, and it's the basis of everything. You put a piece of food in front of him, he of course wants to take it, right? His prefrontal cortex isn't even online yet. And you take it away until he learns and he learns the first day and never forgets that he has to wait until I say, okay, what are you doing there? It's actually not about making him wait for a treat. It's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse. And that, that wicks out to every type of waiting. So you say, wait, or like, see you later, I'm going to work.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  And then you come back and he's not freaking out. He can just, now, he doesn't have to actively suppress the whole time, but the ability to suppress impulse. So much of life, the ability to learn and lean into just enough stress that you trigger learning, the ability to listen when you want to react, the ability to force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing that you don't want to do. So much of that is top down influences. And basically being an effective human is about building up those circuits of top down. Now, do you have to do them in everything? This is a matter of debate. I think that people like Andy Stumpf, who I have tremendous respect for. It's just awesome. I've learned so much from him. I actually made some late, late stage additions to the book based on a conversation I had with him.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So he actually made, you know, very late in the game, I was like, I need to, my editors were like, you can't do this anymore. Like enough is enough. And I'm like, I want it back or else I'm not signing off on the final draft to put in this. You know, Andy has a number of tools that are, that are really useful, but you know, he has this philosophy that he shares, which is throughout your day, when given the option between the easier thing and the harder thing, do the harder thing, that there's tremendous value in that. It's the make your bed thing. It's the, replace the toilet paper roll is the example he gives in his book, Drown Proof, which is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. It hasn't paid me to say this, it's just an awesome book. I recommend it to everybody. But these little things, like there's that piece of trash on the floor that's this big, do I pick it up?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Why would, you know, does, is it about the trash? Does it really make that much of a difference in your life? No, but the action of going against that bottom up influence of just ignoring the harder thing and going toward ease, more pleasure, less pain, even just avoiding subtle pain. Though, there are two ways to build up these circuits. One is by forcing yourself to go like, as we say with like writers always say, like ass to chair, like, you know, which is, you're just gonna like sweat blood until you get those 800 words a day out. The, there are advantages to that or doing the hard workout that you do not want to do. There's also a building up of the same circuits, those top down suppression of impulse through the little things all day long.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  You probably need to do both, but I think that many of us nowadays who are exercising and doing health protocols, we absorb a lot of energy in order to get ourselves to those. Some people more, some people less. And I've started doing these, you know, Stumpf type, uh, smaller things throughout the day. He does the big things too, obviously, but those little things, what you find, what I find is that they make it much easier to overcome the friction that comes from anything. And so there's a really just like getting the reps in, like it doesn't, what it proves is that it's the circuit, it's not what you're doing. You're getting the reps into the circuit. It's kind of like Pavel Satzul and the strength guys, like the grease, the groove thing.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Okay, you do two pull ups every time you pass through, through the door. And does that mean that you can do 200 pull ups in a single set? No. But it actually turns out to be more effective than doing like three sets of 10 twice a week. Okay, then people say, well, that's not true if you add weight. Perhaps not, but it's, maybe it's just two different roads to the same place. But the top down, bottom up tension, this dynamic tension between those two is so much about what being non-reactive is about. It's about what not procrastinating is about. It's what morality is about. It's about being calm under pressure. It's about being, making appropriate decisions in the face of stress. Cause it's not all about not feeling stressed. It's about making adaptive decisions.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything else that you would advise people to do for training willpower?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I think what Andy talks about in his book, and obviously he's not the first person to talk about this, but you know, that, that philosophy, like how you do one thing is how you do anything, that's a little bit vague for me. I like the way he describes it, which is these little micro sucks all day long, like, like it happened to me the other day.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  Andy to call it micro sucks. Yeah. He's a man with a helicopter that's jumped out of a plane like 50,000.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  He holds two world records at wingsuiting.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  I think he flew 36,000 feet or something like that. I mean, yeah. And I mean, there are a lot of badasses in the world and in the tier one operator sphere. And I know a number of those guys that there are a lot of badasses, obviously. What's impressive to me is somebody who has the intelligence and the communication skills to be able to share the things that are relevant to everybody in a way that's relevant to everybody. He's also from Santa Cruz, which is a cool town, it's right over the hill from where I grew up. And like the fact that somebody like that came from Santa Cruz is kind of a hometown joke, which is a pretty, there's only two reasons to go to Santa Cruz. If you're a guy in your teens or twenties or thirties, you go to the, go to the boardwalk to meet girls or you go to fight. People in Santa Cruz, it was like they, you'd always see fights in it. So I always thought of Santa Cruz as, people think of it as this hippie town.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  I always thought of it as kind of a, kind of a, there's a rougher side of Santa Cruz. And then I hear about, you know, Andy's from Santa Cruz, I'm like, that makes no sense whatsoever. But you know, he took all of that kind of local environment. Sounds like he had a good upbringing. He talks fondly about his parents, which is cool. And put it to some really impressive feats and can communicate what, what the exports from that, those experiences are. So, you know, I mean, how many of us in our daily life need to like shoot, move and communicate? You know, like the, the macronutrients of, you know, operators. I mean, some people, yes, but most of us, no. So to me, that's one way. The other way is obviously to do your workouts and, you know, I'm a big believer in asking

• 9:37Speaker 01

  yourself, what am I genuinely curious about learning and where's the fear point for me? What is kind of, why am I shying away from learning about something because, for fear of like poor performance? And then that's the thing you should lean into. You have to be curious about something unless you're in school where you have to learn a subject. So that's another way, like pushing yourself to learn cognitively. And then to me, I think a, a big other part of this top down training is just the way that we approach life. Like, you know, I think there are two reasons to do hard things. Rogan and I were talking about this yesterday. One reason is because it makes you better at doing hard things. The other reason is it allows you to access more awareness of the beautiful things in life.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so much dog shit floating around on the internet and anger. And we, you and I talked about this, there's so many barbed wire drama things. I mean, if I went around, you know, posting every opinion that I reflexively have about some of the like nonsense antics that I see online or the crazy documentaries that are coming out and like, and, and you know, you get to a certain point in life and you tend to be one to six degrees of separation from pretty much anything you see online, as much as you would like to not think of, oh, I know someone who knows someone who knows that person. I met that person once in a party, got a eerie feeling. I won't say who that's about, but that was a real experience. You know, you can go down that rabbit hole. So much of being effective is going nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And I always just take myself back to high school. There are only really three or four reasons to actually be in high school. There's like to learn, right? From teachers and from your peers and in class, that's a legitimate reason to go to school. You know, there were social reasons. There were all sorts of. Observations that I had, like one that was still salient for me, I'll share in a moment. You can learn a lot about people in life.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Human behavior.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I have a, I have a friend who's a professor at Stanford who says, he, he unfortunately calls me Andy. It's really annoying and he's.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  You don't like Andy?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  I think this guy's just persistent.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so what happened was, what happened was.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  Kind of a power move.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I lost a coin flip to another Andrew, like in the third grade.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  He gets to be Andrew and you have to be Andy.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Still pisses me off, you know? So, um, anyway, I eventually took back Andrew. And, you know, and this, the other reason is a lot, there's certain observations that I had in high school that taught me a lot about human nature that are still true across men, women of all ages, all demographics. It's really, really helpful. Actually, I'll just share it right now. So as some people may know, in round 14, I got really into the skateboarding thing. Prior to that, it was like school, swimming, soccer, every kid in my town did those. Really excited about skateboarding. Skateboarding was small then. It wasn't this big thing, no X Games, nothing. I wasn't very good skateboarder. I was decent enough to get picked up, probably just out of sheer sympathy by one sponsor.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And people want to check me on this because people are always trying to, oh, his name, my team manager was Steve Rugi. I rode for Spitfire. It was out of sympathy. Steve, I love you. Thank you for putting me on. I appreciate you also telling me I never be one of the big guys. Boom, done.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  But I remember there was this phase of skateboarding in the early nineties and it wasn't a good phase. But where like the clothes got baggy, the shorts got baggy, there was some sag. And at that time, no one did that. No one, not in hip hop, nowhere. Now, it wasn't really like really extreme sag. It was just like the shorts went from like mid thigh to like right above the knee, maybe a little longer. All right. So that's what we did. We were skateboarders. We didn't care what anyone else did. Came to school and just ridiculed, ridiculed by the jocks, by the, by everybody. Didn't matter the kids were like black, white, male or female, like Mexican, Vietnamese.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  You were uncool.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  We were like teased relentlessly.

• 13:22Chris Williamson?

  Everyone knew that Andy was uncool.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Teased relentlessly, but we knew we liked it. It was a little extreme, like, you know, at the time, we liked it. We, the point back then was to be different, not the same. Okay. Summer happens. That summer, something happened in the world of hip hop where somebody starts sagging their, their pants. Next year, everybody, and I just realized in that moment, I was like, okay, this, I was like, they actually don't know. They actually don't know what they like. They really don't. They're just following, it wasn't following a trend. They actually haven't formed taste. And I was like, what I love about skateboarding, what I loved about certain forms of music, what I love about certain podcasters and what I love about certain scientists, I can name certain scientists who just have the best taste.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  In particular, this guy Jonathan Horton, neurothoracicologist, like his papers are beautiful. They're articulate. The images are beautiful. The discoveries are clear and he's just a, he's a phenom. And, but for a lot of years, you know, his papers kind of existed in good journals, but didn't really pop to the biggest ones. Then they popped. And what I realized was like, whether it's in high school or as adults, people actually, most people don't develop a sense of taste.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  They confuse what they like and don't like with what feels socially acceptable and what feels so different that it's uncomfortable to them. Now, I don't believe in doing things just to be different. That's not taste. That's doing things just to be different. I started realizing, I was like, there's certain people in life that have an exquisite sense of taste. Rick Rubin's one of them. My friend David Cho is one of them. I believe you have taste. You think about how, you know, the people don't let the velvet British accent fool you. Sometimes the British accent can confuse people into thinking, especially Americans, into thinking that somebody's smarter than they are. I'm not trying to, where the kids say, I'm not trying to like puff you up here, where they have all sorts of names for this now.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  But, but really like, I'm not just trying to flatter you, but if it flatters you, fine. Like you're my friend, but also you think right at the boundaries between conflicting opinions. And then you form a third new opinion usually that highlights something both beneficial and deficient about both. That is a skill. It's a super skill that most people don't possess. Most academics don't possess it frankly, because careers are sort of built on like planting your flag and protecting it. Until you absolutely get battered and then you have to like, like relent, you know? And then pivot to something new. I have a beautiful story about that, actually. The, but I, I realized that taste is something that many people never develop.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  And the worst thing is when people who have taste think that their taste isn't taste, that it's a misdirection internally or something, and they don't cultivate that. And I think that, you know, so high school taught me a heck of a lot. It's true. The baggies got too baggy. The sag went way too far. And we just sort of laughed as it took off. We were like, this is hilarious. Actually, but it happened in skateboarding too. There were years later where this kid that I grew up with, I'm friendly with now, but Danny Way who jumped the Great Wall of China, amazing, jumped out of a helicopter. He has all these world records, but he was an aggro kid. He built the first mega ramps. I mean, he's gnarly. He was always just like, so aggressive skateboarder. Incredible, incredible athlete.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  I remember, you know, years later, when he broke his neck surfing at Newport, he started working out with Paul Chek. He started and he built like a strong physique and I remember skateboarders being like, that's for jocks. Skateboarders working out now, if you look, not all of them, but a lot of skateboarders are into like lifting weights, taking care of their body. Chris Jocelyn, Trey flipped the, you know, El Toro stairs this year. This was like a heroic feat. It was like breaking the four minute mile more or less ish for skateboarding. I mean, that dude clearly works out. He takes care of himself. So the things within a subculture and community that make that such a special community. What eventually happens is the community defies its own principles.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  That, you know, the punks turn against, they go, that's not punk. Well, you know, they did that to people like Joe Strummer, who brought hip hop acts as openers. They've done that to friends of mine who are in the, uh, like high level band punk rock where they go, they sold out. Actually, no, actually they're doing great and you're caught up in the eighth grade is what happened. But it's not regressive. It's that taste is the hardest thing for people to understand because it forces them to really put a mirror in front of themselves and go, what do I actually like and dislike?

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a countervailing force against both what's popular and the fickleness of blowing in the wind. Like people confuse something that's popular for something that's tasteful. And you can also confuse something which is, uh, very tasteful, not popular as something that's bad. Like you said before, the difference between liking something and not liking something. You can like something which is untasteful. And I think the difference between taste and popularity and liking is taste is the ability to discern between good and not good. Like, is this thing good in and of itself? And this is one of the problems. If you run it up, because everyone's looking for performance. If you run enough split tests, you will end up with a porn website. That's what happens. You run enough split tests.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Can you explain this? Cause I, you and I have talked about this. It all regresses to porn eventually.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  Everything.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Is it like, if you, basically if you want to get the most eyes and clicks on something, you keep going more, more extreme, more salacious.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And you end up in the dumpster heap of online content.

• 18:47Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Going back to the, the brain. What's your best advice for improving memory and focus? People understand brain fog's a thing. I'm struggling with that. I have lulls with energy throughout the day.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And now you want me to actually answer the question?

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Whenever you want.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Okay. So brain fog is not a specific thing. It's an inability to focus. Let's get a couple of core principles down. People with severe clinical grade ADHD can focus if they're doing something they really like. Tells you something. It means the dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, we call these the catecholamine systems of the brain and body that are involved in many things, but focus among them are there. They're functional, but the threshold to access them is too high. Okay. What does that mean? What it means is that people can learn to focus and they can get assistance in doing that by pushing on one of two ends or both. One is to ramp up the level of those chemicals. That's what things like Adderall, Vivance, Ritalin and so on do.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  A study this last year out of Washington University in St. Louis, sort of the Harvard of the Midwest, if you will, although I think that's unfair to the Midwest. And maybe you would call Harvard the, the Wash U of the East.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Showed that when you compare the attention improving effects of Ritalin to a great night's sleep, they're effectively equal. Hmm. Some of these stimulants, we know blunt stunt growth, excuse me, they stunt growth. We know this. Okay, they limit, they limit ultimate height, they reduce sleep. So they're circumventing a problem. So there's a new idea, which is that maybe lower dosages of these, these medicines combined with better sleep would be as effective a treatment. A lot of parents are airing that way. A lot of adults are airing that way, too. That said, some of these medications can be useful in extreme cases. If somebody wants to learn, let's just say, if you want to learn, you want to focus and

• 20:48Speaker 01

  get rid of brain fog, you want to learn, it's here, here are the key steps. And I review some more of this in the book, but I'm during today's conversation and always, I'm going to try and reference the book only in if people want more information. I'm just going to try and give people the information. If you want the book, they can, they can get it, but I don't want to like cloak the information.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  Everyone needs to go and buy the book.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, thanks for your support of the book. I did, there is a lot of.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  You've fucking bled for this thing, dude. I watched you, I watched you basically.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Eight years.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  You glanced off the bottom of insanity in order to be able to put this, then the original word count was 120,000 and then you were forced to chop it down and.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  It's basically seven short books with, with a long intro, which is some story and context. And I promise you can just navigate to a particular point in the book and understand what's going on, get the tool and go, you can learn the science or not, get the science, you can take the story and read it or not read it, but I figured leave it all on the mat. Look, I'm 51 next this later this month, like, I don't know if I'll make it to 52. I feel great, my biomarkers say I'm great, but you know, I mean, who knows? So I'm, I'm not living this life to try and, you know, soft pedal anything, I'm just going all in. So here are the steps to learning. You need to focus, obviously, to learn. To focus, you need to be alert.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  To get alert, there are many things you can do, and I talk about all of them in the book. There are foundational things like sleep, all right, that's going to help you get alert and focused, but there are also things like exercise. We all hear the exercise makes our brain better, it makes us better at learning. Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons. One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. So in the four to six hours after exercise, you are more alert and you can focus better. Unless you exercise to exhaustion. If you have leg day for, you know, 10 sets of 10 on the squats, followed by a bunch of hamstring work and et cetera, your brain's not going to be so good at focusing, but

• 22:48Speaker 01

  you know, 45 to 75 minutes of hard training, not taken to extreme, a bit like what we did this morning, that was a little bit on the lighter side, not just because we didn't have a whole lot of time, but you're going to come out of that more alert because you have more adrenaline in your body, more norepinephrine being released in your brain and more dopamine being released in your brain. And dopamine is a critical component for learning. Okay? Focus then it becomes easier to access. And in your focus, what are you focusing on? You need to focus on making errors through genuine attempts to do something, something physical, maybe a tennis serve, or you're learning billiards, something cognitive, you're trying to learn a language.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  The error between what you currently do and what you're trying to do, the error is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells need to change. It runs through a circuit involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close. If you can do something, there's no reason for your brain to change. And the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively. And those tag, literally chemically tag the synapses. I mean, there's some additional steps, but they tag those synapses so that then at night, when you sleep, the synapses rearrange and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  That's how it works. So a curiosity and willingness to learn gets you to the gate of learning. The making of errors through genuine attempts puts the key in and turns the key. The agitation is walking through that gate and then getting some sleep or maybe even, you know, a day or two later, even if you don't sleep quite as well as you would like, just some time for the synapses to rearrange, that's the last piece. There's an additional piece that can reinforce it all, which is self-testing. If you want to get good at something and stay good at it and continue to get better at it, you need to self-test. Mental self-testing is the best way to consolidate learning and learn faster. What do I mean by that? I don't mean visualization.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I mean, asking yourself, like for me, if I want to make my memory better, generally speaking, I might think, okay, so that was September 11th, 2001, where was I exactly? What were some of the details? Now, that might be a, something I might not want to think about, but if I were to say, okay, I'm going to go back to my, you know, year one neuroscience graduate school training. Of course, I know what a synapse is, I know what neurons are, I know what astro, I know all this stuff, it's embedded so deeply in me, I can almost do it in my sleep, but then I think, yeah, that's right. Like, what is the role of astrocytes? And is it okay? Because that's stuff that's relevant to me. When you hit the point where you can't remember something, you go and look it up, boom, you've now closed that gap again, and it reinforces those synapses that were weakening.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So if you're trying to learn something new, or you want to get, maintain information from way back when, you need to retest. This is why we used to make people retake their driver's tests or, you know, physicians need.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it used to be, you had to retake your driver's test, not always behind the wheel, but you used to, you didn't used to just give people a license and turn them loose.

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  Right, because they knew the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve was going to come in and smash somebody in the face.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. Their co-founder Jeff Byers played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentous around a higher standard. Every product from Momentous uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back

• 26:47Chris Williamson?

  guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com-modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com-modernwisdom. Modern wisdom at checkout. I suppose one of the advantages, at least with regards to driving practically, is that people are re-triggering that on a multiple times per day basis.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you get a ticket or you get into an accident. It's my, I feel like I'm quoting my dad a lot lately, you know, that's a good sign. As my dad always says, you know, the thing about speeding tickets is they're expensive and money hurts. You know, speeding tickets were, were $20. For most people, that's.

• 27:25Chris Williamson?

  Formative experience.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  It's not trivial, but it's not enough money to really like dent your, your heavy, heavy foot on the pedal. But if you give someone a $300 ticket, plus your insurance goes up, people speed less.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  You're going to remember that.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  People speed less. I'm not saying it, you know, I mean, we could argue about, about speeding laws, but money hurts, right? So, so that's how you learn. You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation. I wish I had learned that in the third grade, I wish they had told me that. Now, many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things. They're getting their sets and reps in, they're push past failure, they love their video games, they love perhaps mathematics, but not literature. The things that we are not facile in, that don't come easy to us, there are two reasons to do some of that learning at, at every stage of life. One is it enriches us. We often find that the things that are hardest to learn, that we then learn are the most satisfying.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  This is the effort that precedes dopamine is far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in. You could say, well, you know, scrolling, there's no, you know, there's no effort involved and that seems very reinforcing. That's more of a compulsive behavior after a certain point, that's going to get passed into reflex, but. Talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, oh yeah, everything was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame that big thing. And that was really the thing that taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things. Right? I mean, no, we don't really like success stories. We like, um, we like underdog often to success story. Pitfall come out of that.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  The hero's journey is something that we resonate with in part because it's so true. But in part because for so many people, it's not true. We know it's there, but most, most people don't embark on those things. And I think it's because we set too lofty an idea of what the hero's journey is. I mean, for a lot of people, it's about learning to do less. I know a lot of hard driving people. It's about learning how to achieve more peace. It's about exploring ideas around spirituality or, um, fiction. If they only read nonfiction, I mean, we all have to ask ourselves, how much should we push ourselves to do things that are, that we're not just naturally inclined to do? I think a mixture of what we love to do and some of the things that we've just avoided because, um, they just seem too hard. I think there's real value in doing those things.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And all the data on cognitive, on maintaining cognitive ability say, will exercise make you smarter? No, it's necessary, but not sufficient to make you smarter. You still have to go learn. And it, without completely joking, I mean, this is evidenced by many guys that spend hours upon hours in the gym, and they're not brilliant people. They, so they're exercising plenty, their brain is clearly not getting bigger. They're not necessarily getting stupider, but they're not doing anything to make themselves smarter. You need to learn information. So there's that, but then there's also, people say, is it crossword puzzles? If you love doing crossword puzzles, guess what, my friend? You're, they're not going to help keep your brain young. You had to do the, the hard puzzles. You know, if they're easy for you, then it's not going to help. You like chess, play Go.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  You like checkers, learn chess. So this is where I think people really lose out on the understanding that people who are striving, maintain brain and bodily function for a long period of time, their internal state is not necessarily one of like, oh yeah, I just love learning and so I just keep learning. I bet you Andy Stumpf, as calm and cool and collected as he is, even though so many of his tier one operator peers tell me, it's really frustrating because Andy's really good at everything. I bet you if we looked at his internal state, his narrative is probably by now says, you know, you can do this, but is, I doubt it's one of complete calm all the time. I'm sure there's, he's just managing the external rep, like he's not showing it.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, talking about that, it seems like one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of people's lives is stress.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  What are your best protocols for managing stress?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And I, I realize some people may have heard this from me like 35,000 times. Morning sunlight, yes, but that physio, just do a long exhale. When you're stressed, do a long deliberate exhale. It slows your heart rate down through a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad. People hear arrhythmia, it sounds bad, but we've all heard of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve collects sensory information from our viscera, which is nerd speak for your internal organs. So your stomach, your spleen, your liver, sending that information up to your brain. Unconsciously, your brain is responding to that all the time. The vagus nerve also has a portion of it that goes from the brain to the heart and other organs.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And there's one particular pathway that contacts and communicates with the sino atrial node of your heart. And it slows your heart rate down when you exhale. And the reason is as you inhale and exhale, the space available for your heart changes. So when you, at some point, your heart is a little bit smaller, right? During your breathing and the volume of blood that's in there moves more quickly. So your brain sends a signal through this vagus nerve pathway to slow your heart rate down. So when you exhale deliberately, this is the key deliberately. I don't think I've ever described it this way. You slow your heart rate down significantly.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  You offload carbon dioxide and your level of autonomic arousal, meaning sympathetic alert versus parasympathetic calm, balances, it tips more towards parasympathetic calm immediately. It's the fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. Better if you can do two big inhales first. And then exhale all the way to lungs empty. That's the so-called physiological sigh discovered in the 1930s, not by shamans, not by breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set of neurons in the parafacial nucleus of your brain stem that capture the activity of this vagal pathway and slow your heart rate down.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  But the beauty of this mechanism is it also increases what's called HRV. The big, most people know, I want higher HRV. How do I do that? Well, I train VO2 max. I do some high intensity interval training. Great. I do some long distance endurance training, lower intensity. Great. You have higher VO2 max. What is higher HRV? Heart rate variability reflects the number of times throughout the day and night that this pathway, this pathway in the vagus signals your sino atrial node to slow your heart rate down. In fact, you can increase your HRV pretty significantly if you just do 10 deliberate exhales throughout your day. And then at night, look at your HRV, it will be significantly elevated.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

  This is why I spoke about this last time. This is why I need to get you one of those om dot health lamp things for resonance breathing. We talked about this previously.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  So you, it's an algorithm. It's a stone on the top of this lamp. I think they're about to launch this month, this om dot health. Um, you, stone on the top of the lamp, you, it vibrates, you breathe in time with the stone. It's got a hundred hertz sensor in it. So it's detecting your HRV all the time. And as it vibrates up and down, you breathe in time with it and it modulates to maximize that arrhythmia. And if you were to see it, you would be swinging from 61 to 72, to 62 to 70. So like 60 to 60 to 72. And it is so fucking cool. And the, the sensation of doing that, if no one's ever done resonant breathing before, it is like, after about three minutes, it almost feels like you've had a drink. It almost feels like you're a little bit drunk.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  It's very, very, when you get it, and the guy, Jay Wiles, who's the main science dude behind it, he talks about precision with this because you can get, uh, a resonance breathing that's not doing biofeedback. The problem with that is everyone's resonance pattern is a little bit different. Everyone's resonance pattern, you're, you might be 4.9 out, uh, 4.9 in and like eight out. And I might be 4.1 in and seven out. And that difference to him, he says, makes a big difference. One final thing on that, he said to go from state change to trait change with regards to resonance breathing. You need to do over 12 minutes. He says over 20, it doesn't start to, uh,

• 35:38Speaker 01

  It's a lot like meditation, it sounds like.

• 35:39Chris Williamson?

  Very similar, very, very similar. And what's cool about this, what I love about this particular thing is you can grab it and you can hold it while watching a movie. It's like, if you're, if you're just doing something else, it's silent. If you're, even if you're with someone, um, you've got the lamp next to the couch or you've got the lamp next to the bed. You can't sleep at night. You grab it, it vibrates, it's pretty much silent and you can just breathe in time with it. You can be doing, watching something else. I haven't been able to read whilst doing it. That's a bit too cognitively demanding.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  But, um, you can breathe whilst watching the TV and that I've racked up hundreds of hours in the last year doing resonance breathing because I've grabbed that.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  All right, I'm going to go buy one of these. Don't give me one, don't, I don't, I don't want, and I don't want om to gift me one. Actually, it's funny, I, I love, um, still love finding new technologies, trying new things.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  Dude, new interventions are the best. They're just harder and harder to find new ones that people don't know about, which is why when I find one, I get, I like chew up on about it for ages. Uh, because I think, I think that it's cool.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  I do the same. I mean, I, um, it's funny, throughout the book, several times I mentioned, cause I talk about behavioral tools. I would say 80% of behavioral tools. And then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements, about the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and, and on and on. But multiple times I mentioned some of the devices that sauna space, a company I'm not affiliated with at all. Sauna space makes these indoor red light saunas that are incandescent.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  They heat up right away. But I also, I travel with a, with one of their red lights. It fills the whole room. I love those things. Uh, raw optics has these incredible non flicker, short wavelength eliminated. Uh, they, well, they actually same bulbs go from daylight to, you can get candlelight at night with, with no flicker and it's LED because incandescents aren't very energy efficient. And I have no relationship to raw optics or to sauna space. Like I know the people there now, because I've mentioned them enough times, they've reached out. But I just enjoy sharing things that I find useful. Physiological size or, or, you know, these particular lights. I just like sharing what I think might be useful to people. And some people have more disposable income than others.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, that nowadays, it seems like the, are we over optimizing becomes a big question? Like, are we over optimizing?

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  I did a huge essay about it not long ago.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  No, I listened and I think it's, um, it's an important question. I mean, to me, optimization is just taking the, like, what do you got today? What's on your plate today? And how do you feel best and do best in that context? And this brings me back to something that I failed to say earlier, which is that top down versus bottom up dynamic tension. Pretty much everything that's in the book, morning cortisol high, nighttime cortisol low, um, physiological size, et cetera. There, all of those things put you in the best position, put these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive, less reactive, it's not meant to rhyme, more adaptive, less reactive life. Right? To be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS that you have no control over, this kind of thing.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  To be less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you, the people that you love, and doing the right things in accordance with that. You know, we all know that a bad night's sleep cripples this circuit such that the bottom up influences take over. We know this, right? People sleep less, they're more prone to, they have less impulse control across the board. And they become slightly psychotic also, especially if they don't sleep well for three or four nights in a row. But when you have these top down mechanisms really reinforced by high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, great sleep. You're buffering stress well. You do a learning bout or two, and I do refer to them as bouts because it should feel like a bout.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  That's when your life is actually headed in the direction you want. But it doesn't matter where you're starting from. That's when your life starts really heading in the direction that you want consistently. And these things don't take a lot of time. In fact, they save time because they position you to be at your best, show up as your best. That's not marketing ploy, it's just true. And some people, now I'm skipping around a bit, but I want to make sure I close a few hatches. Some people might say, how alert and focused do you need to be to learn? We rarely talk about this. Like, one thing I really emphasize in the book is, like, people talk about be present. I give a tool that explains exactly how to be present.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so we'll talk about that. But how alert do you need to be in order to focus and learn? What's the state of mind? Alert and calm, what is that? Because that might mean something different to you than it means to me. How do you stay there? Okay, have you ever played that game Hot Hands? Where, you know, I put my hands on top of yours. Wouldn't that be nice? I put my hands on top of yours.

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  That's what we did all morning. That's literally, we didn't go to the gym.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I put my hands on top of yours. And we play a game where you're going to flip your hands over and you try and smack my hands. Okay, and I'm going to try and pull them out of your way. And you're younger than I am, so you think you have faster reflexes, but you don't. No, I'm just kidding. You probably do. You're the person whose hands are on top. So let's say my hands are on top and you're ready to flip your hands over and tag me. You're the person with hands on top and you're in that ready anticipation of what's going to happen next. That's the state of mind for optimal learning. That's the state of mind you want to be in. So when you sit down to read something and you're like, I read that whole page and I didn't learn anything. Of course you didn't, because your brain was, you're running four or five different circuits at once. In order to really turn on focus, you need to turn off a bunch of other circuits that are, or you need to lower the activity in those other circuits.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  You can't be thinking about, at the same time, okay, what's the, how do my feet feel? How's, what's my heartbeat? What's going on online? What's my girlfriend thinking? What is she, no. You need to be focused. What is focus? Focus is obviously in a tunnel, but then how much alertness? I don't think anyone's ever described it before, but when you look at levels of arousal in a game like Hot Hands, and believe it or not, there are some equivalent data on this, or data on the equivalent sort of thing. When you're waiting for a time trial and you're waiting for something to happen and you have to react quickly, that's the state of mind you want to be in to learn something that's hard for you, but beneficial for you. Period, end of story. So hopefully that'll help people kind of find that mental groove.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And then as you learn, if you find you're getting too stressed, that doesn't, that brings down reaction time. It actually, you start making false positive. You start moving your hands away before the person even does anything. Okay. So hopefully that will help people understand the level of attention and why it's so tiring after about 90 minutes.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  And you're like, huh, okay, I need to take a break.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out, there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria, so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years, since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline.

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  And eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli, because they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now, you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below. Heading to timeline.com/ModernWisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/ModernWisdom, and Modern Wisdom at checkout. What about presence? How can people be more present?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so this one really surprised me. So the final chapter of the book is about personal development, okay? I was going to do a chapter about relationships, but for various reasons, I felt like that wasn't appropriate. Then I thought about relationship to self. I thought, well, that's kind of weird, because what is relationship to self? It's too squishy, a theme, that like, personal development. Step back and start asking questions about, first, acknowledge, step back and acknowledge, there's a lot out there about how to get through trauma. But what are the unifying themes? And can I put a structure on those themes that helps people navigate all of that? What's the business of having a great life? So we talk about that. We hear be present.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  There's this massive study out of Harvard a few years ago that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. I'm sure you're familiar with the data. You ping people throughout the day, you ask them what they're doing and how present they are to it. Turns out, happiness is really about being present. Having your attention, what's called present tethered awareness. Your focus on what's happening now, even if it's unpleasant. People report that as being much happier on average than if their mind is someplace else. Daydreaming has its place, but daydreaming is usually mind wandering to bad things, things of past, things of future. We're just not present.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  Distraction is literally unhappiness.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And the converse is also true, that focusing on what you're doing is a great way to build up your mental health. So then I started asking, because I'm a biologist, not a psychologist, what the hell is presence? Does it mean anchoring my visual attention? How do I be present? Because otherwise, it's just a bumper sticker. And otherwise, I, look, I love psychologists, they have these beautiful studies that discover phenomena. But then, it's like if you're going to say, like, fall asleep. What is falling asleep? And we can talk about that. What is being present? Okay, so be here now. I think Ram Dass said that. Great, be here now. How? Turns out that if we step back and we just say, okay, what does the brain do? Don't worry, this won't turn into a whole lecture. What does the brain do? The brain takes physical phenomenon in our environment.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Photons of light, sound waves, mechanical pressure, chemicals through the nose and mouth, translates those from sensation to perception. Cool. Then we also can remember things, predict things. It's basically what the brain does. And it can change itself. So that's neuroscience in a nutshell. How do we move our brain from thinking about the future and the past to what's happening now? Okay, so that means perceptions about what's only in our immediate physical environment. It means not thinking, not doing, not planning, but asking questions about the immediate physical environment. So we can do this just now, right now, and you can do this anytime you want to be more present. And I want to just preface this by saying, what I'm about to describe is not the end point.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  It's the way to get into the present. But what you do next is critically important, too. So first, you ask trivial questions about your immediate environment that can only be answered accurately by focusing on the present. So for instance, what does it smell like in here right now? Like, I'm not getting much for me, but, okay. What is, like, how many cans are on this table? One, two, three, there's a couple other vessels, four cans, five, okay. All right. Answering two or three trivial questions, seemingly trivial questions about your present environment. How many people are in line in front of me? How loud are the kids screaming in the backseat?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Is it louder or softer than last time? Things like that bring our mind toward, obviously, perception of the present. Duh, there's nothing, you know, profound about that. But it's what they take our mind away from that's critically important. The brain, there's a whole section on thinking. What is thinking? The brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states, which is nerd speak for if I take a ball bearing and I put it on a plate, it essentially can move in any direction. There's some details related to the smoothness of the bearing and the plate, et cetera. But if I put a little groove on that plate and I tilt the plate slightly, it obviously will go toward the groove, it'll get into the groove.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And then if I turn that groove into a, I make it more concave and eventually a trench, the ball bearing stays there. That's how your brain works. The more that you seed a thought, the more that you seed a perception, the more that brain circuits are devoted to things related to that thought or perception. So when you want to be present, something that we know from excellent data, this large study at Harvard, but subsequent studies as well, is so critical for happiness. The way to practice that is to learn from taking your mind from thinking and doing and remembering about things of past and future, to just anchoring your perception to the present. It doesn't require meditating. Meditation is one form of that. What are we doing when we meditate?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  We close our eyes, we focus on our breathing, that's here now. And we focus on the quote-unquote third eye center or whatever. But that's actually interoception. It's focusing on our internal bodily state, which is not that great, frankly, if you look at the data, for being present in a happy way. Most people who are overly focused on their internal state in the present are like, my heart rate is increasing, my heart rate's too low, I'm sweating, I'm uncomfortable. You start thinking about the fact that, like, your, you know, your boxers are like pulled up on one leg, you know? That's not the way to get present and calm and aware. The way to get present, calm and aware, and be able to move forward from that in the best way, is to ask questions about your immediate physical environment.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Once you do that, remember, that's just the first step. The second step is to use that heightened level of awareness to ask yourself, what do I want to, what do I actually want to do next? What do I want to say next? What do I want to think about next? This is the way that you take control of your thoughts. And I won't go into all the detail now, but thoughts have this way they seed each other. So I think we've done this thing about the cat, right? I think we did that previously. We say, like, you know, I think of a cat, okay, you know, tell me about it. People will say, well, it has soft, it's this color, it's this, that. You're starting to recruit more and more neural machinery toward the thought about this trivial thing that we call a seed idea, which is the cat.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  But if you just let your brain run, like, through the tributaries of its, like, own choices, you end up in a pretty unhappy place. So the key to being a high-agency, happy person, it turns out, is being able to control your thinking and bring it back to the present. But then you don't just stay there thinking about your breathing. That's like kind of sociopathic, right? It's weird. It's like, it's just weird. You ask questions about your immediate environment and then you pivot into the person that you want to be in terms of action and thinking and speaking, or maybe silence is called for. And so none of this is psychology. This is all 100% neuroscience. I get into the underlying mechanisms and it fully supports, everything that I just described,

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I should say, is fully supported by the work that shows that people who have heightened levels of activity in the so-called default mode network, this is the network of activity that just takes place when you're doing essentially nothing, are more depressed. Too much activity in the default mode network. Yes, some is associated with creativity, but usually elevated levels of activity in the default mode network are what you find in depressed people because their brain is just kind of all over the place and they feel discombobulated. Unless we're in sleep, we need to organize our internal landscape. The problem is, most people will hear, you need to organize your internal landscape. And they think, oh, you have to get up in the morning, do 10 breaths of meditation, get your light, and they think about it as rigidity. I'm talking about now and throughout the book, it's all about the things that set

• 50:55Speaker 01

  you up to lean into life so that you're reflexively more effective, you're reflexively happy, you're reflexively more adaptive, you're reflexively more present. And I think this is where the over-optimization conversation is relevant. None of these practices are an end in and of themselves, right? I mean, I think nowadays, because people go to the gym and they get like the aesthetic effect they want, they think like, oh, you go to the gym to do that. I go to the gym so that I can sprint for the plane, open the pickle jar, move all the boxes on moving day, up and down the stairs, and feel great tired, but great at the end of the day. And I like being strong for life. I like having endurance so I can go hiking in Yosemite.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  If we go, let's go tomorrow, we're going and carrying 80 pound packs, we do it tomorrow. And yeah, it hurts a little bit, but like in a good way. And you can sprint for the plane and not cough up a lung. You can, you know, there's a section on mobility, which is, you know, four trivial mobility exercises, you know, get your knee behind your glutes once a day, squat down, do kind of bend and look up at the ceiling like to a right angle, be able to look up on both sides, identify any, you know, kind of mismatches on either side and work through those. So I can like lean down and grab things and move, so I can reach and grab things. It's like, you threw me the protein drink out there. I just, for the record, I caught it.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  You did catch it.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  I, I'm not so proud of that. I'm just pissed that your camera guy will probably wait until I drop it and then film that one.

• 52:17Chris Williamson?

  It's the one thing that you did catch.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  They're running a diabolical scheme here at, at Modern Wisdom where they wait for you to F up and then they film it. But when you get it right, no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Actually, I don't care about, I'm not, obviously, my hand eye coordination is not something I'm like really concerned about, but nor do I boast about. But the point being that it's all about being able to move through life with confidence and agency and awareness and sensitivity to what you need to be sensitive to and being and saying to the things that you need to say to, that's a really good life. It's not about the tools, it's about what the tools open up for you.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people have an issue with the over-optimization thing because it feels like more homework. They're already overwhelmed, they're already working hard. The sort of people that read your book and listen to your podcast and are fans of Modern Wisdom, they're already contorting themselves into a pretzel, trying to get more out of their day. They've already got standards that are so impossibly high that they can't meet them. And now, when they sometimes hear people saying, you need to do this and do this and do this and this, they feel like they're overwhelmed.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  And the difference being you can make yourself fragile if your entire performance and your whole life is predicated on this kind of rain dance ritual that you're only able to do the stuff if you have had this like weird two hours of foreplay beforehand. I understand why that's the case.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Two hours of foreplay, yeah, that's, that's a lot.

• 53:39Chris Williamson?

  I knew that that would be it.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I mean, what's that?

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  So, nothing.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  I mean, some people might argue it's not enough.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  That is true.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  I guess it depends on how much time you got.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  That's true. If you could have, it could be a Sunday. But I think, at least from my experience, periodizing your life is one of the best ways to think about this. And a lot of people, especially toward the end of their twenties, especially a lot of guys, go through this manopaws. They go through this period where they realize that all of the strategies, tools, habits, routines, modes of getting recognition and, and, and, you know, success from the people around them, they've stopped working and they want to become something better. It's kind of like a second adolescence. It's actually a more important adolescence, I think, than the one from, you know, 13 to kind of like 17. And they're, okay, what sort of person, what sort of man do I want to become in this world? I don't know, maybe women go through it too, but, but I, I know that I see it in a lot of guys, especially dudes that are a little bit more deep thinkers, and maybe they played

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  the game in their twenties, they were successful, perhaps, maybe at playing the game.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Well, which game are you referring?

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  Like the social norms game. I'm going to like, you know, contort myself or like chameleon a little bit. I'm not going to bring up quite what I think or what I mean or my, my unique interests.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Well, that can be adaptive too. I mean, especially in the age of camera phones. I mean, when I grew up, you say something outrageous at a party, just like, you know, not offensive, but just outrageous. And it may land, it might not land, but you don't worry that it's going to land everywhere.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  It's not concretized on the internet for the rest of time.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, and this is not just for public facing people. I mean, I feel like you're probably a great dancer, but you know, I think like a lot of people are, are not, right? A lot of men in particular are not. And, you know, you'd like to be able to like go to a wedding and dance and have fun and not think about how that's going to show up.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, is someone going to mock me for this video? So anyway, you know, guys get, get to this period and they think, what sort of a person am I going to be? And that, to me, and for me, and for a lot of my friends as well, I needed to basically bundle together quite a lot of, lock it, I needed to lock the fuck in, I needed to lock in for an extended period of time. And from the outside, that might look like an over-reliance on protocols and self-experimentation and optimizing and doing things like that. But what they don't see, when they look at somebody that's going through that period, is I was basically paying a debt that I had slowly accumulated over a decade and a half of running nightclubs. Like, I will go toe to toe with pretty much anyone for degenerate behavior in my twenties, right? I ran more parties, did more of the things that you're not supposed to do in my twenties

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  than almost anyone else. I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs. I attended a thousand parties, right? Thousand parties, that's how many we ran.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  You and my twenties were very different.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  We had a million, we had a million, million lifetime entries.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  I had a great time, but very different venues.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, so I'm like, I've served my time. And then I needed to, I wanted to become somebody that was a little bit more well-rounded, that understood himself, that had a great connect, blah, blah, blah, all of those things. And I was like, okay, so if you look at me from 28 to 32, 33 in isolation, it actually looks like probably quite a fragile, highly strung life, where I've got this elaborate morning routine that's going on for a couple of hours. And I'm like, getting up and getting sunlight in my eyes before it's cool and doing the lateral flow eye movement as you're ambulating through the thing. Like, do you putting salt, Redmond salt in water that I had to import from America because I once read in some random blog post that it might work? Like, all of this shit before it was kind of popularized. And then journaling and breathwork and meditation and reading a book and doing spaced repetition

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  with Anki flashcards and all of this shit. Why? Well, because I wanted to like discover what worked for me and I wanted to like rip myself out of this hole that I dug myself into. And my thing around the, the optimization, like guilt that a lot of people feel or fear that they have, this kind of pushback against the fragility that definitely comes along with it. Like, there is such a thing as, like, the fear of, or the worry that you have of trying to be optimal, killing you more quickly than your suboptimal behaviors. Like, you're so stressed about this. But there is also a period, I think, that you can really use it to like get the momentum moving. Okay, I've got a training practice, I understand how to meditate, I've stopped going to bed late, I've started getting up on time, I've started, you know, those are things that

• 57:44Chris Williamson?

  then carry you forward. And you can either try and slowly engrain them over a long period of time, or you can Navy SEAL hell week it and bundle it together. And that's what I did. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, backed by four clinical trials. Those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well.

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

  Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. Right now, you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  I came on this podcast because I was excited to talk to you. And yes, I'm out on the book thing, but I like learning from you. So can I just like take in what you said for a sec?

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Hit me.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Um, because I'm happy to share what I know, but I want to, I want to think about this because I always learn with you. So one thing that you're so excellent at, and then I'm trying to do more of by way of example from you, is you are very good at spotting contradictions. And as I said earlier, trying to, like clashes and contradictions and trying to export something of value, like a new direction from that. So, you know, I will say, and I acknowledge you in the book for many reasons, by the way, just, you know, we get these conflicting messages inside of any space. Okay, so you have so much within you.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  If you do the right things, you can access these things. Okay. If you do all these things, you're actually a weaker version of yourself, because if you don't do those, not doing the hard thing now becomes the hard thing.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, hell week is a week for a reason. It's not hell year, although talking to people who are instructors and SEAL training and this guy, I mean, I do think they are identifying people that are, that have something different in them as opposed to building that up. I think they build it up in those people, but I think that filter is really unique. I think for the rest of us, you know, I don't, you'd probably make it through, but for the rest of us.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  The, the real question, I think, is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions that are out there and put a structure on them? Forgive me for going slow here, but for once I'm speaking slow enough. No, no, no, stop mapping out. Okay, so years ago, when I was a graduate student, a guy who is really a luminary in the field of neuroendocrinology said to me, he said, you know, it's rarely the people who make like the key discoveries that go on to be associated with the great findings of a field. I go, how can that possibly be? And he said, it's almost always people that are in that field or educate themselves on that field that put a structure on it. And he said, this is why it's important to publish research papers, but also regularly publish

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  reviews. And I always made a point for about every three research papers I published to publish one high quality review, not some like, you know, like yellow ribbon journal, you know, review, because you can publish a review anywhere, but like real compendiums of where the, the knowledge is now. I took those very, very seriously, like annual reviews and so forth, very seriously. And why? Because they help you organize your mind around what's happening and they help other people do that too, because most people aren't going to take the time to do it. In the health and optimization space, now there's so many tools, right? So what we need and what I try and highlight in the book are principles. High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol means high nighttime melatonin means great

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  sleep means better days and so on and so forth. You're, you're essentially got the gears of the system linking together with that. Understand that. And then, yes, it's true, bright light is the best way to spike your morning cortisol, but exercise is pretty effective too. Sometimes you don't have access to either. Sometimes you have access to both. Sometimes you're on a plane, you can't, okay, but you can start doing other things to nudge the system or keep the system online when you have 30 seconds. You also understand that if you miss a day or two, you're okay. Yep. Because you've set up the system through good behaviors going into it. So you don't have to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears because you're on a plane and they don't have any caffeinated coffee and you can't do your air squats and like, I mean, come on. Yep. No one wants to be that guy. Fragility.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you're, you, once you understand a bit of the principles that organize the mechanisms, you're in a great position to be truly strong of mind and body because you can organize information. And the same thing is true, like in chapter seven of the book on personal development, I took a step back and I said, what are the unifying features of all the trauma therapies? What are the unifying features of how to have a great life? Let's just start with how to have a great life. James Hollis came on my podcast, 84 years old, surprised the shit out of me when he said, here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are shut up. That's the first one. I go, shut up? And he goes, yeah, someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you got something to be grateful for. I didn't really expect that from him. You know, he's like this 85 year old Jungian analyst. He talks about the unconscious mind. He goes, shut up. Your day should start with Huberman, shut up. Whatever's got you bothered, shut up. You got it better than somebody. Interesting. I actually wish someone had said that to you earlier, but that's okay. Thank you. Second, You can keep this in. Next. It's a continuation. Next, he said, Chris Williamson, go fuck yourself. Yeah, that's true. First is shut up. Yep. Second is suit up. What is suit up? Suit up is you have a role to fulfill each

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  day for other people and for yourself and for the world. Suit up is get prepared. Shower, organize your room. We've heard this stuff from Jordan and from other people, but get your act together so that you can then do the third thing effectively, which is show up. Go find a role in life and fulfill it. Might not be the role you fulfill your entire life, but if it's a summer camp counselor, if it's a babysitter, if it's a, a nanny, if it's a firefighter, if it's whatever you, you are doing at some point, you're like, in order to have confidence and be a healthy, happy person, you need to fulfill roles for society, meaning for people in your life, not just for you. You have to be in service. Now, some people might think, well, I want to make as much money in the world as possible.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  So that's not me, but a lot of people feel that way. Great. To do what? Go fulfill that role. So get dressed properly. Do those things. It sounds so basic, right? So shut up is about gratitude. Suit up is about prepare and practice. Don't show up, you know, don't, for me, I delayed the publication of the book three times. Why? Because I want the book to be something I'm truly proud of and that people will feel that they were honored as smart people who deserve quality information. Period. End of story. And I was willing to tell the publisher and everyone else, look, I'm so, so sorry, but I'm going back in again and again and again. Eat the shame because ultimately I had a higher value, which was that the book be of good to extreme value to anyone that, that, that read it. Mm hmm.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Or even just looked at a chapter, for instance. And then that last one of show up is actually go do the work, like chop wood, carry water, like no one gives a shit that you don't want to do it today. Just do it. Great confidence comes from those. But then he said, the fourth thing, the pitfall is that when we get too much into role, playing these roles and doing these things, we, we don't often enough, or excuse me, many people end up down a road that they don't really want to be on. And everyone fears that. So he said that solution to this is very simple. Once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus response. You either meditate or just breathe. You draw, you listen to music, you don't look at your phone, you don't think about your role in the world

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  and all you do is you try and listen to, and it sounds real squishy, but when it's next to shut up, suit up, show up, I feel comfortable saying it, which is you ask yourself, like, what is my deeper wish, my heart's desire? What do I need to be focusing on now? Maybe I have enough career, enough money, enough, enough, whatever, you know, colleague respect, et cetera. Maybe now it's time to focus more on relationships. Maybe it's time to focus less on one's role as a mother or father, not completely, but focus more on an artistic, creative side that if you don't satisfy, you're not going to feel like you had a good life. So personal development, if you look at those bins, it's not about shut up, suit

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  up, show up and do this internal practice of getting out of stimulus response. It's, that's just one example. You look out across the landscape of personal development and almost everything slots into one or two, but usually just one of those. Entire books are about the first one or just the, the last one or two of the, two of the four. And I go, that's very satisfying to me because as my colleague said, putting a structure on things is, is very helpful because it helps us navigate without feeling like there's all this information. Wait, I'm supposed to journal and I'm supposed to do therapy and maybe psychedelics, maybe not. And I'm supposed to have social connection. And I'm like, pretty soon you're like, when am I supposed to do the morning sunlight thing? It's a lot. So the idea is that you, you understand the framework. And then when it comes to

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  the trauma piece for unlearning, right? Like there's a tremendous amount of information in the book on how to focus and learn better. But then also, what about unlearning? All of getting over bad stuff is four steps. The process is four steps. The first thing, you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore. You can't suppress it. What are you suppressing? You need to acknowledge this happened, this sucks. Two, the second step is you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this. There are entire books and workshops written around breathing into psychedelicking into, talking into, hugging into, shaking into, Yep. Feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened or things.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  But that's not where it stops. People often just end there. The next piece is feeling calmer even slightly and more peaceful around the accurate, detailed memory of the thing. You're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing. You can't just live in the feel your feelings. We have an entire generation of people and collection of people online who are only there and they wonder why they're still there. At the mercy of their feelings. They're at the mercy of their feelings, but also they're not effective in the world. They're not affecting change. They think they are, but they're not affecting change. This is actually why I think they hate, one of the many reasons why successful people are often hated, because they're moving along. They're like, I feel like sometimes online,

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  I look and I'm like, you remind me of those kids when I would go home. Cause I left, I went to college, then came back and that scared the shit out of me. Cause I was like, oh my God, you guys could write a textbook on how to become like a world-class loser. And some of them weren't like drugging out or anything. I was just like, you guys are still talking about stuff that, well, today I talked about stuff that happened in high school that was helpful for me, but. You guys are like stuck. It's like these people that hang out in the parking lot of bars for years and years talking about this thing. I mean, it's the saddest thing in the world. And men do it one way, women do it another way. It's this fixation on the things that happened that we feel wronged about, and we all have them, right? And granted, some people are genuinely wrong. That's not the point here. It's not whether they were wronged or

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  not. It's that they're stuck there. And the third piece is about the uncoupling. And then the fourth piece is what we kind of think of as the magic of life, where people take the hard thing and the experience and their journey of moving through it, and they transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world. These are the people that go and talk at bereavement workshops, talk to people who've lost a child, talk to people who have experienced horrible things, talk to, maybe they even just plant a flower and put it in the window sill. And every morning, they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience and the beauty that's

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  there representing it. A small detail, right? A small detail in their life, they've transmuted the pain. But you can't just go, you know what? You had this horrible thing happen? You know, plant a flower, put it in the window sill, and think about how beautiful it is. You can't take somebody who's struggling in number one or two, or three, and put them there. So for me- Go back through those four for me? What's that? Go back through those four. Acknowledge the thing. Yep. Straight on, exactly what happened, or how many things, you know, what is the thing that sucks that hurts so much? Two, you have to, in a safe environment, this is why there's an interest in clinical trials on MDMA, because it's this empathogen makes people feel, you know, love and safe, but you need, that's not the only way. I mean, there's therapy, there's journaling. I talk about this and talk about all the different

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  approaches to each of these steps. That's the second step. You have to feel the feelings completely of the horrible thing that happened. The third thing is, once you've done that enough, and we talk about what enough is, you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing that happened with less emotional load. The emotional load starts to peel back. And it's a hard step to get to, but once you get there, it's a process. It's not like you go in and you go, okay, today I'm gonna remember everything, but it's not gonna bother me at all. Little by little, you start to uncouple- It's like memory exposure therapy. Some people do EMDR, that's one way. Some people do hypnosis, some people do talk therapy. Pennabaker has people journal four times for 15 minutes each about the

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  horrible thing that happened. This takes them through steps two and three. 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, no more, no less. And by the fourth day, tens of thousands of data points now, not just individuals, but many, many papers, even if, you know, manuscripts, scientific manuscripts, but even if you tear up the writing afterward, even if you delete the file, you find that people move through steps two and three to a significant degree. And then, the fourth step is not just letting it hover there as this thing that you got through, but finding some way or ways, it can be many, of transmuting that entire experience, the thing that happened

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  and the way you moved through it into some point of beauty or contribution to your own well-being and to others' well-being. Could be, yeah, dog. And the dog represents every bit of your ability to love unconditionally and their ability to love unconditionally that represents the unconditional love you didn't get. Maybe it's that someone who's suffered a horrible trauma is helping people who've suffered similar traumas, or maybe it's some just symbol, right? I mean, you know, in a very Jungian way, it can just be a symbol of like, maybe you have this paperweight and that symbol is the, the weight of your, your certainty that you made it through. And you just, you know, the, the human mind can assign symbols to, to experiences very easily, good or bad. So, those are the

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  four steps. And for me, in thinking about personal development, it was like, how do I look out on the entire landscape of all these books and all these podcasts and things, and, and science and think, what's the best way to move through? You acknowledge that process. Neuroplasticity is alert, focus, agitation through genuine errors to get things right, reinforce through sleep and self-testing. Those are the steps. There's not a fifth step or a sixth step. There's not jump to step three and avoid steps one and two. So, these days, a lot of my role in, in my public life is to educate about processes. And when, and this all comes from my training in neuroscience. You don't teach people, neurons fire action

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  potentials. That's the first thing you teach them. Then you tell them how that happens. And once they understand how that happens, and you get the action potential, they have embedded in their mind an understanding of when a neuron fires, you have a neuron fires, they're not thinking about all the steps, but it's all there. That's what we call true understanding. You have a nuanced, multi-level understanding of something. And I think that all too often in the optimization space, we say, hey, this red light's gonna give you better skin, it's gonna improve your mitochondria. And people, of course, just want those effects. But if people are feeling overwhelmed, they should think, well, what's better? Red light or GHK copper? I would say, well, what's the best source of, of red

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  light? It's the sun minus UV. When does that happen? When the sun is low in the sky. Boom, you got the best red light therapy that you could ever get, minus UV, for zero cost. Congratulations. You want a red light too? Cool, be my guest. I own one. You might want one too. But just, we're talking about long wavelength light minus UV. End of story. So it's not complicated. And I think the same is true in resistance training. Andy Galpin talks about this, or exercise. There are only like five or six different adaptations. Better speed, better power, better, you know, I mean, you've added a seventh of like, like, you know, forearms, but for the rest of us, there are only six. And you can get that through CrossFit, you can get that through Sets to Failure, you can get more volume

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  with Near Failure. Like, once you understand something, you're in a position to make much better choices around it. And so my, I'm actually wondering when to retire right now. I'm kind of thinking, what's next? And I have some ideas about where that's going. But I think we, in 2026, right, heading into 2027, I think we pretty well understand the principles of great mental health, physical health and performance. There'll be more peptides, there'll be more devices. I think devices and pharmacology are really gonna change the game. AI is gonna change the game. But I think we're there. The fundamental, the physics of the system. Pranayama breathing or Wim Hof breathing? Hmm. How do you want to feel? More alert? Inhale, emphasized breathing, passive exhales. You want to feel calm? How should you do

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  that? Exhale, emphasized breathing, passive inhales. Longer exhale relative to inhale, more calm. Why? We know all the mechanisms. So the naming, this, and this probably scares some of my, you know, health colleagues, hopefully not, because no longer can people name things after themselves, or give something a name that cloaks what you're trying to achieve. The reason I went yoga nidra, non-sleep deep rest, and I, I have great respect for the yogic culture that developed this thousands of years ago, is non-sleep deep rest is the goal. What is involved? Exhale, emphasized breathing is slow the heart rate down, shifting

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  the mind from thinking, doing, and, and planning to pure sensation. Great. How do you do that? Present tethered awareness, long exhales, eyes closed. That gets you into a pseudo-sleep that recovers some of your lost sleep, makes you better at sleeping at night, lowers cortisol, puts the brain into microstates of sleep, enhances learning. That's non-sleep deep rest. In a nutshell. Now, why the book has to be so long, given I can just kind of cut it down to a nutshell? That's a different story. But principles are what allow a field to say, you know what? We got it. Yep. Doesn't mean the stuff isn't important. It means we got it, we're moving on. We understand the action potential. We understand plasticity. We understand getting over trauma.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  The tools still need work, but we understand how to get to sleep. We understand how to be focused. We, and so people, I think, I'm hoping will appreciate that we are here now. I didn't podcast and do all this for the last six, seven years, so that I could be in the exact same place and regurgitate the same things. I'm like, here you go. This is my thesis. This is my thesis. This is my graduate thesis. My graduate thesis, like, you know, some people say there's a little bit of like pigeon chasing, but I didn't publish like two papers in some, you know, red, red ribbon journal. We published close to eight first author papers in awesome journals, some in Apex journals. I could have graduated way earlier. I did it because I wanted to close a story in a field. We didn't get everything,

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  but I wanted to get to the point where that field didn't make sense to work on anymore. It was like, we're done. We did it. Like, like, what are we doing? Like, I don't want to stay in high school. I want to graduate. So it's now time, this is my thesis. I'm done. I think it's, I believe it's of real value. I'm on to the next thing. And if people want to quibble about the details, I'm all ears. I'm happy to talk about it. Um, or even the big things, but it's not like I'm done. It's not important. It's like, we got it. Let's move to the next level. And I want you to do this too. I talked to Lex the other day on the phone. You know, everyone's like, where's Lex having her, Lex is building up the next big move. I can't talk about it, but it's awesome. And I'm like, he's so brave. And I'm like, yes.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  You're always on the next thing, you know, Rick's always on the next thing, you know, and it's so cool. Like, it's like, we gotta keep going. We can't stay back there. Can't stay back there. That's what happened in the 1960s and 70s is people got, went down the rabbit holes. They took too many psychedelics, thinking psychedelics were the answer. And a lot of them lost their minds. Or they did too much somatic therapy and they forgot that the mind, that actually you don't store emotions in the body. I'm sorry, folks. You store them in your brain and the body represents them. Turns out we've now moved on. Body and brain are important. So I think it's time we move to the next step.

• 1:19:40Chris Williamson?

  Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests, spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers. Function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard. So you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction. And this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is $365 per year. Just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body.

• 1:20:24Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $25 off, bring it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Is there a good test for microplastics and what is the best detox protocol that you're aware of at the moment for microplastics?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Detox as opposed to limiting the ones coming in. Cause we know where they are, right? They're pretty much everywhere. But glass better than plastic and so on.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  The data on sweating are decent, right? They're not going to purge them completely, but they're, but they're pretty decent. So sauna, sauna, living in Texas, running outside. I mean, heat is heat, right? So, you know, I was kind of joking this morning on a press call, you know, if you're standing outside in Texas in the middle of the day, like you're getting some deliberate heat exposure or non-deliberate heat exposure. It's the same heat as heat.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  So that definitely helps. You know, there's this idea that sulforaphane, which is in cruciferous vegetables, might be able to bind some of it and you can purge some of it.

• 1:21:29Chris Williamson?

  That, uh, aterosol, is that what it's called?

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  I think it's sulforaphane. Um, you can take concentrated sulforaphane, you know.

• 1:21:36Chris Williamson?

  That's the broccoli, broccoli.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Rhonda's very bullish on this. I, um, I don't take sulforaphane. Um, I do try in sauna. Cause it has other benefits a few times a week. Um, and I just think more and more companies that can their beverages are going to start, you know, looking. A lot of canned beverages do and a lot of canned beverages don't.

• 1:21:54Chris Williamson?

  Rhonda put me in touch with a company for Neutonic who have a different wrapper on the inside. Cause all of these cans, it's not tin.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  It's the plastic lining.

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. But there's a, an organic biodegradable liner that you can get. So we're looking into that. It's going to take forever.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the stuff is everywhere. There's, um, the particulate from tires. There's the clothing thing in Europe.

• 1:22:17Chris Williamson?

  Your dryer, whether your dryer is venting inside.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  You can buy a better trap for some of the microfibers. I'll be honest, I don't, I don't do those things. I'm conscious of trying to not put heated food in plastic whenever I order.

• 1:22:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is limiting input though, right?

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  That's limiting input. What, to the extent that it's getting things out, we don't know. I mean, I think also like anything, some people are going to be more susceptible to this. I mean, if people are doing a bunch of other things to disrupt their endocrine environment, right? They're not sleeping well. They're, you know, they're not doing all the right things. Or they're doing some things badly wrong, especially if you're getting a lot of environmental exposure to toxins. Because you, you know, a lot of people work jobs where they work with paints and solvents, you know, laboratories. It's kind of wild, you know, laboratories, you find all sorts of things that can, what we call intercalate into DNA. That's how you, you run gels and things of DNA and, I mean, without getting into the details of looking at proteins and different types of blots or RNA or DNA.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  In order to break up proteins or break up DNA in order to, you know, basically run them out on these gels, you have to put chemicals in them that break the bonds, right? That's not good, right? You don't want that happening to you. It's good for the experiment. It's not good for you.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  People are dermally disrupting their own DNA.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  People who work in laboratories are exposed to, you know, paraformaldehyde constantly. And, um, if you, if you have a neuroscience lab that where you're perfusing brains, you're fixing brains to cut them up. You're working with paraformaldehyde and other fixatives all the time. You're working with, um, things that are mutagens. Sometimes radioactivity, I mean, viruses. I mean, my lab for years, I'm not running a lab anymore. Last, I think last paper came out in 2023, 24, um, now just teaching, but the, the, the lab had adenoviruses, synbysviruses, modified rabies viruses. I mean, we.

• 1:24:01Chris Williamson?

  Some stuff you don't want.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  We worked, we had, yeah, you, we did, we had sedatives that are, you know, federally controlled. You had to keep them in a locker account for every microliter. I mean, laboratories are full, full of dangerous things. Unless it's a computational laboratory, in which case we call those carpet labs where they have carpet and computers. That's real science. It's just different science.

• 1:24:20Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to the microplastics thing, I learned some interesting insights around the fact that the, uh, like micron size of microplastics and the size of your sweat glands can get some out, but not all. Because microplastics range in size. This is a conversation that Ben Greenfield was bringing up. Another interesting one, we're talking on nine 11. A friend told me a story about this particular firefighter who had gone into the towers and had been out of the towers. And then was exposed to all of the, you know, the most particulates probably in history, apart from volcanic eruptions. And, um, he developed a, like a Parkinsonian tremor and he did niacin flush with charcoal. And had a towel wrapped around him when you do that. So you get your heart rate up doing exercise.

• 1:25:05Chris Williamson?

  You get into the sauna, you take the niacin, then you take the charcoal, niacin to flush everything out. And then charcoal to bind it. So it doesn't get reabsorbed again. And apparently the towel that this guy had wrapped around him was like verdigris. It was at all colors of blue and pink and green.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Those firefighters, I mean, they absorbed so much mental and physical, um, damage in those days. I mean, one thing we should say before, I want to talk about nine 11 and that particular thing. I do, but before we do that, I just want to mention one thing that I think is important because the message got out based on one publication that we have a credit cards worth of plastic in us.

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  Already been there.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Okay. So it turns out there was a second publication that went to the same data. And basically found that the, the tool they used in that first study to measure the number of particles was not a very good tool. And it turns out we have far less than that in us.

• 1:26:00Chris Williamson?

  You saw this stuff about the gloves, right?

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Not about the gloves, but that, oh, but, but what's interesting about this study is I think that some people say, well, you have a marble sized, uh, amount of plastic in your brain at this moment, maybe distributed, maybe. But the, I looked at both the, the data analyzed two different ways in those papers. And unfortunately, the more, um, the more catchy thing, you have a credit card and it was worth of plastic in you or your brain. That's our, you know, it kind of did the telephone game of the internet. The second paper didn't, um, didn't get as much airtime.

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep. And the retraction versus the accusation.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Right. And it was a separate group. It wasn't a total retraction, but having spent a lot of years in my lab where you try and count cells and you're trying to decide on a computer scheme, what's a cell? Seems trivial to you. I mean, that's a cell, that's a cell. Sometimes it's very easy. Sometimes you see two clumps like this. Is that one cell or two cells? So where you set your threshold for what you define as a cell is very important. And in this study.

• 1:26:53Chris Williamson?

  So this was, sorry for interrupting.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:26:55Chris Williamson?

  I think this was, this was what I saw. So, uh, basically when people were using nitrile and latex gloves to do the microplastic thing, the way that nitrile gloves actually bend is because tiny fragments of plastic peel off. Basically.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  This just came out this last year.

• 1:27:13Chris Williamson?

  People measuring microplastics wore gloves that got plastic on the plastic detector. That's what happened. So this is like, yeah, one of the biggest.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, if you talk to.

• 1:27:26Chris Williamson?

  There it is. A wild microplastics goose chase based on the glove, like.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  So we might be overestimating the amount of these things, which would be great. Or let's, you know, if we, to be more worried and actually be safer is better than to be less worried and actually in danger, right?

• 1:27:38Chris Williamson?

  Think about this though, if it's the case that microplastics are less prevalent by a factor of a lot. Some of the studies I've seen around this, it's like a hundred less, a hundred times less, or maybe even a thousand times less than we've got. If that's the case, what that suggests is the X factor, which is disrupting endocrine, impacting testosterone and stuff like that, is even greater because people have been able to lay at the feet of microplastics. Like it's kind of the microplastics of the gaps of what's going on with endocrine's, why is sperm count going down, et cetera, et cetera. If we say, oh, actually we've been over measuring that, the X factor begins to need to fill more of the hole.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. We don't know how to match, you know, number of particles to biological relevance. I mean, in a, you know, one parallel example would be for many years, you know, there were new antibodies coming on, becoming available for the study of the brain. And you could label up like, where is the richest concentration of serotonergic neurons in the brain? And a group identified this massive serotonin input to the brain circadian clock. Massive. I mean, it counts for, you know, basically half of the input to the clock. You know what happens if you disrupt that input to the clock? Nothing. Functionally it means nothing. Does that mean it's doing nothing? Excuse me. Functionally it means far less than the anatomy would suggest. In the brain, big, strong synapses mean a lot more than number of synapses.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Number matters, but big and strong matters way more. And so we don't really know how to correlate X number of particles with this much dysfunction. Also, you know, it's not a study that I, um, think about very often, but my colleague, Mike Eisenberg, who you've had on the podcast, right? I mean, it does seem that sperm counts are going down, uh, generation to generation. But it's, they have data that, do you know about this? That penis size is going up, right? And no, no pun intended. Um, but then you start asking, you know, how is this measured? And it's self, it's either self-report. And then you get into these details that I really don't want to discuss. It's too early in the day. Um, you know, like, were they measuring from like the top or the bottom? Like, are they, are they, uh, is it flaccid or is it erect? Like all these different things.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  And you'll talk to Mike and you'll say, you know, they try and standardize these studies, but it's one of these things where the headline is so catchy. Right? One or the other headline. But then you get to, no pun intended, but then you get to, you get to the, the nuance of how these studies are done. And the answer almost always is. Well, let's just stick to microplastics. We need more data. I think that the other

• 1:30:04Chris Williamson?

  We need more penises.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Some people on the planet would argue we need fewer.

• 1:30:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  But that's a different, that's a different podcast. But um, nine 11, um, I'd been on the East Coast. So I'm 51 years old. So um, I remember this very clearly. I'd been on the East Coast at an amazing place on the North Shore, Long Island called Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. This is sort of summer camp for scientists where they go to learn molecular biology. You take courses and it actually operates all year long. Is it one of the premier laboratories in the world? Are you telling me there's something on my face?

• 1:30:35Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no. I'm just grinning about this fucking summer camp for nerds. It's all right.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a great time. So I was a student in there at Cold Spring Harbor. I was a TA. I was a educator and I was a course director for many years. And then I passed the course off onto, you know, people who are better equipped to do that at that time. But we had gone to this course and then flown back, right? A number of us had flown back and some people were still in the process of going back. So I remember that day very well. I also remember two years later, because the course was every other year, going back to this course on in Long Island and there's this day off where half of the students would just recover from their hangovers. There was a lot of drinking back then, not so much of these courses anymore. But you and took the Long Island Railroad into the city and went to the nine 11 site.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  So it was a memorial slash site because it was still, they were still excavating the site.

• 1:31:30Chris Williamson?

  What date was this?

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  What day?

• 1:31:31Chris Williamson?

  Date.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Oh, this would have been a summer of, okay, so two years after nine 11, so it'd be 2003.

• 1:31:37Chris Williamson?

  And they still hadn't finished?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no. I mean, this was a giant, I mean, I think it's hard for people to conceive. Like you see the towers in the photos and they're so huge, but the footprint of these towers was just enormous. You know, multiple city blocks long in it, you know? And there was just, all there was, was it like a, you know, a wooden gate? You could walk around the site. There were pictures everywhere, obviously, and a lot of inscribings and some photos and things of that sort. And there were people working the site, you know, construction workers working, many of them no masks, you know? And then you've got all these tourists, you know, we were essentially tourists.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Reading the, the stuff on the wall, walking around, no doubt, everyone was inhaling tons of whatever was in, in their jet fuel, particulate, et cetera. But the people that got there first? I mean, I can't even imagine what the firefighters and others were exposed to. I did hear an interesting story that one of the companies that was housed in those buildings was led by somebody who had some former military training. Do you know about this? Who had been there for the first bomb, bombing of the World Trade Center? And had run drills for his entire company, insisted on drills going into it. And all but I think 11 of the, of the people in that company got out.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  So they were, they would run these drills about how to, you know, single or double file out of the stairways. I don't know the particular, the particulars of this. But it turns out there were people who were very concerned about this going in for a number of years.

• 1:33:12Chris Williamson?

  So prepared that.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  And that increased survival. Now you don't, I don't know where they were, you know, which, which level, et cetera. But I mean, that was a, that was a huge game changer. And yes, there were videos online at that time.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  So different because there wasn't social media of people, some places in the world, you know, quote unquote, celebrating. But I would say the vast majority of media that you saw, the vast majority of what was online was just people either in shock or um, in, in anger.

• 1:33:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  And just, and surprised. A lot of people in the United States at that time didn't know where Afghanistan was. They didn't, they didn't know what Afghanistan was. They didn't know where Pakistan was. They didn't understand that. I mean, they knew these places in the world exist. They probably heard the names before, but there wasn't a lot of awareness of that side of the world. It was like, oh yeah, like a bombing in Yemen. People would hear these things. But that was the, that and the Challenger explosion were, um, in my lifetime were the two where you just went, oh shit, like this, this is a, a line in the sand. Like things are, are very, very different now.

• 1:34:18Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned nicotine earlier on. I'm seeing pouches everywhere. What's your opinion on nicotine and pouches?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Same. Look, I consume caffeine every day. I love caffeine. Nicotine is sort of similar, although caffeine is safer, obviously. Can even improve health. Nicotine will definitely make you feel alert and calm. Unlike other stimulants, which is a very unique state that's great for learning, right? Sets you up for learning, doesn't let you learn, but it, so excuse me, doesn't make you learn, but it lets you learn.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Raises blood pressure, highly addictive. And, and here's the thing people don't realize. If you take three to six milligram pouches multiple times per day, it's not going to have a cognitive enhancing effect. It's just rescuing the deficit from nicotine withdrawal. Like if you don't drink caffeine for two days, you're not going to feel good. You drink caffeine, you'll feel good. It's bringing you back to baseline. Okay? So if you want nicotine to be a performance aid, you use it occasionally, meaning, you know, three to six milligrams, once or twice total,

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  twice per week maximum.

• 1:35:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  But how many people do you know that are taking?

• 1:35:28Chris Williamson?

  To not develop a dependency.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Or just not do it very often. And then it does something. I mean, this is how I feel about a lot of energy drinks. I love them, but I'll take them when I really want to dial in, really want to, like I, I slut last night, but not quite as much as I would have liked. I'm a time shifted and so on. Um, so this morning I drank one of yours and one of Derek's.

• 1:35:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  And that's a lot.

• 1:35:48Chris Williamson?

  The old twin turbo. Yeah.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:49Chris Williamson?

  Very good.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  The twin turbo and, and that's a lot, but you know, I thought we had a pretty good workout.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you performed well. Well, the previous mode of delivery was smoking. And then we moved on to vaping pretty quickly and vaping became massive.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Talk about the history of this. Humans have found a way to get their nicotine. Smoking causes cancer. Okay.

• 1:36:08Chris Williamson?

  Not good.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Dipping, snuffing, eh, not good cancers. Okay. Oral nicotine, oh vaping, eh, turns out it's not good for us. Really not good. The chemicals associated with it, probably a bit safer than smoking. But this is really wild. The behavioral data say because you can do it anywhere, pretty much. People are doing far more of it. They're taking in far more nicotine and they're coming now having issues, lung issues and issues related to nicotine withdrawal.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Smoking was less healthy and maybe more dangerous per puff. But because the number of puffs that you're consuming from vaping, because you can do it in more places and it's more tasty.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  And there's less fatigue from it.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  Means that maybe the healthier delivery mechanism of vaping versus smoking is more than offset to the point where it's more dangerous.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  In the same way that, you know, cannabis, you don't say is good or bad. Yes, it nukes REM sleep, but that's very, very bad.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  It can cause psychosis and certain males have a predisposition to psychosis. But you'd say, um, smoking cannabis, people are able to put themselves into a plane of high that is not freaking them out. They can take one toke. Bong, you know, when I was in college, everyone was just like, did bong or upset. You're like, you know, and then, but you knew if you could do half of one or one or you, you wouldn't go like four and then wait and see what happens.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Um, some people did that. That didn't work out so well. But with an edible, the problem is people can ingest, you know, a hundred, 150 milligrams of THC like that. And then they're freaking out. In some cases it can trigger a psychotic episode that lasts a long time or doesn't reverse. And so it's the ease of ingestion. So that's the vaping thing. The, the oral nicotine, but they're here to stay. Humans have, since the discovery of nicotine, have found a way to get their nicotine. Same with caffeine. They've just found a way to, they're not going to quit. But a lot of young people using nicotine, they should just be aware of how addictive it is and the fact that it raises blood pressure. And I think that, you know, usually you can scare guys out of it a little bit by just saying, oh, it's vasodilation. And you know, that can have some sexual side effects, but nowadays people are using pharmacology to combat pharmacology.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  You know, and thanks to Mike Eisenberg and other people, you know, like I've said, you know, the, the to doubt, low dose to dalphil for, um, for prostate health. But then people go, whoa, if you take a little bit more, then it, then it's a, you know, it's like a sex drug and like that kind of thing. It's, you know, anyway, that it was developed as a prostate drug, but it's a vasodilator. Does it, does that combat the vasodilation of nicotine? Yeah, in theory, uh, but you now you're, you're doing like sort of a push pull. Bad language. You're now doing a push pull between, you know, one, one set of effects and another set of effects. And, you know, I would say, this is just by observation. You know, people in their teens, twenties, thirties, even early forties, you really want

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  to get away with it using as little pharmacology as necessary.

• 1:38:59Chris Williamson?

  This is why, you know, during my manopause monk mode era, I did a thousand.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Your what?

• 1:39:04Chris Williamson?

  That manopause monk, I went monk mode, which is like.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  You were in manopause?

• 1:39:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  You're too young for manopause.

• 1:39:09Chris Williamson?

  Mano, no, manopause is end of twenties. Listen, I go, I told you.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  We got to return to that. Manopause is.

• 1:39:15Chris Williamson?

  Mano, manopause.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Your androgens dropped at the end of your twenties?

• 1:39:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a colloquial neuroscience term that I use to describe when guys stop behaving the way that they did in their adult infant twenties.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  I have so many thoughts about that hat and none of them good. Please take that off.

• 1:39:31Chris Williamson?

  Um, so, uh, a lot of the time, like when I, when I was doing my period of personal development, becoming a proper human, I did a thousand days without alcohol and 500 days without caffeine because I wanted to prove to myself, I don't need to use any of these things. I don't need to buttress my life with this. I wanted to have that in the back of my mind that if there was ever a period, because I knew for the rest of my life that I was gonna be like around parties, I was gonna be around like caffeine, that's like my thing, right? And now I have a company that does it, something that's kind of interesting. So we've been doing these, which are these pouches. And those, I think by the end of next year, we could do more volume in pouches, more revenue in pouches than in cans because of how many people want to dial back their nicotine. So many people feel like I'm not

• 1:40:15Chris Williamson?

  in control of my nicotine usage and the delivery mechanism has been locked in.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  And, and these are, and it's easy to take and we'll talk about the canister. By the way, if you write a 600 page book, what happens is you stare at things up close, your eyeball lengthens and you become myopic.

• 1:40:31Chris Williamson?

  You've worsened your eyesight because you wrote the book. You literally, literally damaged your own.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  But at the end of this year, right after this book promotion tour is done, I'm going to spend a lot of time staring at horizons and hiking in the mountains and, um, and I might even go hunting this year. So yeah, that's why I'm wearing these. I'm looking at this is crazy, this prescription.

• 1:40:49Chris Williamson?

  You tried to, you made me put them on there. You're blind. They're like tall bottle glasses.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  So, yeah, when you stare at things too close, you become nearsighted. So kids, adults.

• 1:40:58Chris Williamson?

  Be careful.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Get some long view vision each day. My vision at a distance is great, but up, up close is lousy. So the other thing about this that, and these canisters is it's interesting, you know, that, um, I'm not trying to diverge topics here, but you know, like we'll get to peptides, I'm sure, but you have the pens that the GLPs use, the pen with needle, you know, has basically gotten people over their needle phobia. It turns out it was the plunger people were afraid of. I don't like needles. Do I have to inject myself? Turns out if you put the needle at the end of something, it looks like a pen. Everyone's pinning themselves, men, women, people are just pinning themselves. Um, these canisters are interesting because they have like a tactile feel. It's a little bit like, like chips at the casino. But when

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  I was a kid, um, there was a jerky. Do you remember this? There was a beef jerky that came in a canister that looked like tobacco and kids, oh, this stuff was, was horrible. You would take a pinch of beef jerky and you'd put it in your lip. We were like nine years old, 10 years old, and then you'd eat the beef jerky eventually.

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  You were just cosplaying as your dad.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Kids, uh, my dad didn't chew. He did occasionally smoke a cigar or pipe. My grandfather smoked a pipe, but yeah.

• 1:42:04Chris Williamson?

  The people that did.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was like, you would, so we were like little kids.

• 1:42:08Chris Williamson?

  Fucking beef jerky.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  We were little kids walking around lipping beef jerky, beef, not licking, lipping beef jerky.

• 1:42:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  And so, and it was, they clearly figured out that like candy cigarettes and, you know, and, and so there is something about the pouch, the canister.

• 1:42:22Chris Williamson?

  There it is.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  There it is. Jerky stuff. No, no, it's called jerky stuff. That looks so gross. Oh my God.

• 1:42:28Chris Williamson?

  It looks like the fluff that you find in your pocket.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  It's called jerky stuff. Look at this. Ready? There you go. Jerky stuff. And you would, you would stuff your cheek or you'd stuff your, your lip.

• 1:42:40Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. This was a thing. So.

• 1:42:43Chris Williamson?

  It was kind of like jerky flavored sawdust.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  It was, and also barely any, it was probably like four grams of protein per.

• 1:42:50Chris Williamson?

  In the entire.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  And you would pay more for it. And it was because it was, you know, a good way to take in something. So these canisters are also very reinforced. Yeah, it's really tactile. It's nice. And also like, you know, it's your back pocket. Guys love carrying something in their back pocket. Nobody wants to carry the man purse, you know, I might've brought like a small zip thing to the gym today.

• 1:43:09Chris Williamson?

  I did see that. I did see that.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. You didn't ask what was in it, but I'm not going to tell you.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  What are the spiciest protocols that you weren't able to put in the book? What was the stuff that you wish that you could have got clearance on?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Right. So the book is everything I'm certain about that we understand the mechanisms for, and that I know work. Not just because I experienced that, but because many, many people have and we have great data to support it. Like everything's substantiated. There's only one protocol that's a little bit out there. And I said, this is kind of out there. We have a little bit of data, not a, not a ton, but here's, here's why I'm including it. And I think you might want to try this because it can really help you fall asleep when you talk about this. Um, but we know why it ought to work. Um, I don't talk about psychedelics, although I do fit them into a framework along plasticity and learning. And so they make sense of when they might, might be the appropriate tool. I don't talk

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  about hormone therapies and I don't talk about peptides. In part because the data are still coming and also because there'll likely be a second book. Although, you know, if you write a book like this long with, you know, thousands of references and, you know, it can damage relationships in your life. People have been super understanding. This book basically acted as a filter in my, in my own life for like, who really loves me? Right? So, um, but look, it's big, but it also operates as a doorstop, a weapon.

• 1:44:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  If you're feeling not quite tall enough at the table, you can sit on it at Thanksgiving. And, um, and as I joke, if nothing else, it'll cure insomnia.

• 1:44:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Very nice. Okay. What are some protocols that you fully believe in, but you can't scientifically prove?

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Ooh, that's really good. Um, okay. Yeah, let's just be blunt here. Um, but these will be things that aren't in the, in the book, right? Okay. Cause everything there is substantiated by mechanism and description. Um, so

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I've had some wild experiences with a couple of peptides that most people, some people have heard about. Um, you know, I don't have shoulder pain. I've never had shoulder pain, but about three, four months ago, I made the decision. I was like, you know, I should start doing some heavy pressing again. I, I do my dips, I do my overhead presses. I just started doing some like, I don't like flat benching, so I do some low incline pressing. And after about three months, two, three months, I started getting some shoulder pains. I started doing some external rotation work. I'm like, this thing isn't going away. Like what is this? Maybe I need to back off. And it's like, you know what? Like it's pretty bad. I'm gonna just put two injections of BPC in there. So two injections of maybe

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  a hundred or 200 micrograms, tiny amounts, right? Um, gone. History. Can't find the pain. It's gone. Now, is it placebo? I don't know. Maybe it is. I mean, I knew what I was injecting. A better experiment would have been somebody, you know, traded out saline and I go, oh my, you know, that didn't happen. Um, that's pretty incredible. The animal data are really impressive. And I know a number of people with pets, dogs in particular, who've been injecting their animals with BPC because their dogs are getting older. I don't want to name names here because it's, I haven't cleared it with them, but, um, they have dogs that either had spinal strokes or just aged and were limping and not doing well. And they asked, you know,

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  does this stuff work in animals? I'm like, all the data are in animals, you know? Um, so mouse and rat owners, like your, your mice and rats will.

• 1:46:41Chris Williamson?

  If you rupture the tendon, the Achilles.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. Cause there are a lot of data on that. Um, but I know a lot of people now injecting their dogs, aged dogs and saying, oh my goodness, this is crazy. Like they're more mobile, et cetera. And it's hard to give the placebo argument there. I mean, you could say that the owners are doing other things, like they're also massaging, more care. They didn't do the saline control, you know, but kind of hard to explain it away.

• 1:47:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Okay. So the other one is pineal on. Um, pineal on is ironically is a peptide that doesn't come from the pineal, comes from brain tissue. Epithalin comes from the pineal. Who names this stuff? It's like, it's insane. But, um, I've experimented with pineal on every third or fourth night, taking about, about a, you know, a 10th of an IU. And, um,

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  in those nights, those nights, I get anywhere from two and a half to three hours of REM sleep. That's a lot of REM sleep inside of six to seven hours, inside of six hours. You're kind of cheating the system because like, wow, I like normally I'd have to get into my last third of sleep, which for me is seven or eight hours in order to, um, total, in order to get that REM enriched phase, which always comes at the end of the night. But what's, what's so wild is that on the subsequent nights, I also experienced this massive REM increase. So it's, I've cut that back to doing it once a week or once every 10 days and still getting the same effect. The only downside for me is that the next day I can feel not foggy, but I feel like it's harder to become fully alert. I can still focus, but.

• 1:48:20Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of sleep inertia, maybe.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  And I know people who are taking it in the daytime because they like being in this kind of shallow plane of sleep, wake for cognitive work. That's not me, but, um, you know, there's talk about, I don't, you know, well, I mean rumors, whatever. There's talk about people at tech companies who are like, oh yeah, if you're gonna do something for, you know, 12 hours, that's like really laborious. Maybe this is good. I don't know. So that's been interesting. Um, you know, I think there's a lot of excitement nowadays about growth hormone secretagogues, things like tesamorel and uppermorel and CJC. I'm not a fan. They've always nuked my REM sleep. They've always spiked my PSA. I, I just, for me, they don't, they don't tend to work. Um, I am curious about, but I, I don't think

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  I'm old enough yet to really embark on a somatotrop growth hormone experiment, but the clinical trial by exploring low dose growth hormone for people.

• 1:49:15Chris Williamson?

  That would be exogenous, right?

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  That would be exogenous. Yeah. Um, that's intriguing to me, but there, there are data, right? There are data. But I feel like at 51, I'm like still in this place where I feel good. So, so there's no real science there. The other, sorry, aside from the growth hormone thing, the other stuff is there's animal data, not human data, but my experience has been pretty impressive. Now, of course, maybe I gave myself a tumor by injecting the BPC. I have to acknowledge that. Um, but a whole body MRI tells me no. So, you know, um, the things that.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  Well, I've talked about this openly, so I'm happy to talk about it. You know, you'll find clinical trials on MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. You'll find clinical trial, beautiful clinical trial data, in my opinion, on psilocybin for depression and PTSD. You won't find a lot of data combining them. I've experimented in a clinical setting with combining them, right? This is done in a legal clinical setting, so you know, that means therapy going in, therapy during therapy coming out. You have to be very thoughtful about where you do this and who you do it with. They have to, all the adequate supports have to be there. But for me, that was incredible.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  I have to say that psilocybin alone was helpful, but didn't really feel like it resolved certain things for me. MDMA was helpful and being, feeling feelings, et cetera. That first, that kind of first and second bin, acknowledging the thing and really feeling the feelings bin. But the moving through part was really, for me, was uncoupling the negative feelings from the, from the negative thing, but also replacing the negative feelings with positive feelings.

• 1:51:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  That really came about through that combination therapy and, and you won't find a lot of data on that. I mean, it's unfortunately, the data on polypharmacology of different psychedelics isn't there yet. But then again, the FDA approval for the first single treat, you know, single ingredient approaches aren't there yet. And so that's why people have to go out of country to do this.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Or else it's illegal. So I think that the, you know, the data on Ibogaine are really intriguing. We've had conversations with people that are very open about the fact that they did it and it's helped them. I know a number of people are trying to get us to go down to Mexico. Are we gonna go?

• 1:51:43Chris Williamson?

  On a daily basis, I feel like I'm being peppered by somebody else to go, hey, man, just come down and turn your life upside down for a week in fucking Mexico. I didn't know.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  I have a friend that's there right now and I told him not to go, honestly. I'm sorry, but I just was like, you don't, he doesn't have a substance abuse issue. So maybe he has PTSD, but I think there's this idea also with peptides that we can just up level ourselves. Like people say, should I use peptides? Like, what, what effect are you looking for? Better.

• 1:52:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  You know, it's sort of like, you know, it's sort of like, should I invest in blank? It's like, well, what effect are you looking for? And they're like, more, they want more money. So it's, it's understandable. People want to feel better. If like you feel seven out of 10, could you feel 10 out of 10? If you feel 10 out of 10, could you change what 10 means?

• 1:52:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  And be eight out of a new 10? That's way better than your current 10 out of 10? Like, that's an intriguing idea, but I'm not so afraid of the Ibogaine, to be honest, done in the proper clinic with heart rate monitoring. The thing I'm afraid of is the DMT.

• 1:52:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because they have to hit you with that the day after and then pretty much straight after as well.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  I also know a number of people have done DMT and they're, I mean, I know plenty that have done DMT and they're okay. I know a lot who have done DMT and they're genuinely weird now.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Not all of them, but some of them are like legit weird.

• 1:52:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  And they were not that weird before. Some are perfectly fine. The other thing is a guy like DJ, he's talked about this, right? I love that podcast that you guys did, by the way.

• 1:53:07Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Like, DJ is a solid mind, you know, so.

• 1:53:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, also who's starting from a very low baseline. If you're sat watching the sunset with a gun in your mouth, you're already, what's gonna be worse? You know, like you've already considered taking your own life. Okay, wait, you go, smoke the thing, take the drugs, see how you feel.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it seems to have really helped him and Marcus and some of these other guys.

• 1:53:35Chris Williamson?

  Helped him enough that he's trying to be a, like, maître d' for me and you, but a maître d' that sits down at the table and eats along with you.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  What if we go to sleep one night? Not near each other, of course. And.

• 1:53:49Chris Williamson?

  Although actually, given where we live, actually quite fucking near each other.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  So I, I, I got a, a place that turned out to be really close to Chris.

• 1:53:58Chris Williamson?

  Spitting distance.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  It's gonna be like the podcaster neighborhood if we're not careful. It's cool, man. We ended up being neighbors. Good taste, good taste in neighborhoods. But what if you go to sleep in your house and I go to sleep in my house? And then we, we wake up in, in Mexico in this clinic.

• 1:54:15Chris Williamson?

  Because DJ's done a like Maduro on us.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  Someone did a Maduro.

• 1:54:19Chris Williamson?

  I got fucking Maduro by DJ Shipley.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. I've had similar things happen in totally different contexts years ago, where I was supposed to get dropped off after working with this, some friends that have this awesome band. And they were supposed to drop me off back at my lab in my car. And I, I woke up in Utah. They drove to Utah in the middle of the night. I woke up, I was like, where are we? He's like, Utah. I was like, you're one of us now. This is my good friend, Elvis Cortez. He was actually the one that found me Costello.

• 1:54:49Chris Williamson?

  I've been kidnapped.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  I love Elvis, he's great. But yeah, they, technically they kidnapped me, but it was, it was a lot of fun. That was, that was many years ago.

• 1:54:57Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:54:58Chris Williamson?

  We'll, we'll, we'll see.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  There are other things that are perhaps a little less of the Mount Everest of, of that stuff.

• 1:55:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, lower, lower risk.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  But you seem to be in a really good place now.

• 1:55:08Chris Williamson?

  That's true, but still, there's always the sort of ability to show up versus how much of the four steps have you done? In terms of being able to get over zone?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  How do you respond when people say, they go, oh my goodness, like, here you are looking for this next thing and the thing you can do. And they, and they just say, Chris, what you really need to do is just get married and have a couple of kids.

• 1:55:33Chris Williamson?

  I agree.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  And that will be the psychedelic experience.

• 1:55:35Chris Williamson?

  I, I agree. I say, yes, plus, plus two golden retrievers. I agree. And I say, yes. And they're not preaching to the choir.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  You said two girls and retrievers?

• 1:55:42Chris Williamson?

  Golden retrievers.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Golden retrievers.

• 1:55:44Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I, that's a Freudian slip from you.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  No, it's a Freudian slip from you.

• 1:55:48Chris Williamson?

  I said fucking golden retriever, people can rewind the tape. I, I completely agree. I completely, I completely agree on that. And I've said this before, like, I'm the most ardent guy without kids supporter and ambassador for guys just starting a fucking family. And it's not for me to say, hey, I want you to stop your ambition. And the same for women too, like you stop your socioeconomic climb and doing all this stuff. Just like so many of the things that I see people doing, you know, young people and people that are getting into more middle age, I like surrogate families. It's like the, the business that you're building, the fervor with which you're going after this political party or this new sort of social campaign or this like obsessive hobby

• 1:56:31Chris Williamson?

  that you've got or, you know, trying to become wealthy or whatever. A lot of that to me looks and feels like this is the energy that you would be putting into a family, especially the existential energy that you've got. And I'm like, I, I think a lot of your, I don't really know what my purpose is. I don't feel like I'm contributing more largely to the world. All of these questions that people have, like, why am I here? It's like, well, a lot of this, I think, has kind of been solved throughout time, which is like you, you do the golden retriever thing and the family thing. Like golden retrievers do come first. That is an important caveat for me.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Interesting choice of breed.

• 1:57:07Chris Williamson?

  I just want an animal that can't, there is no danger of it competing with me cognitively. So I want something that's both cuddly and stupid.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Golden retrievers are not all stupid.

• 1:57:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and find a breed of golden retriever, which is particularly fluffy and stupid.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  Just find a dog with a really flat head.

• 1:57:23Chris Williamson?

  On a single digit IQ golden retriever.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  And if you think about the Mastiff breeds, they're all very sweet and they have flat heads and they look at you like, you know? So the Mastiffs, the Bulldogs, the, you know, the Boxers, they're smart about certain things, but they're kind of like, dog with a flat head.

• 1:57:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:57:40Chris Williamson?

  Are you doing phrenology for dogs?

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I went to the.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  This is fucking phrenology for dogs.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  I went to the meet the breeds in New York and met hundreds of breeds. Second time I've done this, right? And walked through and met all the different breeds. And I can tell you a couple of things. First of all, people look like their dogs. Okay, so the otter hounds.

• 1:57:57Chris Williamson?

  You do look a lot like Strummer.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  You know, the, thank you. The otter hounds, like these otter hounds, they're, the owners look like otter hounds. It's crazy. The Bulldogs are kind of goo, like the, the demeanor of the people and you just, and it's wild. You have to go, it's so much fun. It's at the Javits Center each year. It's awesome. You meet all the breeds. I walked out of there and I was like, you know, I, I turned to my girlfriend and I go, getting a bulldog breed, I'm getting a mutt. Because I've, I've been around enough dogs, I've experienced them all and the, the muddied bullies, not the pure bullies, but the muddied bullies, they're, they're kind, they're vigorous, they're got a little bit of goofiness. They're very emotional in a good way, but then they also like get over their shit. They're just like a little hedonist sometimes and, and they'll back you. Like they will, they will fight to the death for you.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  But if your life's not on the line, like they're not doing shit at all. They're not reactive, not reactive. I mean, are you kidding me?

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  So yeah, well, listen, I hope you get a dog and the dogs can hang out in the neighborhood. And I do think that, no, I mean, family is awesome. I mean, family is amazing. So what, so what's the, what's the delay?

• 1:59:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's very difficult. First off, I need to get the dog thing. I always felt guilty because my mom and dad have been so good with dogs. Like they would, they walked them all the time. They gave them a great life and I would feel, I, I've seen what a good life for a dog looks like. And I would feel incredibly guilty not being able to, and I can pay someone, I'm sure, or somebody, I can bring, bring them to the office, bring them on the trip or whatever. I'm like, I, I don't want to have a dog that's flying once a week. You know, that I'm having.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Do you travel that much?

• 1:59:31Chris Williamson?

  I did, what, like a hundred thousand miles and maybe 80 flights last year. I've done like a new 80,000 miles. I don't want to do that.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  Also for kids, you want to be present for your kids.

• 1:59:41Chris Williamson?

  Of course, and that, but that is another thing that I think is, it's kind of beautiful if you frame it this way. And at least maybe this is just cope from me, that.

• 1:59:51Chris Williamson?

  If you take the, oh my God, maybe I have just been surrogate family building with this business or with this hobby or with this body or with whatever this finances investing, whatever it is that you've been doing with your time, skill building. But on the flip side of that, I think if you've really closed a lot of the different loops of like, I really feel like I like put it all out there on the table. I do get the sense that there is an additional level of presence that's afforded to you because materially, hopefully you're, you're, you're pretty well set.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  I can tell you, I mean, I don't want to get into details of my personal life, but 100%. I'll also tell you as a hard driving, like in pursuit of knowledge, skills and resources person, which you are, which I am, and which our teams are also. I mean, very, very few things feel as good as being able to resource the people around you that you love.

• 2:00:41Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  Like that, there's like, yes, your presence, obviously. It's not just about earning money and giving them things, but being able to relieve suffering, however minor or major, being able to resource people to be in their full expression of what they want to do. Like, I, I, I think very few things will feel as satisfying as, as that, especially if you, and I say that based on knowing you, but also your prior statement, the fact that you don't want a dog yet because you want the dog to be thoroughly resourced by your, by the, the love that you're gonna, you know, provide, tells you everything you need to know.

• 2:01:19Chris Williamson?

  David Perrell, who does how I write and write a passage, it was when I first moved to Austin and he's about similar age to me and he said, we're having coffee. He turned to me one day and he said, you know what, man? I realized that most of my twenties and thirties were just spent becoming the dad that I want my future kids to have. And I wasn't even bothered about having kids. And all of the accumulation of skills, of habits, of, you know, closing the loops of desires that he wanted to pursuits and adventure and all of this stuff. He'd got rid of that. And he said, oh, you know, I sort of, I feel like I'm here is a way that you could say it. It's like, I actually feel like I'm fucking here. And I think a lot of guys, and you see this with a lot of dads and mums too. I've got these unrequited dreams and children sort of imposed on them. And there's this,

• 2:02:02Chris Williamson?

  you know, low key, perhaps resentment of, oh, you know, I'm doing this thing, but you don't know what I sacrificed for you. And then there's the shame or, oh my God, what sort of a monster am I to blame my kids that I chose to have because I didn't fulfill my dreams beforehand?

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:17Chris Williamson?

  It becomes really messy.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I want to be thoughtful with my words here because again, I do like to maintain some sense of privacy in my life. But I will say that it does check off a sort of a, a deep, must, what must be a primitive circuit of like, of satisfaction, like having kids is a really good feeling. Like, it just feels like, like you fulfilled something of duty, you know? That feels really, really good. And at the same time, it comes with all sorts of challenges and complications, you know? But yeah, I think that, you know, it's become this kind of ongoing debate, you know, between me and Lex or like, you know, is, you know, like a, like, you know, but I think that, look, it sounds like there're

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  gonna be a lot of kids to wrestle and play.

• 2:03:04Chris Williamson?

  I can't wait. It is a competition between me, you and him for who will have kids last, but we'll, we'll, we'll see who's, who's the holdout.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  I think I, well, I'm gonna keep my mouth shut.

• 2:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, there we go.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  I'm gonna keep my mouth shut. But in, because we all, never mind. Wait, I take this back, take this back.

• 2:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's turning you crazy.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  So I've been asking you questions. This feels good. I didn't tell you that the last page of the book is where I do therapy on you. No, I'm just kidding. No, but can I, can I read my acknowledgement to you?

• 2:03:34Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Because I,

• 2:03:35Chris Williamson?

  I didn't even, I didn't even get to that bit.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. I acknowledge you here.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Here we go. So it's brief because the acknowledgements are.

• 2:03:52Chris Williamson?

  Five pages long?

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  I think there's eight pages long. But I figure if you're gonna do something, you just do it. So I just put a bunch of names. I put you, Chris Williamson, for your friendship and for breathing so much life into the podcast and what I refer to as the everyone sphere. Because I don't think you're about the manosphere. I think you're about the human sphere. But human sphere sounded weird. So I said everyone sphere. So I, I mean it. You breathe so much life into this thing. Like, I remember first seeing you online and then you on Rogan and us, you know, and I'm not a skeptic. I always want the best. And I thought, well, who is this guy with this British accent? And like, so, you know, and why are the women in my

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  life asking me if he's single? And, and I go, this guy is really smart. He's really nuanced. And he seems like a really cool guy. And you totally exceeded expectations on all those things. And it's awesome to just see what you're doing. And also, day or night, you're available for an emergency or, or an adventure call.

• 2:04:52Chris Williamson?

  That is true.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  You'll get to the gym early on jet lag. You'll, and you've been super honest and vulnerable in your online and in our, in that career and relationship with your audience, but also just one-on-one. I, you know, there, for anyone that wonders, Chris is who he appears to be on the internet, which is really.

• 2:05:11Chris Williamson?

  For better or for worse?

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  No, for better, man, for better, for better. Like, it's a, it's an honor to have you as a friend. You're a great, great friend and I feel very blessed.

• 2:05:19Chris Williamson?

  It is, it is really cool. You know, I, I think one of the almost inarguable great parts of life is becoming respected and admired by people that you respect and admire. Like, it's one of the coolest things that you can do. My back is also hurting, so I'm trying to self massage at the same time. We did neck training this morning.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  We did a few face pulls.

• 2:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  This is sounding terrible. Jeff Cavalier has an exercise called face pulls. But we did some neck training because, as we both know, having a, the wrong head place, like a, if a neck is too narrow with wide shoulders, it looks, what do you call the coat hanger?

• 2:05:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you look like a coat hanger. Yeah, it's terrifying.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  That's not good.

• 2:05:54Chris Williamson?

  But,

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  You don't look like a coat hanger.

• 2:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Yeah. Becoming admired and respected by people that you admire and respect is just one of the fucking coolest things. It really is. Like, I like that person. I think they've got good taste. I think they're noble. I don't think that they're spiritually chinless. And they.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Spiritually chinless. If ever there was a Chris Williamsonism, spiritually chinless.

• 2:06:17Chris Williamson?

  Spiritually chinless.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  I'm gonna borrow that, but I'll give you attributes.

• 2:06:20Chris Williamson?

  It's Adam Masriani originally, originally, originally. So looking around.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  Wait, you didn't make that up?

• 2:06:25Chris Williamson?

  No. Spiritually Chinless is from Adam Masriani.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Oh. Well, you know that song, breaking rocks in the hot sun. I fought the law and the law. That's a cover of a cover of a cover.

• 2:06:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  But everyone assumes the Clash did it.

• 2:06:38Chris Williamson?

  It's fine. You're at the end of the human centipede of spiritually chinless now. You're the guy at the very, very end.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  I'm gonna just give it to you. They gave, they gave that song to, to the Clash.

• 2:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Fine, I'll take it. Spiritually Chinless. So, you know, you see these people and you go, wow, they're, they're, they're cool. I respect them in a way that I think is really, really sort of noble and aligned. And then if you manage to do something in that industry or a different industry, and they turn to you and they say, hey, like, I like what you do, think, holy fuck, like, that's really cool. And can people take it to an extreme? Yeah, of course. You can basically construct your entire life trying to reverse engineer being liked by people that you like. And that's the, like, charlatan social climate that doesn't have anything below them. But assuming the people that you respect are discerning, and one of the reasons that you respect them is that they are discerning, you shouldn't be able to finesse or fugazi them, fumose them into believing something they don't

• 2:07:29Chris Williamson?

  believe, or you being a person that you aren't. So yeah, man, like, I really hope that everybody that's listening to this gets to experience what it's like to sit opposite someone that they were a fan of and then became a friend of. Like, it's the fucking coolest thing in the world. It's really, really cool.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  Well, that statement includes my experience of you, you know, fan of and then became friends of. You've got an awesome life energy. I mean, we don't want to spiral into a whole other conversation, but maybe for a future time. But I think a lot about energy these days, not just mitochondria, but like, some people genuinely have, I'm gonna offend some people with this. Some people just have more life energy in them. And I think, I like to think that if you're thoughtful, which you are, and I try to be, that you, one, allocates their life energy toward career and pursuits and health and resolve and then pivots that energy, but doesn't decide, you know, I'm gonna shift all my chips to this and then all my chips to that. You have a lot of energy to go around. You know, Rob

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  on my team, my producer of the podcast, is such an engine of productivity and running and he's got a family now. And it's like, you always hear these things, like, people have kids and then they like slow, like, he's picked up speed. We're just like, whoa. And, you know, I think some people just have that extra gear. Some people don't. And they need to take their, whatever they've been allocated and do maximize with that. And some people just have a tremendous amount of life energy. And I think the goal is to not die at 27 if you have a lot of that energy, right? You think about the 27 club. It's almost like took all the energy of a life and crammed it into this early existence. Usually it's drugs and alcohol and then, you know. So, but you also don't want a, like

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  a low, slow arc in life that you never figure out what your peaks are.

• 2:09:15Chris Williamson?

  Put your fucking foot on the gas.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. I'm in the third quarter now. So I figure I'm, you know, so.

• 2:09:20Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of engine, I texted you about this last week. What is happening with the VO2 max versus zone two debate? Because when I was thinking more deeply about, like, I'm getting a little bit older, I should pay attention to my cardio, respiratory fitness and stuff like that. Low and slow was like everything that was sexy.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  You sent me that Jeffrey Dahmer video.

• 2:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it wasn't a fucking Jeffrey Dahmer.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  He sent me a video of a guy talking about this. It was a very good video. My first thought was the guy looks like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's making it a little hard to listen, to watch. So I just.

• 2:09:50Chris Williamson?

  You could have just listened and said, that would have been good. What's happening with VO2 max versus zone two debate at the moment, in your opinion? Because for a long time, it was focused exclusively on low and slow. Now it seems like the VO2 more high intensity Norwegian four by four is increasingly important.

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  I think the word to delete there is exclusively. I think my read of the data is you need some volume of cardio training to get that quote unquote aerobic base that can be very beneficial. I mean, the, the sorts of adaptations that come from doing 45 to 60 minutes of, of long and slow, we're not talking walking, but zone two, three-ish. I don't ever think of it about zone two. I think about upper zone two, zone three. Around there where you just barely can continue without, you know, you could, if you tried to speak, you would, you would have to pause a few times as opposed to just super easy. I mean, you are getting built up a more capillary networks, um, you know, which has a lot of positive downstream

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  consequences. You're getting all sorts of enrichment of the mitochondrial system and the, and genuine enrichment of the cardiovascular system. But I think doing that once a week, so I make it a point to do a long, slow jog. So 45 to 60 minutes or so, once a week or a ruck for, usually if I hike, I'm going for longer than an hour, um, with some weight or something like that. Soft and social with somebody. Um, and then once a week I'll do the, I feel like I'm going to die hit workout, which for me is the Airdyne bike, 20 on, 10 off, eight rounds. And by the seventh round, you're just like cursing everybody and yourself and you get off that thing. You feel so good. You probably cough a few times because you're just like breathing that hard. And I actually just, I do the crude measurement of heart rate, like 220

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  minus my age and then figure out like what my heart rate is a percentage of that max heart rate, right? So we get max, so hit like 85, 90% of.

• 2:11:38Chris Williamson?

  Are you wearing a chest strap for something?

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  I don't. So I talk about this in the book.

• 2:11:40Chris Williamson?

  You're not fucking fingering your heart rate, are you?

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  To your choice of language, man. Um, you with your, your, your.

• 2:11:48Chris Williamson?

  Britishisms.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Look, I get it. You want two wives and a golden retriever. You said that and you're fingering your heart rate. I just put my fingers on my neck and record my pulse or I just, and I'm looking at a stopwatch.

• 2:12:03Chris Williamson?

  So absurdly low tech.

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  And I do that for 30 seconds and then I double it and I'm probably off by, you know, plus or, or minus, you know, five beats, but I'm, you know, in the ballpark and.

• 2:12:12Chris Williamson?

  You're like fucking Schrodinger's podcaster. You're someone who is both very forward thinking, like technologically prepared, excited about AI and also using like a fucking sundial in your fingers to work out.

• 2:12:25Speaker 01

  So funny. I, I, my girlfriend had a birthday recently and she, we, we, I got her this like compass sundial, which is so cool. I love primitive and very advanced tools.

• 2:12:35Chris Williamson?

  And I look at you, I do think.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, primitive and thank you. I bookend. Thank you. And not a lot in the middle.

• 2:12:40Chris Williamson?

  You're the barbell. You are the barbell of a human.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  Thank you. Actually, I, I'll take that. Uh, there's a, a, a great song called Streetwise Professor that I love. It was referring to somebody else. Um, but, uh, um, yeah, sort of like a barbarian, um, intellectual.

• 2:12:59Chris Williamson?

  Slightly elevated.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Something like that. So the, once a week, get your heart rate up near maximum for six to 10 minutes. Maybe do a mild, mile trial, you know, for most people that'll be somewhere between six and 10, unless you're really, really fast, in which case it'll be less or slow, in which case it'll be longer. Um, so jog two laps. I talked about this in the book and then do a mile time once every two or three week, uh, two or three months. Um, you do Norwegian four by four, you do the air. The nice thing about the Airdyne bike, like 20 on, 10 off.

• 2:13:30Chris Williamson?

  Can stop immediately.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah. And after six to eight rounds of that, you're smoked, you hop in the shower and you go, but you, it takes so little time. It takes so little time.

• 2:13:42Chris Williamson?

  But you're also using, the reason the Airdyne is so great or an assault bike, you know, echo bike, pick your like handles and.

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  It's the whole body.

• 2:13:49Chris Williamson?

  Handles and feet bike of choice. The reason that that for me is a superior form for what we're trying to do, which is get heart rate as high as possible.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:13:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that you're getting to use your arms as well.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Chris Williamson?

  If you try and do that on a bike erg, which is a fucking awesome piece of equipment. If you could give me any piece of cardio equipment, I'd choose a bike erg. It's super comfy. You can speed up.

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  Then your calves won't fit in the room.

• 2:14:08Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Your calves, not mine.

• 2:14:11Chris Williamson?

  You're only using your legs, which means that your, your legs are going to be burning like hell. Okay. If I can get a little bit more, I mean, if I was a better rower or a ski erger, I imagine you can probably get to a even higher, higher heart rate.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I mean, the rower, I, I mean, it's not a super skill. It's not brain surgery, but getting the row form proper is not as easy. The Airdyne, as long as you set the seat height, right? You, you can't really screw it up. So go as hard as you can to get your heart rate elevated for six to eight rounds. But do it in a way that you're not going to hurt yourself. Like the skier thing, like, you know, it's not you're going to hurt yourself, but like you said, it's hard to get the heart rate way, way up. So that once a week, the longer thing, once a week. And then in the middle of the week, I just do a, a 30 minute run that's somewhere in between or a 30 minute swim that's somewhere in between. So five minutes of warmup, perhaps, you know, just like jogging. And then you do a 25 to 30 minute run where you're in your

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  zone four, right? You're, you're breathing hard and you know, you could go faster, but you don't.

• 2:15:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Because then you got that HIIT workout later and, you know, two days later or a day later. And I talk, and then I'm just interspersing three days of working out with weights and one day legs somewhere in the week, one day torso. Today we did a push. So it's chest, shoulders, um, neck. Um, and then another day of the week, you're doing, you know, biceps, triceps, calves, maybe neck again. Definitely. I, I'm big on abdominal work these days, core work, not just abdominals.

• 2:15:39Chris Williamson?

  What are your favorite exercises for?

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Pikes.

• 2:15:42Chris Williamson?

  Pikes? What the fuck is that?

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  You hang from the bar. Okay. So you're working your grip strength too. You do knee ups to 90 degrees slow without swinging back and forth. You do five of those, drop down. Then you see if you can do knee up, legs out. So L sit. Can you go back? Do five of those. If you can do five and you just build this up. If you can't do the L sit, you just do what I'll do five sets of five of the, of the knee ups. Next time I come back and try and do at least one or two L sits. So then you're doing, if you can do five L sits. So you're just bring your knees up, then straighten, straighten your legs. You're still holding, right? Cause you're also getting the grip strength work. Then you lower slowly. If you can do five of those, then you start, you could do the one knee at a time, kick out, kick out, kick out, drop one, bring down one

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  leg at a time. And then over time, what you're trying to do is bring your, your feet up to your hands on the bar without just swinging back and forth.

• 2:16:33Chris Williamson?

  Non crossfit.

• 2:16:33Speaker 01

  Using your lower abs, five sets of five or even three sets of five on the pikes. And especially if you're hanging from a thick bar. So you're really working your, your grip. That's a great ab work and I do back hyper extensions. And so keeps your core really, really strong.

• 2:16:47Chris Williamson?

  Why are you bothered about torso work so much?

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  You, you want strong abs. You want strong midsection and you want strong lower back muscles. I mean, I, I noticed that basically all injuries for me, nagging injuries completely disappear. Um, even if I'm sitting a lot, I don't have any pain. Um, if I'm doing, I make sure I get a hundred reps of hyper extensions per week. So I don't care when I put them in. Sometimes I'll put, always at the end of a workout, but I'll put them at the end of arm day or leg day or back day. I'll just mix them. I just, I have a commitment to a hundred reps and I started getting strong enough that I can do them with one leg. So on the 45 degree, you just, you sort of like kick up one leg, like you're a horse getting your, your shoe cleaned or something.

• 2:17:29Chris Williamson?

  The, the GHD, that would have been insane.

• 2:17:31Speaker 01

  No, not on the GHD. I don't do those on the GHD. And then I just go slow and controlled. You don't want to be tilting from one side to the next. So you really discover any imbalances that are there. You're bracing yourself and you just, I'll do five, five reps, switch to the other leg, back and forth, back and forth. And now I'm at the place where I can hold some weight or use a band. And I'll tell you, having those strong spinal erector muscles, like my default posture has suffered in writing this book, even with a standing desk, because you're just looking down so much.

• 2:17:58Chris Williamson?

  Eyesight and posture.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. But, um, yeah, there's some recovery that needs happening, but I did buy an inversion table. Those are fun. I love hanging.

• 2:18:06Chris Williamson?

  I've tried, I've tried those.

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. You have to be careful if you have eye pressure issues like glaucoma, you can blow a gasket. You can make glaucoma worse. Yeah. Yeah. Eye pressure upside down, not good. Um, I don't have glaucoma. So, and knock on wood. But having a strong lower back, I noticed leg days are so much stronger. Pressing, pulling, everything just gets stronger and you don't want any weak links in the chain. And I think Jeff Cavalier really nails it when he says, you want to do the small things like face pulls, back hyper extensions, the glute medius work to stabilize the pelvis. Those little things allow you to do the big things for much longer. People will say, oh, that stuff is like namby pamby stuff. You need to do just your squats and deadlifts and, uh, split squats. And yeah, the way you do those things into your 50s, like me with,

• 2:18:53Speaker 01

  I had this little shoulder thing, but no biggie. Um, is, and continue to get stronger is by doing the little things. And if you do the little things, you stay strong and healthy. If you don't, you are the person who's complaining about your back, who can't deadlift, or you're using a deadlift bar with like elevated handles from plates, you know, you're, you know, it's not, not good. It's, it's, it's just you're becoming weaker through negligence, which is.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  It's excusable, but it takes three minutes to do some hyperextensions.

• 2:19:26Chris Williamson?

  For most educated people as well that are into their training, they know that what they're doing is trading short-term gain for long-term fragility because they've got five minutes left at the end of their session and they're going to go and do another set of bicep curls instead of going to go and do some hyperextensions or whatever, right? Like it's always a trade-off and there's a level of ignorance where you're allowed to not do the thing that you didn't know you were supposed to do.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:19:56Chris Williamson?

  But for most people that listen to you and listen to me, like my brother, you know that you should be doing lower back work. You know that you should be doing some mobility work. You know that you should be getting your heart rate above 170. You know that you should be going low and slow. You know, you need to be walking after meals, the 10-minute walk, post-prandial thing. Like you know, these things, ignorance is no longer an excuse for you.

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it's all out there. I mean, especially since, and I talk about mobility in the book, it's basically get your knee behind your, each knee behind your glutes at least once per day.

• 2:20:24Chris Williamson?

  Like a couch stretch?

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, like a couch stretch, like Kelly Starrett talks about, or just a lunge where you're stretching your hip flexors out. Cause sitting, walking, almost everything is like knee in front of the glutes, right? You could skip like Stu McMillan, but then you have to have the confidence to be a skipper.

• 2:20:39Chris Williamson?

  Are you sitting and holding? Is this more like a Yin yoga type?

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could do it. I talk about just getting your knee behind your glutes or your foot up on a chair or stool and stretching that out if you're at the airport or something. I'll do, you know, 10 seconds per side, three times per side.

• 2:20:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  You want to try and squat down once per day, as I talked about, like sumo squat, put elbow on inside one knee and then looking up, being able to look up from the squatted position, point directly overhead. Most people can't do this right away. They have to, you know, start here and gradually, you know, over a week or so, get to the point where they can look straight up at their finger. And then you want to be able to do it to the other side too, right? What are you doing here? You're getting stretching through neck, thoracic spine, shoulders. It's not, look, there are great mobility programs, but most people don't make the time or have the time. These are the minimum, right? You do the squatting things, you do a couple of those. Then I talk about doing reverse, what gymnasts will call, like kids would call like the crab

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  pose where you, you're in a reverse tabletop, where you're, you know, you can push up for shoulder extension. I don't have like excessively good shoulder extension, but I can get my shoulders behind me, no problem. You know, you have horrible shoulder extension. Okay. So working on that a little bit gradually. And then there's something in there that I didn't develop, which is called, which I, which is really cool called the founder's pose. And I describe it there. It's from, it looks a little bit like a chair sit in yoga, but it's actually for the posterior chain. And I talk about that. And that's described there. It's someone else's creation. I want to be clear and I credit him.

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  It was really, really cool. And those four things take five minutes to do maximum. You can do them anywhere. You can do them watching Netflix. You can do them at your desk. You can do them spread throughout the day to maintain some level of mobility. The other thing is use a full range of motion in your resistance training sets.

• 2:22:27Chris Williamson?

  Strength is gained through the range it's trained.

• 2:22:29Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good. I like that. Full range of motion and holding tension on the stretched position, not, you know, indefinitely, right? Don't turn it into an isometric, but you know, really like on your hamstring curls, making sure that you're setting the machine such that on your seated or lying leg curls, you're really holding tension in the stretch, not passively stretching. And I find like my range of motion is pretty darn good. It's not amazing. You know, I was real stiff for a bit in my mid-back and I did some work to get over that. You just move better, you'll feel better, you'll be more comfortable. So yes, I think that what you're pointing out, that there's really no excuse for people once they have the knowledge, gets to a deeper psychology.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  I don't want to parse this, you know, infinitum, but there are two things that I think are worth stating out loud. One is that if you're somebody who's in pursuit of taking care of yourself and doing well, there are going to be people that say like, you're doing all this stuff all the time. You're doing all this stuff all the time. Like what is this? These are the people that when I would go to scientific meetings, would give me shit for not drinking on the first night. I had a rule, I don't go out the first night, but you find me on night three of a five-day meeting and all day I'm rocking and like I'm engaged, I'm learning. I'm not at a meeting, it's socialized, but I do some of it. But I'm learning, I'm getting techniques, I'm there to work, okay? And they're talking about their hangover, they look like garbage.

• 2:23:52Speaker 01

  And over the years that accumulates for them and it accumulates for me in a positive way. So people will give you a hard time for exercising. They'll give you a hard time for taking good care of yourself. And I do think that the other thing is there is a certain loneliness that comes with being the person who's really diligent. It's a different community of people that I can call at 7:00 AM and go, you want to work out? And it's like, you might say, hey, listen, I was up way too late. Or you might say, yeah, let's go. It's a, your friend group changes. I mean, I have a friend who used to work with people from like really troubled backgrounds. And he would say like, somebody would occasionally make it out of that world and just leave completely. But many times they would get themselves into all sorts of financial and social messes

• 2:24:37Speaker 01

  because they would continue to like kind of revert to this world they grew up in.

• 2:24:41Chris Williamson?

  You've heard me talk about this lonely chapter thing, right? Like this is the whole idea behind that, that there is a period where you are so developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed, that you built your new one and you keep looking back and you're tempted.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  I think Martha Beck calls this the, the empty elevator.

• 2:24:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  You're just, you know.

• 2:25:00Chris Williamson?

  Between floors.

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  Between floors.

• 2:25:01Chris Williamson?

  That's beautiful.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the empty elevator. And then you get there and you realize, well, there are other people who've also felt lonely, who are now in this place, who are doing cool things. And it takes a strength of character to say, no, I'm not going to do that. And yes, I'm going to do this. And, and to also not be defiant and also still be able to go to Thanksgiving and still, yeah, you don't.

• 2:25:22Chris Williamson?

  Better than you.

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's not about better or worse, it's just different. And that, I think that people fear being lonely and I understand, like I get it, you know, your drinking buddies or your, you're eating lousy food buddies. The first night we land in a city, my team always likes to go out to dinner. I'm always in the hotel taking care of myself because I want to have the full week of vigor. And they do great, but they're younger than I am.

• 2:25:50Chris Williamson?

  We'll see, we'll see that because we're going to be in New York together next week. Last time that we spoke, you were telling me that you were teaching an octopus to use an iPad.

• 2:25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:58Chris Williamson?

  How's that going?

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  But she died because.

• 2:26:03Chris Williamson?

  Was she electrocuted?

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  No, she, she died because she laid eggs and they die after they lay eggs. So they live about two years. Yeah. No, no, well, they lay eggs and then the eggs get fertilized by a male and then they die. This is the life cycle of the octopus. So I didn't know how old she was when I got her. They don't tell you, it's hard to, to, to know. And you have some sense, but yeah, she was in her second year. So she, she was really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was a male, but that was pure projection, right? And then I named him Van Gogh because he was a starry night octopus.

• 2:26:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you replace with a new one?

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  That one died too.

• 2:26:47Chris Williamson?

  Maybe you shouldn't have kids.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:26:51Chris Williamson?

  Fucking strummers like looking around all the time, like just waiting.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  The, both of these octopuses were old. They were old.

• 2:26:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were, they were in.

• 2:27:01Chris Williamson?

  Have you given up on the octopus thing for now?

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  No, heck no. I have a new tropical tank, I got the dog, I got the other freshwater tank, hell no. But I need to get a younger octopus.

• 2:27:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Like a purebred newborn on a puppy octopus.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  I just need, I need either a male octopus or I need a younger octopus.

• 2:27:22Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe that you weren't able to discern whether or not you bought a male or a female. Who the fuck are you getting this from? Some bloke on Venice Beach, I swear.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  No, I get them legally, but let's just put it this way, their fate would have been far worse if they hadn't come to me.

• 2:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Chris Williamson?

  Salvaged an octopus.

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  So have not done that yet, but I will say that Van Gogh was spectacularly smart and would sit down in front of the coral and mimic the coral. It was awesome. It was, it was so cool. They're a little bit sadistic, which is a little bit troubling. I think we should probably talk about this so I can get over it. We're in that like second phase of the trauma thing. In all seriousness, like the weird thing about octopuses, they're a little bit of like drama queens because they're, they play with you. So like I would hand feed Van Gogh and she would take the fish and sometimes she would just eat the fish, you know, and give it to her on a forceps. And other times she would take it and she stuffed it against the glass of the aquarium

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  and slowly eat the, eat the fish, then take a nap halfway through. And I was like, oh my God, these octopuses are pretty brutal.

• 2:28:31Chris Williamson?

  Kind of ruthless.

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then sometimes she would just like play with it, you know, and that's rough, you know? A dog is a benevolent creature. They're going to eat their food, that's it. A cat will play with its prey.

• 2:28:41Chris Williamson?

  Cephalopods are motherfuckers.

• 2:28:43Speaker 01

  I, I like cephalopods, I like cuttlefish. I had those for years, kept those alive for a long time, by the way.

• 2:28:49Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  Thank you. So it was a little disturbing to see the octopus sadistically play with and partially eat its food. Yeah, we don't like to think about the animal kingdom that way, but if you look at nature is metal, that account.

• 2:29:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that'll, that'll teach you some stuff pretty quick. You got to get on a plane, my brother.

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:29:10Chris Williamson?

  I love you to bits.

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  Did you get on a plane?

• 2:29:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you got to get on a plane. No, I'm seeing you on Monday, sorry, Tuesday, I'm going to be in New York, you'll be there. We'll do, we'll try and get Rick and a couple of other people.

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  So we could do a wrap-up. So, well, I should just properly say, I should say thank you for hosting me. Grateful for your friendship. Thanks for supporting me through this book, for taking my calls at odd hours of my sanity. Thanks for supporting my, restoring my sanity. And I'm so glad we're neighbors.

• 2:29:39Chris Williamson?

  Me too.

• 2:29:39Speaker 01

  And fun to work out with you this morning.

• 2:29:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're the best. Why should people go to get the book?

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  Protocolsbook.com will put links to all the places you can buy books and different, the books in different languages. The audiobook is read by me in my voice. It's 19 hours long.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  But you can hop to a particular section, learn what you want to learn and then put it away, come back to it anytime.

• 2:30:01Chris Williamson?

  Question, question that I like to ask authors. What is an insight from the book, either an intervention or an area or something that you think most people are going to skip over, but you wish that they didn't?

• 2:30:14Speaker 01

  The wacky eye movement thing to fall back asleep.

• 2:30:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, we talked about that last time that we were together. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  I think people will think it's too crazy, but it's, but it costs nothing and it works and it will get you back to sleep because it confuses your body awareness system. You need to forget where your limbs are.

• 2:30:29Chris Williamson?

  It is really fucking like dizzying when you do it.

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  It, you need to forget about your body position in order to fall asleep. That's a prerequisite to falling asleep. So that will help. I think the one that people will skip over frankly, is the personal development.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Thing around how to finally let go of the difficult things that are you're still carrying forward. You know, I can say 15 minutes of journaling on the hard thing. One day and then subsequently on three more days. The data from Penn and Baker and others show conclusively. It's a super powerful technique, but people just don't do it. And we should ask ourselves, why don't they do it? And I think because the thing is hard and also nowadays getting people to write for 15 minutes is tough. I learned a lot about focus, overcoming procrastination and scruffing oneself into doing hard things and writing this book. And I thought I was pretty good at doing.

• 2:31:24Chris Williamson?

  When I have to write someone a card, but if it's someone's birthday or whatever, I realize I haven't done this in so physically writing a thing. I haven't done this in so long, I've basically forgotten how to do it. But Peterson, before he did 12 rules and then 12 more, there's 24 there. The original answer, the original place that that was born out of was a list of 44 rules on Quora. Remember that place is a website where people can answer questions.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:48Chris Williamson?

  And somebody asked Jordan, what are your rules for a good life or something like that? And he just listed 40 that include like pet a cat when you see it on the street. Don't bother children when they're skateboarding.

• 2:31:58Speaker 01

  Love that one.

• 2:31:58Chris Williamson?

  Don't let your children do anything that let that means that you don't like them, et cetera, et cetera. And one of his that I remember from that was if memory still upset you, full comma, write them down, full stop. And it's like so much of this stuff is pointing in the same direction. Dude, you're awesome. Box fantastic. I'm glad that you're not insane, but you are a little bit short sighted now. I'll see you in New York next week.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Chris. You're a gentleman, a scholar and a beast.

• 2:32:23Chris Williamson?

  Big love. Goodbye, my beauties.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 2:32:26Speaker 02

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