#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships

0:00:04 The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his fifth time on the podcast.
0:00:12 He is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and is an amazing scientist, teacher, human
0:00:17 being, and someone I’m grateful to be able to call a close friend.
0:00:24 Also, he has a book coming out next year that you should pre-order now called protocols
0:00:26 and operating manual for the human body.
0:00:30 And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor.
0:00:32 Check them out in the description.
0:00:34 That’s the best way to support this podcast.
0:00:41 We got AC for naps, element for electrolytes, HG1 for nutrition, Shopify for e-commerce,
0:00:46 NetSuite for business management software, and BetterHelp for mental health.
0:00:48 Choose wisely, my friends.
0:00:52 Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me,
0:00:54 go to lexfreedman.com/contact.
0:00:56 And now onto the full line of reads.
0:00:58 As always, no ads in the middle.
0:01:03 I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
0:01:04 I enjoy their stuff.
0:01:05 Maybe you will too.
0:01:11 This episode is brought to you by ASleep and it’s Pod 4 Ultra.
0:01:17 First of all, Pod 4 is an improvement over the Pod 3, which was already awesome.
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0:02:14 This episode is also brought to you by Element.
0:02:18 The drink that Andrew and I consume a lot of during the episode.
0:02:23 I drink a lot of element almost, not almost on every single podcast episode.
0:02:24 That’s just what I drink.
0:02:26 I put element in the water.
0:02:29 I take, I have one next to me right now.
0:02:33 A power rated zero bottle with 28 fluid ounces.
0:02:36 Fill it up with water, put one packet of element in there.
0:02:40 Usually watermelon salt, mix it all up, put in the fridge.
0:02:46 And about 30 minutes later, there’s cold, refreshing deliciousness.
0:02:51 But yeah, in the Texas heat when I’m doing the long runs or heart training sessions,
0:02:57 like I just did 10 rounds the other day in grappling, no drinks.
0:02:59 I usually don’t like to drink during training.
0:03:03 So afterwards, you’re just your body is completely dehydrated.
0:03:07 And that’s such an amazing feeling to replenish it with all the electrolytes you need.
0:03:10 So, and especially when it’s cold and delicious.
0:03:11 I love it.
0:03:14 Get a sample pack for free with any purchase.
0:03:17 Try it at drink element.com/lex.
0:03:23 This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all in one daily drink to
0:03:25 support better health and peak performance.
0:03:30 It’s kind of hilarious how when Andrew and I hang out, how the
0:03:34 supplementation and the diet and just our way of being is on point.
0:03:37 There’s a lot of AG1 consumed.
0:03:38 There’s a lot of element consumed.
0:03:43 And there’s a lot of ground beef or steak consumed.
0:03:44 On a regular basis.
0:03:48 We’ve been planning to run together more, but we haven’t quite done that.
0:03:54 It’s mostly my fault because running has just been such a solo thing for me.
0:03:58 I really don’t remember the last time I ever run with anybody.
0:04:04 I get so much into my head that I just feel like I’m even more introverted
0:04:06 than I usually am.
0:04:08 Like I lose myself inside my mind.
0:04:12 It’s become such a meditative process that to do running with another
0:04:15 person, it just feels a little bit weird.
0:04:19 I feel like I wouldn’t be able to sort of contribute to the conversation.
0:04:23 If there’s a conversation and also like pacing wise, there’s a certain pace
0:04:27 where conversation is still possible, but it’s a little uncomfortable.
0:04:32 So, and I can’t really think at that pace that well and talk.
0:04:33 I already struggled talking.
0:04:33 So I don’t know.
0:04:38 We’ll have to figure it out, but he’s just a great person to work out with
0:04:41 and a great person to talk to that we’ll have to figure it out.
0:04:46 Anyway, AG1 is always part of the picture and I drink it twice a day.
0:04:48 It’s the foundation of my nutrition.
0:04:54 It’s the thing when I consume it, I feel like I’ve got all my bases covered.
0:04:57 No matter the crazy mental or the physical stuff that I’m going to do.
0:05:04 They’ll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.
0:05:09 This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed
0:05:14 for anyone to sell stuff anywhere with a great looking online store.
0:05:17 It took me a really short time to set everything up.
0:05:19 Let’s read my dot com slash store.
0:05:21 There’s a few shirts on there.
0:05:26 I actually got a Leonard Skinner shirt via Shopify recently, and I love it.
0:05:32 I need to get more rock music, like classic rock shirts.
0:05:36 They brought so much joy to me, I just want to celebrate it.
0:05:40 I don’t know why, but that seems like a cool way to celebrate it,
0:05:45 especially if it’s like a nice Leonard Skinner or Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd shirt.
0:05:48 You know, a shirt I haven’t quite found that’s a go to night.
0:05:51 Sure one exists is SRV, Steve A. Vaughn.
0:05:53 I just don’t want a generic one.
0:05:54 I want a super cool one.
0:06:00 Him and Jimi Hendrix have a certain way about them that requires a super cool shirt,
0:06:01 not just a generic one.
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0:06:24 It is the machine inside the machine where the company is the metamachine
0:06:28 and society is the metamachine is it’s a collection of groups and companies.
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0:07:15 I wonder how many companies there are in the world.
0:07:20 It’s kind of cool to think that there’s 37,000 companies.
0:07:26 Each one with a person who founded or a collection of people founded the head of dream
0:07:32 and that are working hard to bring that dream into a reality, trying to survive,
0:07:37 trying to thrive, trying to make money, trying to put food on the table
0:07:39 of all the families involved, all the responsibility of that.
0:07:40 I don’t know.
0:07:44 Those are all little puzzles, little battles, sometimes big battles fought.
0:07:48 It’s cool. I love humans.
0:07:50 This is one of the ways that humans are awesome.
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0:08:03 This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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0:08:14 It’s kind of incredible the power of language, the power of spoken language
0:08:20 to explore the human mind, because in order to generate speech,
0:08:24 if you take an idea that’s in your head, as you compress that idea
0:08:31 into something that could be represented in comprehensible sequence of words
0:08:35 and you have to speak it within the full context of everything
0:08:37 that’s been spoken previously and everything that’s been going on around.
0:08:40 And then there’s another human being on the other side that hears it.
0:08:46 First of all, they have to hear it correctly, you know, if it’s noisy or whatever,
0:08:50 or maybe their whole mind is focused on some aspect of the scene
0:08:54 that prevents them from being able to really hear what’s being said.
0:09:01 But once they do, they have to then interpret it and decode, decompress
0:09:06 the thing that was represented in language into an idea
0:09:11 and visualize it, integrate it, load it in to the brain
0:09:16 and make sense of that idea again in the full context of everything that’s happened before.
0:09:20 And in that way, back and forth, humans talk
0:09:24 and make sense of the world together and make sense of their own mind together.
0:09:29 It’s just cool. It’s cool that that’s even possible.
0:09:34 And it’s cool that that’s actually a powerful way to understand yourself
0:09:35 and to understand the world.
0:09:39 So, yeah, I’m a big fan of talking, of rigorous deep conversation.
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0:10:01 This is the Lex Freeman podcast to support it.
0:10:04 Please check out our sponsors in the description.
0:10:07 And now, dear friends, here’s Andrew Huberman.
0:10:27 You think there’s ever going to be a day when you walk away from podcasting?
0:10:34 Definitely. I mean, I came up within and then on the periphery of
0:10:39 skateboard culture. And for the record, I was not a great skateboarder.
0:10:42 I always have to say that because skateboarders are relentless.
0:10:44 If you call something you didn’t do or whatever.
0:10:48 I mean, I could do a few things and I loved the community.
0:10:50 And I still have a lot of friends in that community.
0:10:53 Jim Fibo at Deluxe, you can look him up.
0:10:55 He’s kind of the man behind the whole scene.
0:10:58 I know Tony Hawk, Danny Whale.
0:11:02 These guys, I got to see them come up and get big and stay big in many cases.
0:11:05 Start huge companies like Danny and call in the case are DC.
0:11:10 Some people have a long life in something, some don’t.
0:11:13 But one thing I observed and learned a lot from in skateboarding
0:11:18 at the level of observing the skateboarders and then the ones that started companies.
0:11:26 And then what I also observed in science and still observe is you do it for a while.
0:11:30 You do it at the highest possible level for you.
0:11:36 And then at some point you pivot and you start supporting the young talent coming in.
0:11:41 In fact, the greatest scientists, people like Richard Axel, Catherine Doolock.
0:11:44 There are many other labs in neuroscience called Diceroth.
0:11:47 They’re not just known for doing great science.
0:11:50 They’re known for mentoring some of the best scientists
0:11:52 that then go on to start their own labs.
0:11:57 And I think in podcasting, I am very fortunate I got in in a fairly early wave,
0:12:02 not the earliest wave, but thanks to your suggestion of doing a podcast, fairly early wave.
0:12:05 And I’ll continue to go as long as it feels right.
0:12:07 And I feel like I’m doing good in the world and providing good.
0:12:10 But I’m already starting to scout talent.
0:12:15 My company that I started with Rob Moore, Psycho Media.
0:12:17 A couple other guys in there, too.
0:12:21 Mike Playback, our photographer Ian Mackie, Chris Ray, Martin Phobes.
0:12:25 We are a company that produces podcasts right now.
0:12:29 That’s Huberman Lab Podcast, but we’re launching a new podcast, Perform with Dr.
0:12:30 Andy Galpin. Nice.
0:12:34 And we want to do more of that kind of thing, finding a really great talent,
0:12:36 highly qualified people, credentialed people.
0:12:40 And I’ve got a new kind of obsession with scouring the Internet,
0:12:46 looking for the young talent in science, in health and related fields.
0:12:50 And so will there be a final episode of the HLP?
0:12:56 Yeah, I mean, Bullet Buster Cancer aside, you know, someday there’ll be
0:12:58 the very last and thank you for your interest in science.
0:13:00 And I’ll clip out.
0:13:05 Yeah, I love the idea of walking away and not be dramatic about it.
0:13:08 Right. When it feels right, you can leave and you can come back whenever
0:13:10 the fuck you want. Right.
0:13:12 John Stewart did this well with the Daily Show.
0:13:16 I think that was during the 2016 election when everybody wanted him to stay on
0:13:18 and he just walked away.
0:13:23 Dave Chappelle, for different reasons, walked away, disappeared, came back,
0:13:25 gave away so much money, didn’t care.
0:13:30 And then came back and was doing like stand up in the park, in the middle of nowhere.
0:13:37 Genius. You have Habib, who undefeated, walks away at the very top of of a sport.
0:13:40 Is he coming back? No, at least we don’t know.
0:13:42 Yeah. Right. You don’t know.
0:13:44 I don’t know if he bears everywhere a word.
0:13:48 Yeah, I think, you know, it’s it’s always a call.
0:13:53 You know, the last few years have been tremendous growth.
0:13:54 We launched in January, 2021.
0:14:00 And even this last year, 2024 has been huge growth, you know, in all sorts of ways.
0:14:02 It’s been wild.
0:14:05 And we have some short form content planned.
0:14:10 30 minute, shorter episodes that really distill down the critical elements.
0:14:15 We’re also thinking about moving to other venues besides podcasting.
0:14:17 So there’s always the thought and the discussion.
0:14:20 But when it comes to like when to hang up your cleats, you know, it’s like
0:14:23 there just comes a natural time where you can do more to mentor
0:14:27 the next generation coming in than focusing on self.
0:14:29 And so there will come a time for that.
0:14:30 And I think it’s critical.
0:14:34 I mean, again, I saw this in skateboarding, like Danny and Colin
0:14:39 and Danny’s brother, Damon, started DC with Ken Block, the driver who unfortunately
0:14:41 passed away a little while ago, rally car driver.
0:14:45 And they eventually sold it, I think, to Quicksilver or something like that.
0:14:50 But they’re all phenomenal talents in their respective areas.
0:14:55 But they brought in the next, you know, the next line of amazing riders.
0:14:58 The plan B thing, you know, Paul Rodriguez for skateboarders, they know who this is.
0:15:03 Now, in science, there are scientists like Feynman, for instance.
0:15:07 I don’t know if anyone can name one of his mentor offspring.
0:15:12 So there are scientists who are phenomenal, like beyond world class, right?
0:15:16 Multi-generational world class who don’t make good mentors.
0:15:19 I’m not saying he wasn’t a good mentor, but that’s not what he’s known for.
0:15:24 And then there are scientists who are known for being excellent scientists and great mentors.
0:15:29 And I think there’s no higher celebration to be had at the end of one’s career.
0:15:32 If you can look back and like, hey, I put some really important knowledge
0:15:35 into the world, people made use of that knowledge.
0:15:36 And guess what?
0:15:45 You spawned all these other scientific offspring or sport offspring or podcast offspring.
0:15:50 I mean, in some ways, we look to Rogan and to some of the other earlier podcasts
0:15:52 is like they, you know, they paved the way.
0:15:55 Rhonda Patrick, first science podcast out there.
0:16:00 So, you know, it eventually the baton passes.
0:16:04 But fortunately, right now, everybody’s active and it and it feels really good.
0:16:07 Yeah. Well, you’re talking about the healthy way to do it.
0:16:14 But there’s also a different kind of way where you have something like Grisha,
0:16:18 Gregori Perlman, the mathematician who refused to accept the Fields Medal.
0:16:20 So he’s one of the greatest living mathematicians.
0:16:24 And he just walked away from mathematics and rejected the Fields Medal.
0:16:26 What did you do after he left mathematics?
0:16:29 Life, private, 100%.
0:16:30 Yeah, I respect that.
0:16:35 He’s become essentially a recluse is these photos of him looking very broke.
0:16:37 Like he could use the money.
0:16:39 He turned away the money.
0:16:40 He turned away everything.
0:16:44 You know, there’s there’s you just have to listen to the inner voice.
0:16:47 You have to listen to yourself and make the decisions that don’t make any sense
0:16:50 for the rest of the world and make sense to you.
0:16:53 I mean, Bob Dylan didn’t show up to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.
0:16:55 That’s punk. Yeah. Yeah.
0:16:58 He probably grew in notoriety for that.
0:17:03 Maybe he just doesn’t like going to Sweden, but it seemed like a big fun trip.
0:17:05 I think they do it in a nice time of years.
0:17:06 But hey, that’s his right.
0:17:07 He earned that right.
0:17:10 I think the best artists aren’t doing it for the prize.
0:17:12 They aren’t doing it for the fame or the money.
0:17:13 They’re doing it because they love the art.
0:17:15 Yeah, that’s the Rick Rubin thing.
0:17:19 You got to verb it through, download your inner thing.
0:17:24 I don’t think we’ve talked about this, that this obsession that I have
0:17:31 about how Rick has this way of being very, very still in his body,
0:17:35 but keeping his mind very active as a practice,
0:17:38 wouldn’t spend some time with him in Italy last June.
0:17:42 And we would tread water in his pool in the morning
0:17:45 and listen to history of rock and roll and hundred songs.
0:17:48 Amazing podcast, by the way.
0:17:49 It is. Yeah.
0:17:52 And then he would spend a fair amount of time during the day, you know,
0:17:56 in this kind of meditative state where his mind is very active, body very still.
0:18:00 And then Carl Diceroth, when he came on my podcast, talked about how he forces
0:18:04 himself to sit still and think in complete sentences late at night after his kids go to sleep.
0:18:10 And, you know, there’s a state of mind, rapid eye movement, sleep,
0:18:13 where your body is completely paralyzed and the mind is extremely active.
0:18:16 And people credit rapid eye movement sleep with some of the more
0:18:20 elaborate emotion filled dreams and the source of many ideas.
0:18:22 And there are other examples.
0:18:28 Einstein, people described him as taking walks around the Princeton campus,
0:18:32 then pausing and would ask him what was going on.
0:18:36 And the idea that his mind was continuing to churn forward at a high rate.
0:18:42 So, you know, this is far from controlled studies,
0:18:47 but we’re talking about some incredible minds and creatives who have a practice of
0:18:51 stilling the body while keeping the mind deliberately very active,
0:18:53 very similar to rapid eye movement sleep.
0:18:56 And then there are a lot of people who also report,
0:18:58 you know, great ideas coming to them in the shower while running.
0:19:04 So, it can be the opposite as well where the body is very active and the mind is perhaps more on
0:19:10 kind of like a default mode network, not really focusing on any one specific thing.
0:19:14 You know, interesting, there’s a bunch of physicists and mathematicians have talked to,
0:19:20 they talk about sleep deprivation and going crazy hours through the night obsessively
0:19:26 pursuing a thing. And then the solution to the problem comes when they finally get rest.
0:19:32 Right. And we know, we just did this sixth episode special series on sleep with Matt Walker,
0:19:39 we know that when you deprive yourself of sleep and then you get sleep,
0:19:43 you get a rebound in rapid eye movement sleep, you get a higher percentage of rapid eye movement
0:19:49 sleep. And Matt talks about this in the podcast and he did an episode on sleep and
0:19:54 creativity, sleep and memory and rapid eye movement sleep comes up multiple times
0:19:59 in that series. There’s also some very interesting stuff about cannabis withdrawal and rapid eye
0:20:05 movement sleep. People are coming off cannabis often will suffer from insomnia, but when they
0:20:09 finally do start sleeping, they like dream like crazy. Cannabis is a very controversial topic
0:20:14 right now. Oh yeah, I saw that what happened. There’s a bunch of drama around episode you
0:20:20 did on cannabis. Yeah, we did an episode about cannabis, talked about the health benefits
0:20:25 and the potential risks, right? It’s neither here nor there. It depends on the person,
0:20:29 depends on the age, depends on genetic background, a number of other things.
0:20:39 We published that episode well over a year ago and it had no issues online, so to speak. And
0:20:46 then a clip of it was put to X where the real action occurs, as you know, your favorite spot.
0:20:56 Yeah, the four ounce gloves as opposed to the 16 ounce gloves that is X versus Instagram or YouTube.
0:21:04 There was kind of an immediate dog pile from a few people in the cannabis research field.
0:21:09 To PhDs and MDs, yeah. There were people on our side. There were people on our side. I mean,
0:21:18 the statement that got things riled up the most was this notion that for certain individuals,
0:21:27 there’s a high potential for inducing psychosis with high THC-containing cannabis. For certain
0:21:36 individuals, not all. That sparked some issues. There was really a split. You see this in different
0:21:44 fields. There was one person in particular who came out swinging with language that, in my opinion,
0:21:50 is not like of the sort that you would use at a university venue, especially among colleagues,
0:21:55 but that’s fine. We’re all grown-ups. Well, for me, from my perspective, it was strangely rude
0:22:08 and it had an air of elitism that, to me, was at the source of the problem during COVID
0:22:14 that led to the distrust of science and the popularization of disrespecting science,
0:22:19 because so many scientists spoke with an arrogance and a douchebaggery that I wish we would have
0:22:25 a little bit less of. Yeah, it’s tough because most academics don’t understand that people
0:22:33 outside the university system, they’re not familiar with the inner workings of science
0:22:40 and the culture. You have to be very careful how you present when you’re a university professor.
0:22:47 He came out swinging in some four-letter-word type language and he was obviously upset about it.
0:22:51 So I simply said what I would say anywhere, which was, “Hey, look, come on the podcast. Let’s chat.”
0:23:01 You tell me where I’m wrong and let’s discuss. And fortunately, he agreed. And initially,
0:23:05 he said, “Well, no, how can I be sure you’re not going to misrepresent me?” And so I said,
0:23:10 “We got on a DM, then an email, then eventually phone call and just said, “Hey, listen,
0:23:14 like you’re welcome to record the whole conversation. We’ve never done a gotcha on
0:23:18 my podcast.” And let’s just get to the heart of the matter. I think this little controversy is
0:23:26 perfect kindling for a really great discussion. And he had some other conditions that we worked
0:23:31 out and I felt like, cool, like he’s really interested. You get a very different person
0:23:35 on the phone than you do on Twitter. I will say he’s been very collegial and that conversation
0:23:39 is on the schedule. I said, “We’ll fly you out. We’ll put you up.” He said, “No, he wants to fly
0:23:45 himself. He really wants to make sure that there’s kind of a space between, I think, some of the
0:23:50 perception of science and health podcasts in the academic community is that it’s all designed
0:23:56 to sell something.” No, we run ads so it can be free to everyone else. But I think, look, in the
0:24:02 end, he agreed and I’m excited for the conversation. It was interesting because in the wake of that
0:24:10 little exchange, there’s been a bunch of press from traditional press about cannabis has now
0:24:17 surpassed alcohol in many cultures as within the United States as, when I say cultures, I mean,
0:24:23 demographics, the United States as the drug of choice. There have been people highlighting
0:24:29 the issues of potential psychosis in high THC containing. And so it’s kind of interesting to
0:24:34 see how traditional media is sort of on board certain elements that I put forward. And I think
0:24:39 there’s some controversy as to whether or not the different strains, the Indicas and Sativas are
0:24:44 biologically different, et cetera. So we’ll get down into the weeds, pun intended, during that one.
0:24:51 And I’m excited. It’s the first time that we’ve responded to a direct criticism online about
0:24:56 scientific content in a way that really promoted like, “Oh, here, the idea of inviting a particular
0:25:02 guest.” And so it’s great. Let’s get a guest to his expert in cannabis. I believe I could be wrong
0:25:06 about this, but he’s a behavioral neuroscientist. It’s a slightly different training. But look,
0:25:14 he seems highly credentialed to be fun and we welcome that kind of exchange. I’m not being
0:25:19 diplomatic. I’m just saying, it’s cool. He’s coming on. And he was friendly on the phone, right?
0:25:24 He literally came out online and was basically like kind of like F you, like F this and F you,
0:25:27 but you get someone on the phone and it’s like, “Hey, how’s it going?” And they’re like, “Oh,
0:25:32 yeah, well, there was an immediate apology of like, “Hey, listen, I came out, normally I’m like,
0:25:37 not like that, but online.” You get a different… Okay, listen. So it’s a little bit like, it’s
0:25:40 a little bit like jiu-jitsu, right? People say all sorts of things, I guess, but if they, if you’re
0:25:45 like, “All right, well, let’s go,” then it’s probably a different story. It’s not like jiu-jitsu
0:25:49 because in jiu-jitsu people don’t talk shit because they know what the consequences are. Let me,
0:25:56 let me just say, on-mic and off-mic, you have been very respectful towards this person. And I look
0:26:01 up to you and respect you and admire the fact that you have been. That said, to me, that guy was
0:26:07 being a dick. And when you graciously, politely invited him on the podcast, he was still talking
0:26:12 down to you the whole time. So I really admire and look forward to listening to you talk to him,
0:26:22 but I hope others don’t do that. Like, you are a positive, humble voice exploring all the interesting
0:26:29 aspects of science. Like, you want to learn. If you’ve got anything wrong, you want to learn about
0:26:35 it. The way he was being a dick, I was just hurt a little bit, not because of him, but because,
0:26:41 like, there’s some people I really, really admire, brilliant scientists, that are not their best
0:26:47 selves on Twitter, on X. Definitely. I don’t understand what happens to their brain. Well,
0:26:53 they regress. They regress. And they also are protected. You know, when you remove the,
0:27:00 I mean, no scientific argument should ever come to physical blows. But when you remove the real
0:27:06 world thing of being right in front of somebody, people will throw all sorts of stones at a distance,
0:27:11 you know, an over a wall. And they’ve got their wife or their husband or their boyfriend or their
0:27:16 dog or their cat to go cuddle with them afterwards. But you get in a room and it’s like,
0:27:25 confrontational people in real life are pretty rare. But hopefully, if they do it, they’re like
0:27:28 willing to back it up with knowledge in this case, right? We’re not talking about physical
0:27:33 altercation. Yeah, he kept coming and he kept putting on conditions. How do I know you want
0:27:35 this? And I was like, well, you can record the conversation. How do I know you want that? Listen,
0:27:40 we’ll pay for you to come out. How do you know? And eventually, he just kind of relented. And
0:27:46 to his credit, you know, he’s agreed to come on. I mean, he still has to show up. But once he does,
0:27:49 you know, we’ll treat him right like we would any other guest. Yeah,
0:27:54 you treat people really well. And I just hope that people are a little bit nicer on the internet.
0:27:58 Yeah, well, you know, X is an interesting one because it thickens your skin,
0:28:03 you know, just to go on there. I mean, you have to be ready to deal with.
0:28:09 Sure. But I can still criticize people for being douchebags because like that’s still not good
0:28:15 inspiring behavior, like especially for scientists that should be sort of symbols of
0:28:22 scientific thinking, which requires intellectual humility. Humility is a big part of that.
0:28:28 And Twitter is a good place to illustrate that. Yeah. Eight years ago, I used to, I was a student in
0:28:34 TA, then instructor, and then directed a Cold Spring Harbor course on visual neuroscience.
0:28:39 These are summer courses that explore different topics. And at night, we would host
0:28:45 what we hoped were battles in front of the students, where you’d get two people on it,
0:28:49 you know, would it be neural prosthetics or molecular tools that would first, you know,
0:28:53 restore vision to the blind kind of arguments? You know, kind of like it’s kind of a silly
0:28:58 argument because there’s going to be a combination of both, right? But you’d get these great arguments.
0:29:04 But the arguments were always couched in data. And occasionally you’d get somebody would go like,
0:29:10 or would curse or something. But it was the rare, very, very well placed, you know,
0:29:15 insult. It wasn’t, you know, coming out swinging. I think ultimately, you know,
0:29:19 Twitter is a record of people’s behavior, that the internet is a record of people’s behavior.
0:29:23 And here I’m not talking about news reports about people’s behavior. I’m talking about
0:29:29 how people show up online is really important. You’ve always carried yourself with a ton of
0:29:34 composure and respect. And, you know, you just, you would hope that people would grow from that
0:29:38 example. Well, I’ll tell you that the podcasters that I’m scouting, it’s their energy, but it’s
0:29:45 also how they treat other people, how they respond to comments. And, you know, we’re blessed to have
0:29:49 pretty significant reach when we put out a podcast, like someone else’s podcast,
0:29:54 it goes far and wide. So like a skateboard team, like a laboratory where you’re selecting people
0:29:59 to be in your lab, you’re, you want to pick people that you would enjoy working with and
0:30:06 they’re collegial. Etiquette and etiquette is lacking nowadays. But you’re in the suit and tie,
0:30:11 bringing it back. Bringing it back. You said that your conversation with James Hollis,
0:30:15 a Jungian psychoanalyst had a big impact on you. What do you mean?
0:30:22 James Hollis is a 84-year-old Jungian psychoanalyst who’s written 17 books,
0:30:27 including “Under Saturn Shadow,” which is on the healing and trauma of men, the Eden project,
0:30:33 excuse me, which is about relationships and creating a life. I discovered James Hollis in
0:30:37 online lecture that was recorded, I think, in San Diego. It’s on YouTube. The audio is terrible
0:30:44 called “Creating a Life.” And this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span. I can’t remember.
0:30:47 And I was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time. I just found the most
0:30:57 incredible lecture I’ve ever heard. And he talks about the shadow. He talks about your developmental
0:31:06 upbringing and how you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents’ tendencies and values
0:31:11 in certain areas. He talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages
0:31:16 of life to live a full life. So it’s always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast.
0:31:22 And he wasn’t able to travel. So our team went out to DC and sat down with him. We rarely do that
0:31:28 nowadays. People come to our studio and he came in. He had had some surgeries recently and he
0:31:37 kind of came in with some assistance from a cane and then sat down and just blew my mind.
0:31:44 From start to finish, he didn’t miss a syllable. And every sentence that he spoke was
0:31:51 like a quotable sentence with real potency and actionable items. I think one of the things that
0:31:58 was most striking to me was how he said when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response
0:32:05 and we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or
0:32:11 while seated or while lying down. It doesn’t have to be meditation, but it could be that
0:32:17 we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we
0:32:21 really want. And that if we do that practice repeatedly, 10 minutes a day here, 15 minutes a day
0:32:29 there, that we start to really touch into our unique gifts and the things that make us each
0:32:35 us and the directions we need to take. But that so often we just stay in stimulus response. We just
0:32:43 do, do, do, do, do, which is great. We have to be productive. But we miss those important messages.
0:32:49 And interestingly, he also put forward this idea of what is this, like get up, shut up,
0:32:55 suit up, yeah, something like that, like get out of bed, suit up, and shut up and get to work. He
0:33:02 also has that in him, kind of a Goggins type mindset. So be able to turn off all this self-reflection
0:33:07 and self-analysis and just get shit done. Get shit done, but then also take dedicated time and stop
0:33:12 and just let stuff geyser to the surface from the unconscious mind. And he quotes Shakespeare and
0:33:20 he quotes Jung and he quotes everybody through history with incredible accuracy and in exactly
0:33:26 the way needed to drive home a point. But that conversation to me was one that I really felt
0:33:32 like, okay, if I don’t wake up tomorrow for whatever reason, that one’s in the can and I
0:33:38 feel really great about it. To me, it’s the most important guest recording we’ve ever done,
0:33:51 in particular, because he has wisdom. And while I hope he lives to be 204, chances are he’s got
0:33:57 another, what, 20, 30 years with us, hopefully more. But I really, really wanted to capture that
0:34:03 information and get it out there. So I’m very, very proud of that one. And he’s the kind of guy
0:34:08 that anyone listens to him, young old male, female, whatever, and you’re going to get something of
0:34:17 value. What do you think about this idea of the shadow that the good and the bad that we repress
0:34:22 that hides from plain sight when we analyze ourselves that’s there? Do you think there’s
0:34:29 like an ocean that we don’t have direct access to? Yes. Yeah, Jung said it, we have all things
0:34:33 inside of us and we do and some people are more in touch with those than others and
0:34:37 some people that’s repressed. I mean, does that mean that we could all be
0:34:44 horrible people or marvelous people, benevolent people? Perhaps, I think that
0:34:53 thankfully, more often than not, people lean away from the violent and harmful parts of their
0:35:05 shadow. But I think spending time thinking about one’s shadow, shadows is super important. How
0:35:10 else are we going to grow? Otherwise, we have these unconscious blind spots of denial or
0:35:17 repression or whatever the psychiatrists tell us. But it clearly exists within all of us. I mean,
0:35:24 we have neural circuits for rage. We all do. We have neural circuits for altruism and no one’s
0:35:29 born without these things. And some people, they’re atrophied and some people, they’re hypertrophied,
0:35:37 but looking inward and recognizing what’s there is key. Or positive things like creativity. Maybe
0:35:43 that’s what Rick Rubin is accessing when you go silent, silent body, active mind. That’s interesting.
0:35:51 What is it for you? What place do you go to that generates ideas, that helps you generate ideas?
0:35:55 I have a lot of new practices around this. I mean, I’m always exploring for protocols.
0:36:03 I have to. It’s like in my nature. When I went and spent time with Rick, I tried to adopt his
0:36:08 practice of staying very still and just letting stuff come to the surface or the Dyserothian way
0:36:16 of formulating complete sentences and while being still in the body. What I found works better is
0:36:22 what my good friend Tim Armstrong does to write music. He writes music every day. He’s a music
0:36:29 producer. He’s obviously a singer, guitar player for Rancid. And he’s helped dozens and dozens and
0:36:37 dozens of female pop artists and punk rock artists write great songs. And many of the famous songs
0:36:44 that you’ve heard from other artists, Tim helped them write. Tim wakes up sometimes in the middle
0:36:49 of the night and what he does is he’ll start drawing or painting. What he’s done and Joni
0:36:57 Mitchell talks about this too. You find some creative outlet that’s like 15 degrees off-center
0:37:02 from your main creative outlet and you do that thing. For me, that’s drawing. I like doing
0:37:07 anatomical drawings, neuroscience-based drawings, drawn neurons, that kind of thing. And if I do
0:37:14 that for a little while, my mind starts churning on the nervous system and biology. And then I come
0:37:21 up with areas I’d like to explore for the podcast, ways I’d like to address certain topics. Right
0:37:25 now, I’m very interested in autonomic control. A beautiful paper came out that shows that anyone
0:37:31 can learn to control their pupil sizes without changing luminance through a biofeedback mechanism.
0:37:37 And that gives them control over their so-called automatic autonomic nervous system.
0:37:42 And I’ve been looking at what the circuitry is and it’s beautiful. So I’ll draw the circuitry
0:37:47 that we know underlies autonomic function. And as I’m doing that, I’m thinking, oh, what about
0:37:50 autonomic control and those people that supposedly can control their pupil size? Then you go in and
0:37:54 there’s a paper published in Nature Press, one of the Nature Journals, and there’s a recent paper
0:37:58 on this. They’re like, oh, cool. And then we talk about this. And then how could this be put into a
0:38:04 kind of a post? So doing things that are about 15 degrees off-center from your main thing is a great
0:38:09 way to access, I believe, the circuits for, in Tim’s case, painting goes to songwriting.
0:38:16 I think for Joni Mitchell, that was also the case. I think it was drawing and painting to
0:38:21 singing and songwriting. For Rick, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s listening to podcasts. I
0:38:26 don’t know. That’s his business. Do you have anything that you like to focus on that allows you
0:38:32 then an easier transition into your main creative work? No, I’d really like to focus on emptiness
0:38:39 and silence. So I pick the dragon I have to slay. So whatever the problem I have to work on. And I
0:38:46 just sit there and stare at it. I don’t know how fucking linear you are. And if there’s no, if
0:38:55 you’re tired, I’ll just sit. I believe in the power of just waiting. And usually, I’ll stop being
0:39:00 tired where their energy rises from somewhere or an idea pops from somewhere. But there needs to
0:39:06 be a silence and an emptiness. It’s an empty room, just me and the dragon. And we wait. That’s it.
0:39:10 Like if it’s usually with programming, you’re thinking about a particular design. Like how do
0:39:17 I design this thing to solve this problem? Any cognitive enhancers? I’ve got quite the gallery
0:39:22 in front of me. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Should we walk through this? Yeah. This is not a sales thing.
0:39:28 I tend to do this bounce back and forth. Your refrigerator just happened to have a lot of
0:39:32 different choices. So water. This is all my refrigerator. I know, right? There’s no food in
0:39:38 there. There’s water. There’s element, which they now have canned. Yeah. And yes, they’re a podcast
0:39:41 sponsor for both of us, but that’s not why I cracked one of these open. I like them provided
0:39:46 they’re cold. And that’s, by the way, my least favorite flavors I was saying. That’s the reason
0:39:51 it’s still left in the fridge. The cherry one is really good. The black cherry. There’s an orange
0:39:56 one. Yeah. I pushed the sled this morning and pulled the sled from my workout at the gym. And
0:40:03 it was hot today here in Austin. So some salt is good. And then Matina Yorba mate, zero sugar,
0:40:07 full confession. I helped develop this. I’m a partial owner, but I love Yorba mate. Half
0:40:11 Argentine been drinking mate since I was a little kid. There’s actually a photo somewhere on the
0:40:15 internet when I’m like three sitting on my grandfather’s lap sipping mate out the gourd.
0:40:22 And then this, my fun, interesting, this is just a little bit of coffee with a scoop of
0:40:27 Brian Johnson gave me cocoa, just like pure unsweetened cocoa. So I put that in chocolate and
0:40:32 I like it. It just for the taste. Well, actually nukes my appetite. And since we’re not going out
0:40:36 to dinner tonight until later, I figure that’s good. Yeah, Brian’s an interesting one, right?
0:40:41 He’s really pushing this thing. The optimization of everything. Yeah. Although he just heard his
0:40:45 ankle. He posted a photo. He heard his ankle. So now he’s injecting BPC body protection compound
0:40:49 157, which many, many people are taking by the way. I did an episode on peptides.
0:40:54 I should just say, you know, BPC 157, one of the known effects in animal models
0:41:01 is angiogenesis, like development of new vasculature, which can be great in some context,
0:41:05 but also if you have a tumor, you don’t really want to vascularize that tumor anymore.
0:41:13 So I worry about people taking BPC 157 continually, but and there’s very little human data. I think
0:41:18 there’s like one study and it’s a lousy one. So a lot of animal data, some of the peptides
0:41:23 are interesting. However, there’s one that I’ve experimented with a little bit called pinealin,
0:41:30 which I find even if I’ve just taken it twice a week before sleep, then it times it seems to do
0:41:36 something to the circadian timekeeping mechanism because then on other days, when I don’t take it,
0:41:41 I get unbelievably tired at that time that normally I would do the injection.
0:41:44 These are things that I’ll experiment with for a couple of weeks and then typically stop,
0:41:49 maybe try something else. But I stay out of things that really stimulate any of the major
0:41:54 hormone pathways when it comes to peptides. That’s actually a really good question of
0:41:58 how do you experiment? Like, how long do you try to think to figure out if it works for you?
0:42:03 Well, I’m very sensitive to these things. And I have been doing a lot of things for a long time.
0:42:07 So if I add something in, it’s always one thing at a time. And I notice right away if it does not
0:42:12 make me feel good. Like there’s a lot of excitement about some of the so-called growth hormone secretogogs,
0:42:18 hypermoralin, testimoralin, surmoralin. I’ve experimented a little bit with those in the past
0:42:24 and they’ve nuked my rapini movement sleep, but given me a lot of deep sleep, which doesn’t feel
0:42:32 good to me, but other people like them. I also just generally try and avoid taking peptides that
0:42:35 tap into these hormone pathways because you can run into all sorts of issues, but some people take
0:42:40 them safely. But usually after about four or five days, I know if I like something or I don’t,
0:42:45 and then I move on. But I’m not super adventurous with these things. I know people that will take
0:42:51 cocktails of peptides with multiple things, they’ll try anything. That’s not me. And I do blood work.
0:43:01 But also, I’m mainly reading papers and podcasting and I’m teaching a course next spring.
0:43:06 Stanford, I’m going to do a big undergraduate course. So I’m trying to develop that course
0:43:12 and things like that. So I don’t need to lift more weight or run further than I already do,
0:43:16 which is not that much weight or far as it is. All right. You’re not going to the Olympics. You’re
0:43:21 not trying to truly maximize some aspect of your performance. No, and I’m not trying to get down
0:43:27 below whatever, 7% body fat or something. I don’t have those kinds of goals. So hydration,
0:43:31 electrolytes, caffeine in the form of mate and then this coffee thing. And then here’s
0:43:36 one that I think I brought out for discussion. This is a piece of Nicarat. They’re not a sponsor.
0:43:43 Nicotine is an interesting compound. It will raise blood pressure and it
0:43:50 is probably not safe for everybody. But nicotine is gaining in popularity like crazy,
0:43:55 mainly these pouches that people put in the lip. We’re not talking about smoking, vaping,
0:44:02 dipping or snuffing. My interest in nicotine started, this was in 2010. I was visiting
0:44:08 Columbia Medical School and I was in the office of the great neurobiologist Richard Axel, won the
0:44:14 Nobel Prize, co-recipient with Linda Buck for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction.
0:44:21 Brilliant guy. He’s probably in his late 70s now. Probably. Yeah. And he kept popping nicorette
0:44:25 in his mouth. And I was like, “What’s this about?” And he said, “Oh, well, this was just anecdote,
0:44:29 right?” But he said this. He said, “Oh, well, it protects against Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.”
0:44:33 I said, “It does?” And he goes, “Yeah, I don’t know if he was kidding or not. He’s known for making
0:44:37 jokes.” And then he said that when he used to smoke, it really helped his focus and creativity,
0:44:41 but then he quit smoking because he didn’t want lung cancer. And he found that he couldn’t focus
0:44:47 as well. So he would choose nicorette. So occasionally, like right now, I do a half a piece,
0:44:54 but I’m not rushing. Did you just pop the whole thing in your mouth? So I’ll do a couple milligrams
0:44:59 every now and again. And it definitely sharpens the mind on an empty stomach in particular,
0:45:02 but you fast all day. You’re still doing one meal a day. One meal a day. Yeah.
0:45:09 Yeah, I did a nicotine pouch with Rogan at dinner. And I got high. Yeah, that’s a lot. That’s like
0:45:16 usually six or eight milligrams. I know people that get a canister of zinc, take one a day pretty
0:45:20 soon. They’re taking a canister a day. So you have to be very careful. I will only allow myself
0:45:29 two pieces of nicorette total per week. And you will notice that in the day after you use it,
0:45:33 sometimes your throat will feel a little bit like a little spasmy, like you might want to cough once
0:45:39 or twice. And so if you’re a singer or you’re a podcaster or something, you have to do a long
0:45:42 podcast. You want to just be mindful of it. But yeah, you’re supposed to kind of keep it in your
0:45:49 cheek. And here we go. But it did make me intensely focused in a way that was a little bit scary.
0:45:58 The nucleus basalis is in the basal forebrain. Nucleus has cholinergic neurons that
0:46:04 radiate out axons, little wires that release acetylcholine into the neocortex and elsewhere.
0:46:10 And when you focus on one particular topic matter or one particular area of your visual field or
0:46:15 listening to something and focusing visually, we know that there’s an elaboration of the
0:46:20 amount of acetylcholine released there. And it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor sites
0:46:27 there. So it’s a kind of an attentional modulation by acetylcholine. So you’re getting it with nicotine,
0:46:32 you’re getting an exogenous or artificial heightening of that circuitry.
0:46:38 And the time I had Tucker Carlson on the podcast, he told me that apparently it helps him, as he said,
0:46:46 publicly keep his love life vibrant. Really? It causes vasoconstrictions.
0:46:49 Like he literally said, it makes his dick very hard. He said that publicly also.
0:46:56 Okay. Well, as little as I want to think about Tucker Carlson’s sex life, no disrespect.
0:47:05 The major effect of nicotine on the vascular, my understanding is that it causes vasoconstriction,
0:47:12 not vasodilation. Drugs like Cialis, Dodalaphyl, Viagra, etc., vasodilators, they allow more
0:47:19 blood flow. Nicotine does the opposite, less blood flow to the periphery, but provided dosages are
0:47:25 kept low. And I don’t recommend people use it frequently or at all. And I don’t recommend young
0:47:34 people use it 25 and younger. Brain’s very plastic at that time. And certainly, smoking,
0:47:39 dipping, vaping, it’s nothing, aren’t good because you’re going to run into trouble
0:47:45 for other reasons. But in any case, even there, vaping is a controversial topic.
0:47:51 Probably safer than smoking, but has its own issues. And I said something like that, and boy,
0:47:55 did I catch a lot of heat for that. I can’t say anything as a health science educator,
0:48:00 not piss somebody off. It just depends on where the center of mass is and how far outside that you
0:48:08 are. For me, caffeine is the main thing. And actually, it’s a really big part of my life.
0:48:12 And one of the things you recommend that people wait a bit in the morning to consume caffeine.
0:48:22 If they experience a crash in the afternoon. This is one of the misconceptions I regret.
0:48:26 Maybe even discussing it for people that crash in the afternoon.
0:48:31 Oftentimes, if they delay their caffeine by 60 and 90 minutes in the morning,
0:48:35 they will offset some of that. But if you eat a lunch that’s too big or you didn’t sleep all
0:48:40 the night before, you’re not going to avoid that afternoon crash. But I’ll wake up sometimes and
0:48:43 go straight to hydration caffeine, especially if I’m going to work out. Here’s a weird one.
0:48:53 If I exercise before 8.30 a.m., especially if I start exercising when I’m a little bit tired,
0:48:59 I get energy that lasts all day. If I wait until my peak of energy, which is mid-morning,
0:49:04 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and I start exercising then, I’m basically exhausted all afternoon.
0:49:08 And I don’t understand why. I mean, it depends on the intensity of the workout. So I like to be
0:49:15 done, showered, and heading into work by 9 a.m., but I don’t always meet that mark.
0:49:19 So you’re saying it doesn’t affect your energy if you start with exercising?
0:49:24 I think you can get energy and wake yourself up with exercise if you start early and then that
0:49:29 fuels you all day long. I think that if you wait until you’re feeling at your best to train,
0:49:34 sometimes that’s detrimental because then in the afternoon when you’re doing the work we get paid
0:49:42 for, like research, podcasting, et cetera, then oftentimes your brain isn’t firing as well.
0:49:46 That’s interesting. I haven’t really rigorously tried that, wake up and just start running or
0:49:52 this is the jocco thing. And then there’s this phenomenon called entrainment where if you force
0:49:59 yourself to exercise or eat or socialize or view bright light at a certain time of day for
0:50:04 three to seven days in a row, pretty soon there’s an anticipatory circuit that gets generated. This
0:50:10 is why anyone in theory can become a morning person to some degree or another. And this is also
0:50:17 a beautiful example of why you wake up before your alarm clock goes off. People wake up and
0:50:21 all of a sudden it goes off. It wasn’t because it clicked. It’s because you have this incredible
0:50:25 timekeeping mechanism that exists in sleep. And there’s some papers that have been published in
0:50:29 the last couple of years, Nature Neuroscience and elsewhere showing that people can answer math
0:50:36 problems in their sleep, simple math problems, but math problems nonetheless. This does not mean
0:50:41 that if you ask your partner a question in sleep that they’re going to answer accurately. Like they
0:50:48 might screw up the whole cumulative probability of 20% across multiple months. All right, listen.
0:50:53 What happened? What happened? Here’s the deal. A few years back, I did a four and a half hour,
0:51:00 after editing, four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility. The entire recording
0:51:09 took 11 hours. And by the way, I’m very proud of that episode. Many couples have written to me
0:51:13 and said they now have children as a consequence of that episode. And my first question is,
0:51:17 what were you doing during the episode? But in all seriousness,
0:51:24 we should say that it’s four and a half hours. And for people, then they should listen to the
0:51:31 episode. It’s an extremely technical episode. You’re not stopped dropping facts and referencing
0:51:34 a huge number of papers. It must be exhaustive. I don’t understand how you could possibly say that.
0:51:39 It’s about sperm health, spermatogenesis. It talks about the ovulatory cycle. It talks about
0:51:44 things people can do that are considered absolutely supported by science. It talks about some of
0:51:48 the things on the edge a little bit that are a little bit more experimental. It talks about IVF.
0:51:54 It talks about ICSI. It talks about all of that. It talks about frequency of pregnancy as a function
0:52:01 of age, et cetera. But there’s this one portion there in the podcast where I’m talking about the
0:52:10 probability of a successful pregnancy as a function of age. And so there was a clip that was
0:52:16 cut in which I was describing cumulative probability. And by the way, we’ve published cumulative
0:52:20 probability historians in many of my laboratories papers, including one that was a Nature article
0:52:24 in 2018. So we run these all the time. And yes, I know the difference between independent and
0:52:34 cumulative probability. I do. The way the clip was cut and what I stated, unfortunately, combined
0:52:43 to a pretty great gaffe where I said, “You’re just adding percentages, 20 to 120 percent.”
0:52:51 And then I made a joke. I said, “120 percent, but that’s a different thing altogether.”
0:53:00 What I should have said was that’s impossible. And here’s how it actually works. But then it
0:53:07 continues where I then describe the cumulative probability histogram for successful pregnancy.
0:53:12 But somewhere in the early portion, I misstated something. I made a math error,
0:53:17 which implied I didn’t understand the difference between independent and cumulative probability,
0:53:23 which I do. And it got picked up and run. And people had a really good laugh with that one
0:53:29 at my expense. And so what I did in response to it was rather than just say everything I just said
0:53:37 now, I said, I just came out online and said, “Hey, folks, in an episode dated this on fertility,
0:53:43 I made a math error. Here’s the formula for cumulative probability, successful pregnancy
0:53:49 at that age. Here’s the graph. And I offered it as a teaching moment in two ways. One,
0:53:53 for people to understand cumulative probability. It was interesting too, a number of people that
0:53:59 had come out critiquing the gaffe. Also, like biology and folks came out pointing out that
0:54:03 they didn’t understand cumulative probability. So there was a lot of posturing. The dog pile,
0:54:06 oftentimes people are quick to dog pile, they didn’t understand. But a lot of people did
0:54:11 understand. Some smart people out there, obviously. I called my dad and he was just laughing. He goes,
0:54:15 “Oh, this is good. This is like the old school way of hammering academics.”
0:54:22 But the point being, there was a teaching moment, gave me an opportunity to say, “Hey,
0:54:28 I made a mistake. I also made a mistake in another podcast where I did a micron to millimeter
0:54:32 conversion or centimeter conversion. And we always correct these in the show note captions.
0:54:37 We correct them in the audio now. Unfortunately, on YouTube, it’s harder to correct. You can’t
0:54:42 go and edit in segments. We put in the captions.” But that was the one teaching moment. If you
0:54:46 make a mistake that’s substantive and relate to data, you apologize and correct the mistake,
0:54:51 use the teaching moment. The other one was to say, “Hey, in all the thousands of hours of
0:54:56 content we’ve put out, I’m sure I’ve made some small errors. I think I once said serotonin 1M,
0:55:03 and dopamine, and you’re going, you’re riffing.” And it’s a reminder to be careful to edit,
0:55:09 double check. But the internet usually edits for us. And then we go make corrections. But
0:55:13 it didn’t feel good at first. But ultimately, I can laugh at myself about it.
0:55:21 Long ago at Berkeley, when I was TAing my first class, it was a biopsychology class between 1998
0:55:28 or 1999, I was drawing the pituitary gland, which has an anterior and a posterior lobe,
0:55:33 actually it’s a medial lobe too. I have five, six hundred students in that lecture hall.
0:55:37 And I drew, it was chalkboard, and I drew the two lobes of the pituitary. And I said,
0:55:41 my back was to the audience, I said, you know, and so they just sort of hang there.
0:55:46 And everyone just erupted and laughed her because it looked like a scrotum with two testicles.
0:55:51 And I remember thinking like, “Oh my God, I don’t think I can turn around. I can face this.”
0:55:57 And I got to turn around sooner or later. So I turned around and we just all had a big laugh
0:56:02 together. It was embarrassing. I’ll tell you one thing though, they never forgot about the
0:56:06 two lobes of the pituitary. Yeah. And you haven’t forgotten about that either.
0:56:13 Right. There’s a high salience for these kinds of things. And it also was kind of fun to see
0:56:20 how excited people get to see people trip. It’s like an elite sprinter trips and does
0:56:23 something stupid, like, you know, runs the opposite direction out of the blocks or
0:56:29 something like that. And or, you know, I recall at one World Cup match years ago,
0:56:33 a guy scored against his own team. I think they killed the guy. Do you remember that?
0:56:36 Some South American or Central American team. Yeah.
0:56:43 And they killed the guy. But yeah, let’s look it up. I just said World Cup. Yeah, he was gunned down.
0:56:50 Andres Escobar scored against his own team in 1994 World Cup in the United States,
0:56:56 just 27 years old, playing for the Columbia National Team.
0:57:02 Yeah. Last name Escobar. That’s a good name. I think it would protect you. Listen, you know, so
0:57:13 there are some gaffes that get people killed, right? So, you know, how forgiving are we for
0:57:18 online mistakes? You know, this is the nature of the mistakes. People are quite gracious about the
0:57:27 the gaff and some weren’t. And, you know, it’s interesting that we, as, you know, public health
0:57:34 science educators, you know, we’ll do long podcasts sometimes and you need to be really
0:57:42 careful. What’s great is AI allows you to check these things now more readily. So, that’s cool.
0:57:48 And there are ways that it’s now going to be more self-correcting. I mean, you know,
0:57:53 I think there’s a lot of errors out there on the internet and people are finding them and
0:57:57 it’s cool like things are getting cleaned up. Yeah, but mistakes nevertheless will happen.
0:58:05 Are you, do you feel the pressure of not making mistakes? Sure. I mean, you know, I try and get
0:58:11 things right to the best, you know, to the best of my ability. I check with experts. It’s kind of
0:58:15 interesting when people really don’t like something that was said in a podcast. A lot of times I
0:58:20 chuckle because I’m, you know, at Stanford, we have some amazing scientists, but I talk to them
0:58:32 else, people elsewhere. And it’s always interesting to me how, you know, I’ll get divergent information
0:58:38 and then I’ll find the overlap in the Venn diagram. And I have this like question,
0:58:43 do I just stay with the overlap in the Venn diagram? I didn’t episode on oral health.
0:58:49 I didn’t know this until I researched that episode, but oral health is critically related
0:58:54 to heart health and brain health. There’s a bacteria that causes cavities, streptococcus,
0:59:00 you know, that can make its way into other parts of the body through the mouth that
0:59:05 can cause serious issues. There’s the idea that some forms of dementia, some forms of heart disease
0:59:12 are start in the mouth, basically. I talked to no fewer than four dentists, dental experts.
0:59:19 And there was a lot of convergence. I also learned that teeth can demineralize. That’s the
0:59:22 formation of cavities. They can also remineralize. As long as the cavity isn’t too deep, it can
0:59:27 actually fill itself back in, especially if you provide the right substrates for it.
0:59:31 That saliva is this incredible fluid that has all this capacity to remineralize
0:59:36 teeth, provided the milieu is right, things like alcohol-based mouth washes, killing off
0:59:40 some of the critical things you need. It’s fascinating. And I put out that episode thing,
0:59:43 “Oh, I’m not a dentist. I’m not an oral health episode.” I talked to a pediatric dentist.
0:59:51 There’s a terrific one, Dr. Downscore Stacey, S-T-A-C-I on Instagram does great content.
0:59:58 Talk to some others. And then I just waited for the attack. I was like, “Here we go.” And it didn’t
1:00:04 come. And dentists were thanking me. I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a rare thing. More often than not,
1:00:10 if I do an episode about, say, psilocybin or MDMA, you get some people liking it or ADHD
1:00:15 and the drugs for ADHD. We did a whole episode on the Ritalin Vivants, Adderall stuff. You get
1:00:21 people saying, “Thank you. I prescribed this to my kid and it really helps.” But they’re
1:00:25 private about the fact that they do it because they get so much attack from other people.
1:00:32 So, I like to find the center of mass, report that, try to make it as clear as possible.
1:00:38 And then I know that there’s some stuff where I’m going to catch shit. What’s frustrating for me
1:00:46 is when I see claims that I’m against fluoridization of water, which I’m not. We talked about the
1:00:50 benefits of fluoride. It builds hyper-strong bonds within the teeth. I went and looked at
1:00:59 literally the crystal structure. It’s essentially the micron and submicron
1:01:03 structure of teeth. It’s incredible and where fluoride can get in there and form these super
1:01:08 strong bonds. And you can also form them with things like hydroxyapatite. And why is there
1:01:13 fluoride in water? Well, it’s the best. Okay. You say some things that are interesting,
1:01:17 but then somehow it gets turned into like you’re against fluoridization, which I’m not.
1:01:22 Or I’ve been accused of being against sunscreen. I wear mineral-based sunscreen on my face.
1:01:27 I don’t want to get skin cancer or I use a physical barrier. There is a cohort of people
1:01:31 out there that think that all sunscreens are bad. I’m not one of them. I’m not what’s called a sunscreen
1:01:35 truther. But then you get attacked for it. So, we’re talking about there are certain sunscreens
1:01:41 that are problematic. And Rhonda Patrick is now starting to get vocal about this. And so,
1:01:49 there are certain topics that’s interesting for which you have to listen carefully to what somebody
1:01:55 is saying. But there’s a lump or lumping as opposed to splitting of what health educators say.
1:02:00 And so, it just seems like like with politics, there’s this like urgency to just put people
1:02:06 into a camp of expert versus like renegade or something. And it’s not like that. It’s just
1:02:11 not like that. So, the short answer is I really strive. Really strive to get things right. But
1:02:18 I know that I’m going to piss certain people off. And you’ve taught me. And Joe’s taught me. And
1:02:23 other podcasters have taught me that like, if you worry too much about it,
1:02:29 then you aren’t going to get the newest information out there. Like peptides. There’s very little
1:02:34 human data unless you’re talking about Vylici or the Milana stuff in the alpha-Milana site
1:02:39 stimulating hormone stuff which are prescribed for female libido to enhance female libido or
1:02:43 sermorellen, which is for certain growth hormone deficiencies. With rare exception,
1:02:47 there’s very little human data. But people are still super interested and a lot of people
1:02:50 are taking and doing these things. So, you want to get the information out.
1:02:56 Do you try to not just look at the science, but research what the communities are talking,
1:03:00 what the various communities are talking about? Like maybe research what the conspiracy theorists
1:03:08 are talking about just so you know all the armies that are going to be attacking your castle.
1:03:12 Yes. So, for instance, there’s a community of people online that believe that if you consume
1:03:18 seed oils or something that you’re setting up your skin for sunburn and if you don’t,
1:03:23 there’s all these theories. So, I like to know what the theories are. I like to know what the
1:03:28 extremes are. But I also like to know what the standard conversation is. But there’s generally
1:03:35 more agreement than disagreement. I think where I’ve been kind of bullish actually,
1:03:39 as you know, like supplements, like people go, oh, supplements. Well, there’s food supplements,
1:03:43 like a protein powder, which is different than a vitamin. And then they are compounds. There are
1:03:48 compounds that have real benefit. But people get very nervous about the fact that they’re
1:03:56 not regulated. But some of them are vetted for potency and for safety with more rigor than others.
1:04:05 And it’s interesting to see how people who take care of themselves and put a lot of work into
1:04:10 that are often attacked. That’s been interesting. Also, one of the most controversial topics nowadays
1:04:15 is Osempic Munjaro. I’m very middle of the road on this. I don’t understand why the
1:04:21 “health wellness community” is so against these things. I also don’t understand why
1:04:26 they have to be looked at as the only route. For some people, they’ve really helped them lose weight.
1:04:30 And yes, there can be some muscle loss and other lean body loss. But that can be offset
1:04:35 with resistance training. They’ve helped a lot of people. And other people are like, no,
1:04:39 this stuff is terrible. I think the most interesting thing about Osempic Munjaro is that
1:04:44 they are GLP-1. They’re in the GLP-1 pathway, glucagon-like peptide-1. And it was discovered
1:04:54 in Gila Monsters, which is a lizard, basically. And now the entomologists will dive on me.
1:04:59 It’s a big lizard-looking thing that doesn’t eat very often. And they figured out that there’s
1:05:05 this peptide that allows it to curb its own appetite at the level of the brain and the gut.
1:05:10 And it has a lot of homology, sequence homology, to what we now call GLP-1.
1:05:16 So I love anytime there’s animal biology, links to cool human biology, links to a drug that’s
1:05:19 powerful that can help people with obesity and type 2 diabetes. And there’s evidence they can
1:05:27 even curb some addictions. Those are newer data. But I don’t see either or. In fact, I’ve been a
1:05:31 little bit disappointed at the way that the, whatever you want to call it, health wellness
1:05:37 biohacking community has slammed on Osempic Munjaro. It’s like, just get out and run. Listen,
1:05:41 there are people who are carrying substantial amounts of weight that running could injure them.
1:05:45 They get on these drugs and they can improve. And then hopefully they’re also doing resistance
1:05:48 training and eating better. And then you’re bringing all the elements together.
1:05:52 Well, why do you think the criticism has happened? Is it that Osempic became super popular so people
1:05:56 are misusing it or that kind of thing? No, I think what it is, is that people
1:06:04 think if it’s a pharmaceutical, it’s bad. And then, or if it’s a supplement, it’s bad,
1:06:08 depending on which camp they’re in. And it wouldn’t be wonderful to kind of like fill
1:06:13 in the gap between this divide. You know, what I would like to see in politics and in health is
1:06:19 neither right nor left, but what we can just call a league of reasonable people that looks at things
1:06:25 on an issue by issue basis and fills in the center. Because I think most people are in that are,
1:06:28 I don’t want to say center in a political way, but I think most people are reasonable,
1:06:34 they want to be reasonable, but that’s not what sells clicks. That’s not what drives interest.
1:06:41 But I’m a very like, I look at issue by issue, person by person. I don’t like in group out group
1:06:45 stuff. I never have. I’ve got friends from all walks of life. I said this on other podcast and
1:06:51 it always sounds like a political statement, but like the push towards like, you know,
1:06:56 polarization is so frustrating. If there’s one thing that’s discouraging to me as I get older
1:07:03 each year, I’m like, wow, are we ever going to get out of this like polarization? Speaking of which,
1:07:08 how are you going to vote for the presidential election? I’m still trying to figure out how
1:07:13 to interview the people involved and do it well. What do you think the role of podcast is going
1:07:22 to be in this year’s election? I would love long form conversations to happen with the candidates.
1:07:28 I think it’s going to be huge. I would love Trump to go on Rogan. I’m embarrassed to say this,
1:07:33 but I would love to, honestly, would love to see Joe Biden go on Joe Rogan also.
1:07:41 I would imagine that both would go on, but separately. Separately. I think Joe does debates,
1:07:47 but I think Joe at his best is one-on-one conversation really intimate. I just wish
1:07:52 that Joe Biden would actually do long form conversations. I thought he had done it.
1:07:57 It wasn’t me. I think it was on Jay Shetty’s podcast. He did Jay Shetty. He did a few,
1:08:03 but when I mean long form, I mean really long form, like two, three hours and more relaxed.
1:08:08 It was much more orchestrated because what happens when the interview is a little bit too short,
1:08:16 it becomes into this generic political type of NBCC and that type of interview.
1:08:23 You get a set of questions and you don’t get to really feel the human. Expose the human to the
1:08:28 light in the full, we talked about the shadow, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think there’s
1:08:34 something magical about two, three, four hours, but it doesn’t have to be that long, but it has to
1:08:40 have that feeling to it where there’s not people standing around and everybody’s nervous and you’re
1:08:47 going to be strictly sticking to the question, answer type of feel, but just shooting shit,
1:08:53 which Rogan is the best by far in the world at that. I don’t think people really appreciate
1:09:04 how skilled he is at what he does and the number, I mean the three or four podcast per week plus
1:09:12 the UFC announced saying plus comedy tours and stadiums plus doing comedy shows in the middle
1:09:19 of the week plus husband and a father and a friend and Jiu Jitsu. The guys got like super human levels
1:09:26 of output. I agree that long form conversation is a whole other business and I think that people
1:09:32 want and deserve to know the people that are running for office in a different way and to
1:09:39 really get to know them. Well, listen, you know, I guess you, I mean, is it clear that he’s going
1:09:44 to do jail time or maybe he gets away? No, I was going to say, I mean, does that mean you’re going
1:09:50 to be podcasting from prison? Yeah, we’re going to, in fact, I’m going to figure out how to commit
1:09:55 a crime so I can get in prison. Please don’t, please don’t. Well, that’s, I’m sure they have visitors,
1:09:59 right? That just doesn’t feel an authentic way to get the interview, but yeah, I understand.
1:10:04 You wouldn’t be able to wear that suit. You’d be wearing a different suit. That’s true. Yeah.
1:10:09 It’s going to be interesting and you do, I’m not just saying this because you’re my friend,
1:10:14 but you would do a marvelous job. I think you should sit down with all of them separately
1:10:20 to keep it civil and see what happens. Here’s one thing that I found really interesting
1:10:26 in this whole political landscape. When I’m in Los Angeles, I often get invited to these,
1:10:33 like, they’re not dinners, but gatherings where, you know, a local, you know, a bunch of podcasters
1:10:37 will come together, but a lot of people from the entertainment industry, big agencies,
1:10:44 big tech, like big, big tech, many people have been on this podcast and they’ll host a discussion
1:10:50 or debate. And what you find if you look around the room and you talk to people is that about half
1:10:55 the people in the room are very left leaning and very outspoken about that. And they’ll tell you
1:11:00 exactly who they want to see in the presidential race. And the other half will tell you that
1:11:08 they’re for the other side. A lot of people that people assume are on one side of the aisle
1:11:14 or the other are in the exact opposite side. Now, some people are very open about who they’re for,
1:11:20 but it’s been very interesting to see how when you get people one-on-one, they’re telling you
1:11:25 they want X candidate to win or Y candidate to win. And sometimes like, “Really? I can’t believe
1:11:35 it. Like you?” And so it’s what people think about people’s political leanings is often
1:11:43 exactly wrong. And that’s been eye-opening for me. And I’ve seen that in university campuses too.
1:11:47 And so it’s going to be really, really interesting to see what happens in November.
1:11:50 In addition to that, as you said, most people are close to the center,
1:11:55 despite what Twitter makes it seem like. Most people, whether that’s a lot to center,
1:12:00 right? They’re kind of close to the center. Yeah. I mean, here’s to me the most interesting
1:12:06 question. Who is going to be the next big candidate in years to come? Like, who’s that going to be?
1:12:12 Right now, I don’t see or know of that person. Who’s it going to be? Yeah, the young promising
1:12:17 candidates, we’re not seeing them. We’re not seeing them. Another way to ask that question,
1:12:23 who would want to be? Well, that’s the issue, right? Who wants to live in this 12-hour
1:12:28 news cycle where you’re just trying to dunk on the other team so that nobody notices the
1:12:36 shit that you fucked up? That’s not only not fun or interesting, it also is just like,
1:12:46 it’s got to be psychosis-inducing at some point. And I think that, god willing, we’re going to,
1:12:56 you know, some young guy or woman is on this and refuses to back down and was just determined
1:13:03 to be president and will make it happen. But I don’t even know who the viable candidates are.
1:13:11 Maybe you, Lex. We should ask Sagar. Sagar would know. Yeah. Maybe Sagar himself.
1:13:17 Sagar’s show is awesome. He and Crystal do a great thing. He’s incredible. Especially since
1:13:20 they have somewhat divergent opinions on things. That’s what makes it so cool. He’s great. He looks
1:13:24 great in a suit, looks real sexy. He’s taking real good care of himself. I think he’s getting married
1:13:30 soon. Congratulations, Sagar. Forgive me for not remembering your future wife’s name. He won my
1:13:37 heart by giving me a biography of Hitler as a president. That’s what he gave you? Yeah. I gave
1:13:42 you a hatchet with a poem in it. That just shows the fundamental difference between the two. With a
1:13:49 poem inscribed in it, which was pretty damn good. I realized everything we bring up on the screen is
1:13:56 like really depressing. Like the soccer player getting killed. Can we bring up something happy?
1:14:03 Sure. Let’s go to Nature’s Metal Instagram. Those are pretty intense. We actually did a
1:14:07 collaborative post on a shark thing. Really? Yeah. What kind of shark thing?
1:14:17 So to generate the fear VR stimulus for my lab, in 2016, we went down to Guadalupe Island off the
1:14:22 coast of Mexico. Me and a guy named Michael Muller, who’s a very famous portrait photographer, but
1:14:33 also takes photos of sharks. We used 360 video to build VR of Great White Sharks. Brought it
1:14:39 back to the lab. We published that study in Current Biology. In 2017, went back down there.
1:14:48 That was the year that I exited the cage. You lower the cage with a crane. That year,
1:14:52 I exited the cage. I had a whole mess with an air failure the day before. I was breathing from a
1:14:57 hookah line while in the cage. I had no scuba on. Divers were out. The thing got bow constricted up,
1:15:01 and I had an air failure, and I had to actually share air, and it was a whole mess. Sorry for
1:15:05 another time. But the next day, because I didn’t want to get PTSD, and it was pretty scary, the
1:15:10 next day, I cage exited with some other divers. And it turns out with these Great White Sharks,
1:15:14 in Guadalupe, the water’s very clear, and you can swim toward them, and then they’ll
1:15:17 they’ll veer off you if you swim toward them. Otherwise, they see you as prey.
1:15:23 Well, in the evening, you’ve brought all the cages up, and you’re hopefully all alive,
1:15:33 and we were hanging out fishing for a tuna. We had one of the crew on board had a line in the
1:15:40 water was fishing for tuna for dinner, and a shark took the tuna off the line. And it’s a very
1:15:46 dramatic take. And you can see the just absolute size of these Great White Sharks, the waters
1:15:52 there are filled with them. That’s the one. But look, so this video, just the neural link link,
1:15:58 was shot by Matt McDougal, who is the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. There it is, takes it.
1:16:01 Now, believe it or not, it looks like it missed like it didn’t get the fish. It actually just
1:16:08 cut that thing like a band saw. So I’m up on the deck with Matt. Yeah. And so when you look at it
1:16:13 from the side, you you really get a sense of this of the the girth of this freaking thing.
1:16:20 So as it comes up, if you look at the size of that thing, and they move through the water
1:16:24 with such speed, just a couple. So when you’re in the cage and the cage is lowered down below the
1:16:29 surface, they’re going around, you’re not allowed to chum the water there. Some people do it.
1:16:34 But and then when you cage exit, they’re like, Well, what are you doing out here? And then,
1:16:38 you know, they swim toward them, they veer off. But what’s interesting is that
1:16:43 if you look at how they move through the water, all it takes for one of these Great White Sharks,
1:16:47 when it sees a tuna or something it wants to eat is like two flicks of the tail.
1:16:55 And it becomes like a missile. It’s just unbelievable economy of effort. And Ocean Ramsey,
1:16:59 who is in my opinion, the greatest of all cage exit shark divers, this woman who
1:17:04 dealt with enormous Great White Sharks, she really understands their behavior when they’re
1:17:08 aggressive, when they’re not going to be aggressive. She and her husband, Juan, I believe his name is,
1:17:13 they understand how the tiger sharks differ from the Great White Sharks. We were down there basically
1:17:17 like not understanding any of this. We never should have been there. And actually,
1:17:22 the air failure the day before, plus cage exit the next day, I told myself after coming up from
1:17:26 the cage exit, that’s it. I’m no longer taking risks with my life. I want to live, got back
1:17:31 across the border. A couple of days later, I was like, That’s it. I don’t take risks with my life
1:17:37 any longer. But yeah, McDougal, Matt McDougal shot that video. And then it went quote unquote viral
1:17:46 through Nature’s Metal. We passed them that video. Actually, I saw a video where an instructor was
1:17:50 explaining how to behave with a shark in the water, and that you don’t want to be swimming away,
1:17:54 because then you’re acting like a prey. That’s right. And then you want to be acting like a predator
1:17:58 by looking at it and swimming towards it. Right towards them, and they’ll bank off. Now, if you
1:18:01 don’t see them, they’re ambush predators, you know, you’re swimming in the surface. And apparently,
1:18:06 if they get close, you should just guide them away by grabbing them and moving them away. Some
1:18:10 people will actually roll them. But if they’re coming in full speedy, you’re not going to roll
1:18:16 the shark. But here we are back to dark stuff again. I like the shark attack map. And the shark
1:18:20 attack map shows that, you know, Northern California, there were a couple, actually,
1:18:26 a guy’s head got taken off. He was swimming north of San Francisco. There’s been a couple of Northern
1:18:30 California. That was really tragic. But most of them are in Florida and Australia.
1:18:34 Florida. Save without getting. So the Surf Rider Foundation shark attack map,
1:18:39 there it is. They have a great map. There you go. So they have all the scars on them.
1:18:44 So if you zoom in on, I mean, look at this. If you go to North America.
1:18:51 Look at skulls. Yeah, where they’re deadly attacks. But yeah, Northern California,
1:18:58 sadly, this is really tragic. If you zoom in on this one, I read about this. This guy,
1:19:03 if you click the link, 50 year old male, he was in chest high water. This is just tragic.
1:19:10 I feel so sad for him and his family. You know, he’s just three members of the party chose to go
1:19:17 in. He was, you know, nine. It was in his chest high water, 25 to 50 yards from shore. Great.
1:19:22 Breach water seized his head. And that was it. You know, so it does happen. It’s very infrequent.
1:19:30 If you don’t go in the ocean, there’s a very, very, very low probability. But it doesn’t happen
1:19:39 six times in a row. 120% chance. Yeah. Who do you think wins a saltwater crocodile or a shark?
1:19:44 Okay, I do not like saltwater crocodiles. They scare me to no end. Muller, Michael Muller,
1:19:51 who dove all over the world, he sent me a picture of him diving with salties, saltwater crocs in
1:19:55 Cuba. It was a smaller one. But goodness, Chris, have you seen the size of some of those saltwater
1:20:02 crocs? Yeah. I’m thinking the sharks are so agile. They’re amazing. They’ve head cammed one,
1:20:08 or body cammed one, moving through the kelp bed. And you look and it’s just they’re so agile,
1:20:12 moving through the water. And it’s looking up at the surface, like the camera’s looking at the
1:20:19 surface. And you just realize if you’re out there, you’re not, and you’re swimming and you get hit
1:20:25 by a shark, you’re not. I was going to talk shit and say that a salty has way more bite force,
1:20:30 but according to the internet, recently data indicates that the shark has a stronger bite.
1:20:36 So I was assuming that a crocodile would have a stronger bite force, and therefore agility
1:20:41 doesn’t matter. But apparently a shark. Yeah. And turning one of those big salties is probably
1:20:45 not that, you know, turning around. It’s like a battleship. I mean, those sharks are unbelievable.
1:20:51 They hit from all sorts. Oh, and they do this thing. We saw this, you’re out of the cage, or in
1:20:56 the cage, and you look at one and you’ll see it’s eye kind of like looking at you. They can’t really
1:21:00 fove it, but they’ll look at you and you’re tracking it. And then you’ll look down and you’ll
1:21:04 realize that one’s coming at you. They’re ambush predators. They’re working together.
1:21:11 They’re fascinating. I like how you know that they can’t fove it. You’re already considering the
1:21:15 vision system there. It’s a very primitive system. Very primitive. Eyes on the side of the head.
1:21:19 Vision is decent enough. They’re mostly obviously sensing things with their
1:21:27 electro sensing in the water, but also olfaction. Yeah, I spend far too much time
1:21:30 thinking about and learning about the visual systems of different animals. If you get me going
1:21:34 on this, like we’ll be here all night. See, this is what I have the smuggled out to. I saw this in
1:21:41 the store and I got it because this is from a shark. Goodness. Yeah. I can’t say I ever saw one
1:21:48 with teeth this big, but it’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s probably your blood pressure just goes,
1:21:55 and you don’t feel a thing. Yeah, it’s not. Before we went down for the cage exit, a guy in our crew,
1:22:02 Pat Dawson, a very experienced diver, asked one of the South African divers,
1:22:07 so what’s the contingency plan if somebody catches a bite and they were like,
1:22:12 he was like every man for himself and they’re basically saying, if somebody catches a bite,
1:22:16 that’s it. Yeah. Anyway, I thought we were going to bring up something happy.
1:22:22 Oh, that is happy. Well, nature is beautiful. Yeah, nature is beautiful. We lived,
1:22:29 but there are happy things. You brought up nature as metal. See, this is the difference between
1:22:34 Russian Americans and Americans. It’s like maybe there’s actually a good time to bring up
1:22:41 your ayahuasca journey. I’ve never done ayahuasca, but I’m curious about it. I’m also curious about
1:22:50 Ibogaine, Iboga, but you told me that you did ayahuasca and that for you it wasn’t the dark,
1:22:55 scary ride that it is for everybody else. Yeah, it was an incredible experience for me. I did it
1:23:01 twice actually. Have you done high-dose psilocybin? Never, no. I just did small dose psilocybin a
1:23:08 couple of times. I was nervous about it. I’ve done high-dose psilocybin. It’s terrifying,
1:23:14 but I’ve always gotten something very useful out of it. I was nervous about whatever demons
1:23:21 might hide in the shadow, in the Jungian shadow. I was nervous, but I think it turns out, I don’t
1:23:27 know what the lesson is to draw from that, but my experience before Russian, it must be the Russian
1:23:34 thing. There’s also something to the jungle. It strips away all the bullshit of life, and you’re
1:23:41 just there. I forgot the outside civilization exists. I forgot time because when you don’t have your
1:23:47 phone, you don’t have meetings or calls or whatever, you lose a sense of time. The sun comes up, the
1:23:55 sun comes down. That’s the fundamental biological timer. Every mammalian species has a short wavelength,
1:24:01 so you think like blue, UV type, but absorbing cone, and a longer wavelength absorbing cone.
1:24:06 It does this interesting subtraction to designate when it’s morning and evening because when the sun
1:24:11 is low in the sky, you’ve got short wavelength and long wavelength light. When you look at a sunrise,
1:24:15 it’s got blues and yellows, orange and yellows. You look in the evening, reds, orange and blues,
1:24:19 and in the middle of the day, it’s full spectrum light. Now, it’s always full spectrum light,
1:24:26 but because of some atmospheric elements and because of the low solar angle, that difference
1:24:31 between the different wavelengths of light is the fundamental signal that the neurons in your eye
1:24:36 pay attention to and signal to your circadian timekeeping mechanism. At the core of our brain
1:24:45 and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, we are wired to be entrained to the rising and setting of the sun.
1:24:48 That’s the biological timer, which makes perfect sense because, obviously,
1:24:55 as the planets spin and revolve, I also wonder how that is affected by, in the rainforest,
1:25:02 the sun is not visible often, so you’re under the cover of the trees. Maybe that affects-
1:25:08 Well, there are social rhythms. They’re feeding rhythms. Sometimes, in terms of some species,
1:25:14 we’ll signal the timing of activity of other species, but yet getting out from the canopy
1:25:19 is critical. Of course, even under the canopy during the daytime, there’s far more
1:25:23 photons than at night. There’s always what I’m telling people to get sunlight in their eyes
1:25:27 in the morning and in the evening. People say, “There’s no sunlight this time here.” I’m like,
1:25:31 “Go outside on a really overcast day. It’s far brighter than it is at night.”
1:25:36 There’s still lots of sunlight, even if you can’t see the sun as an object, but I love
1:25:43 time perception shifts. You mentioned that in the jungle, it’s linked to the rising and setting of
1:25:48 the sun. You also mentioned that on ayahuasca, you zoomed out from the earth. These are to me
1:25:53 the most interesting aspects of having a human brain as opposed to another brain, of course,
1:26:01 if only you ever had a human brain, which is that you can consciously set your time domain
1:26:06 window. We can be focused here. We can be focused on all of Austin or we can be focused on the entire
1:26:11 planet. You can make those choices consciously, but in the time domain, it’s hard. Different
1:26:16 activities bring us into fine slicing or more broad binning of time, depending on what we’re
1:26:25 doing, programming or exercising or researching or podcasting, but just how unbelievably fluid
1:26:31 the human brain is in terms of the aperture of the time-space window of our cognition
1:26:37 and of our experience. I feel like this is perhaps one of the more valuable tools that we have access
1:26:42 to that we don’t really leverage as much as we should, which is when things are really hard,
1:26:48 you need to zoom out and see it as one element within your whole lifespan and that there’s
1:26:55 more to come. People commit suicide because they can’t see beyond the time domain they’re in
1:27:00 or they think it’s going to go on forever. When we’re happy, we rarely think this is going to
1:27:08 last forever, which is interesting contrast in its own right. I think that psychedelics,
1:27:13 while I have very little experience with them, I have some and it sounds like they’re just a very
1:27:20 interesting window into the different apertures. Well, how to surf that wave is probably a skill.
1:27:26 One of the things I was prepared for and I think is important is not to resist. I think
1:27:32 I understand what it means to resist the thing, a powerful wave and it’s not going to be good,
1:27:35 so you have to be able to surf it. So I was ready for that, to relax through it. Maybe because
1:27:45 I’m quite good at that from knowing how to relax in all kinds of disciplines, playing piano and
1:27:50 guitar when I was super young and then through jiu-jitsu, knowing the value of relaxation and
1:27:54 through all kinds of sports, you should be able to relax the body fully and just accept whatever
1:27:59 happens to you. That process is probably why it was a very positive experience for me.
1:28:04 Do you have any interest in Iboga? I’m very interested in Ibogaine Iboga. There’s a colleague
1:28:07 of mine and researcher at Stanford Nolan Williams who’s been doing some transcranial
1:28:13 magnetic stimulation and brain imaging on people who have taken Ibogaine. Ibogaine,
1:28:20 as I understand it, gives a 22-hour psychedelic journey where no hallucinations with eyes open,
1:28:26 but you close your eyes and you get a very high resolution image of actual events that happened
1:28:31 in your life, but then you have agency within those movies. I think you have to be of healthy
1:28:34 heart to be able to do it. I think you have to be on a heart rate monitor. It’s not trivial,
1:28:41 it’s not like these other psychedelics, but there’s a wonderful group called Veteran Solutions
1:28:49 that has used Iboga combined with some other psychedelics in the veterans community
1:28:57 to great success for things like PTSD. It’s a group I’ve really tried to support in any way
1:29:03 that I can, mainly by being vocal about the great work they’re doing, but you hear incredible
1:29:10 stories of people who are just like near-created in their life or zombied by PTSD and other things
1:29:17 post-war, get back a lightness or achieve a lightness and a clarity that they didn’t feel
1:29:21 they had. So I’m very curious about these compounds. The state of Kentucky, we should check
1:29:28 this, but I believe it’s taken money from the opioid crisis settlement for Ibogaine research.
1:29:37 This is no longer, yes, if you look here, let’s see. Did they do it? Oh, no. Oh, no. They backed away.
1:29:41 Kentucky backs away from the plan to fund opioid treatment research. They were going to use the
1:29:47 money to treat opioid. Now officials are backing off 50 billion, what is on its way over the coming
1:29:52 years? 50 billion dollars. 50 billion dollars is on its way to state and local government over the
1:29:56 coming years. The pool of funding comes from multiple legal statements with pharmaceutical
1:30:01 companies that profited from manufacturing or selling opioid painkillers. Kentucky has some of
1:30:07 the highest number of deaths from the opioid. So they were going to do psychedelic research
1:30:13 with Ibogaine supporting research on illegal folks, psychedelic drug called Ibogaine. Well,
1:30:19 I guess they backed away from it. Well, sooner or later, we’ll get some happy news up on the
1:30:25 internet during this episode. I was talking about the shark and the crocodile fighting.
1:30:29 Yeah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And you survived the jungle. Well, that’s the thing.
1:30:34 I was writing to you on WhatsApp multiple times because I was going to put on the internet,
1:30:37 are you okay? And if you’re alive and then I was going to just put it to Twitter,
1:30:42 just like he’s alive. But then of course, you’re far too classy for that. So you just came back
1:30:51 alive. Well, jungle or not, one of the lessons is also when you hear the call for adventure,
1:30:58 just fucking do it. I was going to ask you, it’s kind of a silly question, but give me a
1:31:03 small fraction of things on your bucket list. Bucket list. Yeah.
1:31:11 Go to Mars. Yeah, what’s the status of that? I don’t know. I’m being patient about the whole
1:31:18 thing. Red Planet ran that cartoon of you guys. That was pretty funny. That was pretty funny.
1:31:24 One where Goggins is already up there. Yeah, that’s a funny one. Probably also true.
1:31:34 I would love to die on Mars. I just love humanity reaching onto the stars and doing this bold
1:31:39 adventure and taking big risks and exploring. I love exploration. What about seeing different
1:31:46 animal species? I’m a huge fan of this guy, Joel Sartori, where he has this photo arc project,
1:31:50 where he takes portraits of all these different animals. If people aren’t already following
1:31:57 him on Instagram, he’s doing some really important work. This guy’s Instagram is
1:32:02 amazing. Like portraits of animals. Well, look at it. Look at these portraits.
1:32:06 The amount of personality, because we don’t want to project anything onto them, but
1:32:13 like the eyes. Occasionally put him moving like that, there’s a little owl.
1:32:19 I delight in things like this. I’ve got some content coming on animals and animal neuroscience
1:32:30 and eyes. Dogs or all kinds of animals. I’m very interested in kids content that incorporates
1:32:34 animals. We have some things brewing there. I could look at this kind of stuff all day long.
1:32:38 Look at that bat. People think about bats as little flickering, a little annoying disease
1:32:43 carrying things, but look how beautiful that little sucker is. How’s your podcast with the
1:32:50 Cookie Monster coming? Oh, yeah. We’ve been in discussions with Cookie. I can’t say too much
1:32:58 about that, but Cookie Monster embodies dopamine, Cookie Monster wants Cookie right now. It was
1:33:04 that one tweet, Cookie Monster, I bounce because cookies come from all directions. It’s just embodying
1:33:10 the desire for something, which is an incredible aspect of ourselves. The other one is, you remember
1:33:17 a little while ago, Elmo put out a tweet, “Hey, how’s everyone doing out there?” It went viral.
1:33:21 The Surgeon General of the United States had been talking about the loneliness crisis.
1:33:25 He came on the podcast. A lot of people have been talking about problems with loneliness,
1:33:30 mental health issues with loneliness. Elmo puts out a tweet, “Hey, how’s everyone doing out there?”
1:33:37 Everyone gravitates toward it. The different Sesame Street characters really embody the different
1:33:44 aspects of self through very narrow neural circuit perspective. Snuffle up, I guess,
1:33:51 is shy. Oscar the Grouch is grouchy. The Count won. The archetypes of it. The archetypes is very
1:33:57 young in once again. Yeah. I think that the creators of Sesame Street clearly either understand
1:34:04 that or it’s an unconscious genius to that. There are some things brewing on conversations
1:34:08 with Sesame Street characters. I know you’d like to talk to Vladimir Putin. I’d like
1:34:14 to talk to Cookie Monster. It illustrates the differences in our sophistication or something.
1:34:23 Illustrates a lot. Illustrates a lot. I love animation. I’m not anime. That’s not my thing,
1:34:28 but animation. I’m very interested in the use of animation to get science content across.
1:34:36 There are a bunch of things brewing. Anyway, I delight in Sartori’s work. There’s a conservation
1:34:40 aspect to it as well. But I think that mostly I want to thank you for finally putting up something
1:34:46 that where something is not being killed or let some sad outcome. These are all really positive.
1:34:51 They’re really cool. They’re really cool. Every once in a while, look at that mountain line.
1:34:56 But I also like to look at these and some of them remind me of certain people.
1:35:01 So let’s just scroll through. For instance, I think when we don’t try and process it too much,
1:35:11 so look at this cat. This is amazing. I feel like this is someone I met once as a young kid.
1:35:13 There’s a curiosity in it. Curiosity and a playfulness.
1:35:19 Carnivore. Carnivore, frontalized eyes. Found in forced-depth perception.
1:35:24 Right. So then you go down. It’s like this beautiful fish.
1:35:29 Neon pink. Right. It reminds you of some of the influencers you see on Instagram,
1:35:35 right? Except this one’s natural. Just kidding. Let’s see. No filter.
1:35:42 Let’s see. I feel like… Bears. I’m a big fan of bears.
1:35:45 Yeah. Bears are beautiful. This one reminds me of you a little bit. There’s a stoic
1:35:50 nature to it, a curiosity. You can feel the essence of animals. You don’t even have to
1:35:55 do psychedelics to get there. Look at that. He’s like the behind the scenes of how it’s actually
1:36:05 and then there’s… Wow. Yeah. In the jungle, the diversity of life was also stark.
1:36:09 From a scientific perspective, just the fact that most of those species are not identified
1:36:15 was fascinating. Right. It was like a little… Every little insect is a kind of discovery.
1:36:21 Right. I mean, one of the reasons I love New York City so much, despite its problems at times,
1:36:25 is that everywhere you look, there’s life. It’s like a tropical reef. If you’ve ever done
1:36:29 scuba diving or snorkeling, you look on a tropical reef and it’s like there’s some
1:36:33 little crab working on something and everywhere you look, there’s life. The Bay Area, if you
1:36:37 go scuba diving or snorkeling, it’s like a kelp bed. The Bay Area is like a kelp bed.
1:36:41 Every once in a while, some big fish goes by. It’s like a big IPO. But most of the time,
1:36:45 not a whole lot happens. Actually, the Bay Area, it’s interesting as I’ve been going back there
1:36:53 more and more recently. There are really cool little subcultures starting to pop up again.
1:36:59 There’s incredible skateboarding. The GX1000 guys are these guys that bomb down hills.
1:37:05 They’re nuts. They’re just going… So just speed, not tricks.
1:37:10 You gotta see GX1000. These guys going down hills in San Francisco, they are wild. And
1:37:14 occasionally, unfortunately, occasionally, someone will get hit by a car. But GX1000,
1:37:17 look, into intersections, they have spotters. You can see someone there.
1:37:23 Oh, I see. There’s somebody looking down. But into traffic. Yeah, into traffic.
1:37:32 Yeah, this is crazy. This is unbelievable. And they’re just wild. But in any case…
1:37:35 What’s on your bucket list that you haven’t done?
1:37:41 Well, I’m working on a book. So I’m actually going to head to a cabin for a couple weeks and write,
1:37:45 which I’ve never done. People talk about doing this, but I’m going to do that.
1:37:49 I’m excited for that, just the mental space of really dropping into writing.
1:37:51 Like Jack Nicholson in the shining cabin.
1:37:55 Let’s hope not. Let’s hope not. Before… I mean, I only started doing public
1:38:01 facing anything for posting on Instagram in 2019. But I used to head up to Wallala on the northern
1:38:08 coast of California, sometimes by myself, to a little cabin there and spend a weekend by myself
1:38:15 and just read and write papers and things like that. I used to do that all the time. I missed that.
1:38:21 So some of that, I’m trying to spend a bit more time with my relatives in Argentina, relatives
1:38:25 on the east coast. See my parents more. They’re in good health, thankfully.
1:38:28 I want to get married and have a family. That’s an important priority.
1:38:30 And put a lot of work in there.
1:38:31 Yeah, that’s a big one.
1:38:35 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, put a lot of work into the runway on that.
1:38:43 What other advice for people about that, or give advice to yourself about how to find love in
1:38:48 this world, how to find, how to build a family, get there.
1:38:50 And then I’ll listen to it some day and see if I hit the marks.
1:38:57 Yeah, well, obviously pick the right partner, but also do the work on yourself, know yourself,
1:39:06 the oracle, know thyself. And I think, listen, I have a friend. He’s a new friend,
1:39:13 but he’s a friend who I met for a meal. He’s a very, very well-known actor overseas.
1:39:18 And his stuff has made it over here. And we become friends and we went to lunch and we were talking
1:39:24 about work and being public facing and all this kind of thing. And then I said, you have kids,
1:39:28 right? And he says he has four kids. I was like, oh, yeah, I see your posts with the kids. You
1:39:33 seem really happy. And he said, he just looked at me, leaned in and he said, it’s the best gift
1:39:41 you’ll ever give yourself. And he also said, and pick your partner, the mother of your kids,
1:39:47 very carefully. So that’s good advice coming from, excellent advice coming from somebody who’s
1:39:52 very successful in work and family. So that’s the only thing I can pass along.
1:39:58 We hear this from Friends Fires as well. But kids are amazing and family’s amazing.
1:40:06 All these people who want to be immortal and live to be 200 or something,
1:40:13 there’s also the old-fashioned way of having children that live on and evolve a new legacy.
1:40:17 But they have half your DNA. So that’s exciting.
1:40:19 Yeah, I think you make an amazing dad.
1:40:20 Thank you.
1:40:24 It seems like a fun thing. And I’ve also gotten advice from friends who are
1:40:31 super high performing and have a lot of kids. They’ll say, just don’t overthink it.
1:40:31 Right.
1:40:32 Start having kids.
1:40:33 Let’s go.
1:40:39 Right. Well, the chaos of kids is kind of the, like, you can either bury you or it can give you
1:40:45 energy. But I grew up in a big pack of boys always doing like wild and crazy things. And so
1:40:49 that kind of energy is great. And if it’s not a big pack of wild boys, it’s, you know,
1:40:53 you have daughters and they can be, you know, different form of chaos, sometimes same form of
1:40:56 chaos. How many kids do you think you want?
1:41:00 You know, it’s either two or five.
1:41:03 Yeah.
1:41:05 Very different dynamics. You’re one of two, right?
1:41:05 Yeah.
1:41:05 You’re the other.
1:41:11 Yeah. I mean, I’m very close with my sister. I couldn’t imagine having another sibling because
1:41:13 there’s so much richness there. We talk almost every day.
1:41:19 Very, you know, three, four times a week, you know, sometimes just briefly, but we’re tight,
1:41:26 you know, we’re really look out for one another. She’s an amazing person, like truly an amazing
1:41:32 person and has like raised her daughter in an amazing way. She’s like, you know,
1:41:36 my niece is like going to head to college in a year or two and like my sister’s done an amazing
1:41:44 job and her dad’s done a great job too. They both really put a lot into the family aspect.
1:41:49 Got a chance to spend time with a really amazing person in Peru in the Amazon jungle,
1:41:53 and he is one of 20 kids. Wow.
1:41:59 So he’s got, it’s mostly guys. It’s just a lot of brothers and I think two sisters.
1:41:59 Wow.
1:42:03 I just said Jonathan Haight on the podcast. The guy who’s talking about anxious generation
1:42:06 causing the American mind. He’s great, but he was saying that, you know, in order to keep kids
1:42:10 healthy, they need to not be on social media or have smartphones until they’re 16.
1:42:17 I’ve actually been thinking a lot about getting a bunch of friends onto neighboring properties.
1:42:20 You know, everyone talks about this, not creating a commune or anything like that,
1:42:26 but I think Jonathan’s right. We were more or less, our brain wiring does best when we
1:42:31 are raised in small village type environments where kids can forage the whole free range
1:42:36 kids idea. I mean, I grew up skateboarding and building forts and dirt clawed wars and all that
1:42:41 stuff. It would be so strange to have a childhood without that.
1:42:48 Yeah. And I think more and more as we wake up to the negative aspects of the digital interaction,
1:42:53 we’ll put more and more value to in person interaction. So, I mean, it’s cool to see,
1:42:57 for instance, kids in New York City, just kind of moving around the city with so much sense
1:43:02 of agency. It’s really, really cool. The suburbs, like where I grew up, like as soon as we could get
1:43:08 out, take the 7F bus up to San Francisco and hang out with, you know, wild ones. Like, you know,
1:43:12 while there were dangers, I mean, we couldn’t wait to get out of the suburbs. The moment that,
1:43:17 you know, forts and dirt clawed wars and stuff didn’t cut it, we just, like, wanted into the city.
1:43:23 So, bucket list, I will probably move to a major city, not Los Angeles or San Francisco,
1:43:32 in the next few years, New York City potentially. There’s all such different flavors of experiences.
1:43:36 Yeah. So, I’d love to live in New York City for a while. I’ve always wanted to do that,
1:43:42 and I will do that. I’ve always wanted to also have a place in a very rural area. So, Colorado,
1:43:48 Montana are high on my list right now. And to be able to pivot back and forth between the two
1:43:53 would be great, just for such different experiences. And also, I like a very physical life. So,
1:43:58 the idea of getting up in the sun with the sun in the Montana or Colorado type environment,
1:44:07 and I’ve been putting some effort towards finding a spot for that. And New York City, to me, I know
1:44:11 it’s got its issues, and people say, “It wasn’t what it was.” Okay, I get it, but listen, I’ve
1:44:18 never lived there, so for me, it would be entirely new. And, you know, Schultz seems full of life.
1:44:21 There is an energy to that city, and he represents that. I mean, there’s,
1:44:27 and the full diversity of weird that is represented in New York City is great.
1:44:30 Yeah, you walk down the street, there’s like a person with like a cat on their head and no one
1:44:35 gives a shit, you know? That’s great. San Francisco used to be like that. The joke was like,
1:44:39 you have to be naked and on fire and San Francisco before someone takes it. But now it’s changed.
1:44:43 But again, recently, I’ve noticed that San Francisco, it’s not just about the skateboarders,
1:44:48 it’s there’s some community houses of people in tech that are super interesting. There’s
1:44:55 some community housing of people not in tech that I’ve learned about them and known people
1:44:59 have lived there, and it’s cool. Like, there’s stuff happening
1:45:04 in these cities that’s new and different. I mean, that’s what youth is for. They’re supposed to
1:45:11 evolve things out. So, amidst all that, you still have to get shit done. I’ve been really
1:45:17 obsessed with tracking time recently, like making sure I have daily activities,
1:45:24 I have habits that I’m maintaining, and I’m very religious about making sure I get shit done.
1:45:28 Do you use an app or something like that? No, just Google Sheets. So, basically,
1:45:34 I spread sheet and I’m tracking daily. And I write scripts that whenever I achieve a goal,
1:45:40 it glows green. Yeah. Do you track your workouts and all that kind of stuff too?
1:45:47 No. Just the fact that I got the workout done. So, it’s a checkmark thing. So, I’m really,
1:45:53 really big on making sure I do a thing. It doesn’t matter how long it is. So, I have a rule for myself
1:46:01 that I do a set of tasks for at least five minutes every day. And it turns out that many of them
1:46:08 might do way longer, but just even just doing it, I have to do it every day. And there’s currently
1:46:13 11 of them. And it’s just a thing. Like, one of them is playing guitar, for example.
1:46:22 So, do you do that kind of stuff? Do you do, like, daily habits? Yeah, I do. I wake up if I don’t
1:46:27 feel I slept enough. I do this non-sleep-deep-rest yoga-needra thing that I’ve talked about a
1:46:32 bunch. We actually released a few of those tracks as audio tracks on Spotify. 10-minute,
1:46:37 20-minute ones puts me back into a state that feels like sleep and I feel very rested. Actually,
1:46:41 Matt Walker and I are going to run a study. He’s just submitted the IRB to run a study on NSDR
1:46:45 and what it’s actually doing to the brain. There’s some evidence of increases in dopamine,
1:46:49 et cetera. But those are older studies, still cool studies. But so, I’ll do that,
1:46:55 get up, hydrate. And if I’ve got my act together, I punch some caffeine down,
1:47:02 like some metina, some coffee, maybe another metina, and resistance train three days a week,
1:47:08 run three days a week, and then take one day off. And like to be done by 8.39. And then I want to get
1:47:14 into some real work. I actually have a sticky note on my computer. It’s like just like reminding me
1:47:18 how good it feels to accomplish some real work. And then I go into it right now. It’s the book
1:47:25 writing, researching a podcast, and just fight tooth and nail to stay off social media, text
1:47:31 message, WhatsApp, YouTube, all that. Get something done. How long can you go? Can you go like
1:47:39 three hours? Just deep focus? If I hit a groove, yeah, 90 minutes to three hours if I’m really in
1:47:46 a groove. That’s tough. For me, I start the day actually. That’s why I’m afraid. I’d really prize
1:47:55 that those morning hours I start with the work. And I’m trying to hit the four-hour mark of deep
1:48:03 focus. Great. I love it. Then count the import. I’m really, really faithfully. It’s often torture
1:48:09 actually. It’s really, really difficult. Oh, yeah. The agitation. But I’ve sat across the table
1:48:12 from you a couple of years ago when I was out here in Austin doing some work, and I was working on
1:48:19 stuff. And I noticed you just stare at your notebook sometimes, just pen at the same position.
1:48:22 And then you’ll get back into it. There are those moments you’re building that hydraulic
1:48:28 pressure and then go. Yeah, I try and get something done of value. Then the communications start.
1:48:37 Talking to my podcast producer, my team is everything. The magic potion in the podcast is Rob
1:48:44 Moore, who’s been in the room with me every single solo. Costello used to be in there with
1:48:47 us because that’s it. People have asked. Journalists have asked. Can they sit in? Friends have asked.
1:48:55 Nope. Just Rob. And for guest interviews, he’s there as well. And I talk to Rob all the time.
1:49:03 All the time. We talk multiple times per day. And in life, I’ve made some errors in certain
1:49:07 relationship domains in my life in terms of partner choice and things like that. And
1:49:12 certainly don’t blame all of it on them. But I’ve played my role. But in terms of picking
1:49:19 business partners and friends, to work with, I mean, Rob, it’s just been bull’s-eyes. And it’s
1:49:23 just Rob has been amazing. Mike Blavack, our photographer and the guys I mentioned earlier.
1:49:30 We just communicate as much as we need to. And we pour over every decision like near neuroticism
1:49:36 before we put anything out there. So including like even creative decisions of like topics to
1:49:40 cover all of that. Yeah. Like a photo for the book jacket the other day. Mike shoots photos.
1:49:46 And then we look at them. We pour over them together logo for the perform podcast with Andy
1:49:49 Gallop. And then we’re launching like, is that the right contour? Mike’s the real, he’s got the
1:49:55 aesthetic thing because he was at DC so long as a portrait photographer. And his cute close friends
1:50:00 with Ken Block to Jim Conna, like all the car jumping in the city stuff. Like, I mean, Mike
1:50:07 is a master. He’s a true master of that stuff. And we just pour over every little decision.
1:50:12 But even with sponsors, you know, there are dozens of ads now. By the way, that whole
1:50:16 josser-sizer thing of me saying, “Oh, a guy went from a two to a seven.” I never said that. That’s
1:50:22 AI. I would never call it number off somebody, a two to a seven. Are you kidding me? It’s crazy.
1:50:26 So is AI. If you bought the thing, I’m sorry. But like our sponsors,
1:50:29 we list the sponsors that we have and why on our website. And like the decision,
1:50:34 do we work with this person or not? Do we still like the product? I mean, we’ve got ways with
1:50:39 sponsors because of like changes in the product or change, you know, most of the time it’s amicable,
1:50:45 all good. But, you know, like just every detail and that just takes a ton of time and energy.
1:50:50 But I try and work mostly on content and my team is constantly trying to keep me out of the other
1:50:58 discussions because I obsess. But yeah, you have to have a team of some sort, someone that you
1:51:03 can run things by. For sure. But one of the challenges, the larger the team is, and I’d like
1:51:07 to be involved in a lot of different kinds of stuff, including engineering stuff, robotics,
1:51:14 work, research, all of those interactions, at least for me, take away from the deep work,
1:51:20 the deep focus. Unfortunately, I get drained by social interaction, even with the people I love
1:51:24 and really respect and all that kind of stuff. You’re an introvert. Yeah, like fundamentally
1:51:31 an introvert. So to me, it’s a trade-off, getting shit done versus collaborating. And I have to
1:51:36 choose wisely because without collaboration, without a great team, which I’m fortunate enough to be a
1:51:41 part of, like you wouldn’t get anything really done. But as an individual contributor to get
1:51:45 stuff done, like to do the hard work of researching or programming, all that kind of stuff,
1:51:51 you need the hours of deep work. I used to spend a lot more time alone. That’s on my bucket list,
1:51:58 spend a bit more time, dropped into work alone. I think social media causes our brain to go the
1:52:05 other direction. I try and answer some comments and then get back to work. I’m really, after going
1:52:13 to the jungle, I appreciate not using the device. I’ve played with the idea of spending certainly,
1:52:19 maybe like one week a month, not using social media at all. I used it. So after that morning
1:52:23 block, I’ll eat some lunch and I’ll usually do something while I’m doing lunch or something,
1:52:29 and then a bit more work and then real work, deep work. And then around 2.30, I do a non-sleep
1:52:36 depressed, take a short nap, wake up, boom, maybe a little more caffeine and then lean into it again.
1:52:44 I find if you’ve really put in the deep work, two or three ballots per day by about 5 or 6 pm,
1:52:49 it’s over. I was down at Jaco’s place not that long ago and in the evening did a sauna session
1:52:54 with him and some family members of his and some of their friends. And it’s really cool, like they
1:52:58 all work all day and train all day. And then in the evening, they get together and they
1:53:04 sauna and cold plunge. I’m really into this whole thing of gathering with other people
1:53:09 at a specific time of day. I have a gym at my house and Tim will come over and train.
1:53:18 We’ve kind of slowed that down in recent months, but I think gathering in groups once a day,
1:53:22 being alone for part of the day, it’s like very fundamental stuff. We’re not saying anything
1:53:27 that hasn’t been said millions of times before, but how often do people actually do that and call
1:53:31 the party? Be the person to bring people together if it’s not happening. That’s something I’ve really
1:53:36 had to learn, even though I’m an introvert. I’m like, “Hey, gather people together.” You came
1:53:40 through town the other day and there’s a lot of people at the house. It was rad. Actually,
1:53:44 it was funny because I was getting a massage when you walked in. I don’t sit around getting
1:53:49 massages very often, but I was getting one that day and then everyone came in and the dog came in
1:53:55 and everyone was piled in. It was very sweet. Again, no devices, but choose wisely the people
1:54:03 you gather with. I was clothed. Thank you for clarifying. I wasn’t, which is very weird.
1:54:13 Yeah, the friends you surround yourself with, that’s another thing. I understood that
1:54:20 from ayahuasca and from just the experience in the jungle. Just select the people. Be careful
1:54:26 how you allocate your time. I just saw on somewhere, Conor McGregor has this good line.
1:54:31 I wrote it down about loyalty. He said, “Don’t eat with people you wouldn’t starve with.”
1:54:37 That guy’s, I mean, he’s big on loyalty. All the shit talk, all of that. Set that aside.
1:54:43 To me, loyalty is really big. If you invest in certain people in your life and they stick
1:54:49 by you and you stick by them, what else is life about? Yeah. Well, hardship will show you who
1:54:56 your real friends are. That’s for sure. We’re fortunate to have a lot of them. It’ll also
1:55:04 show you who really has put in the time to try and understand you and understand people. People
1:55:11 are complicated. I love that. Can you read the quote once more? “Don’t eat with people you wouldn’t
1:55:23 starve with.” Yeah. In that way, a hardship is a gift. It shows you. Definitely. It makes you
1:55:31 stronger. It definitely makes you stronger. Let’s go get some food. Yeah. You’re one meal a day guy.
1:55:35 Yeah. I actually ate something earlier, but it was like a protein shake and a couple pieces of
1:55:41 Bill Tong. I hope we’re eating a steak. I hope so too. I’m full of nicotine and caffeine. Yeah.
1:55:45 What do you think? How do you feel? I feel good. Yeah. I was thinking you’d probably like,
1:55:51 I only did a half a piece and I won’t have more for a while, but a little too good. Yeah.
1:55:57 Thank you for talking once again, brother. Yeah. Thanks so much, Lex. It’s been a great ride,
1:56:01 this podcast thing. And you’re the reason I started the podcast. You inspired me to do it.
1:56:06 You told me to do it. I did it. And you’ve also been an amazing friend. You showed up in some
1:56:14 very challenging times and you’ve shown up for me publicly. You’ve shown up for me in my home,
1:56:22 in my life, and it’s an honor to have you as a friend. Thank you. I love you, brother. Love you too.
1:56:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Kuberman. To support this podcast,
1:56:32 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
1:56:39 Carl Jung. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
1:56:53 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
1:56:59 [Music]