Why You’re Tired, Stressed & Unfocussed (and how to fix it) - Dr Andrew Huberman

Asked for advice on combating brain fog and low energy throughout the day, the speaker offered a simple answer. If he had only two minutes with someone asking what single thing they could do for their health, he would say: make the first hour of your day high cortisol and the last hour low cortisol.

High cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated mood, focus, and alertness all day long. It allows you to buffer stress better, and it ensures your nighttime cortisol stays low. If you don't spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours, the benefits don't follow.

If you don't spike your morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day, you end up with a high, flat cortisol curve — not good. That makes you less resilient to stress, causes brain fog, makes you less amenable to learning, and so on.

So the question becomes: what can you do? We can make this very simple. In the morning, get bright light — especially sunlight, or 10,000 lux artificial light — particularly in the first 30 minutes after waking. Add hydration, caffeine if you like caffeine, and exercise in the first three hours of your day if you can; some people can't. Then, at night, in that final hour, do everything you can to reverse the pattern: dim the lights, especially overhead lights, dim your screen, use red light or candlelight, limit caffeine, and exercise in the final hour before sleep only if that's the only time you can do it — for some people it is.

Interestingly, eating in the first three hours of your day can also spike cortisol. I personally fast during those hours, but eating works too. People ask why eating would spike cortisol — basically anything pro-arousal, anything involving activity, spikes cortisol. So bookending your day — spiking cortisol at the beginning and lowering it at the end — really is, if there is a cheat code to life, this is it. Is it going to make you completely stress-resilient? No. Able to learn anything with ease? No. But it sets you up for the best possible sleep, which makes you more alert the next day.

It also anchors a process I haven't discussed on any podcast before, and frankly didn't touch on directly in the book: so much of life is about balancing what we call bottom-up and top-down influences. Bottom-up influences are impulses driven by the hypothalamus and other deep brain structures — you want the cookie, so you eat the cookie; you know you shouldn't be scrolling as much as you are, but you keep scrolling. Thankfully, we also have top-down influences: the prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses. This is the two-marshmallow test in kids — which, by the way, a lot of people say was debunked, but the debunk was itself debunked.

It's the ability to suppress action. It's what I taught my bulldog-pit mix, Strummer, the day I brought him home, and it's the basis of everything. You put a piece of food in front of him — of course he wants to take it, his prefrontal cortex isn't even online yet — and you take it away until he learns. He learned the first day and never forgot that he has to wait until I say "okay." It's actually not about making him wait for a treat; it's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse. And that carries over to every type of waiting: you say "see you later, I'm going to work," and when you come back he's not freaking out — he no longer has to actively suppress the whole time.

So much of life depends on this ability to suppress impulse: the ability to learn by leaning into just enough stress to trigger learning, the ability to listen when you want to react, the ability to force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing you don't want to do. Being an effective human is essentially about building up those top-down circuits. Whether you have to practice them in everything is a matter of debate.

People like Andy Stumpf, whom I have tremendous respect for — I've learned so much from him — actually prompted some very late additions to the book. My editors said I couldn't keep doing this, that enough was enough, and I said I wanted it back or I wouldn't sign off on the final draft. Andy has a number of really useful tools, and he shares a philosophy: throughout your day, when given the option between the easier thing and the harder thing, do the harder thing. There's tremendous value in that. It's the "make your bed" idea — the example he gives in his book Drown is replacing the toilet paper roll. It's an awesome book; I highly recommend it to everybody, and he doesn't pay me to say that. These little things — there's a piece of trash on the floor, do you pick it up? Is it really about the trash? Does it really make that much of a difference in your life?

No. But the action of going against that bottom-up influence—the pull toward ease, more pleasure, less pain, even just avoiding subtle pain—builds up these circuits. There are two ways to do it. One is forcing yourself through, as writers say, "ass to chair": you sweat blood until you get those 800 words a day out, or you do the hard workout you don't want to do. The other is building up the same circuits—the top-down suppression of impulse—through the little things all day long. You probably need to do both.

But many of us who exercise and follow health protocols absorb a lot of energy just getting ourselves to those. Some people more, some less. I've started doing these smaller things throughout the day. He does the big things too, obviously, but what I find is that the little things make it much easier to overcome the friction that comes from anything. It's like getting the reps in: what it proves is that it's the circuit, not what you're doing. You're getting the reps into the circuit.

It's kind of like Pavel Tsatsouline, the strength guy, and his "grease the groove" idea: you do two pull-ups every time you pass through the door.

Does that mean you can do 200 pull-ups in a single set? No. But it turns out to be more effective than doing three sets of 10 twice a week.

People say, "Well, that's not true." If you add weight, perhaps not—but maybe it's just two different roads to the same place. The top-down, bottom-up tension, this dynamic tension between the two, is so much of what being non-reactive is about, what not procrastinating is about, what morality is about, being calm under pressure, and making appropriate decisions in the face of stress. Because it's not all about not feeling stress—it's about making adaptive decisions.

Asked what else people can do to train willpower, the speaker points to the idea Andy describes in his book—noting Andy isn't the first to say it—that how you do one thing is how you do anything. He finds that phrasing a bit vague, but likes Andy's framing of "micro sucks" throughout the day, and mentions it came up in his own life recently.

The conversation turns to Andy himself: a man with a helicopter who has jumped out of planes, holds two world records in wing suiting, and once flew around 36,000 feet. The speaker says there are plenty of badasses in the tier-one operator sphere, but what impresses him is someone with the intelligence and communication skills to share what's relevant to everybody in a way that's relevant to everybody. Andy is also from Santa Cruz, right over the hill from where the speaker grew up—something of a hometown joke, since he saw Santa Cruz not as the hippie town people imagine but as a rougher place: for a guy in his teens, 20s or 30s, you went to the boardwalk to meet girls or you went to fight. Hearing Andy was from there made no sense to him at first, but Andy apparently took that local environment, had a good upbringing he talks fondly about, turned it into genuinely impressive feats, and can communicate what those experiences actually export.

After all, how many of us in daily life need to shoot, move, and communicate—the macronutrients of operators? Some people, yes, but most of us, no.

Other ways to train it

A second route is simply doing your workouts. He's a big believer in asking yourself what you're genuinely curious about learning and where the fear point is—why you're shying away from learning something for fear of poor performance—and then leaning into that thing. You do have to be curious about it, unless you're in school and required to learn a subject. So that's pushing yourself to learn cognitively.

A third part of this top-down training is simply how you approach life. He thinks there are two reasons to do hard things—he and Rogan discussed this the day before: one is that it makes you better at doing hard things; the other is that it lets you access more awareness of the beautiful things in life.

There's so much nonsense, anger, and barbed-wire drama floating around online. If he posted every reflexive opinion he has about the antics he sees or the crazy documentaries coming out—well, at a certain point in life you tend to be one to six degrees of separation from pretty much anything you see online. You realize you know someone who knows someone who knows that person, or you met that person once at a party and got an eerie feeling. He won't say who that's about, but it was a real experience. You can go down that rabbit hole, and so much of being effective is just going nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

He takes himself back to high school, where there were really only three or four legitimate reasons to be there: to learn from teachers and peers in class, and social reasons. You can also learn a lot about people and human behavior—there were observations from that time still salient to him, one of which he plans to share.

He got to be Andrew, and it still annoys me. Eventually I took back Andrew. But there's another reason: certain observations I made in high school taught me a lot about human nature—patterns that still hold true across men and women, all ages, all demographics—and that's been really useful.

Let me share one now. As some people may know, around age fourteen I got really into skateboarding. Before that it was school, swimming, soccer—what every kid in my town did. Skateboarding was small then; there were no X Games, nothing like today's scene. I wasn't a very good skateboarder—I was decent enough to get picked up by one sponsor, probably out of sheer sympathy. People can check me on this: my team manager was Steve Rugie, and I rode for Spitfire. It was out of sympathy. Steve, I love you, thank you for putting me on—and also for telling me I'd never be one of the big guys. Done.

There was a phase of skateboarding in the early 90s—it wasn't a good phase—where the clothes got baggy, the shorts got baggy, there was some sagging. At that time nobody did that: not in hip-hop, nowhere. It wasn't extreme sagging; the shorts just went from mid-thigh to right above the knee, maybe a little longer. That's what we did. We were skateboarders and we didn't care what anyone else did. We came to school and got ridiculed—by the jocks, by everybody. It didn't matter whether the kids were Black, white, male, female, Mexican, Vietnamese—we were teased relentlessly. But we knew we liked it. The point back then was to be different, not the same.

Then summer happened. Something happened in the world of hip-hop where somebody started sagging their pants. The next year, everybody was doing it. And I realized in that moment: they actually don't know what they like. They really don't. They're just following—not even following a trend, because they haven't actually formed taste.

That's what I love about skateboarding, about certain forms of music, about certain podcasters, and about certain scientists—I can name scientists who just have the best taste. In particular, this guy Jonathan Horton, a neuropathologist: his papers are beautiful, articulate, the images are beautiful, the discoveries are clear. He's a phenom. But for many years his papers existed in good journals without popping to the biggest ones—then they popped.

Whether in high school or as adults, most people don't develop a sense of taste. They confuse what they like and don't like with what feels socially acceptable, and with what feels so different that it's uncomfortable to them. Now, I don't believe in doing things just to be different—that's not taste, that's just doing things to be different. But I started realizing there are certain people in life with an exquisite sense of taste. Rick Rubin is one of them. My friend David Cho is one of them. I believe you have taste—and don't let the velvet British accent fool you. A British accent can confuse people, especially Americans, into thinking someone is smarter than they are. I'm not just trying to flatter you, but if it flatters you, fine. You're my friend, but you also think right at the boundaries between conflicting opinions, and then you form a third, new opinion that usually highlights something both beneficial and deficient about both.

That is a skill—a super skill that most people don't possess. Frankly, most academics don't possess it either, because careers are built on planting your flag and defending it until you're battered enough to relent and pivot to something new. I have a great story about that, actually. But I've realized that taste is something many people never develop.

And the worst thing is when people who have taste believe their taste isn't really taste—that it's some internal misdirection—and so they never cultivate it. High school taught me a lot about this. The baggy pants got too baggy; the sag went way too far, and we just laughed as it took off, like, "this is hilarious." The same thing happened in skateboarding. Years later, Danny Way—a kid I grew up with and I'm still friendly with, the one who jumped the Great Wall of China and jumped out of a helicopter and holds all these world records—was an aggro kid. He built the first mega ramps. He's gnarly, an incredibly aggressive skateboarder and an incredible athlete. I remember years later, after he broke his neck surfing at Newport, he started working out with Paul Trek and built a strong physique—and skateboarders would say, "that's for jocks, skateboarders don't work out." Now, if you look, a lot of skateboarders are into lifting weights and taking care of their bodies. Chris Joslin and Trey flipped down the El Toro stairs this year—a heroic feat, more or less the four-minute mile of skateboarding. That dude clearly works out and takes care of himself.

The things within a subculture that make it such a special community eventually lead to the community defying its own principles. The punks turn on people and say, "that's not punk." They did that to Joe Strummer for bringing hip-hop acts as openers, and they've done it to friends of mine in high-level punk rock bands: "they sold out." No, actually they're doing great, and you're stuck in the eighth grade—that's what happened. It's not regressive. Taste is the hardest thing for people to understand because it forces them to hold a mirror up to themselves and ask, "What do I actually like and dislike?"

It's a countervailing force against both what's popular and the fickleness of blowing in the wind. People confuse something popular for something tasteful, and they can also confuse something tasteful but unpopular for something bad. As you said before, there's a difference between liking something and not liking it—you can like something that's untasteful. The difference between taste, popularity, and liking is that taste is the ability to discern between good and not good: is this thing good in and of itself? That's one of the problems when everyone is optimizing for performance: if you run enough split tests, you will end up with a porn website. That's what happens.

Can you explain that? We've talked about this—it all regresses to porn eventually. If you want the most eyes and clicks on something, you keep going more extreme, more salacious, and you end up in the dumpster heap of online content.

Correct. Exactly.

Asked for his best advice on improving memory and focus, the guest began by reframing the problem: brain fog is not a specific condition—it's an inability to focus.

Focus is a threshold problem

The core principle: even people with severe, clinical-grade ADHD can focus when doing something they really enjoy. That tells you something. The catecholamine systems of the brain and body—dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine—are involved in many functions, focus among them, and in these people they are functional. The threshold to access them is simply too high.

That means people can learn to focus, and can get assistance doing so, by pushing on one or both of two ends. One is ramping up the level of those chemicals, which is what drugs like Adderall, Vyvanse, and Ritalin do.

A study out this year from Washington University in St. Louis—"sort of the Harvard of the Midwest, although I think that's unfair to the Midwest; maybe we should call Harvard the WashU of the East"—showed that when you compare the attention-improving effects of Ritalin to a great night's sleep, they're effectively equal.

Some of these stimulants are known to stunt growth, limiting ultimate height, and they reduce sleep. So there's a new idea: perhaps lower dosages combined with better sleep would be as effective a treatment. A lot of parents are erring that way, and a lot of adults too. That said, some of these medications can still be useful in extreme cases.

The steps to learning

Setting the book aside—he promised to just give the information directly rather than cloak it—the steps begin here:

To learn, you need to focus. To focus, you need to be alert. There are many ways to get alert. Foundational ones like sleep help you get alert and focused, but there's also exercise.

Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons. First, it increases the catecholamines—dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. So in the four to six hours after exercise, you are more alert and can focus better—unless you exercise to exhaustion. If it's leg day with ten sets of ten on squats followed by a pile of hamstring work, your brain won't be good at focusing. But 45 to 75 minutes of hard training, not taken to extreme, will leave you more alert: more adrenaline in your body, more norepinephrine released in your brain, and more dopamine released in your brain.

And dopamine is a critical component for learning. Once that's in place, focus becomes easier to access.

Within focus, what you need to focus on is making errors through genuine attempts to do something—something physical, like a tennis serve or learning billiards, or something cognitive, like learning a language. The error is the gap between what you currently do and what you're trying to do. That error is the signal the neurons, the nerve cells, need in order to change. It runs through a circuit involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close. If you can already do something, there's no reason for your brain to change.

The agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated epinephrine in the body and norepinephrine in the brain. Those chemically tag the synapses—there are some additional steps, but they tag them—so that at night, when you sleep, the synapses rearrange and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve. That's how it works.

Curiosity and a willingness to learn get you to the gate of learning. Making errors through genuine attempts puts the key in and turns the key. The agitation is walking through that gate, and then getting some sleep—or even a day or two later, even if you don't sleep quite as well as you'd like, just some time for the synapses to rearrange. That's the last piece.

There's an additional piece that can reinforce all of it: self-testing. If you want to get good at something, stay good at it, and keep getting better, you need to self-test. Mental self-testing is the best way to consolidate learning and learn faster. By that I don't mean visualization. I mean asking yourself questions. For example, if I want to improve my memory generally, I might think, "September 11th, 2001—where was I exactly? What were some of the details?" That might be something I wouldn't want to think about. But I might say, "I'm going back to my first year of neuroscience graduate school. Of course I know what a synapse is, I know what neurons are, I know all this—it's embedded so deeply in me I could almost do it in my sleep." And then I think, "Right, but what is the role of astrocytes?"—because that's relevant to me. When you hit the point where you can't remember something, you go and look it up, and boom—you've closed that gap again, reinforcing the synapses that were weakening.

So whether you're trying to learn something new or maintain information from long ago, you need to retest. This is why we used to make people retake their driver's tests.

Right—there was a time you had to retake your driver's test, not always behind the wheel. You didn't just give people a license and turn them loose.

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

I suppose one advantage with driving, practically speaking, is that people are re-triggering that learning multiple times per day.

Yeah—or you get a ticket, or you get into an accident. I feel like I'm quoting my dad a lot lately, which is probably a good sign. As my dad always says, the thing about speeding tickets is that they're expensive and money hurts. Speeding tickets used to be $20. For most people, that's a formative experience—it's not trivial, but it's not enough money to really dent a heavy foot on the pedal. But if you give someone a $300 ticket, plus their insurance goes up, people speed less.

You're going to remember that. People speed less. I'm not saying it—we could argue about speeding laws, but money hurts, right? So that's how you learn. You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation. I wish I'd learned that in the third grade. I wish they had told me that.

Now, many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things: they're getting their sets and reps and pushing past failure, they love their video games, they love perhaps mathematics but not literature. But there are two reasons to do some of the learning that doesn't come easy to us at every stage of life. One is that it enriches us. We often find that the things that are hardest to learn, that we then learn, are the most satisfying. The effort that precedes dopamine is far more reinforcing than when dopamine just arrives. You could say scrolling involves no effort and seems very reinforcing, but that's more of a compulsive behavior after a certain point—it kind of gets passed into reflex. But talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, "Oh yeah, everything was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame that big thing, and that was really the thing that taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things." We don't really like pure success stories; we like the underdog-to-success story, the pitfall and coming out of it. The hero's journey is something we resonate with, in part because it's so true, but in part because for so many people it's not true—we know it's there, but most people don't embark on those things. I think it's because we set too lofty an idea of what the hero's journey is. For a lot of people it's about learning to do less. I know a lot of hard-driving people for whom it's about learning how to achieve more peace, or exploring ideas around spirituality, or fiction if they only read non-fiction.

We all have to ask ourselves how much we should push ourselves to do things we're not naturally inclined to do. I think a mixture of what we love to do and some of the things we've avoided because they just seem too hard—there's real value in doing those things. And all the data on maintaining cognitive abilities says: will exercise make you smarter? No. It's necessary but not sufficient to make you smarter—you still have to go learn. Not completely joking, this is evidenced by many guys who spend hours upon hours in the gym and aren't brilliant people. They're exercising plenty; their brain is clearly not getting bigger. They're not necessarily getting stupider, but they're not doing anything to make themselves smarter. You need to learn information.

Then there's also the question people ask: "Is it crossword puzzles?" If you love doing crossword puzzles, guess what, my friend—they're not going to help keep your brain young. You have to do the hard puzzles. If they're easy for you, it's not going to help. You like chess, play Go. You like checkers, learn chess.

This is where I think people really lose out on an understanding: people who are striving maintain brain and bodily function for a long period of time, but their internal state is not necessarily one of "oh yeah, I just love learning, so I just keep learning." I bet you Andy Stumpf, as calm and cool and collected as he is—even though so many of his tier-one operator peers tell me it's really frustrating because Andy's really good at everything—I bet if we looked at his internal state, his narrative probably by now says "you can do this," but I doubt it's one of complete calm all the time.

I'm sure he's just managing the external rep, like he's not showing it.

Yeah, talking about that—

Stress is one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of people's lives. When asked for his best stress-management protocols, the first answer was familiar: morning sunlight. But the more actionable tool is the deliberate long exhale.

The physiological sigh

When you're stressed, do a long, deliberate exhale. It slows your heart rate down through a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia—which sounds bad, but it isn't. The vagus nerve collects sensory information from your viscera (nerd speak for your internal organs—stomach, spleen, liver) and sends it up to the brain, which responds unconsciously all the time.

The vagus nerve also carries signals from the brain to the heart and other organs. One particular pathway contacts the sinoatrial node of the heart and slows your heart rate when you exhale. The reason is mechanical: as you breathe, the space available for your heart changes. At some point in the breath cycle the heart is slightly smaller, so the blood inside moves more quickly, and the brain signals through this vagal pathway to slow the heart rate down.

The key word is deliberately. A deliberate exhale slows your heart rate significantly, offloads carbon dioxide, and tips your autonomic balance—sympathetic alertness versus parasympathetic calm—toward calm immediately. It's the fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. It works even better if you do two big inhales first, then exhale all the way to empty lungs. That's the so-called physiological sigh, discovered in the 1930s—not by shamans or breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set of neurons in the parafacial nucleus of the brain stem that capture this vagal pathway's activity and slow your heart rate.

Heart rate variability

The beauty of this mechanism is that it also increases HRV—heart rate variability. People want higher HRV and usually pursue it through VO2 max training, high-intensity intervals, or low-intensity endurance work. But HRV reflects how many times throughout the day and night this vagal pathway signals the sinoatrial node to slow the heart down. You can raise your HRV significantly just by doing ten deliberate exhales across your day; check your HRV that night and it will be elevated.

For anyone who has never done resonance breathing, after about three minutes it almost feels like you've had a drink—slightly intoxicated, once you get into it. Jay Wilds, the main science person behind it, emphasizes precision: resonance breathing without biofeedback misses the fact that everyone's resonance pattern differs. You might breathe 4.9 seconds in and 8 out, while someone else does 4.1 in and 7 out—and he says that difference matters a lot.

One final point from him: to go from a state change to a trait change with resonance breathing, you need sessions over 12 minutes; beyond 20, it stops adding benefit. It's very similar to meditation. What's appealing about the device is that it's silent and can be held while watching a movie or lying in bed unable to sleep—you just breathe in time with the vibration.

You can be watching something else while doing it. I haven't been able to read whilst doing it — that's a bit too cognitively demanding — but you can breathe whilst watching the TV, and I've racked up hundreds of hours in the last year doing resonance breathing because I've grabbed that.

All right, I'm going to go buy one of these. Don't give me one, and I don't want M to gift me one either. It's funny — I still love finding new technologies and trying new things.

New inventions are the best. They're just harder and harder to find — new ones that people don't know about — which is why when I find one, I like to chirp on about it for ages, because I think it's cool.

I do the same. Throughout the book I mention it several times: I talk about behavioral tools — I'd say 80% behavioral tools — and then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements, the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on. But multiple times I mention some of the devices. Sauna Space, a company I'm not affiliated with at all, makes these indoor red light saunas that are incandescent; they heat up right away. I also travel with one of their red lights — it fills the whole room. I love those things. Raw Optics has these incredible non-flicker, short-wavelength-eliminated bulbs — actually the same bulbs go from daylight to candlelight at night with no flicker, and they're LED, because incandescent bulbs aren't very energy efficient. I have no relationship to Raw Optics or to Sauna Space. I know the people there now because I've mentioned them enough times and they've reached out, but I just enjoy sharing things I find useful — physiological things, or these particular lights. Some people have more disposable income than others, and nowadays it seems like "are we over-optimizing?" becomes a big question.

I did a huge essay about that long ago.

No, I listened, and I think it's an important question. To me, optimization is just: what have you got on your plate today, and how do you feel best and do best in that context? This brings me back to something I failed to say earlier, which is the top-down versus bottom-up dynamic tension. Pretty much everything in the book — high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, physiological sighs, and so on — puts these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive, less reactive life: to be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS you have no control over, less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you, the people you love, and doing the right things in accordance with that.

We all know that a bad night's sleep cripples this circuit such that the bottom-up influences take over. People who sleep less have less impulse control across the board, and they become slightly psychotic too, especially if they don't sleep well for three or four nights in a row. But when these top-down mechanisms are really reinforced — high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, great sleep, buffering stress well, doing a learning bout or two (I call them bouts because it should feel like a bout) — that's when your life is actually headed in the direction you want. It doesn't matter where you're starting from.

That's when your life starts really heading in the direction you want consistently. And these things don't take a lot of time — in fact, they save time, because they position you to show up at your best. That's not a marketing ploy; it's just true. And some people — now I'm skipping around—

Some people might ask, "How alert and focused do you need to be to learn?" We rarely talk about this. One thing I emphasize in the book is that people talk about being present, and I give a tool that explains exactly how to be present.

So how alert do you need to be in order to focus and learn? What's the state of mind? The answer is alert and calm. Have you ever played the game hot hands, where I put my hands on top of yours and you try to flip your hands over and smack mine while I try to pull them out of the way? You're younger than I am, so you'd think you have faster reflexes — you probably do.

But when your hands are on top and you're in that ready anticipation of what's going to happen next, that's the state of mind for optimal learning. That's the state you want to be in.

So when you sit down to read something and think, "I read that whole page and didn't learn anything" — of course you didn't, because your brain was running four or five different circuits at once. To really turn on focus, you need to turn off, or at least lower the activity in, those other circuits. You can't simultaneously be thinking about how your feet feel, what your heartbeat is, what's going on online, or what your girlfriend is thinking. Focus is obviously a tunnel, but the question of how much alertness — I don't think anyone has ever described it before. When you look at levels of arousal in a game like hot hands — and believe it or not, there are data on the equivalent situation, like waiting for a time trial where you have to react quickly — that's the state of mind you want to be in to learn something that's hard for you but beneficial for you. Period. End of story. Hopefully that helps people find that mental groove.

And as you learn, if you find you're getting too stressed, that brings down reaction time — you start making false positives, moving your hands away before the person even does anything.

Hopefully that helps people understand the level of attention involved and why it's so tiring after about 90 minutes, when you think, "Okay, I need to take a break."

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The conversation turns to presence: how can people be more present?

The guest explains that this topic genuinely surprised him. The final chapter of his book covers personal development. He had considered writing about relationships, but for various reasons that didn't feel appropriate. Then he thought about relationship to self, but that seemed too squishy a theme. So he stepped back and asked what the unifying themes are across all the advice about getting through trauma, and whether he could put a structure on those themes that helps people navigate them — essentially, what is the business of having a great life?

We constantly hear "be present," and there's a massive Harvard study from a few years ago showing that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Researchers ping people throughout the day, asking what they're doing and how present they are to it. It turns out happiness is really about being present — having your attention, what's called present-tethered awareness, focused on what's happening now, even if it's unpleasant. People report being much happier on average in that state than when their mind is somewhere else. Daydreaming has its place, but it usually means the mind wandering to bad things — things of the past, things of the future. We're just not present.

The host summarizes: "Distraction is literally unhappiness." The guest agrees, adding that the converse is also true — focusing on what you're doing is a great way to build up your mental health.

Being a biologist rather than a psychologist, he then started asking what presence actually is. Does it mean anchoring your visual attention? How do you actually be present? Otherwise it's just a bumper sticker. He loves psychologists — they have beautiful studies that discover phenomena — but then the question becomes mechanistic: what is falling asleep, what is being present?

"Be here now," as Ram Dass famously said. But how? Stepping back and asking what the brain does: it takes physical phenomena in our environment — photons of light, sound waves, mechanical pressure, chemicals through the nose and mouth — and translates them from sensation to perception. It also remembers things, predicts things, and can change itself. That's neuroscience in a nutshell.

So how do we move the brain from thinking about the future and the past to what's happening now? That means grounding perception in the immediate physical environment — not thinking, not doing, not planning, but asking questions about what's right in front of you. He prefaces the exercise by noting that what he's about to describe is not the endpoint; it's the way to get into the present, and what you do next is critically important too.

First, ask trivial questions about your immediate environment that can only be answered accurately by focusing on the present. He demonstrates live: what does it smell like in here right now? How many cans are on this table? One, two, three — plus a couple of other vessels, four cans. Other examples: how many people are in line in front of me? How loud are the kids screaming in the back seat — louder or softer than last time? Answering two or three of these seemingly trivial questions brings the mind toward perception of the present. There's nothing profound about that — but it works.

Thinking, Presence, and Taking Control of Your Mind

But it's what these environmental questions take our mind away from that's critically important. There's a whole section on thinking in the book: what is thinking? The brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states—which is nerd-speak for the following. If I put a ball bearing on a plate, it can essentially move in any direction, with some details depending on the smoothness of the bearing and the plate. But if I put a little groove on that plate and tilt it slightly, the bearing will roll toward the groove and settle into it. And if I make that groove more concave, eventually a trench, the ball bearing stays there. That's how your brain works: the more you see a thought or perception, the more brain circuits get devoted to things related to that thought or perception.

So when you want to be present—something we know from excellent data, including a large Harvard study and subsequent work, is critical for happiness—the way to practice it is to learn to move your mind away from thinking, doing, and remembering things of past and future, and simply anchor your perception to the present. It doesn't require meditating; meditation is one form of that. But what are we doing when we meditate? We close our eyes, focus on our breathing that's here now, focus on the "third eye center" or whatever. That's actually interoception—focusing on our internal bodily state—and frankly, if you look at the data on being present in a happy way, it's not that great. Most people who are overly focused on their internal state in the present end up thinking, "My heart rate is increasing, my heart rate's too low, I'm sweating, I'm uncomfortable," or noticing that their boxers are pulled up on one leg. That's not the way to get present, calm, and aware.

The way to get present, calm, and aware—and to move forward from there in the best way—is to ask questions about your immediate physical environment. And remember, that's just the first step. The second step is to use that heightened level of awareness to ask yourself: what do I actually want to do next? What do I want to say next? What do I want to think about next? This is how you take control of your thoughts. I won't go into all the detail now, but thoughts seed each other. We've done this exercise before with the cat: think of a cat, then tell me about it. People say it's soft, this color, this and that—and you're recruiting more and more neural machinery toward the thought about this trivial thing, which we call a seed idea. But if you just let your brain run through the tributaries of its own choices, you end up in a pretty unhappy place.

So the key to being a high-agency, happy person, it turns out, is being able to control your thinking and bring it back to the present. But then you don't just stay there thinking about your breathing—that's kind of weird. You ask questions about your immediate environment, and then you pivot into the person you want to be in terms of action, thinking, and speaking—or maybe silence is called for.

And none of this is psychology; this is 100% neuroscience. I get into the underlying mechanisms, and it's fully supported by work showing that people with heightened activity in the so-called default mode network—the network of activity that takes place when you're doing essentially nothing—are more depressed.

Too much activity in the default mode network, yes. Some is associated with creativity, but elevated levels are usually what you find in depressed people, because their brain is all over the place and they feel discombobulated. Unless we're in sleep, we need to organize our internal landscape. The problem is that most people hear "you need to organize your internal landscape" and think they have to get up in the morning and do ten breaths of meditation—they think of it as rigidity. What I'm talking about, now and throughout the book, is the things that set you up to lean into life, so that you're more reflexively effective and reflexively happy.

You're reflexively more adaptive. You're reflexively more present. And this is where the overoptimization conversation is relevant: none of these practices are an end in themselves. Because people go to the gym and get the aesthetic effect they want, they assume that's what the gym is for. I go to the gym so I can sprint for the plane, open the pickle jar, move all the boxes on moving day up and down the stairs, and feel great—tired, but great—at the end of the day. I like being strong for life. I like having endurance so I can go hiking in Yosemite; if we go, let's go tomorrow, carrying 80 lb packs. It hurts a little bit, but in a good way. And you can sprint for the plane without coughing up a lung.

There's a section on mobility, which is four trivial mobility exercises: get your knee behind your glutes once a day, squat down, bend and look up at the ceiling to a right angle, be able to look up on both sides, identify any mismatches between the two sides and work through those. That's so I can lean down and grab things, move, reach and grab things—like when you threw me the protein drink out there. For the record, I caught it.

You did catch it.

I'm not so proud of that—I'm just pissed at your camera guy. They're probably waiting until I drop it to film that one. It's a diabolical scheme here at Modern Wisdom: they wait for you to mess up and then film it. No, I'm just kidding—no one's capturing anything. Honestly, my hand-eye coordination isn't something I'm really concerned about, nor do I boast about it. The point is that it's all about being able to move through life with confidence and agency and awareness, being sensitive to what you need to be sensitive to, and saying the things you need to say. That's a really good life. It's not about the tools. It's about what the tools open up for you.

I think a lot of people have an issue with the overoptimization thing because it feels like more homework. They're already overwhelmed, already working hard. The sort of people who read your book, listen to your podcast, and are fans of Modern Wisdom are already contorting themselves into a pretzel trying to get more out of their day. They've already got standards so impossibly high that they can't meet them, so when they hear people saying you need to do this and this and this, they feel overwhelmed. The difference is that you can make yourself fragile if your entire performance and your whole life is predicated on this rain dance ritual—where you're only able to do the stuff if you've had this weird two hours of foreplay beforehand.

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

People might argue it's not enough.

That's true. It depends on how much time you've got—it could be a Sunday.

From my experience, periodizing your life is one of the best ways to think about this. A lot of people, especially toward the end of their 20s—especially a lot of guys—go through this "manopause": a period where they realize that all the strategies, tools, habits, routines, and modes of getting recognition and success from the people around them have stopped working, and they want to become something better. It's like a second adolescence—actually a more important one, I think, than the one from 13 to 17. The question becomes: what sort of person, what sort of man, do I want to become in this world? I don't know, maybe women go through it too, but I see it in a lot of guys—especially deeper thinkers who played the game in their 20s and were perhaps successful at it.

Which game are you referring to?

The social norms game—contorting myself, chameleoning a bit, not bringing up quite what I think or what I mean.

Well, that can be adaptive too, especially in the age of camera phones. When I grew up, you could say something outrageous at a party—not offensive, just outrageous—and it might land or might not, but you didn't worry that it was going to land everywhere.

Concretized on the internet for the rest of time. And this isn't just for public-facing people. You're probably a great dancer, but a lot of people—a lot of men in particular—are not. You'd like to be able to go to a wedding, dance, and have fun without thinking about how that's going to show up.

Yeah—is someone going to mock me for this video? So anyway, guys get to this period and think: what sort of person am I going to be? For me, and for a lot of my friends, that meant I needed to lock in for an extended period of time. From the outside, that might look like an overreliance on protocols, self-experimentation, and optimizing. But what people don't see is that I was basically paying a debt I had slowly accumulated over a decade and a half of running nightclubs. I'll go toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone for degenerate behavior in my 20s—I ran more parties and did more of the things you're not supposed to do than almost anyone else. I met a million people on the front doors of nightclubs and attended a thousand parties.

A thousand parties?

That's how many we ran. We had a million lifetime entries across two venues. So I've served my time. Then I wanted to become somebody more well-rounded who understood himself. If you look at me from 28 to 32 or 33 in isolation, it actually looks like a fragile, highly strung life: an elaborate morning routine running a couple of hours—getting up, getting sunlight in my eyes, doing lateral eye movements while walking, putting Redmond salt in water that I had to import from America because I once read in some random blog post that it might work—all of this before it was popularized, then journaling, breathwork, meditation, reading, spaced repetition with Anki flashcards. Why? Because I wanted to discover what worked for me and rip myself out of the hole I had dug myself into.

On the optimization guilt a lot of people feel—the fear that being optimal might kill you faster than your suboptimal behaviors, that you're so stressed about it—yes, that fragility definitely comes along with it. But there is also a period where you can really use it to get the momentum moving.

Once you have a training practice, understand how to meditate, have stopped going to bed late, and started getting up on time, those habits carry you forward. You can either slowly ingrain them over a long period or "Navy SEAL hell week" it and bundle them together — that's what I did.

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I came on this podcast because I was excited to talk to you, and yes, I'm out on the book thing, but I like learning from you—so let me take in what you said for a second. I'm happy to share what I know, but I want to think about this, because I always learn with you.

One thing you're so excellent at, and that I'm trying to do more of by way of example from you, is spotting contradictions and clashes, and trying to extract something of value—a new direction—from them. I acknowledge you in the book for many reasons, by the way.

Within any space, we get these conflicting messages. You have so much within you; if you do the right things, you can access it. But if you do all these things, you're actually a weaker version of yourself, because not doing the hard thing now becomes the hard thing. Hell week is a week for a reason—it's not hell year. Although, talking to instructors from SEAL training and the like, I do think they are identifying people who have something different in them.

I think they build it up in those people, but that filter is really unique. For the rest of us—you'd probably make it through, but for the rest of us—the real question is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions out there and put a structure on them.

Forgive me for going slow here, but for once I'm speaking slow enough. Years ago, when I was a graduate student, a luminary in the field of neuroendocrinology said to me: it's rarely the people who make the key discoveries that go on to be associated with the great findings of a field. I asked how that could possibly be, and he said it's almost always people who are in that field, or who educate themselves on it, that put a structure on it. That's why it's important to publish research papers, but also to regularly publish reviews. For about every three research papers I published, I made it a point to publish one high-quality review—not some throwaway journal review, because you can publish a review anywhere, but real compendiums of where the knowledge currently stands. I took things like annual reviews very seriously, because they help you organize your mind around what's happening, and they help other people do that too—since most people aren't going to take the time to do it in the health and optimization space.

Now, there are so many tools. What we need—and what I try to highlight in the book—are principles. High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol, which means high nighttime melatonin, which means great sleep, which means better days, and so on. You've essentially got the gears of the system linking together. Understand that.

Yes, it's true that bright light is the best way to spike your morning cortisol, but exercise is pretty effective too. Sometimes you don't have access to either; sometimes you have access to both. Sometimes you're on a plane and can't, but you can do other things to nudge the system or keep it online when you have 30 seconds. You also understand that if you miss a day or two, you're okay—because you set up the system through good behaviors going into it. You don't have to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears because you're on a plane with no caffeinated coffee and can't do your air squats. Come on, no one wants to be that person.

Once you understand a bit of the principles that organize the mechanisms, you're in a great position to be truly strong of mind and body, because you can organize information.

The same thing is true in chapter seven of the book, on personal development. I took a step back and asked: what are the unifying features of all the trauma therapies? What are the unifying features of how to have a great life? Let's start with how to have a great life. James Hollis came on my podcast—he's 84 years old—and he surprised the hell out of me when he said, "Here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are: shut up." I said, "Shut up?" And he said, "Yeah. Someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you've got something to be grateful for."

Shut Up, Suit Up, Show Up — and One More

The speaker admitted he didn't expect this advice from the source of it — an 85-year-old Jungian analyst who talks about the unconscious mind. The analyst's version was blunt: "Shut up. Your day should start with Huberman. Shut up. Whatever's got you bothered, shut up. You got it better than somebody."

The second step is suit up. Suit up means you have a role to fulfill each day — for other people, for yourself, and for the world. It means getting prepared: shower, organize your room, get your act together. We've heard this from Jordan Peterson and others, but the point is to prepare so you can do the third thing effectively, which is show up: go find a role in life and fulfill it. It might not be the role you keep your entire life — a summer camp counselor, a babysitter, a nanny, a firefighter, whatever you're doing at some point in your life. To have confidence and be a healthy, happy person, you need to fulfill roles for society, meaning for the people in your life, not just for yourself. You have to be in service. Some people want to make as much money in the world as possible — that's not the speaker, but many feel that way. Fine: go fulfill that role. Get dressed properly, do those things. It sounds basic.

So shut up is about gratitude. Suit up is about prepare and practice. As an example of not showing up unprepared, he delayed the publication of his book three times because he wanted it to be something he was truly proud of, so readers would feel honored as smart people who deserve quality information. He was willing to tell the publisher, "I'm so sorry, but I'm going back in again and again. Eat the shame" — because his higher value was that the book be of good to extreme value to anyone who read it, even just a chapter.

Show up, then, is actually going and doing the work — chop wood, carry water. No one cares that you don't want to do it today; just do it. Great confidence comes from that.

But the analyst named a fourth thing, the pitfall: when we get too deep into playing these roles and doing these things, many people end up down a road they don't really want to be on, and everyone fears that. His solution is simple: once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus–response. Meditate or just breathe, draw, listen to music — no phone, no thinking about your role in the world. All you do is ask yourself — and it sounds squishy, but next to "shut up, suit up, show up" he feels comfortable saying it — what is my deeper wish, my heart's desire? What do I need to focus on now? Maybe you have enough career, enough money, enough colleague respect, and it's time to focus more on relationships. Maybe it's time to focus less on your role as a mother or father — not completely — and more on an artistic, creative side that, if left unsatisfied, will leave you feeling you didn't have a good life.

Looking at the landscape of personal development through this lens, almost everything slots into one — or occasionally two — of these four. Entire books cover just the first one, or just the last one or two. The speaker finds that satisfying because, as his colleague said, putting a structure on things helps us navigate without feeling buried in information: I'm supposed to journal, do therapy, maybe try psychedelics — maybe not — have social connection, and when am I supposed to do the morning sunlight thing? It's a lot. The idea is to understand the framework first, and then apply it — for instance, to the trauma piece and unlearning. The book has a tremendous amount of information on how to focus and learn better, but also on what unlearning means.

The Four Steps of Getting Over Bad Things

All of getting over bad stuff is four steps. First, you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore, and you can't suppress it. You need to acknowledge: this happened, and this sucks.

Second, you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this. Entire books and workshops have been written around breathing into, using psychedelics into, talking into, hugging into, shaking into feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened.

But that's not where it stops, and people often just end there. The next piece is feeling calmer, even slightly, and more peaceful around the accurate, detailed memory of the thing. You're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing. You can't just live in "feel your feelings." We have an entire generation of people, and a collection of people online, who are only there and wonder why they're still there.

They're at the mercy of their feelings, but they're also not effective in the world. They're not affecting change—they think they are, but they're not. This is one of the many reasons successful people are often hated: they're moving along. Sometimes I look online and think, "You remind me of those kids when I went home from college." That scared me, because I realized they could write a textbook on how to become a world-class loser. Some of them weren't drugging out or anything—I just thought, "You guys are still talking about stuff that happened in high school. I talked about that stuff too, and it was helpful for me, but you guys are stuck." It's like people who hang out in the parking lot of bars for years, talking about the same thing. It's the saddest thing in the world. Men do it one way, women another: a fixation on the things that happened that we feel wronged about—and we all have them. Granted, some people were genuinely wronged, but that's not the point. It's not whether they were wronged or not; it's that they're stuck there.

So the third piece is the uncoupling, and the fourth piece is what we think of as the magic of life, where people take the hard thing, the experience, and their journey of moving through it, and transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world.

These are the people who go and speak at bereavement workshops, talk to people who've lost a child or experienced horrible things. Or maybe they just plant a flower and put it on the windowsill, and every morning they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience, and the beauty there representing it. It's a small detail in their life—they've transmuted the pain. But you can't just say, "You had this horrible thing happen—plant a flower, put it on the windowsill, and think about how beautiful it is." You can't take somebody who's struggling at step one, two, or three and put them there.

The Four Steps, Restated

Going back through the four:

1. Acknowledge the thing. Straight on, exactly what happened—what is the thing that sucks, that hurts so much.
2. Feel the feelings completely, in a safe environment. This is why there's interest in clinical trials on MDMA—it's this empathogen that makes people feel love and safety. But that's not the only way; there's therapy, there's journaling. The book covers all the different approaches to each of these steps.
3. Recall the details with less emotional load. Once you've done step two enough—and we discuss what "enough" is—you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing with less emotional load. The emotional load starts to peel back. It's a hard step to get to, and it's a process: you don't just decide, "Today I'm going to remember everything and it won't bother me at all." Little by little, you start to uncouple the emotion from the memory.
4. Transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world.

Asked whether this is like memory exposure therapy: some people do EMDR—that's one way. Some do hypnosis, some do talk therapy. Pennebaker has people journal four times, 15 minutes each, about the horrible thing that happened, which takes them through steps two and three.

The journaling protocol is 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next, for four days—no more, no less. With tens of thousands of data points now, not just individuals but many papers and scientific manuscripts, even if you tear up the writing afterward or delete the file, people move through steps two and three to a significant degree.

The fourth step is not just letting the experience hover there as something you got through, but finding some way—or ways, it can be many—of transmuting the entire experience, the thing that happened and how you moved through it, into some point of beauty or contribution to your own well-being and to others' well-being. It could be a dog that represents every bit of your ability to love unconditionally and theirs—the unconditional love you didn't get. Maybe it's someone who suffered a horrible trauma helping people who suffered similar traumas. Or maybe it's just a symbol, in a very Jungian way: perhaps a paperweight that symbolizes the weight of your certainty that you made it through. The human mind can assign symbols to experiences very easily, good or bad.

Moving through the process, not around it

Those are the four steps. In thinking about personal development, the question became how to look out over the entire landscape of books, podcasts, and science and ask what's the best way to move through the acknowledge process. Neuroplasticity is alert focus and agitation, through genuine errors, to get things right, then reinforcement through sleep and self-testing. Those are the steps. There's no fifth or sixth step, and there's no jumping to step three while avoiding steps one and two.

These days much of my public role is to educate about processes, which comes from my neuroscience training. You don't start by teaching people that neurons fire action potentials—that's the first thing you teach—then you explain how it happens. Once they understand how, they have embedded in their mind that "when a neuron fires, a neuron fires"; they're not thinking about all the steps, but it's all there. That's true understanding: a nuanced, multi-level understanding of something.

All too often in the optimization space we say, "This red light will give you better skin, it'll improve your mitochondria," and people just want those effects. But if someone feels overwhelmed and asks whether red light or GHK copper is better, I'd say: what's the best source of red light? It's the sun minus UV. When does that happen? When the sun is low in the sky—and you've got the best red light therapy you could ever get, minus UV, for zero cost. You want a red light device too? Cool, be my guest—I own one. But we're talking about long-wavelength light minus UV. End of story. It's not complicated.

The same is true in resistance training, as Andy Galpin talks about: there are only five or six different adaptations—better speed, better power, and so on. (You've added a seventh with forearms, but for the rest of us there are six.) You can get them through CrossFit, through sets to failure, or more volume with near-failure training. Once you understand something, you're in a position to make much better choices around it.

I'm actually wondering when to retire right now, thinking about what's next, and I have some ideas about where that's going. But I think we, in 2026,

Heading into 2027, we pretty well understand the core principles of great mental health, physical health, and performance. While future developments in peptides, pharmacology, devices, and AI will be game changers, the fundamental physics and mechanisms of the system are already established.

Mechanistic Principles Over Branded Protocols

The underlying mechanisms explain practices across traditions:

• To feel more alert: Use inhale-emphasized breathing with passive exhales.
• To feel calm: Use exhale-emphasized breathing with passive inhales, as a longer exhale relative to the inhale slows the heart rate down.

Clarifying these mechanisms demystifies practices and moves past proprietary naming. For example, the term "non-sleep deep rest" (NSDR) was chosen over traditional labels like Yoga Nidra to clearly describe the actual objective. With deep respect for the ancient yoga culture that originated it, the goal of NSDR is straightforward:

1. Slow the heart rate down through exhale-emphasized breathing.
2. Shift the mind from planning and active thinking to pure sensation using present-tethered awareness and closed eyes.

This state induces a pseudo-sleep that recovers lost rest, improves nighttime sleep, lowers cortisol, introduces micro-states of sleep into the brain, and enhances learning.

Moving to the Next Frontier

When a field establishes its foundational principles, it can confidently move forward. We now understand action potentials, neuroplasticity, trauma recovery, sleep induction, and focus. While specific tools still require refinement, the core science is mapped out.

Podcasting and synthesizing this research over the past six to seven years serves as a comprehensive thesis. Just as a graduate researcher aims to publish enough definitive work to close a scientific chapter before moving on, it is time to progress rather than repeatedly rehashing the same concepts.

In the 1960s and 1970s, people got stuck in conceptual rabbit holes—overusing psychedelics or assuming emotions are physically stored in the body rather than stored in the brain and represented by the body. Modern science recognizes the integrated role of both brain and body, and the priority now is advancing to the next level of application and discovery.

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Asked whether there's a good test for microplastics and what the best detox protocol currently is, the guest said the priority is detoxing as opposed to limiting the ones coming in — though we know where they are, since they're pretty much everywhere, and glass is better than plastic and so on.

The data on sweating are decent. It won't purge microplastics completely, but it's pretty decent. So sauna — and living in Texas or running outside counts too, since heat is heat. He joked on a morning press call that standing outside in Texas in the middle of the day is heat exposure, deliberate or not; it's the same heat as heat.

There's also the idea that sulforaphane, found in cruciferous vegetables, might be able to bind some of it so you can purge some of it. You can take concentrated sulforaphane — Rhonda Patrick is very bullish on this. He himself doesn't take sulforaphane, but does try to sauna a few times a week because it has other benefits.

He expects more and more companies canning their beverages will start looking at this, since a lot of canned beverages do and a lot don't. Rhonda put him in touch with a company, Newtonic, which has a different wrapper on the inside — all cans use a plastic liner, not tin, but there's an organic biodegradable liner available. They're looking into it, though it's going to take forever.

The stuff is everywhere: particulate from tires, the clothing issue in Europe, and whether your dryer is venting inside — you can buy a better trap for some of the microfibers. He admits he doesn't do those things, but is conscious of trying not to put heated food in plastic whenever he orders.

The host noted this is limiting input, and the guest agreed — limiting input, to the extent that it's getting things out that we don't know. As with anything, some people will be more susceptible: if people are doing other things to disrupt their endocrine environment, like not sleeping well or doing some things badly wrong, especially if they get a lot of environmental exposure to toxins. Many people work jobs with paints and solvents.

Laboratories are a wild case. You find all sorts of things that can intercalate into DNA — that's how you run gels of DNA. To break up proteins or DNA in order to run them out on gels, you have to put chemicals in them that break the bonds. That's good for the experiment, not good for people — you don't want that happening to you. People are dermally disrupting their own DNA. Lab workers are exposed to paraformaldehyde constantly; in a neuroscience lab where you're fixing brains to cut them up, you're working with paraformaldehyde and other fixatives all the time, plus mutagens and sometimes radioactivity.

His own lab, which he no longer runs — his last paper came out around 2023–24 and he now just teaches — worked with adenoviruses, Sindbis viruses, and modified rabies viruses, plus federally controlled sedatives that had to be kept in a locker with every microliter accounted for. Laboratories are full of dangerous things, unless it's a computational laboratory — a "carpet lab," with carpet and computers. That's real science, just different science.

On the microplastics question specifically, he learned an interesting insight: given the micron size of microplastics and the size of your sweat glands, sweating can get some out but not all, because microplastics range in size. This was something Ben Greenfield was bringing up.

Microplastics, 9/11 Detox Stories, and Measurement Error

Another interesting one we were talking about was 9/11. A friend told me a story about a firefighter who had gone into the towers and been out of the towers, exposed to probably the most particulates in history apart from volcanic eruptions. He developed a parkinsonian tremor, and he did a niacin flush with charcoal, with a towel wrapped around him while doing it. You get your heart rate up with exercise, get into the sauna, take the niacin, then take the charcoal — niacin to flush everything out, charcoal to bind it so it doesn't get reabsorbed. Apparently the towel this guy had wrapped around him was like verdigris, all colors of blue and pink and green.

Those firefighters absorbed so much mental and physical damage in those days. But before we talk about 9/11, I want to mention something important, because the message got out based on one publication that we each have a credit card's worth of plastic in us.

It turns out there was a second publication that went back to the same data and found that the tool used in the first study to count particles wasn't very good. We actually have far less than that in us.

Some people say you have a marble-sized amount of plastic in your brain right now — maybe distributed. But I looked at both papers, the same data analyzed two different ways, and unfortunately the catchier claim — a credit card's worth of plastic in you or your brain — went through the telephone game of the internet. The second paper didn't get as much air time. It wasn't a total retraction, and it came from a separate group. But having spent years in my lab trying to count cells, deciding on a computer screen what counts as a cell — sometimes it's easy, sometimes you see two clumps and ask, is that one cell or two? Where you set your threshold for what you define as a cell matters enormously, and that's what was at issue in this study.

Here's what I saw: when people were using nitrile and latex gloves to do the microplastic measurements, the way nitrile gloves actually bend is that tiny fragments of plastic peel off. So the people measuring microplastics wore gloves that got plastic onto the plastic detector. It was a wild microplastics goose chase based on the glove.

So we might be overestimating the amount of these things, which would be great. Being more worried when we're actually safer is better than being less worried and actually in danger. But think about this: if microplastics are less prevalent by a large factor — some studies suggest 100 times less, maybe even 1,000 times less — then the X factor disrupting endocrine function and impacting testosterone is even greater, because people have been laying things at the feet of microplastics. It's been the "microplastics of the gaps" for what's happening with endocrine function — why sperm counts are going down, and so on. If we've been overmeasuring microplastics, the X factor has to fill more of the hole.

Right — we don't know how to match the number of particles to biological relevance. A parallel example: for many years, new antibodies became available for studying the brain, and you could label where the richest concentration of serotonergic neurons is. One group identified this massive serotonin input to the brain's circadian clock — massive, accounting for basically half the input to the clock. What happens if you disrupt that input? Nothing, functionally. Does that mean it's doing nothing? Functionally, it means far less than the anatomy would suggest.

In the brain, big strong synapses matter far more than the number of synapses. Number matters, but size and strength matter way more. So we don't really know how to correlate a given number of particles with a given degree of dysfunction.

This isn't a study I think about very often, but my colleague Mike Eisenberg, who you've had on the podcast, has looked at it. It does seem that sperm counts are going down generation to generation, but there's also data suggesting penis size is going up. Once you start asking how this was measured, it turns out to be self-report, and you get into details I'd rather not discuss this early in the day — measuring from the top or the bottom, flaccid or erect, and so on. Researchers do try to standardize these studies, but it's one of those cases where the headline is so catchy that the nuance of how the studies are done gets lost.

The answer almost always is: we need more data. Though sticking to microplastics, that is — the other answer, as the joke goes, is we need more penises. Some people on the planet would argue we need fewer, but that's a different podcast.

I was 51 years old now, so I remember 9/11 very clearly. I had been on the east coast at a remarkable place on the north shore of Long Island called Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories — sort of a summer camp for scientists where they go to learn molecular biology. You take courses, and it actually operates all year long as one of the premier laboratories in the world.

"Are you telling me there's something on my face?"

"No, no, no. I'm just grinning about this summer camp for the nerds."

"Oh, it was a great time. I was a student there at Cold Spring Harbor, then a TA, an educator, and a course director for many years. Eventually I passed the course on to people better equipped to run it at that time."

We had gone to the course and then flown back — a number of us had flown back, and some people were still in the process of going back. So I remember that day very well. I also remember two years later, because the course ran every other year. There was a day off when half the students would just recover from their hangovers — there was a lot of drinking back then, not so much at these courses anymore. We took the Long Island Railroad into the city and went to the 9/11 site. It was a memorial site, because they were still excavating it.

"What date was this?"

"This would have been the summer of 2003, two years after 9/11."

"And they still hadn't finished?"

"Oh, no. I think it's hard for people to conceive. You see the towers in the photos and they're so huge, but the footprint of these towers was just enormous — multiple city blocks. All there was around the site was a wooden gate you could walk around. There were pictures everywhere, inscriptions, photos, things of that sort. And there were people working the site — construction workers, many of them with no masks. Then you had all these tourists; we were essentially tourists, reading the stuff on the wall, walking around. Everyone was no doubt inhaling tons of whatever was in the jet fuel, particulate, and so on. But the people who got there first — I can't even imagine what the firefighters and others were exposed to."

I did hear an interesting story: one of the companies housed in those buildings was led by somebody with former military training who had been there for the first bombing of the World Trade Center. He had run drills for his entire company and insisted on drills going into it, and all but about 11 of the people in that company got out. They would practice how to file out single or double file through the stairways — I don't know the particulars. But it turns out there were people who had been very concerned about this for a number of years, and that increased survival. I don't know which level they were on, but it was a huge game changer.

Yes, there were videos online at that time — so different, because there wasn't social media — of people in some places in the world, quote unquote, celebrating. But I would say the vast majority of what you saw in the media and online was just people in shock, in anger, and surprised. A lot of people in the United States at that time didn't know where Afghanistan was, or what it was, or where Pakistan was. They knew these places existed and had probably heard the names, but there wasn't a lot of awareness of that side of the world. A bombing in Yemen — people would hear about these things, but that was it.

That, and the Challenger explosion, were the two moments in my lifetime where you just went, "Oh no — this is a line in the sand. Things are very, very different now."

Asked about nicotine pouches, the speaker said his view is the same as on caffeine: he consumes caffeine daily and loves it, and nicotine is similar—though caffeine is safer and can even improve health. Nicotine will definitely make you feel alert and calm, unlike other stimulants, which is a very unique state that's great for learning. It doesn't make you learn, but it lets you learn. It raises blood pressure, however, and is highly addictive.

The key point people miss: if you take 3 to 6 milligram pouches multiple times per day, it's not going to have a cognitive enhancing effect—it's just rescuing the deficit from nicotine withdrawal. It's like caffeine: if you don't drink caffeine for two days, you won't feel good, and drinking it brings you back to baseline. So if you want nicotine to be a performance aid, use it occasionally—3 to 6 milligrams once or twice per week maximum. But how many people do you know who don't develop a dependency? He compares this to energy drinks: he loves them but saves them for when he really wants to dial in, like after a night of less sleep than he wanted—this morning he drank one of the guest's and one of Derek's, "the old twin turbo," which is a lot, but he thought they had a pretty good workout.

Delivery methods and their risks

Humans have always found a way to get their nicotine. Smoking causes cancer. Dipping and snuff—not good, cancers. Vaping turns out to be really not good either; its chemicals are probably a bit safer than smoking, but the behavioral data are wild: because you can do it almost anywhere, people vape far more, take in far more nicotine, and are now showing up with lung issues and nicotine-related problems. Smoking was less healthy and maybe more dangerous per puff, but the number of puffs people consume from vaping—because it can be done in more places, it's tastier, and there's less fatigue from it—means the healthier delivery mechanism may be more than offset, to the point where vaping is more dangerous.

He draws a parallel with cannabis, which you don't call simply good or bad. Yes, it nukes REM sleep, which is very bad, and it can cause psychosis in certain predisposed males. But smoking cannabis lets people titrate their high—they know whether they can handle half a bong hit or one, and wouldn't do four and wait to see what happens (some did in his college days; that didn't work out so well). With an edible, by contrast, people can ingest 100–150 milligrams of THC just like that and end up freaking out, sometimes triggering a psychotic episode that lasts a long time or doesn't reverse. It's the ease of ingestion—that's the vaping problem.

Oral nicotine products are here to stay: since the discovery of nicotine, humans have found a way to get it, same with caffeine—they're not going to quit. But young people using nicotine should simply be aware of how addictive it is and the fact that it raises blood pressure.

You can usually scare guys off nicotine a bit by pointing out that it causes vasoconstriction, which can have sexual side effects. But nowadays people are using pharmacology to combat pharmacology. Thanks to Mike Eisenberg and others, tadalafil — developed as a prostate drug but also a vasodilator — has become known as a sex drug. Does that combat the vasoconstriction of nicotine? In theory, yes, but then you're doing a push-pull between one set of effects and another.

Just by observation, people in their teens, 20s, 30s, even early 40s really want to get by using as little pharmacology as necessary. That's why, during my "manopause monk mode" era, I did a thousand days without alcohol and 500 days without caffeine — I wanted to prove to myself I don't need to buttress my life with these things. I knew I'd be around parties and caffeine for the rest of my life — it's my thing, and now I have a company that does it — so I wanted that knowledge in the back of my mind.

Something interesting: we've been making these nicotine pouches, and by the end of next year we could do more volume and revenue in pouches than in cans, because so many people want to dial back their nicotine. They feel like they're not in control of their usage, and the delivery mechanism has been locked in.

By the way, if you write a 600-page book, you stare at things up close, your eyeball lengthens, and you become myopic — nearsighted. My distance vision is great but up close it's lousy, so after this book promotion tour ends this year, I'm going to spend a lot of time staring at horizons, hiking in the mountains, and maybe even go hunting. Kids and adults: get some long-distance vision each day.

On the canisters — and I'm not trying to diverge topics, we'll get to peptides — the GLP-1 pens with needles have basically gotten people over their needle phobia. It turns out it was the plunger people were afraid of. If you put the needle at the end of something that looks like a pen, everyone's pinning themselves — men, women, everyone. These canisters have a nice tactile feel, a bit like casino chips. When I was a kid, there was a beef jerky that came in a canister that looked like tobacco. It was horrible — we were 9 or 10 years old, taking a pinch of beef jerky and putting it in our lip, then eventually eating it.

My dad didn't chew; he occasionally smoked a cigar or pipe. My grandfather smoked a pipe.

So we were little kids walking around with beef jerky tucked in our lip, not licking it — lip-ing it. Clearly, the makers had figured out the same trick as candy cigarettes: there was something about the candy version of an adult habit.

There it is. It's called Jerky Stuff. Look at this. Ready? There you go, Jerky Stuff.

You would stuff your cheek or your lip with it. It was kind of like jerky-flavored sawdust, and it had barely any nutrition — probably like four grams of protein in the entire canister. You paid more for it, but it was a good way to take something in.

These canisters are also very reinforced. It's really tactile, it's nice — and it fits in your back pocket. Guys love carrying something in their back pocket; nobody wants to carry the man purse.

I might have brought a small zip pouch to the gym today. I did see that. You didn't ask what was in it, and I'm not going to tell you.

Asked what the spiciest protocols were that he couldn't put in the book, he explained that the book contains only what he's certain about: protocols where the mechanisms are understood and that he knows work — not just from his own experience, but because many people have used them and there's strong supporting data. Everything in it is substantiated. There's only one protocol that's a bit out there, and he flagged it as such: "This is kind of out there. We have a little bit of data, not a ton, but here's why I'm including it, and I think you might want to try this because it can really help you fall asleep... but we know why it ought to work."

He doesn't discuss psychedelics, though he does fit them into a framework of neuroplasticity and learning, so it makes sense when they might be the appropriate tool. He also doesn't cover hormone therapies or peptides — partly because the data are still coming in, and partly because there will likely be a second book.

Writing a book this long, with thousands of references, can damage relationships in your life, though people have been very understanding. He joked that the book basically acted as a filter for who really loves him — and that it's big enough to operate as a doorstop, a weapon, or a booster seat if you're not quite tall enough at the Thanksgiving table. "If nothing else, it'll cure insomnia."

Asked which protocols he fully believes in but can't scientifically prove, the speaker notes these examples aren't in the book, since everything there is substantiated by mechanism and description.

BPC-157 and shoulder pain

He describes a personal experience with BPC-157. He doesn't normally have shoulder pain, but after two or three months of adding low-incline pressing to his dips and overhead presses, he developed shoulder pain that didn't respond to external rotation work or backing off. He injected two doses of maybe 100 or 200 micrograms—tiny amounts—and the pain vanished completely.

He acknowledges it could be placebo, since he knew what he was injecting; a better experiment would have swapped in saline without his knowledge. Still, he finds it pretty incredible, and the animal data are impressive. He knows people injecting their aging dogs with BPC—dogs that had spinal strokes or were limping and doing poorly—and reporting dramatic mobility improvements. He won't name names since he hasn't cleared it with them, but jokes that all the data are in animals anyway, so mouse and rat owners are covered.

It's hard to make the placebo argument there, though he concedes the owners could be doing other things, like massaging the dogs more, and there was no saline control. Still, it's hard to explain away.

Pinealon and REM sleep

The other example is pinealon, which ironically comes from brain tissue, not the pineal gland—epithalamin comes from the pineal. "Who names this stuff? It's insane."

He experimented with taking about a tenth of an IU every third or fourth night. On those nights he got two and a half to three hours of REM sleep within six to seven hours—normally that REM-enriched phase only comes in the last third of the night, which for him means seven or eight hours of sleep. What's wild is that on the subsequent nights he also experienced a massive REM increase.

He's cut back to once a week or once every ten days and still gets the same effect. The only downside is that the next day he finds it harder to become fully alert—he can still focus, but there's a bit of sleep inertia.

He knows people taking it during the day because they like being in that shallow plane of sleep-wake for cognitive work, which isn't for him. There are rumors of people at tech companies using it for long, laborious stretches of work, but he's skeptical: "I don't know."

There is a lot of excitement around growth hormone secretagogues like tesamorelin, ipamorelin, and CJC, but they do not work well for everyone. In personal experience, they disrupted REM sleep and spiked PSA levels. While clinical trials exploring low-dose exogenous growth hormone are intriguing, embarking on such an intervention at age 51 may not be necessary if baseline health and energy levels remain strong. Aside from growth hormone, many experimental peptides rely heavily on animal data rather than robust human clinical trials.

Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Combinations

Solid clinical trial evidence exists for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in treating PTSD, as well as psilocybin for depression and PTSD. However, data on combining these compounds remains scarce.

In an appropriate legal clinical setting—with structured therapy before, during, and after the session—combining MDMA and psilocybin can produce unique benefits:

• Psilocybin alone can be helpful, but it may leave certain issues unresolved.
• MDMA alone helps with acknowledging trauma and experiencing emotions.
• The combination can facilitate uncoupling negative emotions from traumatic memories while actively replacing them with positive feelings.

Data on the polypharmacology of psychedelics is currently lacking, and single-compound treatments have faced regulatory hurdles with FDA approval, prompting many individuals to travel abroad for treatment.

Ibogaine, Peptides, and Risk Profiles

Ibogaine has shown promising results for substance abuse and PTSD, leading many people to seek treatment centers in Mexico. However, much like the general interest in peptides, people often seek out these intense interventions without a specific medical indication, simply looking to optimize their baseline well-being or feel better.

When conducted in an accredited clinic with proper cardiac monitoring, ibogaine itself is manageable, but standard protocols often follow it with DMT. While many people tolerate DMT without issue, others experience lasting behavioral and personality shifts after use.

Some are perfectly fine. The other thing is that a guy like DJ has talked about this himself — and I love that podcast you guys did, by the way. DJ is a solid mind.

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

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

Helped him enough that he's trying to be a mentor for me and you — a mentor who sits down at the table and eats along with us. Like, what if we go to sleep one night — not near each other, of course—

Although actually, from where we live, we are near each other.

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

It's going to be the podcaster neighborhood if we're not careful. It's cool, though — we ended up being neighbors. Good taste in neighborhoods. But seriously, what if you go to sleep in your house and I go to sleep in mine, and then we wake up in Mexico at this clinic?

Because that's what DJ did.

Someone did a Maduro.

I got Maduro Road'd by DJ Shipley.

Exactly. I've had similar things happen in totally different contexts years ago. I was supposed to get dropped off after working with some friends of mine — I have this awesome band — and they were supposed to drop me back at my lab where my car was. Instead, I woke up in Utah. They had driven to Utah in the middle of the night. I woke up and asked, "Where are we?" He said, "Utah." I said, "You're one of us now."

This is my good friend Elvis Cortez — he was actually the one who found me and Costello, and I love Elvis, he's great. But yeah, technically they kidnapped me, and it was a lot of fun. That was many years ago.

I don't know. We'll see.

There are other things that are perhaps a little less than the Mount Everest of that stuff—

Lower risk.

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

That's true. But there's always the question of the ability to show up versus how much of the four steps you've done — in terms of how you respond when people...

The question came up of how to respond when people say, "Chris, what you really need to do is just get married and have a couple kids, and that will be the psychedelic experience." I agree — I say yes, plus two golden retrievers. They're not preaching to the choir.

After some banter about a Freudian slip over the breed's name, I said I completely agree with that advice. I've said before that I'm the most ardent supporter and ambassador for guys without kids to just start a family. It's not for me to tell anyone to stop their ambition — the same goes for women and their socioeconomic climb. But so much of what I see young and middle-aged people doing looks like surrogate families: the business you're building, the fervor with which you chase a political party or social campaign, an obsessive hobby, trying to become wealthy. A lot of that looks and feels like the energy — especially the existential energy — you would be putting into a family. When people ask, "What is my purpose? Am I contributing to the world? Why am I here?" I think a lot of that has been solved throughout time: you do the golden retriever thing and the family thing. Golden retrievers do come first — that's an important caveat for me.

"Dude, I just want an animal where there's no danger of it competing with me cognitively. I want something that's both cuddly and stupid."

Golden retrievers are not all stupid, but he said he'd try to find a breed that's particularly fluffy and stupid — a single-digit-IQ golden retriever. He pointed to the mastiff breeds: they're all very sweet, have flat heads, and look at you a certain way. The mastiffs, bulldogs, and boxers are smart about certain things, but they're "a dog with a flat head." "Are you doing phrenology for dogs?"

He explained he'd been to Meet the Breeds in New York — at the Javits Center each year — and met hundreds of breeds, twice now. A couple of takeaways: people look like their dogs. Otterhound owners look like otterhounds; bulldog owners have that gooey demeanor. It's wild, and it's a lot of fun.

He walked out of the event telling his girlfriend he'd get a bulldog mix rather than a purebred, because he'd been around enough dogs. The mixed bullies are kind, vigorous, and a little goofy — very emotional in a good way, but they get over it like little hedonists. And they'll back you: they'll fight to the death for you, but if your life isn't on the line, they're not doing anything. Not reactive at all.

"Well, listen, I hope you get a dog. Then the dogs can hang out in the neighborhood. And I do think family is awesome — family is amazing. So what's the delay?"

"Well, it's very difficult to try. First off, I need to get the dog thing. I always felt guilty because my mom and dad have been so good with dogs — they walked them all the time."

They gave them a great life, and I've seen what a good life for a dog looks like. I'd feel incredibly guilty not being able to provide that. I'm sure I could pay someone to help, or bring the dog to the office or on trips, but I don't want a dog that's flying once a week.

"Do you travel that much?"

I did something like 100,000 miles and maybe 80 flights last year, and I've done about 80,000 miles this year. I don't want to do that to a dog.

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

Of course. But there's another angle that I think is kind of beautiful—maybe this is just cope on my part. If you've spent your time building a business, a hobby, or skills in finance or investing, perhaps you've been surrogate family building. And on the flip side, if you've really closed a lot of those loops—put it all out there on the table—I do get the sense that there's an additional level of presence afforded to you, because materially, hopefully, you're pretty well set.

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

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

David Perell, who does How I Write and Write a Passage—it was when I first moved to Austin, and he's about my age—we were having coffee one day and he turned to me and said:

"You know what, man? I realized that most of my 20s and 30s were just spent becoming the dad that I want my future kids to have."

And he wasn't even bothered about having kids at the time. All the accumulation of skills and habits, closing the loops of desires he wanted—pursuits and adventure and all of that—he got rid of that, and he said, "I now sort of feel like I'm here. I actually feel like I'm here."

I think a lot of guys—and you see this with a lot of dads, and moms too—have these unrequited dreams and children sort of imposed on them, and there's this low-key resentment of, "I'm doing this thing, but you don't know what I sacrificed for you." And then there's shame around it: "What sort of a monster am I to blame my kids, whom I chose to have, because I didn't fulfill my dreams beforehand?"

"Yeah, really messy."

I want to be thoughtful with my words here because I do like to maintain some sense of privacy in my life, but I will say that having kids checks off what must be a deep, primitive circuit of satisfaction. It's a really good feeling—it feels like you've fulfilled something of duty. At the same time, it comes with all sorts of challenges and complications. It's become this ongoing debate between me and Lex, but look, it sounds like there are going to be a lot of kids to wrestle and play with.

"I can't wait. It's a competition between me, you, and him for who will have kids last. We'll see who's the holder."

I think I'm going to keep my mouth shut on that one.

"So, I've been asking you questions..."

The guest reads the acknowledgement he wrote for Chris Williamson from the last page of his book. It's brief, since the full acknowledgements run eight pages, but he wanted to include him "for your friendship and for breathing so much life into the podcast and what I refer to as the everyone's sphere."

He explains that he doesn't think Williamson is about the manosphere but about the human sphere — "human sphere sounded weird, so I said everyone's sphere." He remembers first seeing him online and then on Rogan: "Who is this guy with this British accent? And why are the women in my life asking me if he's single?" He concluded the guy was smart, nuanced, and seemed cool, and Williamson exceeded expectations on all of it. He's available day or night for an emergency or adventure call, gets to the gym early despite jet lag, and has been honest and vulnerable both with his audience and one-on-one. "Chris is who he appears to be on the internet."

"For better, man. For better. It's an honor to have you as a friend. You're a great friend, and I feel very blessed."

Williamson responds that one of the almost inarguable great parts of life is becoming respected and admired by people that you respect and admire — "it's one of the coolest things that you can do." (He notes his back is hurting from the neck training and face pulls they did earlier, joking that Jeff Cavalier has an exercise for it, and that a neck too narrow for wide shoulders makes you look like a coat hanger.)

He repeats the point: becoming admired and respected by people you admire and respect is one of the coolest things. "I like that person. I think they've got good taste. I think they're noble. I don't think that they're spiritually chinless."

The guest laughs at "spiritually chinless" as a classic Chris Williamson-ism and says he'll borrow it. Williamson credits it to Adam Mastriani, comparing it to "I Fought the Law" — a cover of a cover of a cover that everyone assumes the Clash did. "You're at the end of the human centipede of spiritually chinless. Now you're the guy at the very very end."

I'll take it — spiritually journalist. You see these people and you go, "Wow, they're cool. I respect them in a way that I think is really noble and aligned." And then if you manage to do something in that industry or a different one, and they turn to you and say, "Hey, I like what you do," you think, "Holy [ __ ], that's really cool." Can people take it to an extreme? Yeah, of course. You can construct your entire life trying to reverse engineer being liked by people that you like — that's the charlatan social climber who doesn't have anything below them. But assuming that people you respect are discerning — and one of the reasons you respect them is that they are discerning — you shouldn't be able to finesse or fugazi them into believing something they don't believe, or into thinking you're a person that you aren't. So yeah, man, I really hope everybody listening to this gets to experience what it's like to sit opposite someone they were a fan of and then became a friend of. It's the [ __ ] coolest thing in the world.

Well, that statement includes my experience of you — fan of, and then became friends of. You've got an awesome life energy. We don't want to spiral into a whole other conversation, but maybe for a future time. I think a lot about energy these days — not just mitochondria, but the fact that some people, and I'm going to offend some people with this, just have more life energy in them. I like to think that if you're thoughtful, which you are and I try to be, you allocate your life energy toward career and pursuits and health and resolve, and then pivot that energy — but you don't decide, "I'm going to shift all my chips to this and then all my chips to that." You have a lot of energy to go around. Rob on my team, my producer of the podcast, is such an engine of productivity and running — he's got a family now, and you always hear that people have kids and then they slow down, but he's picked up speed. We're just like, whoa.

I think some people just have that extra gear. Some people don't, and they need to take whatever they've been allocated and maximize with that. And some people just have a tremendous amount of life energy. I think the goal is to not die at 27 if you have a lot of that energy, right? You think about the 27 club — it's almost like they took all the energy of a life and crammed it into this early existence, usually through drugs and alcohol. But you also don't want a low, slow arc in life where you never figure out what your peaks are.

Put your [ __ ] foot on the gas. Yeah, man. I'm in the third quarter now, so I figure — so, speaking

Speaking of engines, I texted you about this last week: what is happening with the VO2 max versus Zone 2 debate? When I was thinking about getting a bit older and paying attention to cardiorespiratory fitness, low and slow seemed like everything. For a long time the advice was to focus exclusively on low and slow, but now it seems VO2 max work — the high-intensity Norwegian 4x4 — is increasingly important.

The word to delete there is "exclusively." My read of the data is that you need some volume of cardio training to build the so-called aerobic base, which can be very beneficial. The adaptations from 45 to 60 minutes of long, slow work — not walking, but upper Zone 2, around Zone 3, where you could still continue but would have to pause a few times if you tried to speak, as opposed to super easy — include a buildup of more capillary networks, which has a lot of positive downstream consequences, plus enrichment of the mitochondrial system and genuine enrichment of the cardiovascular system.

I make a point of doing a long slow jog of 45 to 60 minutes once a week, or a ruck — if I hike, it's usually longer than an hour, with some weight, often socially with somebody. Then once a week I do the "I feel like I'm going to die" HIIT workout, which for me is the Assault Bike: 20 seconds on, 10 off, eight rounds. By the seventh round you're cursing everybody and yourself, but you get off feeling so good — you probably cough a few times from breathing that hard.

I use the crude measurement: heart rate as 220 minus my age, then figure out what percentage of that max I'm hitting. I reach about 85–90% of max.

Are you wearing a chest strap or something?

I don't. I just put my fingers on my neck and record my pulse for 30 seconds, then double it, looking at a stopwatch. I'm probably off by plus or minus five beats, but I'm in the ballpark.

The obvious joke here is that you're Schrödinger's podcaster — someone who is very forward-thinking, technologically prepared, and excited about AI, yet also using a sundial made of your own fingers to measure heart rate. My girlfriend recently had a birthday and I got her a compass sundial, which is so cool — I love primitive and very advanced tools. I bookend them, with not a lot in the middle. "You're the barbell of a human" — actually, I'll take that. There's a great song called "Streetwise Professor" that I love; it was about somebody else, but it's something like a barbarian-intellectual, elevated.

A practical weekly protocol

Once a week, get your heart rate up near maximum. For most people that's somewhere between six and ten minutes of hard effort — less if you're really fast, longer if you're slow. Jog two laps as a mild warm-up, as I describe in the book. Then do a mile time trial once every two or three months, and Norwegian 4x4s or Assault Bike intervals of 20 on, 10 off. The nice thing about the Assault Bike is that you can stop immediately, and after six to eight rounds you're smoked — you hop in the shower and go. It takes so little time.

The reason the Assault bike — or an Echo bike, pick your handles-and-feet bike of choice — is superior for what we're trying to do, which is get heart rate as high as possible, is that you're using your arms as well. A regular bike is an awesome piece of equipment; if I could have any cardio machine, I'd choose a bike. It's super comfy and you can speed up. But on a bike you're only using your legs, which means your legs are going to burn like hell. If I were a better rower or ski erg user, I imagine you could get to an even higher heart rate.

Yes and no. The rower isn't a super skill — it's not brain surgery — but getting the rowing form proper isn't as easy. On the Assault bike, as long as you set the seat height right, you can't really screw it up. So go as hard as you can to get your heart rate elevated for six to eight rounds, but do it in a way that you're not going to hurt yourself.

So that's the HIIT workout once a week, the longer thing once a week, and then in the middle of the week I just do a 30-minute run or a 30-minute swim that's somewhere in between. That's maybe 5 minutes of warm-up jogging, then a 25 to 30 minute run in zone four — you're breathing hard and you know you could go faster, but you don't, because you've got the HIIT workout a day or two later. I'm then interspersing three days of weights with one day legs somewhere in the week, one day torso. Today we did a push: chest, shoulders, neck. Another day of the week you're doing biceps, triceps, calves, maybe neck again. I'm big on abdominal work these days — core work, not just abdominals.

Pike hangs for core and grip

What are your favorite exercises? Pikes. You hang from a bar — so you're working grip strength too — and do knee ups to 90°, slow, without swinging back and forth. Do five of those, drop down. Then see if you can do knee ups with legs out — an L-sit. Do five of those. You just build this up: if you can't do the L-sit, do five sets of five knee ups, and next time try at least one or two L-sits. In an L-sit you bring your knees up, then straighten your legs while still holding, so you're also getting the grip work. Then lower slowly. If you can do five of those, you can progress to one leg at a time — kick out, kick out, drop one, bring down one leg at a time. Over time, the goal is to bring your feet up to your hands on the bar without swinging, using your lower abs. Five sets of five, or even three sets of five, on the pikes — especially hanging from a thick bar, so you're really working your grip. I also do back hyperextensions, which keeps your core really strong.

Why prioritize torso work

You want strong abs, a strong midsection, and strong lower back muscles. I notice that basically all my little nagging injuries completely disappear, and even if I'm sitting a lot, I don't have any pain. I make sure I get 100 reps of hyperextensions per week — I don't care when I put them in. Usually at the end of a workout, whether arm day, leg day, or back day; I just have a commitment to 100 reps. I've gotten strong enough that I can do them with one leg: on the 45-degree bench you kick up one leg like a horse getting its shoe cleaned. Not on the GHD — that would be insane. I go slow and controlled, not tilting from one side to the next, so you really discover any imbalances. You brace yourself and do five reps, switch to the other leg, back and forth. Now I'm at the point where I can hold some weight or use a band.

Having strong spinal erector muscles matters — my default posture has suffered while writing this book, even with a standing desk, because you're always looking down at some eyesight angle. But I did buy an inversion table. Those are fun; I love hanging.

You have to be careful if you have eye pressure issues like glaucoma — you can blow a gasket and make glaucoma worse. Eye pressure upside down is not good. I don't have glaucoma, knock on wood, but having a strong lower back, I've noticed leg days are so much stronger — pressing, pulling, everything just gets stronger. You don't want any weak links in the chain. I think Jeff Cavalier really nails it when he says you want to do the small things like face pulls, back hyperextensions, and glute medius work to stabilize the pelvis. Those little things allow you to do the big things for much longer.

People say, "Oh, all that stuff is namby-pamby. You just need to do your squats and deadlifts and split squats." But the way you keep doing those things into your 50s, like me — I had this little shoulder thing, but no biggie — and continue to get stronger, is by doing the little things.

And if you do the little things, you stay strong and healthy. If you don't, you're the person complaining about your back who can't deadlift, or you're using a deadlift bar with elevated handles from plates. You're becoming weaker through negligence. It takes three minutes to do some hyperextensions.

Most educated people who are into their training know that what they're doing is trading short-term gain for long-term fragility — they've got five minutes left at the end of their session and they'll do another set of bicep curls instead of hyperextensions. It's always a trade-off, and there's a level of ignorance where you're allowed to not do the thing you didn't know you were supposed to do. But for most people who listen to you and me — like my brother — you know you should be doing lower back work, mobility work, getting your heart rate above 170, going low and slow, and walking after meals. The 10-minute postprandial walk. You know these things. Ignorance is no longer an excuse for you. It's all out there.

Minimum daily mobility

I talk about mobility in the book. It's basically getting each knee behind your glutes at least once per day.

Like a couch stretch?

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

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

Yeah, you could do it. I talk about just getting your knee behind your glutes, or putting your foot up on a chair or stool and stretching that out if you're at the airport or something. I'll do 10 seconds per side, three times per side. You also want to try and squat down once per day, like a sumo squat: put your elbow on the inside of one knee and, from the squatted position, look up and point directly overhead. Most people can't do this right away — they have to start lower and gradually, over a week or so, get to the point where they can look straight up at their finger. Then you want to be able to do it to the other side too. What you're getting there is stretch through the neck, thoracic spine, and shoulder.

There are great mobility programs out there, but most people don't make the time or have the time. These are the minimum. Then I talk about doing a reverse position — what gymnasts or kids would call the crab pose — a reverse tabletop where you push up for shoulder extension.

I don't have excessively good shoulder extension, but I can get my shoulders behind me no problem. If yours is horrible, work on that a little bit gradually. Then there's something in there I didn't develop, which is really cool, called the founders pose. It looks a bit like a chair sit in yoga, but it's actually for the posterior chain. It's someone else's creation—I want to be clear, and I credit him. Those four things take five minutes maximum. You can do them anywhere: watching Netflix, at your desk, or spread throughout the day to maintain some level of mobility.

The other thing is to use a full range of motion in your resistance training. Strength is gained through the range it's trained. Full range of motion, and holding tension in the stretched position—not indefinitely, don't turn it into an isometric, but really, on your seated or lying leg curls, setting the machine so you're holding tension in the stretch rather than passively stretching. My range of motion is pretty good, not amazing. I was real stiff for a while in my mid-back and did some work to get over that. You just move better, you'll feel better, you'll be more comfortable.

So yes, once people have the knowledge, there's really no excuse—and that gets to a deeper psychology. I don't want to parse this ad infinitum, but there are two things worth stating out loud. One: if you're somebody in pursuit of taking care of yourself and doing well, there will be people who say, "You're doing all this stuff all the time—what is this?" These were the people who, at scientific meetings, would give me grief for not drinking on the first night. I had a rule: I don't go out the first night. But find me on night three of a five-day meeting—all day I'm engaged, I'm learning. I'm not at a meeting to socialize, though I do some of it. I'm there to work, to get techniques. Meanwhile they're talking about their hangover and look like garbage. Over the years that accumulates for them, and it accumulates for me in a positive way.

People will give you a hard time for exercising, for taking good care of yourself. The other thing is there's a certain loneliness that comes with being the person who's really diligent. It's a different community of people I can call at 7 a.m. and say, "You want to work out?" You might say, "I was up way too late," or you might say, "Yeah, let's go." Your friend group changes. I have a friend who used to work with people from really troubled backgrounds, and he'd say that occasionally somebody would make it out of that world and leave completely, but many times they'd get themselves into all sorts of financial and social messes because they kept reverting to the world they grew up in.

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

I think Martha Beck calls this the empty elevator. You're just between floors. That's beautiful. And then you get there and realize, wow, there are other people who've also felt lonely, who are now in this place doing cool things. It takes strength of character to say no to that and yes to this—and also not to be defiant, to still be able to go to Thanksgiving. It's not about better or worse; it's just different. People fear being lonely, and I get it—you're drinking buddies, or you're eating-lousy-food buddies. The first night we land in a city, my team always likes to go out to dinner; I'm always in the hotel taking care of myself, because I want to have the full week of vigor. They do great, but they're younger than I am.

We'll see, because we're going to be in New York together next week.

The last time we spoke, Andrew was teaching an octopus to use an iPad. She died. Not from electrocution—she died because she laid eggs. Octopuses lay eggs, the eggs get fertilized by a male, and then they die; that's the life cycle. They live about two years, and sellers don't tell you how old the animal is when you get it, though you get some sense of it. She was in her second year. He had thought it was a male—"pure projection," he says—and named him Van Gogh because it was a starry night octopus.

The replacement octopus died too, though Andrew insists both were old. He hasn't given up on the idea: he has a new tropical tank, a dog, and a freshwater tank, but he needs to get a younger octopus—or a male one. When the host marveled that he couldn't tell whether he'd bought a male or female, Andrew joked it was "some bloke on Venice Beach," then clarified that he gets them legally, and that their fate would have been far worse if they hadn't come to him.

Van Gogh was spectacularly smart, and would sit in front of the coral and mimic it. But octopuses are also a little sadistic, which Andrew found troubling. He hand-fed Van Gogh with forceps: sometimes she would just eat the fish, other times she'd take it, stuff it against the glass of the aquarium, slowly eat it, and take a nap halfway through. Sometimes she would simply play with it. A dog is a benevolent creature—it eats its food, that's it. A cat will play with its prey. The host noted we don't like to think of the animal kingdom that way, but accounts like "nature is metal" will teach you otherwise pretty quickly.

Andrew also likes cephalopods generally, and kept cuttlefish alive for years.

Closing Thanks and the Book

The host had to catch a plane, and the two confirmed they'd see each other in New York on Tuesday, hoping to get Rick and a few others together for a wrap-up. Andrew closed by thanking the host for hosting him, for the friendship, for supporting him through the book, and for taking his calls at odd hours and restoring his sanity—and said he's glad they're neighbors.

The book is available at protocolsbook.com, with links to all the places it can be bought in different languages. The audiobook is read in Andrew's own voice and runs 19 hours, but you can hop to a particular section, learn what you want to learn, and come back to it anytime.

Asked which insight from the book people are likely to skip over, Andrew Huberman named two. The first is the wacky eye movement technique for falling back asleep. People think it sounds too crazy, but it costs nothing and it works: it confuses your body awareness system, and you need to forget where your limbs are. As the host noted, it's genuinely dizzying to do. Forgetting your body position is a prerequisite to falling asleep, so the technique helps.

The one people will skip over, frankly, is the personal development material on how to finally let go of difficult things you're still carrying forward. The method is 15 minutes of journaling about the hard thing on one day, then again on three subsequent days. Data from Pennebaker and others show conclusively that it's a super powerful technique, but people just don't do it. He suspects it's because the thing itself is hard, and nowadays getting people to write for 15 minutes is tough. Writing the book taught him a lot about focus, overcoming procrastination, and forcing himself into hard things — and he thought he was already pretty good at that.

The host connected this to Jordan Peterson: before 12 Rules and its sequel, the original source was a list of 44 rules Peterson posted on Quora, in answer to a question about his rules for a good life. The list included entries like "pet a cat when you see it on the street" and "don't bother children when they're skateboarding." One the host remembered was: if memories still upset you, write them down. So much of this advice points in the same direction.

The conversation closed with mutual thanks and a sign-off ahead of meeting in New York the following week.