Jocko Podcast - 332: Influence & Ownership Over Your Physiological & Psychological Being w/ Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 332 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. So when I first started this podcast, when we first started this podcast, I was talking about different situations, how I handled different situations, what I thought about various subjects, different viewpoints I had concerning leadership and really concerning. human nature and almost immediately started getting feedback and started getting asked questions and people would say hey have you studied stoicism or are you did you do a lot of work you know looking at at nietzsche or some other ancient or modern school of philosophy and the short answer was that no i i didn't i didn't do that i mean i left high school joined the middle

So there wasn't this big educational background for me. I'm not an academic of any kind in fact there was a A funny one of the earliest live events that I did and it was a relatively cultured audience Out there and someone asked you know, hey, who's your favorite? Who's your favorite? Philosopher and I said Lemmy and no one laughed like I laughed but no one else laughed and and so I added I said, you know, I said, you You know, Lemmy from Motorhead. And a couple people sort of awkwardly laughed, but not much. And later on, we explored this idea a little bit more on the podcast.

And because, look, there's much to be learned from old philosophers and old thinkers. And as it turns out, I agree with. And I'm aligned with a lot of what they say. No doubt about it. I'm not trying to say anything negative about these ancient philosophers and the theories that they had. But the fact of the matter is I just didn't study them. I mean, like I said, I was a shitty high school student.

I didn't, I don't think I read any books in high school. So, yeah, I didn't learn anything about these things. I just figured these things out through my own random trials and tribulations in life. And it was a similar situation with Jordan Peterson. when he came on the podcast for the first time, it was really obvious that we had come to many of the same conclusions in our views of life, but he got to those conclusions through rigorous academic study

and work as a clinical psychologist, and I got there through my experiences in life and in the teams. And I've been very lucky in that regard, very lucky to kind of stumble into things been guided in certain situations been shoved in some directions made some good decisions along the way made some bad decisions and been lucky enough to live through it and learn from it so I've been very very lucky but I also pay attention to these kind of things a lot of times I was paying attention to these kind of things because I was trying to teach them I originally started paying attention to leadership because I had to learn it

in order to become a leader. So I was paying attention and I was watching what leaders were doing. And eventually I was paying attention to leadership because I was teaching it. And so I saw things and I stumbled into things. And one of the things I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics, I mean my first platoon were clearing gas oil platforms.

I do a big write up about this and in that book. But my platoon ends up on a skirmish line. We're all looking down our weapon. looking to engage targets and no one's making a call. No one's making any kind of a decision. And I, as a new guy, I take a step back, which means I broaden my field of view. I look around so I can see more.

And a nice calm comes over me and now I can see what we need to do. And I make a call. And I started to teach that. I started to teach that to young leaders. Hey, you need to take a step back. You need to broaden your field of view. You need to look around. And it's going to calm you down and allow,

you to make a decision. I also would tell guys, hey, you need to take a breath. And I didn't have some, you know, I wasn't saying you need to take some spiritual transcendent breath. You need to reach deep into your inner soul and breathe. I wasn't saying that. The actual reason I was saying is because you don't want to sound panicked when you come up on the radio. You don't want to come up on the radio and say, we need to get everyone over this building. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do it. Number one, because everyone else is going to now panic. And number two, because everyone's going to make funny you when you get back from this operation so you don't want to either one of these so when you have to make a decision you take a step back and then you take a breath you detach you broaden

your field of view and these things will calm you down and allow you to make better decisions and recently i've heard some podcasts tim ferris and joe rogan by the way uh they've had a guy on a couple times named andrew huberman and this is a good i've heard some podcasts and this guy's a doctor, a neuroscientist, a professor. And as I was listening to what he was saying, a lot of the things that I have been teaching were aligned with what he was saying. And believe it or not, one of the things was a broad field of vision calms you down. Taking a breath is something that scientifically calms you down, physiologically calms you down. Broadening your field of view physiologically calms you down and guess what I know this the calmer you are the

better decisions you're gonna make then there are other things when I listen to him talk that I recognize from my own experiences cold water but doesn't feel good when you get in it but it feels good when you get done lifting weights fasting things that I had kind of instinctively or through trial and error figured out were now being reinforced by someone that actually academically understood the science behind my instincts. Now, my instincts are not always right by any stretch of the imagination. I should probably write an entire litany of books about the dumb things I've done. But I'm always looking to see, hey, if there's some things I'm doing right, why are they right?

If there's things I'm doing wrong, why are they wrong? and always looking to increase the understanding that I have behind the things that I think of figured out, which is why we are fortunate to have Dr. Andrew Huberman here with us tonight to help explain and explore what we think, what we think we know, what we think we think, and how we can get better at all of the above. Andrew, thanks for coming down.

man it's good to meet you great to be here did that um when I was listening to you talk and I was hearing you talk about how you're if you're focused on something small it amps up your adrenaline I was I was listening I was going oh it was all these things were coming together all these dots were getting connected it's kind of crazy right it's pretty wild I mean I think some people may know this many people probably won't was which is that your eyes are two pieces of your brain They're the only two pieces of your brain.

And yes, they are brain for those of you that want to look it up. They're part of your central nervous system and they're outside your cranial vault. And they are there to set the aperture, right, that either tunnel vision or the broad field of view, not just on your vision, but on your thinking, which is what you described. And widening your field of view, your visual aperture will allow you to parse more information. it also changes your perception of time. So the simplest way to put this is that when you are in a narrow field of view, it's a bit like having a video camera in slow motion. Your frame rate is higher,

but in that small aperture, you're looking at minor details. As soon as you hear it, you think, duh, of course. But the opposite is also true. When you broaden your field of view, and that could be by literally moving your head around, but it can also just be by keeping your head more or less, stationary and just deliberately broadening your field of view, we call it panoramic vision. You are taking smaller frame rate, or I should say, sorry, larger bins of time, but the way

the visual system works is really clever. It actually allows you to sense motion more quickly. So when you run and catch a ball or when you're walking along and you blink and a bee hits your eyelid, you didn't see it coming, see in quotes, but you were in that panoramic field of view and your reaction time is four times what it is when you're in that narrow aperture. Now, again, I just want to reiterate this and just clarify this. For like 20 years, I have been teaching young seal leaders and then, you know, other people in the world, in the business world, in the first responder world, in the military at large, for 20 years,

I've been saying, hey, listen, when things start to get wild, you need to get off your gun, You need to take a step back. You need to broaden your field of view. You need to look around to see what's happening. I've been telling people that for 20 years. Only because it just worked for me. And I luckily figured that out in my very first seal platoon. And it took me a while to where I said, oh, that's something I need to tell other people to do.

Like I figured it out and would do it. But then once I was a position where I was teaching these things. So that's just like wild that there's all these physiological things that occur that for me was I knew it. I knew that you better do this. Because, I mean, imagine you want to talk about a field of view. Imagine what your field of view is like when you're staring down the barrel of your gun. It's tiny.

Your field of view is so focused. And you don't see anything. I mean, other than the target right in front of you, you don't see anything. And that's what happens to when a young seal is in a leadership position. That's what happens to them. They're looking down their weapon and they don't see anything that's happening. They can't make any decisions because they don't see. the entire picture.

They see nothing. So that's kind of crazy. And that's, again, these are just some of the examples that I've pulled from listening to you and listen to your podcast, by the way, Huberman Lab. Before we get down any more rabbit holes, let's talk about where you came from,

how you ended up in this spot. Because I would say you didn't take sort of a standard route to end up where you ended up. So let's talk about young Andrew Huberman. What's going on? Where are you born? I was actually born in Stanford Hospital. Oh, okay.

I joke, I was born at Stanford hospital. I trained at Stanford. I work at Stanford. I'll probably die at Stanford. Hopefully a long time from now. People say, you're going to die in your office. They're a worse place to die than Stanford. How are you born there?

Why? Does your parents work there or so? My dad's from South America. He actually came here. He was a physicist, but he came here from Argentina on a Navy scholarship. So the Navy paid for my dad to leave Argentina where there were no opportunities to do science. Came to the U.S., went to University of Pennsylvania.

Over the years, he's worked on various projects related to government. I actually don't know a ton about what he does now. But growing up, well, he met my mother in New York City, and she's from East Coast, it's from Jersey. And my grandfather went to college on the GI Bill, so he was a World War II vet, had my mom while he was in graduate school, and he was a real physical guy.

That'll come up later. Your dad was? My grandfather on my mom's side. So my dad, my mom met, moved to California and had my sister and I. And this was a time I should say when Palo Alto is, you know, no dot com, no Silicon Valley, in this scope of wealth in the Bay Area, we were middle class. We weren't upper-room class. So we single story home.

I mean, we didn't want for things. You know, I didn't imagine about having Ferraris or any of that. We didn't. But there were kids in the other high school. There are two high schools in Palo. I went to the one where all the nerdy kids went. It's actually called Gunn High School, GUNN. And it has a funny reputation, not funny,

it has an infamous reputation. It's the highest suicide rate of any high school in the United States for reasons that we can talk about. So from the time I was born until about age 13, I had a pretty, I would say kind of magical childhood. A bunch of young boys about my age live down the street. They're older sisters. They all seem to have older sisters who were about my sister's age.

And so it was biking around and skateboard around, playing baseball on the street, soccer, swimming. Those are big sports in the Bay Area. And we ate dinner together every night as a family. You know, we just kind of have a great life. And this is, so this is like this until you're around 13? Yeah, until I was 13. And then my parents split up. This was at a time in the 80s when I think there was only one other kid in school with divorced parents.

Remember these times? Right now it's, you know, it's rampant. But, and unfortunately, they didn't have the skills to handle it properly. So just imagine the rulebook of all the things parents aren't supposed to do in a divorce. They basically systematically broke every one of those. My dad moved away and was overseas for a bit. And I was at home with my mom and she struggled with the fracture of our family in a major way. This was right about the time I hit puberty.

So it's like throwing gasoline on fire, right? And at the time, I was a bit into skateboarding. This was early days of the Bones Brigade and Animal Chin videos. Oh, yeah. Okay, so for those of you that don't know, you can look it up and you get a sense. But I quickly got into the skateboard community and dropped everything else. Stop playing soccer, really stopped doing any kind of structured school sports and things of that sort, and just got really into skateboarding.

And the reason I got into skateboarding was, A, you didn't need your dad to go, right? Soccer, all the other kids had dads there. My dad wasn't there. It was kind of embarrassing. My mom would have gone. And actually, she would have been the one shouting the loudest. She's from Jersey after all. She's got teeth. But, you know, Boy Scouts wasn't going to be my thing. I had some friends that went into Eagle Scouts. Guys were playing lacrosse and water polo. And, you know, skateboarding made a lot more sense. And so what ended up happening was from about 13, 14, 15. I started riding the 7F bus up to San Francisco. There was a big gathering of kids in Justin Herman Plaza, the now infamous. famous EMB crowd, the Embarcadero. And this was a scene, a very nascent scene at the time of young feral guys, it was almost exclusively guys, that hung out there all day long. None of them went to school. They drank 40 ounces and 40 ounces.

And, you know, people were smoking weed and drinking and skateboarding. And there were fights and people would rip off tourists. And it was kind of a rough scene, but there was also some amazing skateboarding. Now, I never really like drugs or alcohol, so I lucked out in that way. For me, it was all about the skateboarding. And over the years, you know, those early years of going up there, I got to know a lot of guys. I would say about a third of them have, just to give you a sense of where it went, about a third of them have gone on to found companies and do really well.

I'm fortunate to be friendly with guys like Danny Way. I talked to, you know, I remember the young Rob Gerdick coming through, and a lot of guys went on to create some impressive things. and did very well. About a third are just living their lives and I don't know where they are. And about a full third of the guys I knew from back then are dead or in jail.

So I saw a lot of fights, a lot of drinking, a lot of guys got their girlfriends pregnant. It was a mix, you know. And I suppose looking back in that time, I was kind of aimless, right? I wasn't that good a skateboarder. I want to be really clear because the skateboarding community

is kind of ruthless in terms of holding accountability, almost as much or probably as much as in the teams, right? I have a number of friends from the team. It's like you want to be very careful with what one implies. And so I don't want to imply that I was fated to become a Danny Wayer. I didn't have the skills. Actually, my body wasn't developed yet.

I kept getting hurt. I was skinny. I kept breaking feet and, you know, getting hurt doing things that other guys could do trivially. So that was really tough. And I kept feeling like I couldn't keep up, but all my friends were there. And, you know, I could throw out a bunch of names. But I will mention some of the brighter lights in that scene. You know, I got to see and witness great scapeer.

from a guy named Mike Carroll, who's an incredible skateboarder. And his older brother, Greg Carroll, was kind of a big brother to all these parentless kids. I also learned that going to school was an option for certain kids in the city. And here I was this kid from Palo Alto, and I thought, well, I just won't go anymore. Well, what ended up happening was someone took notice and that I wasn't in school. And one day, when I was back in high school, so it would be ninth grade, I got called into the office. and I was sitting down and they were talking to me, you know, how are things at home? How are things going?

They start probing. There's this guy sitting in the corner. And at some point, I realized, I think they're going to take me away. So that's what ended up happening. How much school did you skip? Yeah, I could tell you more about the curbs in the gun high school parking lot that I can tell you about any classes I took up until about the 11th grade. And in the 11th grade, as the story goes, the only reason I really went there is because there was a girl in the 12th grade who was very beautiful, who for whatever reason had allowed. of judgment and decided to go out with me and then ended up being my girlfriend and

and I'm grateful to her because as the story eventually goes you know that was the reason I went off to college at all although that didn't go well either so I wasn't going much at all and so my grades were not good and your mom was just was she working at this time what was she doing or she's like just she was working allowing you to go to San Francisco and skate all day allowing me in air quotes I remember me and a guy who has gone on to do very well as a documentary filmmaker, Jake Rosenberg. He actually made the Waiting for Lightning documentary about Danny Way. And a couple other guys took Jacob's parents Volvo Vanagan or whatever those wagonins things.

I forget what those were. I don't know if they told me. Those are pretty cool. We piled into that and we all went to the Reno Nationals for a week mid-exams, you know, and just kind of went out there. I think we forged signatures. Kids don't do this, by the way. I'm a professor now, I just want to say, for the record, wait to get your tattoos.

Don't get the pulled ear earrings for reasons that don't even need explanation. And please, please stay in school. But went up there. I had managed to get picked up by a wheel company and a truck company. What truck company? Funder trucks. Oh, Chad. And they put me on.

What wheel company? It was Spitfire. Okay. Yeah. So you were like at least riding. I couldn't manage. And getting free trucks. That's all you were getting, wasn't it?

Yeah. So there's any money, did they? No. So, gosh, because somewhere out there, the great Jim Thiebo who owns Deluxe, which is real skateboards and all anti-hero and all that, it's probably listening, thank you, Jim. He put me on out of sympathy. I was hanging around the factory at Deluxe. So in San Francisco, there was an amazing thing about skateboarding that I'm guessing most

people don't know, which was this guy, Fausto Vitello, who started Thrasher magazine, and also independent trucks, the great independent trucks. and then he had a brilliant idea, which was, why don't we just make a bunch of companies, Thunder, Spitfire, Venture? Well, guess what, folks? It's all the same company. And so kids, you know, you'd say, oh, I ride thunders, no, I ride Indians. It's all Irmico.

That's where they poured the stuff. So during those years of high school, I started going up to the factory and hanging around the factory, which is in Hunter's Point, which is the only truly dangerous part of San Francisco, at least at the time, was the only truly dangerous part. And you had to really watch yourself there. I saw a guy get pushed off a motorcycle beaten up and his motorcycle taken at a stoplight midday. This is, you know, this is really rough blocks. And so, you know, here I was this 14-year-old kid from Palo Alto, getting a pretty quick street education.

Start getting into fights a little bit. Like I said, fortunately didn't like drugs or alcohol because of... And you just randomly didn't like drugs or alcohol? Was there something in your parenting that made you feel that way? Did you not like the loss of control? You know, it was probably the drugs and alcohol that I was exposed to. So alcohol made me feel kind of sedated, as it does, as a forebrained inhibitor, as we'd say, in neuroscience. And the drugs, at the time, people were mostly smoking weed and hash, taking LSD and mushrooms.

And none of that really appealed. I mean, I do have a drug, and it's adrenaline. I love the clarity of mind and the energy that comes from adrenaline. And I learned early on that beautiful but very, very, very dangerous edge where everything is clear. You have immense amounts of energy. And if you can regulate a bit, you're incredibly calm. And yet there's that readiness in your body. I'm sure, as I describe this, many people and especially you guys will know this feeling very well. And it's a very drug-like state. Right. It's as powerful as being in love and lust all at once, right? It just hits that. It's a beautiful tunnel. And I fell in love with it pretty early on. And I also love camaraderie, right? So my family quickly became this big group of feral kids and some older guys that really took care of all of us. Are you going home at night? Are you like squatting somewhere? So not sleeping on the street.

There were guys that slept in Barkerrero all the time. I wasn't one of those. I would stay at this guy, Ray Myers house, he was a skateboarder but also a computer programmer. And this links back to that day where they were going to take me away. I ended up leaving to the city. I ran away. So I bolted. I messed up your story. That was your freshman year? That was my freshman year, maybe early sophomore year.

And you think these guys are going to take me? Right. And put me in some kind of whatever. Right. So I took off. I went to Ray's house. I took the bus up to San Francisco. I bolted.

I think I said I had to use the bathroom and then they went. Obviously, they weren't thinking what they were dealing with. And I went to Ray's house. He lived in his parents' attic. he was a computer programmer and also a professional skateboarder. One of the more stable people in that in that world. What year is this? So this would be 1989.

And you know, and I don't look anything like, well, I had shaved head and, you know, and maybe my hair might have been dyed blue black or something. And I was just excited because, you know, I had whatever new pair of kicks on and was. Oh, and the Thunder thing. If you rode for Thunder back then, you got this shirt that is in my high school year. your book and I saw it the other day, which says, I ride for Thunder trucks and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And they only made a few of them. And if you have one of those out there, I'd love to see it. I'd love to see it. But I went to raise and stayed there for a bit. And at one point,

he said, you know, you can't stay here. And I said, why not? He's like, I live at home with my parents. Like, this is weird. You live in my house. You know, you have to go home. So eventually I went back and then it was no forgiveness. They took me to a place up the peninsula, which was neither juvenile hall nor a mental hospital nor jail. It was this kind of truant, troubled kids place. And I'll never forget what they told us. They said, okay, there's an adult ward over there, and they're crazy. And then there are these little kids younger than you, I think it was younger than 14, in this other building. And they're really disturbed. But you guys, you're normal. You just have a lot of problems. And I thought to myself, that's definitely what they're telling the people

in the other buildings. But what happened was I was on a 72-hour hold. You know, I hadn't done anything. I hadn't harmed anyone or myself. And it was on the third day that one of the counselors there, who was a really good guy, you know, we sometimes forget that the people that do that kind of low-income work with kids like me back then and kids now, probably in graduate school or something. A lot of these people have their own set of problems, and that's what led them there. And he sat down and he said, listen, you can get out of here and go right back to what you were doing.

or you can ask whether or not there's anything here of value. And at the time, I was pretty frightened. I was in this place. My roommate was this guy. He looked like Richard Ramirez, the night's doctor. Big guy. If you haven't seen that documentary on, that'll make you never want to live in Los Angeles County,

although Richard Ramirez was happy to travel to kill you, it turned out. So I remember staying up at night and being really frightened. I thought, I don't know, this guy is going to try and harm me in any kind of way. Turned out he was just another sad story of somebody who was just really, really troubled. He was really, oddly, he was one of the bigger, more dangerous looking guys in the place, but he was cutting on the bottoms of his feet so that no one would see. Horrible.

Met some good kids in there who, you know, had different sets of problems than me. A lot of them, drug problems, some of them had been molested. Fortunately, I never experienced that. You know, and I was like, wow, like, I'm in trouble, right? I'm, I'm, this is a long way from home. It's also a long way from Embarcadero. I called my team manager. I'm going to name him this time because we're friends now.

His name was Steve is Steve Rugi, Shrugi. Really good guy. Team manager from Thunder and Deluxe. And again, they put me on the flow team out of sympathy. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Shrug. And I called him and I said, listen, they got me behind Lock and Key. I don't know what to do.

And he said, you called me? And I said, yeah, and he said, bro, you're the most normal guy I know. And I said, I know. And I'm in here. And he said, no, including me. I can't help you. And I thought, wow, I'm in trouble. So what ended up happening was I was let out.

And as a condition of being let back in school, I had to go to school. I had to chart a certain number of days. And I was assigned to do therapy twice a week. and at the time no one did or if they did they didn't talk about therapy this was before goodwill hunting this was before any kind of sense actually as a little factoid i saw some statistics out of stanford i think um it was college-wide statistics in the u.s that 10 years ago if you ask college students how many of them go to or are willing to explore therapy of something like 14 percent now it's in excess of 90 percent we could argue whether or not that reflects a good or a bad

change. But anyway, I was assigned to a guy who was remarkable. He really understood what I was going through, which I have to imagine was just a stroke of luck. He understood that my home life didn't have structure, that at the time there was no strong paternal role, even though my dad's a pretty strong-minded person, and a strong opinion. He's Argentine after all. Just that I was spinning out. And he strongly discouraged me from doing any drugs because he understood that that was going to be a risk in my current configuration. And he understood that I wasn't going to get excited about school right away. I was always a reader. So I was going to Tower Books and reading about fitness and reading about, I love to read about fitness. I like history and I like to read about sex. So like not the

porno magazines, but I would go read a lot like sexual health. I was really curious, right? And then, you know, young guy. I was like, oh, you know, there's like protocols in here. You know, let's learn this. And about fitness, lifting weights, like the Ellington Darden books and the old, you know, super slow movement stuff. And Mike Menser. And actually, what happened was he said, well, what do you enjoy doing? I told him what my interests were. And he said, well, you should exercise. He swims, I think.

You know, you don't learn much about your therapist if it's an appropriate therapy relationship. So I started swimming about a mile a night. I would run to this pool. I'd hop the fence because I'm a skateboarder. I'm not going to pay to go in during the day. Fences are there to go over. So I'd hop the fence and I'd swim at night. And then I started running and I started lifting weights.

And there was a teacher at our school. His name is Bob Peters, big guy football player. And he taught me out of lift weights. And then I started running cross country. And eventually I got a girlfriend. I had done dating the skateboard way. Like there were girls that we'd meet at contests and the kind of thing. But a really nice, smart, very sweet and kind girl whose dad actually was a real blue-collar guy.

How much time is passed in this? So now I'm 16 or so. I get my driver's license. So are you a sophomore now or maybe even a junior? I'm a junior. I'm a junior, 16. Because I started school in the fall. I'm a fall baby.

So I was always the youngest in my class. What do you think, how did this therapist actually connect to you? Because most of the things I see with kids, yours truly included when I was a kid, a super rebellious kid. I didn't listen to anybody. Like that was, you know, any adult, just. didn't know anything. And how did how do you think that person made a connection with you? That's a great question. No one's ever asked me that. Three things. One was completely nonverbal.

He was physically fit. I looked at him and I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind looking like that dude someday. You know, I was skinny and I kept getting hurt skateboarding, right? And I thought he wasn't really big and yoked, but he was tall and fit. He had good posture and the way he would greet me. He was kind. I also remember he had his, uh, So he's kind of a badass. Yeah, and he had his initial stitch into his socks. I was like, I guess he probably makes good money doing this. But he wasn't, there was no aristocracy about him.

He just, yeah, he looked like the kind of person I might want to be. He looked like he had his life together. I also remember that one day I came in and he said, you're smiling. And I said, yeah, I'd hollied the front eight. And he said, what does that mean? And I said, well, I'd do this thing. And he said, why don't you show me? So we went downstairs.

I did push, push, push. I think I fell a few times. Then I, you know, clicked down this front eight. We went upstairs, and I was like, wow, I think that's the first time that, like, a grown man has cared about what I was doing. And so there was that seed there. This is the first time I remember that very clearly now.

And then he, I remember falling asleep in his office a lot. I must have been pretty out of it at times. And then when I met, my girlfriend, she was a year older, I was a little intimidated. It's a whole other thing when you're just traveling and I guess you're just hooking up with girls or whatever, but when you actually like somebody now, they've got something to lose. And he really encouraged me to, he said, great advice, by the way, he said, when it comes to decision making, ask her opinion, but I think she'll appreciate if you just make the plans. All right. So I would pick the restaurant. I would

restaurant back then I had no money right but in terms of you know so I used to run to my girlfriend's house and wash her car she had a Bronco so I used to go there while she was at church on Sundays her dad was a blue collar guy very little education but had done okay in this country by buying apartments and then taking care of them himself one of these guys with I remember he had a hundred keys on his key always a sign that somebody works hard right just remembering what all those keys are too it's a memory task what do you what do you listen to for music right now So as you start talking about this, and I'm sitting here running through my life

and thinking about, well, what kind of people had influence over me? And there was like one of one guy that I knew, his older brother was in the Marine Corps, was a Marine Corps drill instructor. And, you know, in my mind when I was like 13 years old and I saw that, I was like, okay, that dude looks like he can kick ass and that seems like a good thing to be able to do. And then, you know, as I started listening to hardcore music

and all of a sudden, you know, you know Henry Rollins in Black Flag is like doing pushups and you think, okay, it looks like I need to start doing some pushups. And then some other hardcore bands where you know that the guys are working out. And I remember like my friends and me were like, okay, looks like we're working out. Why? Because it's interesting you brought up like the kind of the posture and the stature. because when you're a kid and you're 13 and you weigh 138 pounds or whatever, you see someone that's like 190 pounds.

And they kind of look like, like you said, that's kind of what I think I should be doing, even though it's an interesting thing. I heard, I heard, I think it was either Rollins or Ian McKay, and they were talking about seeing HR from the bad brains. And HR from the bad brains was like, You know, because they were around in the late 70s, but he had been an athlete, HR from the Bad Brains,

had been an athlete in high school. He was like a track athlete. That's how come he could do these flips, but they like looked at him and he looked like a man, like a jacked guy and they're like, yes. And so that, again, you see these, it's an interesting thing, that little physical stature means something apparently.

Yeah, these, I guess, you know, the psychologist, we have to ask Jordan, You know, these masculine archetypes. You get a seed going there. You know, there are a couple of things. One important person I failed to mention, the guy that sold me my first skateboard, this guy named Gary Hall and ran the skateboard shop and was an interesting guy because he's very physically strong, plays hockey, but also skateboarded.

Actually, it was a professional skateboarder in the kind of late 70s or early 80s. He took early on when he saw me going off the rails because I used to skateboard with him a lot. He said, listen, your parents are going through a lot. Whatever you do, do not mess your life up by not going to school, not getting a job, doing all these things. So I didn't follow his advice as well as I could have, but Gary and I have remained close friends for, God, I can't even count the years. Now more than 35 years. A little story here. He's actually the operations manager from my laboratory at Stanford.

And he's a very put-together guy. If you walk past him on the street, you wouldn't even know he's skateboards. but he was very into, you know, for instance, I've never seen a leaf on his front lawn. It's edged perfectly. My laboratory, I'm very proud to say, and thank you, Gary, has passed every single inspection with 100%. Nobody does that. Like, they're going to find something, and he makes sure they don't. And, you know, so there were examples of people like that or my therapist, but that I thought, wow, I would love to be like that person.

but I somehow couldn't find the internal organization to do it. You asked about music. One thing that was just terrible about the early 90s about skateboarding, it was the era of little wheels and people wearing really baggy clothes with bright colors with like fruit salad on the front. And it would be a few years before the Danny Ways and those guys would come in like blasting Slayer and ACDC and jumping over a great wall of China and really bringing. It was almost like we had everyone, it was like a pre-peubertal phase of skateboarding,

which then eventually went through puberty and some incredible stuff happened. So the music at the time that kids in my high school were listening to was also, to me, was just dreadful. No disrespect to anybody. But, I mean, people were like hacky-sacking and listening to fish.

And they are, you know, sure, the Grateful Dead would play at Frost Ampitheater at Stanford and we'd go over there for other reasons, you know. But it just petul-y smell and like none of that stuff resonated for me. And then what happened was I was 14, and Jim Thebo of Deluxe and has great fame. And he's a very quiet, humble guy, but he's sort of the secret parent of all skateboarding.

You can look him up. He's a very important figure still to this day and a great person. I was up at Spitfire Thunder, a place was called Deluxe Low Warehouse, and he gave me a tape. And it was a band called Crimpshrine, which is an East Bay punk band. and that led me to the discovery of the great Operation Ivy. Then Operation Ivy was featured in the first H Street video, the entire album of 27 songs.

And Operation Ivy, Jesse Michaels and Tim Armstrong, which is now of Rancid fame and transplants with Travis Barker. Okay, and on and on. So when I heard Operation Ivy, wow. I mean, I can still feel it in my body now. I'm not going to try and sing it, but Jesse was like, you know, I got no. It was just so, the energy was so much like, that's me.

That, that's me. It's like seeing someone on the street that looks just like you, and it's a feeling inside you, that's me. And then Operation Ivy, I went to gym and I said, where can I get more of this? And he was, oh, if you like that, stiff little fingers. And I was like, stiff little fingers. Yeah, I was going to say, unfortunately, Operation Ivy, one album.

Yeah, so they had that energy EP that was really long. Yeah, they broke up because there were a bunch of teenagers touring and they had this huge success. Now, fortunately, that led to the great, I mean, my favorite band of all time and tremendous respect and love and admiration and appreciation for Rancid. So in my mind, if you were going to design a punk band

or a band of any kind, you'd have a bullet-belted Mohawk guy up front, that's Tim, with a lift pin. Like, he actually is missing no piece of that front tooth. And then you'd have an amazing bass player like Matt Freeman, who's like a big, you know, car guy. And then you'd have a drummer like Brett Reed who actually used to skateboard with us at the Embarcadero. I remember thinking like no one had tattoos back then. It was what we call the

autoclave days. Now they used disposable needles. Back then it was actually dangerous because you weren't sure if they actually ran the autoclave or if they were sober while they did it. And he had a huge spider tattoo on his chest and we're like, whoa, that's a commitment. And then you'd have Lars Fredrickson, an oy guy, right? From the South Bay from San Jose. And I remember the first time I heard Rancet, which was first a three piece and then when they added Lars. And I thought, this is like Operation Ivy graduated and went to college, which none of those guys did. They get what I'm talking about, but just so much energy. Like the albums would open with, and I was maturing, right, had gone through, I was going through puberty and I thought this. This is, this is it.

And actually I have to say that throughout my entire life, every Rancid album has tracked to a particular five-year phase of my life. And I could go on and on about this and I won't, but I own every beat track, every outtake. I mean, I've even got a song by Rancid called The Sentence, which nobody knows, which is queued up in my phone so that if I'm on a plane, it starts to go down, as much as I love the people in my life, I'm plugging in and I'm going down listening to the sentence. So that was all during those years. And then the fitness thing really took off because of this, my guy, football coach, Bob Peters. And then because my, because my Girlfriend at the time, she was a year older.

She had dated a guy that someone showed me a picture of and he was this big football player from the other high school. And I was, you know, six foot tall at that time, 150 pounds. Oh, my goodness. Like, she must think I'm a dental floss, right? So I started doing my sit-ups and my push-ups and then I started lifting Kansas soup, like classic thing. And then I saw an ad from Mike Menser in a magazine.

And I paid, I was working at the time. So I started working at a cafe, you know, busing tables and things like that. And I got a program from Mike Menser and got on the phone with him. And he said, listen. You got on the phone with Mike? Well, I paid him. Yeah. Oh, okay.

And he explained high intensity training and bringing muscles to failure. And so I started doing this thing of training once every time. How much did that cost? It's probably about $100 at the time. That's crazy. It would have been a huge investment. Mike Mentzer. Huge investment for me.

How many people did he do that for? That doesn't even scalable. I remember I had to go get a, I had to go to Western Union and send him Western Union. That's not. It was great. And my mother, I remember when he called, she's like, why is this grown man calling you? And I started doing the, you know, once every train, rest two days, train, rest two days. And my body just responded like crazy to that.

So I was eating and training and just growing like a weed. And as most people know, when you're untrained and you start training even a slight, you know, training hard, you just grow. And when you're how old? I was, so that was 17 to 19. Your body's just seething with testosterone. So from HGH or whatever. Everything. I mean, from, and from the 16 until, I guess when I started,

I eventually followed that high school girlfriend off to college. I went from 150 pounds to 2.15 in a period of about, you know, three, three years or so. It wasn't all solid, but it was solid enough. I still had the baby fat, the round, roundish face. But, and I was sprinting. and lifting. And then basically... And are you now back in school?

Are you paying attention in school? So here's the irony. I got a girlfriend. I dyed my hair back to a normal color. I started wearing flannels instead of the skateboard gear. Oh, wait. You dressed like a skateboarder in the 90s like you were wearing those big jeans and stuff?

There are photos of those out there. There are a few videos. I didn't wear the super baggies. I got out before that. You were danger close. I was danger close. It's true. Very embarrassing garb, which is coming back.

Like for me in like I guess I was a generation before that, right? Because I guess I'm five years old or six years old than you. So like when I got Thrasher magazine, it was like nothing but like hardcore and metal. And matter of fact, my name with my subscription to Thrasher magazine for whatever reason, the way I wrote my name when I mailed in the thing, they sent it to Volko Willink. The way I wrote out of it. So somewhere they got files on me at Thrasher Magazine. They used to send the magazine to Volko Willink.

But they would know it was like hardcore. And that was it. Man, it was total rebellion. It was absolute rebellion. And that's the way. And that's where you discovered music. Yeah. That's where I got.

That's where I picked up a lot of music and started. seeing that and having that attitude and that rebellious attitude has suited me very well for my whole life most most of the time it's worked out right sometimes been a little bit much but but yeah then then so I joined the Navy and that's when you know unfortunately for you you got roped into big baggy pants and stuff right there was it was pretty bad the um yeah well and I stopped skateboarding and started working out and I got into Muay okay uh started actually opening the doors on this Muay place so they let me train there for free. It was in San Jose. I think it still exists, the Muay Academy. And it was interesting, there were a lot of cops that trained there and bodyguard

training. They had some weapons training. So now I'm hanging around with a different group of guys. Still liked fighting, still had a lot of aggression, but I wasn't skateboarding. I was hanging out with my girlfriend. Do you ever get your ass beat in these fights? You know, I'm lucky that over the years I've never been knocked down or knocked out, but I've definitely taken hits. And, you know, there's that, I always say the amazing thing about adrenaline is that when you get in a fight, it's amazing how little it hurts during the fight and how much it hurts afterward. So definitely experience the clarity of getting hit and feeling ultra clear. And again, I don't recommend it to people, especially as you've pointed out many times on your podcast, and I appreciate that you do this. You know, you can hit someone just right and it's all fair and square and they can, you know, pull out a gun and kill you or the person next to you.

in it. Or, and this I'll tell a story that unfortunately happened, you know, when I went off, basically I went off to college because the girlfriend went to college. She went to UC Santa Barbara and I was going down there in my senior year, literally sleeping in my car in the parking lot. She was my family. Wait, so your senior year of high school? Yeah. So she's already in college? You know, so what happened was, she was a year ahead of me. So my junior year, I started hanging out with her. You asked if I was going to school. I was going. I was dressing the part more of a normal person. But unfortunately, I was still really challenged in school.

I didn't have the skills. I hadn't barely gone in the early years. I was reading and I was smart enough to kind of get by, but I wasn't doing very well. And I thought, what am I going to do with myself? And she's going to college soon, I'm sure. And I decided to take fire science classes down at Mission College, become a firefighter.

I like hanging out with a bunch of dudes and lifting weights. And I love the camaraderie, and I want to make a living. And, you know, she's the one drives the Bronco. I don't even have a car. How am I going to get a car or a truck? You know, I mean, how am I going to live? And so I started thinking about my future a bit, but that was as far as I was thinking out. Then I somehow managed to graduate.

Don't ask me how. And I, and she went off to college. And so in that year where she was a year ahead of me and I was a senior, I was going down to Santa Barbara to visit her quite a lot, sleeping in the parking lot, getting into mischief of various kinds, but basically just wanted to be as close to her as I could. and then I decided I would apply to college. And the reason was there was a counselor admission who said, well, you know, you can go into the fire service without a college degree, but if you have a college degree,

there are some opportunities that open up for you in there that you wouldn't have otherwise. So I was still in therapy, talk to my therapist. I think it would be a good idea. You seem to have a mind that wants to consume a lot of knowledge. So I took the SAT, and by some stroke of luck, I, you know, I broke a thousand, which, you know, for gun high school would be considerably the low end because everyone there is like, you know, perfect.

This is the only score that it was acceptable. And then there was me, you know. And I wrote my college entrance essay saying that I'd like to run a station house someday and become a firefighter. And I told a little bit of my story. It wasn't a sob story or this and that. You know, I just told my story. And I got in. So I go to UC Santa Barbara.

She's now living off campus. I'm staying with her. I think I had a bed in the dorms. I show up with... Wait, you got into UC Santa Barbara? I did. Okay, sweet. Yeah, which at the time, I think the standards for getting in.

were lower than they are now. It's super competitive of all UCs now, but got in and it was a total disaster. Getting in fights, I got the lifting weights part down. I would go for runs. I was training a Muay Thai gym downtown. Found someone who would hold bags for me

and would spar with me a little bit. Even made some money teaching some self-defense classes on campus and things like that. And the girlfriend and I are now starting to fracture, mostly because I was like, wow, there are a lot of other attractive women here. And not good. I will say this, guys, if there's a woman who is really beautiful, dedicated, sweet, and kind,

and it's early, it is worth investing in those early relationships and going through some developmental milestones together. If you think you'd have to break up just to explore, think twice. Talk to me first because she would have been a great choice, but I was distracted. And then I started, I got thrown out of the dorms for fighting. I had a guy. You're not, you don't drink still. I drank a little bit the first year and then, you know, I, not so much.

For me, it was, I've never really needed to drink. So if I go out, listen to music, I was still going to punk rock shows. Always, always, always. And I'd go to parties and, you know, it was fun. You know, people were drinking and having a good time, but I wasn't really into drinking. And I could say whatever I wanted to say without it. I think I just always had that kind of wild side in me that I didn't need to drink in order to. But you're still getting in fights, even though you're not.

drinking because drinking leads to a lot of fighting. Yeah, so I don't have that excuse. The, yeah, guy pulled a fire alarm in our building because he was done with finals and he was celebrating. I remember waking, jumping out of bed because I need my sleep because you grow when you sleep, running out there and grabbing him and hitting him, those kinds of, that kind of stupidity.

He stuck a key through my cheek, it was actually this cheek. I remember a thing, someone said, you have blood on your face, and I said, he's got his blood on my face. I'm like, no, you're bleeding. This kind of thing, just young stupidity, 19 years old or 18 years old. or 18 years old. And then what happened was that summer she moved home and I decided to stay in that little town of Iowa Vista and I didn't pay rent. I just skateboarder just these none of these

houses are locked just stay in one. So I was staying in one. I was delivering bagels for the bagel cafe driving the little truck and 4.30 in the morning come home, sleep, get up and go find a barbecue and hang out skateboard or do whatever work out. And it was 4.30. of July 1994, remember this very well. And we went to go the store to pick up some stakes. We were driving back. And there were some guys coming out of the house with a bunch of stuff, surfboards, skateboards. And one of the guys in our car said the usual thing. He said, oh, let's get them. Let's speed them up. And I was like, no, no, no, that's not how you do it. Right. If you just say, I'm going to beat you up. This is like bad tactics. Right. Here I'm

talking to you guys about fighting. This is amusing. Also, there's the first podcast I've ever been except the one with Joe Rueh, where I'm the smallest person in the room. Joe's a big guys, you know, he's thick. So what ended up happening is there was a big fight between a bunch of guys and us and the whole thing. And it was like knives and bottles. And it worked out in the sense that no one got cut or killed. The police showed up, and I'll never forget this. The cop came up to me and he said, a big crowded assembled and people were, and I'd done it.

Were these guys when they were walking, were they jacking stuff? Yeah, they were stealing stuff. Okay, so they were stealing stuff. And, you know, and I hit a guy. the whole thing. And like, and I ended up on my feet and then there was a huge crowd. And a couple guys I was with ran away. He was like, let's get them. But then when they come out with bottles and knives, it's like out of town. And so, um, police showed up and I'll never forget this. The cop said, um, good job. And I remember feeling, just the worst sunken feeling in my stomach.

I thought like, good job. I mean, first, I just, it all kind of fell into place. It's like I'm 19. girlfriend's gone. I don't have a job. I'm not doing well in school. I'd actually been thrown out of the dorms for fighting and some other just stupidity. And, you know, I'm getting in fights. I could have cut someone, someone could cut me.

I could be dead or in jail. It could be like one of the stories from Embarcadero of the guys that didn't make it. That didn't skateboard. They just hung out drinking and parting and fighting all day, right? And I remember going back to my place that night and thinking, this is it. Like, this is the line.

I need to do something. I'm basically a loser. And I was. I was a total loser. And I thought, what am I going to do? Well, I had gotten C-minuses and Ds in all my classes up until then at Santa Barbara, barely finished high school. And so I decided to take a leave of absence.

I did not drop out. I took a leave of absence. I moved home and I went to Foothill College, community college. And I didn't talk to any of my old friends from the skateboarding world. It was just too familiar with a bunch of things. I didn't talk to my family. I lived in a little apartment, and I just started studying. I thought, what am I good at?

Okay, I can remember things pretty well. I like to read. This is it. And I remember thinking my dad's an academic, so I thought, you know, I'm not going to do this. That'll just validate, you know, what he does and his choices. I thought, well, that's stupid, right? So I started working, and I did okay in my courses, took art history, took biology, took psychology. then I went back to Santa Barbara.

And I had this reputation in Santa Barbara at that time as a guy that was fun to have at parties because something fun was going to happen. You know, something wild was going to happen or there would be a big fight. You know, you're the guy getting nosed up to the front to take the damage or do the damage for other people's entertainment. So I went back and I lived in the studio plaza apartments. I still have a photo of that door because it has great meaning for me. I lived in the corner there. I lifted weights. I studied like a main.

maniac and I did not drink or party except once a month I'd allow myself to go out and and I would really You know, I would just stay out all night parting, but over time what I realized is I didn't like it because then it made the rest of the week that much harder So in those years I discovered a guy an amazing person's name was Harry Carlisle Former Navy guy incidentally ran a laboratory and and taught classes and he was teaching about at the time there was no neuroscience he was teaching about He was teaching about psychology and biology. They called it biosecology and about how depression was based on these things called neurotransmitters and schizophrenia, and schizophrenia, and schizophrenia and smithers and schizophrenia or so. He was teaching about the brain and how it works.

And then he was talking about thermal regulation and he was talking about why people die. at raves, he said, I heard of these things called raves and the people taking this drug and he break down the structure of MDMA, ecstasy, and explain how it would disrupt the hypothalamus and one's perception of how hot it was, and this is why people would overheat, even if they were pouring water on themselves. As a little scientific factoid, when you're overheating in the desert or while training, you might think, oh, put a cold towel over my head or the back of my neck. Well, that's like putting a cold towel on a thermostat, because you have a thermostat in your brain. What happens when you put a cold towel on the thermostat? The thermostat turns on the heat.

That's how you overheat and die. Turns out the best way to dump heat is through the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet. You have a special venous portals called AVAs where you can dump heat. So if you want to cool off fast, in fact, you can save your life by getting the bottoms of your bare feet or the palms of your hands into cool water. We can talk about how this can be leveraged for training because there's some amazing research on this. So I was learning about thermal regulation and I was learning about drugs of abuse and why some of my friends were addicts probably was these pathways related to dopamine and et cetera, et cetera. I thought, well, who is this guy? So I started talking to him and he drove a black truck and he was in shape.

And I thought, I want to be like this guy. And so I started hanging around his lab and he would drink black coffee and he let me listen to whatever music I wanted after hours. And we started doing experiments. I started working in a laboratory. And he pulled me aside at one point and he said, you know, you seem to have some proficiency for this. You know, if you go to graduate school, they'll pay you. I thought, they pay you to do this? And he said, yeah, they'll pay you to do it. He didn't tell me how much they pay you. But basically what happened was, make a long story short, no more fighting, was never into the drugs or alcohol, as I mentioned, did not get back together with the girlfriend, but I went from a CD student to a straight A student. I got a B plus my senior year and it still pisses me off. But that was in

neuroanatomy, which is now what I teach to medical students. It became my favorite topic. I went on to take multiple courses and that's always that one thing that didn't quite get you. I think Dan Gable talks about this in wrestling. It's the one guy that I think in his words, gumbeat out and then pinned him or beat him by points. It's that one guy that teaches you the most. Right. So I became a straight-A student, went on to, you know, graduate with honors, went to graduate school first at Berkeley and then did my PhD and then did my postdoc at Stanford and so on and so forth. I will say over the years, I kept in touch with various people in the skateboard community. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of like a residency between your PhD and professorship.

I was at Stanford and I was working extremely hard. I've always had a capacity to work long hours. Actually, I have a, hope the insurance companies don't mind me saying this, but it would only hurt me. I have a mutation in an adrenal-related gene. So I probably have the capacity to make a little bit more adrenaline than most. I can get by on very little sleep, at least for a couple nights. I'm guessing a lot of team guys might have this. It's a pretty common mutation, about 12% of males have it.

So I can do fine with one night, no sleep. Second night, I'm kind of falling apart of it. But if I need to take a one hour nap and bounce right back in, I'm good. I don't recommend it. I try and get my good sleep now. So I was just work, work, work, lift, lift, lift, run, run. Just repeat. So you graduate from Santa Barbara?

That's right. And then you go from there to Berkeley? I go to Berkeley. And the first week at Berkeley, Rance is playing at the Greek theater. Oh, hell, yeah. So I'm there, and I'm still doing that. I'm still in it. But I'm not, but I'm the guy now on the side lines.

Just happy to be there. And then eventually I did my PhD. My graduate advisor moved. So I went up to Davis. And I worked for an incredible woman up there who is just a really, really good scientist. She was just extremely rigorous. Gave me a lab and some keys to the lab. Show me where things were and said, listen, I'm going to have a couple kids in the next few years.

And the best thing I can do for you is to be available when you need me, but figure it out. Don't burn the lab down. Don't kill yourself. Go for it. And so it was like, you kidding me? There was no one else in there. I thought, and this was perfect. Tinfoil on the windows, lock the doors,

ranted blasting all day, ignore the knocks on the door and just do experiments, experiments, experiments. We published 10 papers together. What kind of experiments? Let's just give me an example. So at the time. I'm thinking like eighth grade. I was putting like hydrogen peroxide in something, whatever.

Yeah, a little disclaimer. Now my laboratory mainly focuses on humans, but at the time we were using animal models. So at the time, and listen, and I have mixed feelings about this. By the time we were doing experiments on carnivores, including cats and ferrets, because they have a visual system that's very immature,

so we were studying neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience, really trying to define fundamental principles that do carry over to humans. And I was also, there's a primate center at Davis where it's doing work on non-human primates, macaque monkeys. Big, dangerous monkeys that you wouldn't want to be left alone with. But I was working, trying to understand embryonic development,

so working on fetal macaques. So getting to do surgeries on fetal macaques, and I loved it. I loved working with my hands. I also discovered something in science, which is sitting and learning from books is great, but I have a lot of energy, and I need to put that someplace. And doing careful dissections for hours and hours was a great way to change. I learned how to take all that energy that normally would go into big movements and just channel it into total focus.

I could spend eight hours down the microscope just doing dissections and listening to music and doing dissections. In fact, I used to play this game where I'd try and get his... ramped up and alert as possible by listening to music and drinking coffee and then just do my dissections as slowly as possible. It's all this crazy stuff. And in those years, I was still going to shows. There was a place up in Sacramento, rough place. And I started going to see Roger Moray in the Disasters Play.

And, you know, as you know, agnostic front, it's only fair to call him the great Roger Murray. I'd go to these shows where I was legitimately afraid. You know, I'm like, at that point, the last thing I want to do is get into a fight. I'm just legitimately afraid of what's going to happen. This was at a place called the Boardwalk, and there was a place up on Broadway, the Colonial Theater, and they would do Mexican wrestling one night with the hands dipped in glass, and then they would do punk rock shows.

I got to see the transplants, which is Tim Armstrong and Travis Barker and bands like that play in a little tiny theater. And I thought, life is so good. I'm working on my PhD. We're publishing papers. I still have arms in this world, although I didn't know any of the characters. And then eventually I graduated, I got my PhD and went and did a postdoc at Stanford. And that was a problem.

I was back in the early location. There's this thing in neuroscience called Condition Place Preference, where if something really good happens for you someplace, you really like it. And your body goes into a great state when you're there. There's also conditioned place aversion. And here I am back in Palo Alto and think, gosh, like this was a kind of, a dark place for me. Forget the well-trimmed lawns and everything. This place is not, I'm starting to get depressed. So I moved to San Francisco. And one day I got this idea,

I thought, wait a second, thrashers right over the hill. Why aren't I there? So I have a friend that was at a sibling magazine to Thrasher, which is Slap Magazine. It's now closed up. But I got named Mark Whiteley that I grew up with, who now works for Apple, called up Mark and said, hey, you know what, can I go do some work for you guys? He said, sure. So do you know how to take photos? And I said, sure. That's not true.

But I said, I know how to take a photo. Of course you do. So he said, well, you can always do music stuff. So I started going to shows and taking pictures and doing write-ups and traveling a little bit for that for some extra cash. What year is this? 2005 to 2010. So there's some publications in Thrasher. People can, you might be able to find them.

My own know. So I covered Moray in the disasters, bouncing souls, love those guys. I remember when Roger Moray went to jail and the, I don't forget what year it was, but I remember going to, they would have like benefit shows to raise money to get to get. I don't know, to break him out on what we were doing. I was down for the cause. I was down for the call, so I can tell you that much. Well, the thing about Rogers, that's really interesting. And I don't even know if he'd remember who I was.

I became friendly with, I think it was his bass player, Reese. There was a, um, he was for the disaster. It was a great band, by the way. I love the band, like the Janie Hawk song. And some of those are just amazing songs. And I remember, um, You seen Murray when I was a kid and his neck was like I used to have a bulldog Mastiff a few years ago. Costilla and Costilla never lifted weights, right?

But Roger's neck is huge, right? And this is a guy that probably didn't lift weights. It's just huge because he's just born that way. And it's like you guys are big dudes. It's like there's certain people that, you know, wrists are thick, neck is big. And I've been like, and like, Marais could sing happy birthday. And he'll be like, who, you know, it's just his voice, it just comes from so deep inside his body. It's just beautiful and amazing to see what he can do and the physicality of it.

And so I did a thing for Thrashron, Marine the Disaster, did some transplant stuff, bouncing souls, was going to shows, getting $500 to $1,000 to $1,000 per article, which at the time as a postdoc felt pretty good because, you know, life was expensive. And when you're a postdoc or graduate student, you're not making much money at all. And this is because at this time you're also at Stanford, you said. That's right. Doing what? It's a postdoc. So when you finish your PhD, you typically do five years where it's just pure research before you go hopefully get a professorship.

So I would go to shows, stay up most of the night, then come back to Stanford, sleep under my bench, wake up and start doing experiments, and shower at the gym. And so, and this is the thing, you know, those old habits die hard. You said a lot of those, as you mentioned, a lot of those early years, the decision making and the habits carry over. And fortunately, I was able to move the good ones forward, the good habits, that is. So when I was a PhD student, I thought, why pay rent? There's a building here with a shower. It was a cage wash shower for the monkeys, but they never used it. So I would shower in there or at the gym. I'd brush my teeth in the sink and I'd sleep there. I did that also as a postdoc.

and I confess even eventually what happened was I finished my postdoc I was hired as a what they call pre-tenure professor assistant professor at UC San Diego I got a house because at the time when houses down here were it was in normal heights and it was relatively inexpensive so went from no responsibility no property no nothing at a house a bulldog and a laboratory in my own but and this was at UC San Diego UC San Diego so this would be 2011 and I thought well the commute from normal heights to UC San Diego is pretty far So I'm just put a couch in my office. The dog was fine.

There's a field outside where I can take him out. And so I would sleep in lab, you know, two nights a week. And then eventually, and I did well there. My lab, I'm proud to say, and the credit really goes to the people, very hardworking. Published good papers, had grants, and my career really took off in neuroscience. And then eventually I was recruited back to Stanford as a tenured professor, which is where I've been now for about seven years. And even then, when I got back, I thought, well, why? the housing in the Bay Area is crazy.

I looked at Costello, my bulldog, I was like, how about we moved back into the lab? So I stayed there until someone finally came along and said, this sends the wrong message. I said, well, it actually sends the message that there should be better housing for faculty. But I saved some money that way, so that was able to eventually buy a small home.

So over the years, it's been consistently the same themes. Work hard, train, keep out of any kind of mischief, which is easy to do now. I value so many things in my life. I wouldn't want to do that. And then just try and bring the spirit of skateboarding and punk rock music to the whole thing of science. And then the piece of that where it kind of wraps around is that a few years ago I decided

I'd write a book, but then I decided I didn't want to write a book. And so I started going on podcasts, Joe and Ferris and the others. and you know there was this guy Lex Friedman of course and he said maybe should start a podcast so I started the podcast and when I did it I looked to a couple of communities I thought who can just put things together really well that really understand aesthetics and the DIY you know do do it yourself kind of mantra and get it right and so I looked to a guy named Rob Moore who produces the fight podcast with Teddy Atlas and who comes from the world of PR but also knows a lot about the fight world. And I went to Mike Blayback, who's a famous skateboard photographer, took the

pictures of Danny Way, jumping the Great Wall of China, DC shoes, Nike skateboarding. And Mike just knows how to do the kind of photographs that I like, which are black and white and very, you know, look, there's a, there's a common theme. And so that's the podcast. And, you know, people always ask, why do you always wear a black shirt? And, you know, I've been wearing a black shirt to work for 25 years. This isn't a costume for the podcast. I've just, you know, I've just, you know, I've just, always addressed this way, done it this way. And the wonderful thing about social media is you get in touch with people like you.

And I should say, for me, it's a real honor to be here because when not 2015-16, I was living with my girlfriend at the time we'd met in San Diego, my ex-girlfriend now, but we're on good terms, so I can tell this story. And there was a kind of weird Navy SEAL theme in our household because the guy she had been with before was a team guy.

Uh-oh. Right. And so it was like, I'm back in high school again. You know, this guy's, I won't say who it is, but he seems like a really nice guy. But team guy and she was doing CrossFit with a bunch of team guys and stuff. Here I am like the dweeby scientist. I lived wigs and do all that.

But, you know, her first party or gathering where all these guys come over. I'm like, once again, I'm the smallest person in the room. I'm a scientist. I'm used to being the biggest guy in the room, smallest guy in the room, real good guys, as you all are. But what ended up happening was I was an avid Tim Ferriss podcast listener. And I remember looking at the picture and it was your, your, your, your, grill looking at me. And I showed her and I said, I said, this guy, it was just on Tim Ferriss. And he goes, well, if you were going to draw a team guy, that's the guy you draw. And I thought, well,

there's a lot behind that statement. Let's not, I'm not going to ask why. So in any case, I loved that podcast. And it was, you know, when I lived here in San Diego, I was involved a little bit in fitness and martial arts at a real superficial level. And you guys would come in and, you know, beat everybody up and then go go off laughing and smiling and leave the rest of us mere mortals to think about what just happened. Not just kidding. Basically what that you guys would do would come in and take over bars. Well, that's, yeah.

And so I learned which bars not to drink at. Not because I was going to get into any mischief with anybody, I know, you know, but because, you know, there are only some, how do I say this correctly? It's a, it's a resource allocation issue. So anyway, I've been running my lab for a long time now. The podcast is a newer thing we've had about a year and a half. But the themes of skateboarding punk rock music, they are not just part of it. I think this will make sense to you guys.

They're in me, right? They're wired into my nervous system. And I feel really honored to be here and also that the skateboarding community has reembraced me with open arms and in touch with a lot of those guys, Tony Hawk, Danny Way, Mike Blayback. and there's so many names and people. And it's an amazing community because skateboarding and punk rock music, I don't know about other things because that's only what I know. But odd but really special communities because you can be nine years old

and hanging out with people there in their 30s. And so you can learn a lot for better or for worse. But it's also a community that especially more and more is really starting to take care of each other in a way that I think is probably not present in other. communities. It can be harsh too. I mean, if you screw up, they're going to let everybody know. So maybe some parallels with the teams. Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of brings us through your sort of educational system and what you've been learning along the way. And I want to grab some of that knowledge, you know, of what you've learned about, you know, how to be better, how to be

smarter, how to be stronger, how to be faster, how to be more healthy. Because all those things are things that, you know, I've been trying to do my whole life as well. And obviously not done it on an academic level, but really through trial and error. And also being surrounded by a bunch of people that were always, you know, had that same kind of mindset. We were very lucky in the SEAL teams. We had guys that would go way down the rabbit hole on some random form of exercise or some random diet or some random thing that it would get spread. And then we really, I would say around maybe 2005, 2006, we started really bringing in professionals. Actually, it was earlier than that.

We'd always bring in professionals. So we'd bring in professionals that were really good at their designated field. So I feel like I got very lucky with some of that as well. But obviously, you're a living experiment on this stuff. And then you have the academics to back it up. So let's talk about some of this stuff. And I've listened to a bunch of your stuff, you know, and anyone that wants to go deep on this, trust me, you can go deep listening to your podcast.

I mean, you can go real deep. Yeah, I always say, if nothing else, will cure insomnia. You listen to it. He might nod out. But, yeah, we do go detailed. I've had the great fortune of working with some units in special operations doing, talking about physiology and using physiology. Yeah, these are tools that over the years I've used, but most of what we cover on the podcast and what we can talk about now are things that come from other laboratories.

This is one thing I truly enjoy is talking about my own work and research, but a lot of what has been wonderful for me is bringing on expert guests and connecting with people who are experts, say, in thermal regulation. Something is, I mean, the ability to adjust one's temperature through some dedicated actions is the difference between being able to do more work or no more work physically. and mentally, we can talk about that. But in terms of things that really enhance performance, we can talk about the, there are two ways to think about biology. One are modulators and the others are mediators. So there are some things that you can do that will strongly modulate your ability

to do lots of other things. Let's just give an example. If I sleep deprive Echo for two days, his ability to focus is going to be diminished relative to what it would be if he had slept well for two nights. Why? Well, sleep and its various outputs modulate attention, but it doesn't mediate attention. You can't really use sleep in real time

to enhance attention, okay? A fire alarm will modulate my attention, but it doesn't mediate it. So we can talk about modulators and mediators. And the important thing to understand is that there are certain foundational behaviors, dos and don'ts, that set the stage for you to be better at everything.

So a lot of times people will say, how can I lift more, focus better, remember things better. It's like, well, let's think about the foundation of that. And that's always going to come back to two elements. And that's sleep and what I call non-sleep deep rest. So sleep is the fundamental practice or part of our 24-hour cycle where if you don't get it on a consistent basis, you are down-regulating your ability to do everything, right? metabolism is screwed up, immune system is screwed up, et cetera, et cetera.

However, it is not the case if you get a one night's bad sleep or that if you're not sleeping perfectly that you can't perform well. But let's talk about sleep and just because I think it's important. The goal for most people, unless you're pulling vampire shifts on deployment or you're a shift worker and thank you shift workers. We'll talk about shift work. You should try and get really good sleep 80% of the time, 80% of the nights of your life.

The other 20% I hope you're not getting good sleep for good reasons that you enjoy. But the point is that there are a couple things that you can do. First of all, every cell in your body has a circadian rhythm, meaning every cell has a 24-hour circadian clock that's regulated by genes. Think of your body as a bunch of millions of clocks and you need to align those clocks to a single time. This is why when you travel overseas, your gut goes off, or it's more easily you get sick,

or your thinking isn't quite right. The clocks aren't in alignment. They're not entrained, as we say. Number one practice for everything, sleep especially, is try and get some natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up. If you wake up before the sun, turn on a bunch of bright lights and then get sunlight in your eyes once it comes out. If there's dense cloud cover, there are still more photons, light energy coming through that cloud cover than there are coming from artificial lights. So try and get five to ten minutes without

sunglasses outside in the morning once the sun is out, most days, if not all days. This has an outsized effect on a number of things. First of all, it modulates the timing of what's called the cortisol pulse. Once every 24 hours, you're going to get a boost in cortisol, big spiking cortisol. It's a healthy boost. It sets your temperature rhythm in motion, sets your level of alertness, your level of focus, and your mood. You want that cortisol pulse to happen as early in the day as possible. What's triggering the cortisol pulse? The cortisol pulse is naturally entrained by these genetic programs to happen once every 24 hours, but light will anchor it to the period where you see bright light. Got it. A late-shifted

cortisol pulse. So imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the morning in bed or you're spending the morning in bed and you're texting or you're indoors and you're typing on the computer. That's not enough light to accomplish what I'm talking about. And then you go outside around noon or one. You're in what's called the circadian dead zone, which is the time in which is the time in which is the time in which is that cortisol pulse is going to come in the afternoon, which means that your temperature rhythm is going to be shifted late. And that's actually a signature of depression and anxiety and difficulty falling asleep. These are from studies done by the great Robert Sapolsky and David Spiegel, my colleagues at Stanford. So you want that increase in cortisol to happen early in the day. Basically you wake up because your temperature goes up. So let me ask you this. I have a sense for you. What time do you wake up typically?

Generally between 415 and 4.30. Okay. So for most people it's going to be a little bit later, probably. But for you, that means, so you're waking up. If it's because of an alarm, it's because of an alarm. But if that's your natural wake-up time now without an alarm, that means that your temperature is starting to rise at that time. That's why you wake up.

That temperature increase triggers that cortisol release. Now, and that's why some people wake up right before their alarm clock. It's this cortisol pulse. Okay. And two hours before that, so for you, approximately 2.30 in the morning, is what we call your temperature minimum. It's when your temperature is lowest that it's ever going to be in the 24 hours. cycle. If you view light within the four hours after that temperature minimum, it will tend

to wake you up and will keep you in entrained to the normal cycle. However, if you were to wake up at 1.30 in the morning and see very bright light, it would delay your circadian clock. It would make it so that the next night you'd want to go to bed later and wake up later. And the way it does that is by changing your core body temperature. So the way it works is you wake up because of an increasing core body temperature. That increasing core body temperature, that increasing core body temperature triggers that increase in cortisol. And by viewing light at that time, you entrain, you ensure that it happens at the same time the next day. Wait, if I woke up at two o'clock in the morning and saw bright light, that would delay your clock. So what you want, so when you wake up at

4.30 in the morning, it's because your clock is in your, the clocks of your body are entrained. They're matched to this cortisol pulse. So viewing bright light in the morning anchors it, when we say entrained, it, it tell, through a circuit that involves cells in the eye and cells in the hypothalamus, which then talk to the rest of the cells of the body through a signal, a peptide that's released, make sure that the temperature starts rising, goes up, up, up, up, up, and sometime around two or three in the afternoon, you're going to hit your temperature maximum. You might feel a little sleepy at that time, but that's actually the time in which all your systems are kind of revving at the maximum capacity, and then it's going to start

to drop, drop, drop, drop. Now that drop in temperature eventually will be a full one to three degrees below your temperature maximum, and that's when you're going to get sleepy and fall asleep. This is why it's important to keep the room cool at night to fall asleep. Why keep the room cool? Well, you can always put warm blankets on and put your hand out or your foot out because you actually dump heat through the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet. But if you're in a hot room, you'd have to have an ice bath next to you to put your hand in. That's not feasible.

I guess I live in a luxurious scenario. I can't imagine that there's, like, what kind of person is in a situation? where they don't see the sun. Oh, so. That's horrible. Well, I'll blame my last, being on a submarine, that's horrible. Being on a ship, sometimes you get stuck down below decks. And I remember, this is interesting, I remember I would have like the urge to go out and go outside.

Like we would, we would, we, you know, being a seal platoon on a ship, you don't actually have a job on the ship. You're just kind of riding the ship. So you'd have this urge to go outside. We'd go outside in PT. We'd go outside. Believe it or not, we'd go outside in a hacky sack. One of my. We played hacky sack.

Yeah, but not listening to fish. We weren't listening to fish, but I'm going to tell you, we played so much hacky sack that I kind of hurt one of my knees. It's kind of get to. What's that weird inward rotation of the head? But we wanted to be outside. I remember having a distinct urge to want to get outside. So it's really sad if people are in scenarios where they aren't seeing the sun for four hours upon wakeup. That's kind of crazy.

Or just not. getting enough light period. A lot of people think, for instance, they can get the sunlight through the car windshield or through the window. Car windshields and windows have UV filtration. Blue light has been demonized, and we can talk about light later in the evening, because you don't want to get too much bright light in your eyes later in the evening if you want to improve sleep. But it does not work as well or as quickly through a window or through a windshield or through sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. If you think about what those do, they actually focus light to the retina. So that's why they're there. They'll help you. Even if there's

UVB protection. Many people are waking up and they're just spending time indoors and they're putting on sunglasses, getting in their car and driving, or there's cloud cover and they think there's no sun out. I don't mean that you actually have to stare at the sun. Never stare at any light so bright. It's going to damage you. Please don't. And blink as necessary. But the indirect rays from the sun trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin ganglion cells. These ganglion cells, these are neurons. They send a signal to your hypothalamus. Then the hypothalamus releases this peptide, which is a wake-up signal for your whole brain and body and sets a timer for the onset of melatonin release 16 hours later,

melatonin being the hormone that makes you sleepy and makes you want to go to sleep. So you can imagine what happens if you don't get that light until a few hours later. Everything's shifted. And then you want to go to stay. Don't know why you're wide awake at 1130 or 12 and everything's messed up. The other thing is that you can get bright light

from electronic devices early in the day, but it's not enough. You need photons from sunlight. Now, if you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, if you're up in like, you know, Trunheim or Ohhus or something, like, okay, fine. Don't buy an expensive daytime simulator. Get one of these LED light boxes for drawing. They're very inexpensive in comparison.

You find them on Amazon. I don't have a relationship to any of these brands, but they're easy to find, 20, 30 bucks. Put that on your desk and just look at that thing for a few minutes in the morning. Not as good, but better than being in the darkness. Then when the sun's out, get outside. Now, this is a huge, huge effect for the following reason. The signal that arrives from the eyes to the hypothalamus also triggers the release of the neuromodulator dopamine. We hear about dopamine as a feel-good molecule, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine hits.

But dopamine's main role in the brain and body is to drive motivation, craving, and pursuit. It is not the molecule of pleasure. It is the molecule of drive. It is life force. And we'll talk later about how dopamine and testosterone have a close relationship. Dopamine is actually the molecule from which adrenaline, epinephrine, is manufactured. And you may notice you said we crave sun. It also does make you feel good.

Here's why, if you think about seasonally breeding animals, let's think about the Arctic fox. Well, the Arctic fox in winter is white, but in the summertime has darker pellage. It actually, there's a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine to, melanin production in the skin and fur. So animals that transition from light color to dark color, that's all mediated by dopamine. Guess what else happens? The gonads grow. There are animals that I've worked on in the laboratory and that also in humans, it's now been shown in a beautiful study, that people who get 20 to 30 minutes of light on their skin.

This was a study done in Israel. So they wear an appropriate amount of clothing, but they're sleeveless, no hat, no sunglasses. They were told to go outside 20 or 30 minutes, three times a week, just in the sunshine. Ideally, they were shorts also. They measure testosterone and estrogen in men and women. Significant increases in both. And all the associated things of increased passion, blah, blah, blah, blah, that is what they measured in the study.

Why? Well, it turns out that light to the eyes, but also light to the skin, the skin is an endocrine organ. It's not just something to tattoo and hang earrings from and put clothing on. It actually, there's a pathway involving a molecule called P53 and the caratinocytes are these skin cells that when sunlight, when UVB ultraviolet blue light penetrates the skin because it can penetrate the skin superficially, triggers these keratinocytes to stimulate a pathway that releases dopamine in the brain and body.

So you feel better when you're getting light in your eyes and on your skin, and you're increasing testosterone and epinephrine and dopamine increase. That's why you feel good in the summer months. People in SkinnerNavian know this, this kind of spring fever. In the winter months, you want to go through every bit of effort to double or triple the amount of time that you're spending outside in the morning. So instead of 10 minutes, make it 30 minutes. You can read outside.

You could even be on your phone, but we'll talk about why that might not be optimal. In addition to that, there's a study done out of China now tens of thousands of subjects looking at the incidence of myopia, nearsightedness in kids, but now this is also true in adults. When you look at things up close, the eyeball actually starts to elongate over time. And the image then focuses in front of the neural part of the eye and things are blurry. That's why they call it near-sighted. It's not far-sighted would be the image falls behind. So it's just pure optics.

It's falling in front, becoming myopic. Spending time outside and getting UVB exposure during the day can offset, in some cases, reverse myopia. So all these kids who are spending time indoors on screens and reading on books, but not getting any outdoor time. Serious problem. And now adults are doing this too. The pandemic was, there was also a pandemic of myopia and depression that was simply because people were indoors too much. So get that sunlight early on They shut down the freaking beaches in San Diego

I mean it was crazy Hey I went to college I was an English major and there was one one semester I took five English classes Five English classes was a dumb move But whatever I'm trying to plot out my My uh classes so that I could go to jihitsu for like three four hours a day So anyways I ended up taking five classes and so I was reading Like on the weekends I would read like eight ten hours a day and yeah that's when I realized oh if you don't stop and take a break

you're like I'd get done and I'd walk out you know walk outside and my my vision would be blurry and because I was just working at that close range for five six seven eight hours horrible yeah you definitely want to get a horizon view every once in a while is when you look at a horizon unless you're tracking something on the horizon you naturally go into panoramic vision this is a great way to learn how to do panoramic vision we were talking about before. In an environment like this where it's close quarters, I can look at you and then I can dilate my gaze consciously and you don't know I'm doing it. As we talked about earlier, it calms the nervous system. The nice thing is

is also covert. You can be doing public speaking. You can be meeting somebody where you're starting to feel a little tense or whatever and you can dilate your gaze or you can learn to it. I think it's a great skill to be able to dilate and contract the aperture of vision. And a horizon will teach you kind of the feeling of having dilated vision, and then you can kind of accomplish that without looking at horizon. So, yes, if you're looking at things up close, they say for about every 45 minutes of doing that, you want 20 minutes of long distance viewing.

That's very hard for most people to get in this kind of work environment. So one thing that works really well to reset the eyes and the nervous system throughout the day is walks are great and jogs are great. Why? Well, it turns out that self-generated optic flow, so not a peloton, sorry, won't work, not a treadmill. Sorry, but walking or running or cycling or something where visual images are going by you on all sides while you're in effort. There's some beautiful papers, now five papers, showing that when we are in self-generated optic flow, the amygdala, a site in the brain that's commonly associated with fear, but it's mainly a site of threat detection and anxiety is the activity in the amygdala is suppressed.

I think about this a lot when I read your book and hear stories from the teams of, you know, this notion of having a forward center of mass and how it's often harder to stay still, right? I know you guys don't have a retreat button, but it's harder to stay still than it is sometimes to move forward. That forward movement can actually calm us. And so a lot of people there on the precipice of something scary or challenging will retreat or pause. but forward movement actually suppresses the activity of the amygdala. This again has been shown in humans and non-human primates and in small animal models. And it makes really good sense because forward ambulation, forward movement is incompatible with the fear response in many ways. And so one of the big discoveries in our field of neuroscience the last few years was laboratories not exploring the topic of fear at all.

They were actually looking at eye movements and motor movements found when they did brainwide imaging that they're, these sights in the brain that quiet down when animals or people are moving forward. And the fear center is shut down. So if you find yourself afraid, this is, I imagine that, you know, the kid who, I mean,

handrails are always dangerous. You can, you can end your family lineage with handrails. I've seen people do that. I won't name names. There's a guy we grew up with who, unfortunately, you know,

hopefully he successfully reproduced at some point, but you've seen some hard stacks on handrails. It's not pretty. But it's always going to be harder to sit up there at the top of the ramp, thinking about dropping in, dropping in. Got to go. When I was a kid, Gary Hall, the guy mentioned earlier, said, I'm going to, you put your tail down on the deck, I'm on the top of the ramp that is, I'm going to escape from one

end of the deck to the other, and if I come back the third time and you haven't dropped in, I'm pushing you in. And I saw a lot of kids get pushed in. Now, a dad did that to his kid on YouTube and I think was punished for child abuse. So nowadays the rules have changed, but back then you were dropping in because you didn't want to get pushed in. In any case, it's always easier to drop in than stand there and wait and what do I do? What do I do?

And that's this suppression of the amygdala. When you go into forward action, the fear centers of the brain shut down. So this is like another little connect of the dots and echoes because he's heard me talk about this a million times. It's like, hey, when you're waiting to do something, you're going to be more scared. You're getting it built up. You need to step forward. You need to start taking action.

Taking action is a way to overcome the feeling of hesitation and fear that you have in your body. So now I have another physiological backup to my instincts. That's good. So we got up in the morning. We got some light. Yes. This is interesting because I wake up early morning.

I work out. But I go for a run. By the time I'm going for a run, the sun's out. Perfect. I never, and the sun might not be fully out. I was going to ask, like, does it need to be hitting my skin? Or can it be kind of below the horizon? Are we good?

On a day, on a cloudless day, it can be anywhere. On a day with more clouds, you probably want to try and orient toward where the sun might be and get out of the shade a little bit, just so you don't have to be out there for more than five, ten minutes. Okay, well, I'm going on, you know, half an hour, 45-minute run. Great. So we got some light. And by the way, interestingly, I don't, and I wear sunglasses a lot, and maybe that's bad.

I wear sunglasses actually almost all the time if I'm in the sun. But when I go for a run in the morning, I never wear sunglasses because of sweat and all this other stuff. And you have a lot of sun here in San Diego. So you're getting a lot of photons all day long. So there are a couple things about your practice that are perfectly designed. One is you're, there are a few things. Let's just make it really simple for people. The goal here is to increase body temperature in order to be awake and to decrease body temperature

in order to be asleep. If we stay with those themes, a lot of this will just fall into bins. So you wake up, getting sunlight in your eyes, will enhance the, or bright artificial lights, and then sunlight, if you're up before the sun comes out, turn on bright artificial lights if you want to be awake, right? will enhance the cortisol pulse. Cortisol is going to further increase in body temperature. Exercising will increase body temperature.

Somewhat paradoxically, getting into a cold shower or cold water, everyone says, well, it must make you cold, right? Well, if you stay in there a long time and become hypothermic, right? But let's remember the thermostat example. You have a little area in your brain called the medial preoptic area. And if you make the surface of your body cold, guess what happens? Core body temperature goes up. So if you're going to do ice baths or cold showers,

you can do it. I would say do them sometime better than not at all. And there's the whole thing relative to training we talk about. But early in the day would be better. Okay. So I get back from my run and I'm going in the ice bath. Perfect. So body temperature.

I'm doing five to seven minutes in the ice bath. That's a good long ice bath. But you guys are, you guys are weaned in cold water. Yeah. You guys, I swim with a guy from the teams, but Pat Dosset.

And we sometimes with a, for me, it was a long swim, like a one mile, no wetsuit swim in the Pacific. For me, around the Santa Monica Pier and then run back. For me, you know, I'm quaking like an alcoholic with delirium tremens by time I get to the coffee shop. We go in there sometimes quaking like this, and I'm convinced they think that we're all have delirium tremens. You know, that's a cold swim for me, and I don't do it very much anymore. I should do it more often. But what's interesting is he sees the water. Guys, like you see the water. And it's like you want to get in the thing. For me, there's a 10-minute

break in period when I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe it. And then you have the triathletes on the beach and their wetsuits going, are you really going to go in without wet suits? And I was like, I didn't realize people go in with wetsuits. But I just go numb when I hit the water. But I never crave it. I always think, all right, I'm going to do this because here I am. And like, if I don't go in, I'll feel bad about myself and that kind of thing. You're doing some serious negotiations. Yeah, I know, right. Yeah. We all know how I will say I think about like for my, for my ice bath in the morning, I always think like, I feel so good when I get done that it's worth a little shock of when you get in. And actually, you legitimately do get used to the, the quote, shock of getting in.

Like, if I go on a trip for a week and I come back and wherever I am, there's no, there's no ice, which is pretty normal. There's not normal ice baths around the world. But when I come back, that first day, maybe even the second day, it's a little bit more of a little bit of a, I'm having some freaking Andrew Huberman conversations with myself. Oh, my. Now, now, now, now, now deliberation over hard work has a name. This is a, thank you. I deserve it.

You're absolutely right. Yeah, duds not buds for me. But the, so, well, I'm glad you mentioned the mood enhancing effects. So there's a beautiful paper published in the European Journal of Physiology in the year 2000, which took people and had them sit. They actually had them on lawn chairs in water, a pool. It was a great way to run an experiment. I always say people ask about cold showers.

There are not a lot of experiments on cold showers because think about it's very hard to control. Is everyone under the shower the same way, et cetera? You put someone up in water up to their neck. It is what you're doing. So it's an experimental rigor that drives that. But they had people get into reasonably cool water, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's not that cool, but they had them stand for an hour. Or they've had people get into very cold water, something like 40 degrees, for just 20 seconds.

Now here's what's really interesting. That shock that you referred to is a, adrenaline, also called epinephrine. And it is released from the adrenals, obviously, but also from a site in the brain called locust serulius, a little area of the brain stem that then sprinklers the rest of the brain with epinephrine and wakes up the rest of the brain. So that shock occurs in the brain and the body, and actually the stuff in the body doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. So you're a two part system. We can talk about this layer because when those two systems are aligned, it's beautiful. When those two systems are out of alignment,

that's not good. So you get into cold water, that's the shock. For the first 30 seconds, for most people who are untrained, your forebrain, which is controlling decision-making, is basically suppressed in its activity, and other areas are ramped up. So just know that. Exactly, panic. Just to understand that passes.

Then what happens is when you get out of the cold, whether or not it's a longer period at 60 degrees or a short period, I would hate to hear that people are only doing 20 seconds, but maybe a minute to three minutes at 45 degrees or something. There's a long arc release of dopamine and epinephrine. That's what was shown in the study. In humans, because people always go, well, it's just in my... No, in humans. And that long arc of dopamine leads to a near doubling or more of dopamine in epinephrine.

In my colleague, Annalemke's book called Dopamine Nation, she works on addiction, runs our dual diagnosis. Addiction Clinic at Stanford. She talked about a patient of hers that basically helped himself get over cocaine addiction by doing cold baths because it was the only thing that would give him the kind of dopamine release that even slightly mimicked his cocaine addiction. and allowed himself to weaned himself off with a healthier behavior. Now, I'm not saying it's the equivalent of a drug like cocaine, but I am saying that it's a better decision than a drug like cocaine for obvious reasons. So that mood-enhancing effect that you feel afterwards, it's real. It's based on a real neurochemical effect. And that dopamine and epinephrine will combine with the temperature increase from cortisol plus light, plus exercise,

all things that increase core body temperature. Now you've got increased core body temperature. you created a dopamine release, epinephrine. You've created a summer month inside your body. I don't care if you live in Minneapolis in the depths of winter or someplace even as cold as New Hampshire. You are creating summer in your body by doing that. Now, if you live in San Diego or Los Angeles or Arizona,

and it's the summer, and you're staying indoors and you're on your phone and you're not doing any movement until the afternoon, which is fine to exercise in the afternoon. I realize there's some important benefits. of that and you're laying in bed or you're just walking around the kitchen or you're putting on sunglasses and driving to work. Guess what? You're creating a Colorado winter inside of your body despite the fact that the sun is out. So if you're wondering why you're slightly depressed, your metabolism is lower, your testosterone output is slightly lower than maybe you'd like it to be.

There could be other reasons too, of course. But again, we're talking about modulators. I'm not saying getting sun in your eyes in the morning is going to make your testosterone perfect. What I'm saying is you're setting an internal milieu through things that increase core body temperature, dopamine, epinephrine, et cetera. And that should be done relatively early in the day. Now, we could sort of skip to something about temperature just to benefit people and kind of bookend, the opposite end of the day. As the evening comes around, oh, I'm sorry, you asked a question, and I want to close the hatch on this, about sun low in the sky. You do not need to see the sun rise across the horizon. However, the cells in the eye that trigger all this, the so-called melanops

and gangling cells, respond best to yellow-blue contrast. The next time you see a sunrise or a sunset, you will see the yellow-blue contrast I'm referring to. And what it's associated with is a low-solar angle sunlight. So if the sun is directly overhead, that yellow-blue contrast isn't there. Take a picture with your phone and everyone will see what I'm talking about. So you don't have to see the sunrise. If you're not getting up as early as Jocco, that's fine. But around, let's say you get a up at 8.30 and you're outside by nine and the sun is low in the sky. It's certainly not overhead. You're still getting that yellow-blue contrast that triggers the optimal activity of these cells. Ideally, you would also see, get some sunlight in your eyes in the afternoon

because it turns out you don't have one circadian clock, one master clock in your brain. You have two oscillators. This gets a little bit tricky in the biophysics, but you have a morning oscillator and an evening oscillator. For people that think about oscillators, you geeks out there, two oscillators can predict many more things. It's one plus one equals eight in this case. Having two oscillators allows you to do a number of computations in the brain, including timing the onset of sleep, metabolism, et cetera. So try and get some sunlight in your eyes in the evening as well.

Here's why. Even though I said early in the day, you need sunlight and a lot of light to trigger these pathways. Late in the day, retinal sensitivity goes up. So if you see bright light in the evening and you're viewing too many screens and too much bright light in the evening, it's very easy to wake your system up again. So you want to really dim the lights in the evening. You don't necessarily have to wear blue blockers.

In fact, if you're wearing blue blockers and the light is still too bright, it won't make a difference because it's broad spectrum light will trigger these pathways. So dim the lights in the evening, lower the temperature in your home or in the room that you sleep. And evening would be or afternoon would be a great time to, I don't know, get in a sauna, take a hot shower, take a hot bath. Why? Well, if you stay in a long, long time, of course you'll heat up. But again, if you heat up the external part of the body, your core body temperature will drop after you get out of that sauna, after you get out of that bath.

And when it comes to sauna, Dr. Rhonda Patrick's really the more proficient one here. But we've talked about this literature. There are a couple ways to use sauna. I'll just mention in hot baths work also really well. The study is showing enormous increases in growth hormone. We're done the following way. They had people get into a hot sauna for 30 minutes, then get out for five minutes, 30 minutes, then five minutes out, for a total of two hours in the sauna,

between 175 and 210 degrees sauna. How often? Once a week. Okay. If they did it more often, the amount of growth hormone release went from a 16-fold increase, which is pretty mega, down to a two or three-fold increase. Oh, got worse. Got worse because you become heat-adapted.

And you can also become cold-adapted. So we could talk about cold and how to use cold, but remember, the more comfortable you get with a stimulus, the less of an adaptation effect you're getting, just like weights or running or anything else. Now, it is true that the more often that people did 20 minutes of sauna at 174 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit, I think that's 80 to 100 degrees Celsius, if I recall, the more often they did that, two or three times a week turned out to be better than one, and five to seven times turned out to be better than two or three for lowering all-cause mortality and death to cardiovascular events. So we're talking about growth hormone release. You

want to do it every once in a while for many hours with breaks in the middle. For improved overall health, getting blood flow, you're doing it every night would be great. So it depends on what your goal is. The same thing with the water. If you want to build resilience, well, make the stimulus as terrible as possible. And here's an easy way to do it. I like to kind of poke fun at the tough guys on the internet who get into the ice bath and sit there really stoic.

Well, guess what? There's this thing called a thermal layer that builds up around you. And we're sitting there really stoic. You're not making it as cold as you could be, guys. gals, sift your body around a little bit. Now it's cold. Get those hands under, get those feet under, and pedal those while keeping your mind calm. It is considerably colder because you're breaking up that thermal layer.

It sucks. Hence the waves out there on Coronado. Yeah, it sucks when you, because at my ice bath, well, I have like the little jet, mine has a little jet on the side. You know, it's ionizing the water or whatever. So it's shooting in and like that side is super cold because it's flowing past your body. my other side, I've got it perfectly still. I got a thermal layer just, you know,

keeping me all toasty warm on that right side. Well, I would say, you know, it's fun to play with the ice bath because what you're doing is you can play with your relationship to adrenaline. So the way I think about ice baths and cold showers and things like that, I think of it as a series of walls. When you get into the shock that you described, that's a pulse of adrenaline in your brain and body. But then, you know, you might ask yourself this question,

you know, if you can withstand something for a second, why not a minute? And if a minute, why not three hours? Well, the reason is, is that adrenaline is released in pulsatile fashion, and it compounds a one wave than another wave. So you're building, it's like an upward spiral of adrenaline. It's not one then down to zero, one. It's one down to 0.5, 2.5. So it's building on itself in the brain and body. And as it circulates, it gets more and more painful until you go numb, and then it gets easier as you know. So one thing to do is to just imagine and actually learn to sense the waves of adrenaline. So maybe the first wave is just getting in the damn thing. Maybe climbing, I think of that as one wall. You climbed over that wall, now you're in.

Then you could say, well, I'm going to go 30 seconds. And then maybe at 20 seconds, you'll feel that wall. You thought 30, but that wall comes. Climb that wall. What you'll start to notice is the walls actually start getting further and further apart because adrenaline has this incredible anti-inflammatory numbing quality to it. So the walls actually get lower as time goes on. but they start off very high. That's the way that I think about the ice bath, and that maps to the way that adrenaline physiology actually functions. So again, it's those first steps are the hardest.

I think about this when I wake up in the morning and I don't want to do something. I often see your watch staring at me on my phone. I do, and I think, ah, like this is a big wall. And I think, okay, but the walls are going to be diminishing over time. Even if it gets harder, adrenaline bolsters you in that way. It's a magical molecule. So toward evening,

heat is going to be beneficial. The other thing is dim the lights, obviously, because lights are serving as a wake-up signal. And then, you know, a lot of people have this problem that they go to sleep and then they wake up at three in the morning or two in the morning and they can't fall back asleep. And so I said the two major modulators are sleep and non-sleep deep rest. And non-sleep deep rest or NSDR is a phrase that, to be direct, I coined to encompass a lot of behaviors that are designed to just teach you to lower your level of activation, your nervous system. Meditation is one form, but the problem with meditation is meditation involves focus. You have to pay attention to your breath, for instance, sit there and meditate. That actually puts

a high demand on the metabolic systems of the forebrain. So it's work. It's like reading, except you're reading your breaths and your thoughts. Non-sleep deep rest includes things like, as a kind of corny name for some, it's called Yoga Nidra, which means yoga sleep. You lie down, you just listen to a script. You can find these on YouTube or elsewhere. 10-minute ones or 30-minute ones. take you through a body scan some long exhale breathing. You talk about why this calms the body. Or there are various forms of hypnosis that really involve teaching you to relax. So non-sleep deep rest is kind of a general term for things that we deliberately do

to teach our body to downregulate in real time. And so I highly recommend that if people have trouble falling back asleep in the middle of the night, that they turn on a yoga nidra and listen to that. Or they use an app like Reverie, which I think they have a free trial on their There are other... Is Yoga Netra English speaking or is it a chant or what's Yoga Nietzsche got going on? It means yoga sleep. It's existed for thousands of years.

It has you lie down. The scripts are in English, the ones that you'll find on YouTube. There's actually an NSDR script put out by a team guy and his company made for. These are, again, zero cost tools. You can just listen to them. It takes you through a body scan, a lot of long exhale breathing. The reason he put that out there and the reason why I talk about NSDR is that when people, People hear Yoga Nidra or they hear meditation, they think, you know, flying carpets, monks,

and lotus position. And one of the problems with science and with some of the better practices from different communities in, you know, Asian and Indian communities is that a lot of it's vaulted behind language. You know, science is guilty of this too. You start talking about adrenaline and locust serulius. And if you don't put it in context, people are like, yeah, that doesn't mean anything to me. Yoga Nidra, it sounds like something very foreign.

At the end of the day, non-sleep deep rest practices are all about the same thing. We have a system in our body called the autonomic nervous system. This is the system that when a bomb blast goes off or you hear a loud noise, immediately put adrenaline in your body. The most amazing molecule, right? I mean, if you think about it, you didn't need sleep, you didn't need a nap, you didn't need caffeine. All of a sudden, you are alert, you're done.

You're there, rather. And that's the so-called sympathetic nervous system getting activated. Broad system goes out, it's called simpa, because simpa means together, and you have a chain of neurons called the sympathetic chain ganglia that run from your belly button up to about your heart. When some external stimulus or some thought triggers the sympathetic nervous system, all those cells fire off at once. They just pulse of adrenaline into your body, or they trigger the pathways to do that. So when you're driving and you almost get an accident and you feel the adrenaline, like reaching out to your fingers, like you feel it come. That's what's happening? literally emanates from the center. And what's interesting is in fish and in other animals,

all mammals of all kinds, but also in fish. It actually triggers the muscles of the, the thoracic muscles and the motor neurons there to start undulating to know which direction to go. Animals that get into a threat mode often have an undulation to them. That's the sympathetic nervous system. You know, a body in motion is more available for movement in any trajectory, as opposed to being completely still, et cetera. So then you have another system, which the parasympathetic nervous system, it's like the other end of the seesaw, and it's neurons that exist from the neck down to about the heart and from the belly button down to the bottom of your tailbone. Those are the ones that's so-called rest and digest system, but it's much more than that.

It's also the system that allows you to dilate your gaze reflexively, right? You can learn how to do that under states of high adrenaline, if you like. But naturally, when you're relaxed, your gaze dilates. Reproduction is kind of a balance between the two, the process of Reproducing the verb, literally, of sex, not the biological sex, but the verb sex is a process of the autonomic seesaw. There's arousal, which involves a kind of balance in these systems, et cetera. Kids look it up. Not too young.

Appropriately aged kids, look it up. But it's inherent to the evolution of our species is a balance between activation and calm. And so when we are born, we have an asymmetry in this autonomic nervous system. That asymmetry is the following. None of us need to learn how to stress or react. That system, the activation of the sympathetic nervous system is automatic in response to different thoughts and stimuli. Cold, for instance, being the universal trigger of adrenaline. Why not use heat?

Well, you can only use so much heat before you damage tissues or kill people. You can use a lot of cold, as they know on Coronado. You can use cold a lot before you have to be careful, but you have to get pretty damn cold for a long time before you die. But do be careful with this stuff, obviously. the parasympathetic system is different. We rarely learn how to calm ourselves. We all are familiar with getting sleepy and falling asleep. That's the parasympathetic nervous system taking over.

The longer we are awake, the longer the buildup of something called adenosine in the brain and body. And adenosine turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, suppresses the sympathetic nervous system. When we sleep, adenosine is pushed back down. What is caffeine? Caffeine effectively, through some chemical steps, blocks the effects of adenosine. So if you wait, so here's a little trick if you, that's, I don't like the word hacks because hacks imply using something for a purpose it wasn't designed for. Here we're talking about hardwired biology.

But if you wake up in the morning and you didn't sleep quite as much as you would have liked, that means, and you're sleepy, that means you still have a buildup of adenosine in your system. Let's say you immediately reach for caffeine. Great. You suppress the action of that adenosine and you will be more alert. And guess what happens? Then the caffeine wears off and the adenosine binds to the receptors with greater affinity and you have

your afternoon crash. So a practice that's very useful to people is to delay the intake of caffeine by 60 to 90 minutes after waking. Allow the adenosine to be cleared out because it's not just cleared out in sleep. It's also cleared out in those kind of sleepy states of early morning. So allow it to be cleared out. The other thing that clears it out, exercise. So when you get up in the morning you're kind of sleepy, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, but you hydrate and train, you clear out the adenosine. Now, I like to drink caffeine before I train or during training. I'm weak like that. But for people to have an afternoon crash, this can have tremendous benefits of,

and maybe start by pushing it out 15 minutes per day. Most of everyone that does this says, oh my goodness, I didn't understand why in the afternoon I'm crashing so hard. This will really, really help. I'm curious, do you drink coffee before you train? Nope. That's for weak people, right? I don't like the taste of coffee, but I also don't drink any caffeine.

I don't drink one of my one of my go drinks or anything like that. And I just wake up, you know, I drink water in the morning and I go work out. And I've, I've thought about it. You know, I thought, and I thought about it and I always thought, well, honestly, I thought it seems kind of weak to like have to do that, right? So I didn't do it. But there has been time from thinking, man, like I'll see, you know, look at other people and they'll be like drinking coffee. Is it working out first thing in the morning? And I'm thinking, you know, maybe I should do it.

you know, maybe I am wrong. And I'm open to being totally wrong. Well, here's the thing. If adrenaline is the most incredible molecule in biology, and I do believe it is for its capacity to immediately grab our attentional systems and our readiness systems, dopamine is perhaps the second place winner there,

but still a significant one. You know, there's this incredible experiment that's been done in animals and humans that really illustrates what dopamine does. Take two rats, and they've done this with people in naturally occurring situations. And you put rats next to some delicious water,

they lake water with sucrose in it, or a delicious food. And the rats will reach up and drink that or eat that food. One of the rats, it turns out, doesn't even have neurons that make dopamine or all their dopamine is blocked by the injection of a drug. Turns out they will indulge in that food just fine, just like the one that has plenty of dopamine.

So just to make sure I'm tracking it. You've got two rats. Yeah, separate. One of them has, their dopamine has been blocked. Correct. But at this point, they're both just eating the sugary, drinking the sugary water. Just everything's fine. Yep.

Taste good and they experience pleasure. Both of them experience pleasure. Proof that dopamine is not required to experience pleasure. Now you do a simple experiment. You simply move the location of the food or water one rat length away from the rat. And guess what? The rat with its dopamine walks over and eats the food. food. It might even cross a little metal plate where it gets an electrical shock, but you know,

it's hungry and it wants to eat, so it'll take the zap and do it. The rat without dopamine won't even walk one rat's lane to get its dopamine, even if the food is laid out on the floor for it. Dopamine is not the molecule of pleasure. It is the molecule of motivation, desire, and pursuit. See, this is interesting. We had an experiment that we talked about on here. I had a back in the day I had an RV. And for whatever reason, I had taken the mint chocolate chip ice cream and put it in the RV freezer

for some reason. I forget why. And, you know, when that stuff's in the freezer in the house, it was like, oh, cool, I'm going to get it's right there. We're going to go get it, right? But I guess I wasn't dopamine-fueled enough. Like three, four, five days went by before I was like, all right, I really want it.

So I'm going to go get it. Well, it's, it is the molecule of drive. The way to think about dopamine is that it is a non-infinite yet renewable resource. Non-infinite yet renewable. What do I mean by that? Well, this relates to the energy drink caffeine question. Should you be doing all this stuff? Just as adrenaline, epinephrine is released in response to psychological stressors, physical stressors, cold water, final exams, you know, broken relationship, excitement.

These are generic molecules, right? I mean, they're used to create activation states in the body. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, pursuit, and desire. And it can be triggered by a number of different things. However, it is a non-infinite yet renewable resource. So if you have too big a dopamine release, let's say from methamphetamine, cocaine, damn, we're going there. We're going there.

Or let's say, to be fair, because I, you know, know people or from being in a lot of gunfights in a short period of time. The period immediately after that will involve a mirror symmetric decrease in dopamine. You don't go back down to baseline. You go below baseline. So we all should guard our dopamine peaks very carefully. A little bit goes a long way. A lot goes even further, but it also takes you down deeper afterwards.

This is the basis of addiction. And this is the beautiful work of Annalemke and Rob Malenka at Stanford and elsewhere showing that it... When it goes down, do we want it back right now? Ah, so the dip afterwards is actually associated with a molecule called dinorphin, which is the opposite of endorphin and involves pain in the body. So for every bit of pleasure that we get from pursuit and getting the thing that we were pursuing, the crash that comes afterwards feels painful. And all that we need to do in order to return to a baseline of dopamine, renew that resource, is to wait and make sure that we don't try and trigger yet more dopamine in that time. So you asked about, should I be taking caffeine in addition to training and blasting music? I always say people differ on this spectrum, but be careful about stacking dopamine.

Training itself is a stimulus for dopamine release. Cold water is a stimulus for dopamine release. But if you start doing training, cold water. are listening to your favorite music, plus you're taking, let's say, some stimulant. It doesn't, obviously, the stimulants we've been talking about are terrible, but some of the stronger stimulants out there used to be aphedrine back when I was in college.

But now people taking Adderon. Rift fuel. Is that riff fuel? Now illegal, right? Now illegal. Yeah. I had a guy I worked with, unfortunately, he died, but you would see, like he was in my platoon,

you would see, he, he, he, he, he, he, he would take that, he called it rippy rip. Well, and it readies you. Actually, you can tell if somebody has a lot of dopamine and adrenaline in their system just by looking at them, their pupils are big. So somewhat paradoxically, when pupils are big, your visual aperture is narrow. That just has to do with the so-called accommodation of the eye, the optics of the eye. So remember, big pupils means somebody is high on their own dopamine and adrenaline. Could be drug-induced, could be situational, et cetera.

Small pupils are going to be a relaxed state. Now, of course, it's also going to be modulated by how bright it is in an environment because of the way these systems work. But when you can see somebody wide-eyed, well, dopamine and adrenaline also do something else. They actually trigger activation of the brainstem cranial nuclei that cause opening of the eyelids. They also cause an eyes up effect. When we get sleepy, what happens? Our eyes go down. When we're awake, eyelids are open and eyes are up.

They might not be up like this. These relate to three different cranial nerve nuclei for the future med students. You'll learn what these are. So it all makes perfect sense because nature is beautiful and the biology is laid out for us. But if we start stacking behaviors plus pharmacology, plus mindsets that increase dopamine, great. But what that means is that if you get a really big dopamine increase,

well then that afternoon you might not feel the drive to do the work. You might think, why am I sleeping in the after? Why am I kind of less motivated? Or next day for training without that pharmacology, you're thinking, oh yeah, the workout isn't I don't get quite as intense a contraction of the muscles. The hype train left there. Exactly.

That's what you saw, the hype train. Well, I'm just thinking about it because, you know, a lot of times people ask me, you know, I have a hard time, you know, like I get fired up to do stuff, but then I don't actually do it. You know, that's a common sort of thing for humans. And now I can kind of track it a little bit. Oh, you got yourself super worked up and then you let that go or you, you know, maybe you work for a little bit of time. You know, like, hey, writing a book. I've written a bunch of books. You're not like hyped to write the book.

You're like, oh man, this is going to be, and you, that only lasts for seven minutes of typing, bro. That's it. It's chop wood, yeah. Yeah. Then it's like, oh, this is just going to suck and that's just the way it is. But now I realize if you, this is what I like about this, if you're aware of the fact that, oh, this is my dopamine crash and I can't, I shouldn't anticipate continued hype through this situation. I need to push through it. That's good awareness to have.

Definitely. And nowadays you hear, especially in Silicon Valley, but dopamine fasting, you know, the people, I don't even want to look at somebody else's face. I'm not going to eat any, you know, tasty food. I'm not going to do anything that stimulates dopamine. Sure, that will reset what you find pleasurable. But let's be realistic. The better way to do things would be to modulate dopamine release, control it, make it work for you.

And everyone's going to differ. So for some people, it's got to be music, the pre-workout, the, you know, four cups of espresso and, you know, and someone screaming in their face that they have to do it. Well, for other people, we require fewer of those variables. But everyone needs to learn how they feel both before, during, and after a behavior. You know, I think the right amount of exercise is what you can do consistently and train hard, but that also allow you to perform, unless you're an athlete, and that's your profession, to be able to do the other things throughout the day that are beneficial to you.

And, of course, some people are training late in the day, and I have no problem with that. I got kind of attacked by the fitnessistas recently or whatever you call them online. Because I said, you know, training early in the day sets this dopamine pulse. Like, training late in the day has been shown in these 19 studies. Sure. I'm sure for when your body temperature is elevated later in the day, you know, lubrication of the joints and mental acuity. Sure. But for most people who just need to get more movement and are trying to maximize focus

and productivity throughout the day, early day training is going to be probably the better option. But sometime is better than no time. But if you're training late in the day and you're getting a big increase in body temperature and you're doing it under bright lights and you're drinking a pre-workout and you're wondering why you can't sleep at night, you know, you don't have to be Sigmund Freud or a neuroscientist to understand that you're basically just have your body, you're cranking your body temperature up. Hence a lot of these technologies, and here this isn't a promotion, we don't at least not now, don't have any relationship to any of them.

I won't even name them. There are a lot of technologies now about making your bed cool, this matter, this, you know, to cool down your body, temperature at night so you can sleep. So if you start thinking about this and you have a rational structure, it makes sense. It also makes sense why, for instance, after a big win, sometimes we feel a crash and we need some time to reset. And that low or depression, sometimes people make the mistake of going out and pursuing more dopamine. One of the areas that I have real concern about just because I hear about it so often and it wasn't an issue when I was growing up is a lot of young guys in particular approach me because they're based on the questions I'm getting.

They're watching a lot of really intense pornography. And that has, we know, there are studies now going on at Stanford and elsewhere. Pornography creates a strong dopamine rush. These are very primitive pathways that in some ways can overwhelm the dopamine system. And then, you know, another thing is happening. There's a lot of young guys are getting all this arousal from watching other people have sex. And then they're in the real world scenario. And it's like, wait, you're no longer third personing this.

You're actually in this scene. and it's completely collapsing them. And so I'm not one of these anti-porn people. I'm not here to judge. I'm just a scientist. I'm reporting the, I always say I'm not a doctor. I don't prescribe things.

I'm a professor, so I profess things. You can decide what you want to do with it or not. But if you, once you understand dopamine, that all makes perfect sense. They're getting this enormous dopamine release from something that is external to them

and real life, you know, may not mimic the intensity of the combination of variables, right? Or people are exercising, for a little while and it's all exciting to them and they're taking tons and tons of pharmacology to do it and then they kind of lose motivation well it remember non-infinite yet renewable resource

yeah that's uh being aware of these things i think is so important because what you know if uh if if if i said hey you're going to walk through my house and i'm going to scare you i'm going to jump out and scare you at some point i probably wouldn't be able to do it because you'd be aware waiting and I'd jump out and go boo and you'd be like oh yeah you know whatever I'd probably be able to do it but imagine if I didn't tell you right and I said yeah come by my house and uh you know just just let yourself in I'll be there in a little while then I freaking jumped out and scared you you'd be scared because you're not aware of it you're not aware of what's going to happen so having awareness I remember had a fighter who had been a highly competitive wrestler and he was

going to fight in a in a big organization and he was sort of like I was like hey are you feeling nervous at all. This was a couple weeks prior. Hey, are you feeling nervous? He's kind of blown me off a little bit. You know, hey, I've been fighting for, I've been, I've been wrestling for my whole life. I've been competing. I've been on the national stage, blah, blah, blah, right? I'm not nervous. I said, okay, great. I should have known better because when he went and fought, now he's in the UFC and he got nervous. And what really, I think, messed him up was he didn't understand what was happening. And then I remembered, I used to talk to like a new guy that was showing up on deployment And you'd see him before an op and you could just see the look on their face like they are scared

And what they're scared of is they're scared of getting getting killed and get blown up. That's fine They're scared of doing a bad job. That's fine. But what really is making them nervous is the fact that they feel nervous They don't even know what that feels like because they made it through training and they've jumped out of airplanes and they've you know Scoob-dived at night off the coast and so they're used to being afraid and they don't they don't feel fear anymore so they don't even understand what it feels like so then all of a sudden they get knots in their stomach their heart rate's going and they that's what they're scared of they're like why am I feel like this and it's freaking out so when you say oh hey you uh you feel like you feel like you feel like you feel like you feel like you know you're don't want to tell you the truth

they're like no no I feel fine it's like bullshit I can see and they go yeah and say cool you're just you're just nervous it's just your body getting ready for combat it's no big deal everyone's going to feel like that and then they feel okay so situation that you're talking about where if you don't know what it is, it's like that enough can can can can make you fall whereas you say hey listen after you get a good big dopamine hit you're not going to feel fired up three hours later. That's when you got to put in the work be aware of the fact that you won't feel like doing it because people think we know what the I just didn't feel like going anymore it's like yeah of course you didn't you got all your dopamine and you already used it and you need to let that

thing rebuild but you can still go get a good workout and you can go still complete the task and go still write some more you know but for your book that you're doing or do whatever labor you got to do so I think it's very important for people to understand what's going on inside so they don't feel like it's do maybe I don't even want to do this you know maybe I don't even want to be here you know I remember you know I just get get to because I trained jihitsu at night or in the afternoon and man when I was in the team sometimes you come home and you're like man dude I really even want to do this

right now and I would just say yeah you do and it doesn't matter how you feel like just gonna go do it so being able to overcome that I think that's what's nice about what you're informing us of is people can now go oh I know what this is this isn't me being a wimp this isn't me you know not wanting to do this it's my own natural you know hormones that are doing this thing making me feel this way and I can just work through them absolutely extremely well put you know earlier I mentioned in the reference to sunlight I talked about dopamine and testosterone.

Testosterone has a huge number of effects in the body. And it's sibling molecule, if you will, dihydro testosterone is perhaps the more dominant androgen in humans. Dihydro testosterone. Yeah, DHT. Okay. You know, there are pharmacologic versions of this, right?

Oxanrolone, anavoir. I'm not suggesting people take those, right? What I'm talking about is the DHT you make naturally. Very powerful androgen. It's converted from testosterone into the, you get DHT in a conversion of testosterone to DHT through a molecule called five alpha reductase. Anytime you hear ace, it's almost always an enzyme. ACE is basically, you know,

a cat, you know, protein ace. Okay. So DHD, it's going to cause some male pattern baldness. So this, your widow's peak, your widow's peak, yep, yeah, what was it, widow's peak? Sure. So you get out there, my, my now elaborating widows, that's dihydro testosterone, causes beard growth on the face and causes male pattern baldness. It has inverse effect on the scalp and on the face. It has other effects. Strength, et cetera. The testosterone, molecule and the dopamine molecule will bear a very close relationship. So if somebody pushes, pushes, pushes really hard, wins, wins, yes, that will increase testosterone. Winning increases testosterone. Losing decreases testosterone in all venues. So they look at this with day traders.

Win, win, win, win, win, more money, they get more testosterone. Losing. Okay, now here's the interesting thing. I had an episode of the podcast with the great Robert Sapolsky who wrote why zebras don't get ulcers, the trouble with testosterone, etc. Let's talk about the effects of testosterone and dhd in the brain. The main effect of these androgens in the brain is to make effort feel good. Because of the way that testosterone and dhd bind to receptors and activate certain components of the amygdala.

We always think the amygdala as a fear center, but it's a threat detection center, and it has a lot of different parts, including parts that allow you to be forward center of mass in response to pressure. So am I suggesting people take exogenous testosterone? No, that's a personal, choice that people can explore on their own if they want to do that. But if you've been pushing,

pushing, pushing, pushing, and winning, winning, or just pushing really hard, and then you've experienced that crash, a lot of people need some time to recover in order to be able to come back and be able to work hard again. But here's what's really interesting. Not only does testosterone make effort feel good, effort increases testosterone. So this is the athlete or the student who's like, I don't want to do it, I don't want to do anything. Getting into some degree of forward center of mass, I always say, I think I picked this up from a team guy. It's very team guy language. You can either be back on your heels, flat-footed or forward center of mass on anything.

Getting into that forward center of mass mental orientation can start to trigger some of the pathways related to these hormones and these neuromodulators. What you don't want to do is start using a lot of exogenous factors, caffeine, or a lot of things outside of you in order to try and create those states because then you're going to further deplete your dopamine and so on. I think you went on Rogan at one point and I overheard a portion, I listened to a portion of the conversation where you said you had been working really hard and then you went on vacation and then you got sick.

So this is interesting. That's the autonomic nervous system. That's happened to me like numerous times. Okay. So there's a very clear explanation for that in a very simple remedy, although it's not obvious, which is why many people experience this. Many people experience studying for finals and then it ends getting sick. Taking care of a loved one, round the clock.

The person either gets better or sometimes dies or whatever it is. and then the caretaker gets sick. Why is that? Well, we always hear that stress compromises the immune system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stress activates the immune system. Think about it. How would your immune system, your spleen,

and your other immune organs of the body, know when it's under pressure? Well, you could have some foreign bacteria or virus in your body, but when you are in a mode of go, go, go, the molecule adrenaline triggers the release of killer B cells and T cells from the spleen. it's when you relax. Now, you need to get your sleep, but it's when you finally experience that symmetric swing back of the seesaw.

You're go, go, go, go, boom. And then you completely relax and you're hanging out of it and all of a sudden you get the sniffle and the rest of the thing. There's a beautiful study done by, that was done in response to none other than Wimhoff, believe it or not. There's a really beautiful quality scientific study published in the Proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences where they had two groups of people, One group meditated.

The other group did Wim Hof type breathing. So what we call in the laboratory, cyclic hyperventilation. So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale 25 times. Forceful inhales and forceful exhales. Then hold your breath, lungs empty for 15 seconds, repeat for about three rounds. What does that do? Why do you heat up adrenaline? It's such a generic thing.

It's adrenaline. You could have gotten into an ice bath. Adrenaline. You could have someone shout in your face. Adrenaline. It's just adrenaline. What do they do? They injected both groups of people with E. coli.

Injected them with E. coli. One group gets nauseous, vomiting, and feel sick. The group that does this cyclic hyperventilation, Wimhoff, also called Tumot-type breathing, far fewer symptoms, if any, including lack of fever. So why? Well, they were able to combat the attack of this bacteria. So if you're coming off of a hard bout of work and you're starting to relax into vacation, you would be wise to still get into some cold water.

you would be wise to still do some cyclic hyperventilation breathing. Certainly don't do those at the same time. A number of people actually have died doing cyclic hyperventilation and then doing breath holds because when you exhale a lot of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is the trigger to breathe. This is really important. If you do hyperventilation and then you hold your breath, you can do a much longer breath hold than you could if you just started off without having done that.

Why? You don't take breaths because of a need for oxygen, although you do need that. breaths because of a buildup of carbon dioxide triggers these brain stem neurons, which have you do the gas reflex. Okay. Well, if you dump all your carbon dioxide and you're not a skilled free diver like Markele or somebody like that who really understands that, what happens is you're swimming along. You're like, wow, I can really hold my breath down here a long time. Lights out. Actually, I'm aware of a few people in the military community who've dabbled with Wimhoff-Tumotype breathing and have died and it's not good. I think it's not allowed, basically. It's not in, certainly

not encouraged from what I understand. So do it on land away from water. And the idea here is that adrenaline protects us. You don't want it cascading out of control so that you can't sleep. You want to use things like non-sleep deep rest and the appropriate timing of light and exercise, et cetera, to be able to sleep well at night to reset all these systems. But if you go too quickly from go, go, go, go, to complete relaxation, your immune system, your defense system will crash too. And so you're not going to be able to fight off even the smallest or the, you know, the pettiest of viruses and bacteria. That's when you get the sniffle, you get sick. You're like, I'm finally resting.

What's going on? So you can taper out of those high intensity phases. There are actually, you know, guys in the teams now that I think are aware of this and are starting to think about this for various effects. But in the mind, testosterone makes effort feel good. Adrenaline puts us into a mode of readiness. Dopamine puts us into a mode of motivation. And then there's the mirror side of all this, which, are the neurochemicals that broadly defined promote relaxation and parasympathetic activation.

And those come under the names that you probably heard them before, like serotonin, oxytocin, and the hormone prolactin. Serotonin and oxytocin are molecules that make us feel good, make us feel soothed, not in response to things that we're motivated to go get, but in response to what we already have. So this might sound a little woo, but, you know, if you sit there and do a gratitude practice, or you hang out with your dog and your kids, or you eat a meal, right? You're nourishing yourself with food

that you are not in the process of having to kill first. You're just really in, you know, Thanksgiving, a few moments of appreciation, simple things. The feel good that you experience, the love and kindness meditations, these kinds of things.

We know, based on neuroimaging studies and blood draws and things of that sort, promote the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin. That nature has designed beautiful systems of pursuit and pleasure that are designed to oscillate and designed to keep us in pursuit and pleasure cycles. In relationships, typically, the dopamine phase is the early phase. Simultaneously in these cycles?

Oftentimes not simultaneously. Typically, dopamine and serotonin are released. There's always some floating around our system at any moment, but typically dopamine and adrenaline are associated with pursuit of things that are outside the confines of our immediate possession in our skin. And serotonin is more about the things that we have. have the things, you know, seeing your kid, holding your kid, that promotes the release of oxytocin and serotonin. It feels amazing, right? These are the molecules that led to our evolution as a species.

So I'm not diminishing one or the other, but they need to oscillate, right? In early relationship, there are times when people aren't sleeping very much. It's like a mental illness. It's like a, it's a form of mania. You're so excited. You don't need sleep, right? People are able to do all sorts of things at frequency and intensity that they find themselves two years later in a relationship and they love the person. It's very warm and cozy. But, well, unless they're going off on deployments and coming back, they don't have that reset of the system. So, you know, the ability to miss somebody reset that pursuit and desire system. These are powerful systems and they don't just pertain to romantic relationships. This is also school. I always, you know, I always did

summer school because I had to do a lot of catching up to do based on the. You know, a lot of catching up. But, you know, there's some value in taking a week off and realizing you are truly resetting all the systems for pursuit. And I hear from a lot of hard-driving folks who are like, wow, once I understood dopamine, I realized why I'm so burnt out. People think of adrenal burnout. Guess what?

There's no actual medical term, adrenal burnout. There's adrenal insufficiency syndrome that's a rare syndrome, but you have enough adrenaline packed away in your brain and body to for three lifetimes. Think about what people used to go through. I mean, you talk about some of this on your podcast. You see the images of people and you read the stories. You can make it through finals, kids.

So what happens, though, is we're in such modes of pursuit and overthinking, over thinking, we need to learn how to switch back and forth on a regular basis. What I call deliberate decompression or non-sleep deep rest. Have a practice each day of 10 to 30 minutes where you're not on your phone and you're in kind of a wordless state. You're just either yoga nidra or you're just. relaxing or not watching anything, not taking in any sensory information, not meditating, not journaling, just in a state of just trying to blank your mind and just watch how much

stronger you come back in terms of your ability to focus and your motivation. That's one, I love the phone and social media has been very good to me and I appreciate many of its features, but one of the problems is we tend to fill our idle time with more sensory information and that doesn't allow us to go into this deliberate decompression. It doesn't allow us to, you remember, I cut myself off, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a movie is worth a million pictures. Now I can scroll through millions of movies very quickly. And so the dopamine system is just a little bit overwhelmed. I don't think we need to be off our phones all the time. We just take some time to just deliberately decompress each day, any time of day. And you'll focus better. So you're getting

hit with that dopamine on Instagram. So at first you are. But here's how you know, dopamine, and it's, we'll give you a window into addiction if you're, if you're not an addict, you'll be able to sympathize with, maybe even empathize with addicts of various kinds. When you first get on social media, you're excited. Maybe you or Joe or somebody has a new podcast out, right? You know, you're excited. Oh, I can't wait to hear that. That's dopamine. You're motivated. But if you ever find yourself doing a behavior and you kind of don't know why you're doing it, like this doesn't feel any good anymore. It's like that, what is that Chris, well, now he's a funny story there because of new stuff, but that Chris Rock thing where he's talking about like, you know,

when you're shanking somebody and your heart's just not in it. Like that, it does a funny thing, right? I think it was him. You're sort of like that. Like, yeah, your heart's not in. Like, why am I here? Why am I? What am I doing?

I'm not even getting any pleasure, but here I am like a, you know, rat pressing a lever. Well, that's, the dopamine system has been depleted. And so what you need is some time away from it. Could be 10 minutes. Could be 10 days. And then it feels good again. True for relationships, true for exercise. You know, I believe in training hard and training often.

But if you train too hard too often, you can't bring the intensity that you need to get the stimulus to adapt. And pretty soon you're either plateauing or you're getting worse. Here's a experiment I did with myself. I went in my ice bath and I had my phone. I was, for whatever reason, I wanted to see something on social media on Instagram. So I was like, I'm just going to look at it. I want to waste some time. So I'm just going to, while I'm sitting in the ice bath for, you know, five minutes,

I'm going to look at it, look at social media. So I got, I'm on Instagram in my ice bath. And normally you're in your ice bath and you're like, how long I've been in here for? You don't really want to look at your watch, you know? It's like, if I'm going to torture someone when they're in my ice bath, I'm like, you've been in for 30 seconds. That's 37 seconds. That's someone to tell them every increment of time because you're not going to let it all blur together.

So, you know, I always hold off on looking at my watch, you know, when I'm in there. I'm just going to wait, you know, because it's not going to be as long as you thought it was. So I'm in that mode. I'm looking at Instagram. So my hands aren't in it, but still, it's like, I'm looking at Instagram and I go, how long has it been? It's probably been, it's probably been at least, I'm probably at the three minute mark right now. I roll over, look at my watch at like 520. So I got that way. That's how people look at their freaking screen and all of a sudden they look up and they look up and they've wasted 28 minutes on there. Because, I mean, I was in cold water, you know,

and time went by a little bit quicker. Imagine if you were sitting in a relaxing chair or whatever, you know, that's just going to slip by you. And next thing, you know, you've been looking at your phone for 22 minutes or a half an hour. You know, you can write 500 words for a book in a half an hour. You know, like you can do a lot of things in a half an hour that are going to benefit you as a human being.

Instagram isn't one of them. Right. The algorithm is going to get you. That's right. It's going to get you. And if you want to create content, you build the raw materials. You find and build on the raw materials for that content away from the place where you distribute that content. I always tell myself that I love reading scientific papers and books, but Instagram can draw me in too.

And I always say the gems exist outside of social media, and I want to bring those to the podcast into social media. So the deeper I can read into the library or to these papers, the more that I can bring. I'm glad you brought up time perception because dopamine and serotonin and the states they are associated with. So broadly speaking, dopamine and adrenaline or serotonin and oxytocin are associated with different perceptions of time. Here's the best way to think about this is if you've ever had a day that was really exciting or think to an op that was particularly exciting or difficult or challenging required a lot of focus. It's amazing how quickly you, perceive that day going by. But then when you look back on it, it feels like so much happened.

Now think about waiting in the doctor's office. It feels like it goes on forever. And yet you look back on it and it feels like nothing happened. Dopamine and adrenaline change our perception of time. We micro-slice time. But it seems like everything goes by really fast. And then we look back, like we did this and then we did that and we did that thing. When you're a 10-year-old and it's your birthday. So much happened, so much dopamine. Then think about the most boring phase of doing nothing. And you look back, nothing happened. Why? It's all about how these neuromodulators shift our perception of time, our gaze and our understanding of the outside world, and so on. So you can imagine that if you're on Instagram and you're scrolling and scrolling and not a whole lot is happening

and yet you go, oh my God, time, all this time went by, but nothing happened. Well, you're not in a high dopamine state. When you're in a high dopamine state, you will know because life feels exciting. You'll almost feel a readiness in your nervous system because some people will even tremble a little bit. That's the readiness for action because again, these are generic molecules. They didn't evolve for social media or for gunfights or for rolling jujitsu or for taking final exams or studying for them. They evolved to either put us into states of readiness and pursuit or relaxation. And so once you understand that we all have both systems in us, but that some people, the seesaw is just naturally tilted a little bit toward one side or the other, excuse me, then you're in a position

to really control it as opposed to it controlling you. And there's a term that I like to use when thinking about this. We all think about stress, but really there are two kinds of stress. There's the, I'm too activated, I'm too alert, and I need to calm down. And then there's the, I'm too calm, I need to lean into action. And I refer to this as limbic friction. Your limbic system controls these very basic states of being alert or being stressed or being calm. But your forebrain, this incredible real estate just behind your forehead, is what controls what we call top-down modulation.

It's the look at the watch. It's 445. Chaco's already up. Like I need to do this. But wait, hold on. If I get into action, adrenaline would come. Thoughts actually allow us to overcome our limb. tendency to just want to go back to sleep.

Or if I'm very, very stressed, I can quickly calm down. I can just pass along. There's actually a physiological tool to calm down. It wasn't discovered by me. It was discovered in the 1930s. There's a pattern of breathing that every person and every mammal does when carbon dioxide builds up too much in the bloodstream, and it's called a physiological sigh. This is two inhales through your nose and then a long full exhale.

Looks crazy, but believe it or not, we all do this once every five minutes or so. This podcast is like the documentation of the release of that. Because I, I, I'll be reading something just super stressful or even talking to someone that, you know, was in a terrible situation. You can go listen to this podcast and you'll hear like just silence and you'll hear me go.

Like it's so obvious that I do that to release the, the stress that I have from, you know, listening to someone or dragging some horrible story out of someone. Exhale, slow the heart down, inhale, speed the heart up. There's something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So when you inhale, basically what happens is your diaphragm moves down, right? It actually moves down.

There's actually more space in the cavity that your heart sits in. Blood flows more slowly through that larger volume. The heart got a little bigger. The brain sends a signal and speed the heart up. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up. Heart gets a little smaller, blood moves more quickly through that smaller space. Brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. If you increase the duration or the intensity of exhales relative to inhales, you'll calm down.

Increase the intensity or the duration of inhales relative to exhales, you will become more alert through these brainstem centers that were not discovered by me, but by this brilliant guy at UCLA named Jack Feldman, who found the two brain areas that are responsible for this. Physiological size, reopen all the small sacks in the lungs so that you can then offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide when you actually. So the big deep inhale through the nose and then squeeze in a little bit more air, reinflates the little sacks in the lungs and allows you to offload carbon dioxide on the long exhale that follows.

You do this in sleep. People who have apnea don't do this well. Apnea is very dangerous. It actually will shorten your life, lead to all sorts of issues. Not good. People will use the CPAP or they'll learn to mouth breathe or do these kinds of things. You can also use physiological size between rounds and jiu-jitsu to calm down if you want to calm down. Or you can do more inhales if you want to ramp up.

I mean, fighters know this stuff intuitively and they know how to use breath. But none of these are hacks. These are defined circuits that we all come into the world with. And the reason I say they're not hacks is they work the first time and they work every time. Because guess what? You're using them all the time anyway. We're just not normally aware. And so you can, when you're speaking a lot, oftentimes you'll feel stressed because you're not taking a few moments to do these double

inhales and exhales as I'm doing now. But if you're having trouble sleeping, do some long exhale breathing. You'll notice you'll calm down. So I call these real-time tools because they don't involve stepping away from what you're doing. The other cool thing about the physiological size is that the nerve that controls the diaphragm is called the frenic nerve. And it has a little branch, we call this a collateral that goes to the liver and a few other organs. If you're ever running and you get that side stitch, you think it's a cramp, that is not a cramp. That has to do with your pattern of breathing in the movement of the diaphragm.

And the phrenic nerve sometimes gets into a pattern of firing that's not quite optimal. You're getting what's called referred pain of the liver. And the pain inside the body is not as precise as it is on the surface of the body. What do you do? Well, we used to be told, oh, you run with your hands over your head or you need more water. All you have to do is a few physiological size, and you'll reset the pattern of breathing to the correct motion. So the next time you have a side stitch or a cramp,

just do a few double inhale exhales while running, and that referred pain will just disappear. So you mentioned the limbic system. So I'm sitting here, you're painting this picture when you're talking about serotonin and your testosterone and dopamine. You get this picture in your head like, wow, every human being should just be running at this optimum thing where, hey, I'm going to go get some testosterone reward reward for my dopamine. And then when I'm done with that, I'm going to go hug my kids. And it seems like we should be in this perfect cycle of where everything is great because we're either in pursuit or, or in gratitude and this is great.

Unfortunately, we all know that that's not the reality and people end up in this weird thing where they don't go in in pursuit. In matter of fact, they don't go in pursuit at all. They don't even get off the couch. We have people that don't appreciate what they've got. And so is that the limbic? What is the opposing force to these two totally positive things

that we've got out there of, hey, I've got this dopamine reward system. When I go out, I'm going to do some squats. I'm going to feel great when I get done. I'm going to see my dog. I'm going to pet him. I'm going to feel great. Like life is great.

What is the opposing force on these things that trips us up? Yeah, very important question. And fortunately or unfortunately we have an answer, which is that we can now access dopamine release without any effort at all. High flavor, high calorie density food, right? It's probably rare in nature at one point. We had to work hard in order to get game, get grains, get berries. So it used to be effort, dopamine, relaxation, repeat.

Now you can get enough dopamine from food. Remember the rat just sitting there? It won't cross the cage because it has no dopamine. But most people are like the rat just sitting there just popping. Just on the couch. I saw this on the plane. And I'm not being disparaging of anybody. but I sat down next to this person.

And it was, and I was not shocked. I was actually just really dismayed. This person was sitting there kind of like hooded eyes. I don't think they had been drinking alcohol. It didn't smell like it. Just popping Cheetos into their mouth, like a rat, just feeding from a dispenser. Just the whole time, just passively, right? So you're getting at this low level of dopamine, lots of calories, lots of, with no activity.

Yes, their phenotype, as we'd say in biology was as you would predict. And it was just really sad. There was no, there was, I think that when it's, it's fair to say that dope, high levels of dopamine achieved without effort will destroy a person, whether or not that comes through a high potency drug or a high potency food. If it comes within an intensity and a frequency that's too high, that doesn't require effort, it will destroy a person. So what else is there?

There's food. We can get a dopamine hit from Cheetos. Anything pleasurable. TV? Extremely pleasurable. Yes, I would say... Does TV work? Yeah, I would say here I'm borrowing from Anna Lemke's work. She's, again, a medical doctor who focuses on dopamine and addiction, but also behaviors that relate to addiction.

Video game addiction, for instance. Social media or YouTube addiction. I can give you one very salient example of this. When we're getting, you know, let's say that dopamine, it doesn't work actually work this way, but let's just say with arbitrary units can be released at anywhere from zero to a hundred level. Let's say methamphetamine is 100 because we know it does. evoke a lot of dopamine release. Let's say a nice pizza after a good long run is 20. What about a nice pizza after watching a Netflix show?

Yeah. I'm saying is that is that is that also going to be a 20 or is that only a 10 because you didn't really earn it? Ah, well, it can be very pleasurable, but what's going to happen is that you're still getting dopamine and it's incremental, right? Remember I said earlier, stacking dopamine is dangerous. It's not that you have one reservoir or one kind of hydraulic system putting a pressure for dopamine and then you spend it all and it comes back. You have multiple things. So if you're listening to music and you're eating and you're having a good time, that's great.

I mean, that's life. I mean, we want to encourage people not be total stoics and they want to enjoy life. But what's going to end up happening if you're just sitting there eating high calorie food, taking in a lot of sensory information that has you really wrapped with attention, there's really no incentive to be motivated to do anything else at a biological level. So then someone's, in fact, I was talking to my podcast producer. He had a friend in college that was a spectacular student early on and got really into video games. And there came the day to move out of their house.

And everyone was packing up and moving out and this guy didn't have his stuff together. And the trucks were literally coming. And they realized he actually can't do anything. He only seems to be getting his dopamine from this one behavior. I have a close friend whose son graduated from high school. school was going to community college and pretty soon developed what he thought was a case of pretty severe ADHD and depression. Obviously that can happen. Young guy I've known him. He's always been a swimmer and an athlete, very impressive kid, good looking kid, always very sociable. And pretty soon

he wasn't going his community college classes. He wasn't working, no relationship, living at home with the parents. This is what they call failure to launch, right? Pretty scary at 20, much scarier at 25. he heard Ana Lemke talk to on a different podcast about the dopamine system and he realized that he's spending all this time on YouTube video games. He got a little bit into crypto and was kind of dabbling there, nothing. And he went on a complete fast of all these things. And I'm pleased to say that he's complete now. He's now lives with his girlfriend. He's got a job.

He's completely off any ADHD meds. And I realize some people do need these ADHD meds. Guess what ADHD meds are. Ritalin, Adderall, Vivance. They all trigger the release of. dopamine. It's a way of getting dopamine. And some people really need that. But you can imagine if you're getting it from all these sensory stimuli, YouTube, et cetera, and listen, I love YouTube. I appreciate them, but it's a potent stimulus. You can find pretty much anything on there. And so the key, you asked,

why are we so off balance? Why can't we just do this naturally? Is because naturally, we just want pleasure. We really do as a species just seek pleasure and avoid pain. All species do that. And Now it takes a very deliberate, forebrain-oriented person who really actually associates their value and their self-image with effort and reward, not just reward, to get through this jungle of, you know, plants that can basically just grab us and pull us down. And we see it everywhere, and it should not surprise us at all. And so is the key to completely discard with any pleasures? No, the key is put effort in front of pleasure. And you will have a, and learn how to relax and access these other systems of serotonin, et cetera, and appreciation. And if you can do that, you can completely control the trajectory of your life.

But pleasure without effort preceding it is absolutely deadly. It's, you clude me in on this one, echo variable rewards. So like, even when you're looking at YouTube, right, and you click on a video, And it looks good. It's got a good thumbnail, right? It's good click. Big eyes. They told us, you know, thumbnails with crazy eyes,

actually get more clicks. Okay, so there you go. So you get lured in on that, but it's not quite as good as you want. So then, but you see another one. And so you click on that one, and it's not quite as good. But then you click on one and say,

oh, it's pretty good. You know, it had a good freaking car crash in it or whatever it is that you wanted to see. And so then you get that variable reward in Instagram. You get it in YouTube. and where it's like you get a little spike. Like, oh, there it is. That was a really good meme or whatever.

That one made me laugh. You have to look at seven memes that are dumb, and then you see a good one, and then you go, well, maybe the next one will be good too, and you want that little hit. It's freaking disturbing. How does it do with anticipation, right, or something like that?

Yes, you guys are team me up with the exact language. So the best schedule for maintaining motivation over time is called random intermittent reinforcement. This is what the slot machines do. This is gambling. The reason people go to Vegas, I like it to do a little bit of gambling. I like to sit there.

I like the dumb gambling. I like roulette. I just like to sit there and watch the wheel go. I don't like to have to think too hard or look at the cards or anything and just put things on numbers and eventually get something and go, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.

But it's always a set amount. Why do I like this? Well, it's boring, boring. And then boom, you hit. You hit. You get 18 to 1. on something you do. That's random intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful reinforcement schedule in all species for all things. Some people even all species, all things, all species, random

all mammalian species. Intermittent reward. Yeah, give a rat a reward for pressing a lever every time. It actually will press that lever less often. It'll get its dopamine fix, right? It's the person next to me eating Cheetos on the plane. They'll keep doing it, but not with this. They won't work to do it. Whereas if you give it to them every fifth time animals and people learn intuitively, they're not necessarily even counting. They just know how fast they need to press before they get it again. Random intermittent reinforcement means if you're not expecting a reward, you get more dopamine. So you said anticipation. So there's something in the dopamine literature that is called reward prediction error. If you anticipate a reward and it comes, you get some dopamine. If you don't

anticipate a reward and it comes, you get even more dopamine from the same reward. And if you anticipate a reward and it doesn't come, guess what? Dopamine drops below baseline. Hey kids, we're going to go get ice cream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get to the ice cream shop, closed. Ooh, not good. You crash them below. Now you're negotiating trips to Disneyland, right? If you are walking by an ice cream shop, you turn to them and you say, ice cream, bigger dopamine release from the actual ice cream. This is a very powerful modulator of our behavior. So anticipation is key because remember, dopamine isn't about the pleasure. Dopamine is about the anticipation of pleasure.

And there are beautiful experiments. If people want to learn more about this, just put reward prediction error. The guy Wolfram Schultz, yes, was the guy over in Germany who discovered a reward prediction error. He found that the neurons in the brain that control dopamine release are firing before you get the reward. Then you get the reward and it goes up a little bit and then it drops. And that drop is the pain that you feel afterwards. Why? To keep animals and humans motivated to go pursue more. And a lot of our behavior can be understood through reward prediction error.

This also pertains, again, human relationships. Don't tell somebody a restaurant is so incredible or a blank is so incredible. Don't build yourself up to be so incredible if you want to actually be experienced as that incredible. Anticipation is wonderful, but then you better bring it. Because if you don't, you are going to sink dopamine way lower than you would have otherwise. So surprise is one of the wonderful elements of the dopamine circuitry. And if you think about an animal foraging for food or a human foraging for food, this is what led to people, you know, looking for game to kill.

Well, you're a hunter, right? Maybe you're a hunter as well. I've done a hunting, but I've done some fishing and you're kind of like, oh, this. He hunts at Vaughans pretty much. But I'm good, though. He's pretty good at him. What do you hunt for? Just kidding.

And it's a real stretch to call me a hunter. I got into hunting a few years ago and have been going hunting each year. And very, very cool, very, very, very rewarding, very difficult, very, very rewarding. Yeah, it's, you know, because that's a very dynamic system. As our gunfights and whatnot, it's not just about hitting targets on a range, obviously, the other person or the animal gets a vote too. And so that's that, we crave that as human beings. And combat taps into that and basic mating interactions and the things that lead, up to that, you know, the dance that is human evolution of mating and aggression and all these

other things, you know, all tap into the dopamine system. And we experience wins and then we try and make predictions about where we will experience wins again based on our previous history. And yet what keeps us, it would be so boring if you always knew the deer was going to be standing right next to that tree looking at you, right? One reason I like Cam Haynes's videos and I watch those is I love the unpredictability of it. I'm also, always amazed at how many objects are in front of them and obviously a very skilled hunter. So it's the uncertainty that certainly people in special operations, you know, it's defined by uncertainty. The rules are set and yet there's this huge set of variables for which you need to

be able to adapt in real time. That's going to lead to more dopamine increase than anything else. Yeah. It's interesting because the hunting thing, like how does it compare to combat? I've had guys asked me that and there's a really big difference is that that you know that thing's not going to shoot back at you but if you go and hunt like a grizzly bear with a bow and arrow and you mess up that thing absolutely will kill you so that does go that does get very close to the the same kind of scenario that you're dealing with and I'm sure the dopamine hit and I haven't hunted any bear yet but that's got to be next level. Absolutely.

I remember backpacking and glacier and running into a bear cub, pop, you know, the eaten berries on the trail. We took the bear bell off. You know, those bear bells are really annoying. And the whole time we're walking with these bear bells, I'm going, let's take these bear bells off. Ignore the ranch, you know.

And we're hiking out. And sure enough, there's a bear cub sitting there. And you go, oh, at first you go, bear cub, and then you go, bear cub. So, absolutely. There's, you know, these systems, again, are oriented toward our survival, our reproduction, our drive. When we meet people that are very driven, typically it's because they have systems like yourself,

like yourself. I mean, these systems almost always are designed to overcome what I referred to earlier as limbic friction. It's rarely that someone has just a system of making everything easy that allows them to be continually motivated. I think this is one of the big misconceptions. People think, oh, and we've done episodes on the Huberman Lab podcast like workspace optimization. And I always sort of hesitate to do these episodes because it's true.

If you put your computer screen up as opposed to looking down it, you'll be alert for longer because of what we were talking about before, eye positioning. If you have a standing desk, you'd probably be alert because standing actually, you know, and so on and so forth. But what you find is that people that display motivation over long periods of time have systems that put them into limbic friction. and then overcome limbic friction again and again. Remember, effort, then reward. And many people are looking for the tools, the hacks, and the tricks that are going to take all the effort part out. What you do, what you want to do is build the effort and the limbic friction in and then the reward in on a consistent basis. Brief me again on the limbic friction.

Yeah. So where's that coming from? Yeah. So you have areas of the brain. In the old days, people used to call them ancient and then now people don't like that. But basically there are parts of the brain that exist in humans and in other animals like the hypothalamus, which is a cluster of neurons, basically above the roof of your mouth, little tiny real estate within the nervous system, but controls things like motivation, aggression, rage, sex behavior, temperature.

These are clusters of what we call nuclei, little clusters of neurons that control all these different primitive states. So much so that if I were to just tickle one of those with an electrode, I could put you into a rage state like that. There's a wonderful video if people want to see it. It's a little disturbing for people that can't handle this stuff from David Anderson's lab at Caltech. You can put Anderson Lab aggression mating into YouTube. Two mice, electrode in an area of the brain called ventromedial hypothalamus. Stimulate one category of neurons in there using some neuroscience tricks. And the animal immediately goes over and starts to mate with the female animal.

Turn those neurons off. There are ways you can do this instantaneous. and remotely, turn on the neurons in the ventrometrial hypothalamus that are distinct from those, and the animal starts to kill the other animal. Put that animal alone in a cage with a glove filled with air. Stimulate these neurons, it tries to kill the glove. Looks like a kid at an agnostic front show. It was just swinging his arm like that, you know, just rage, although that's a controlled rage. So we have switches in the hypothalamus. Then we have this real estate that we call the prefrontal cortex, which controls rational,

decision-making, has access to the hippocampus with information about the past, the present, and the future, right? When we're in a states of rage, it's all about now. States of stress, it's all about now. States of fear, it's all about now. The prefrontal cortex can draw on a memory bank of experiences from the past, the present, and future, for better or for worse, and say, uh-uh, the last time we tried to cross this bridge with our team, things didn't work out so well. Let's stop. Let's think. Or, you know, we're under attack, you immediately want to respond, what are you guys called swift violent action,

but sometimes I'm guessing there's a time to regroup swift violent action in a more successful way. Okay, I'm just borrowing language from your community. That ability to tamp down basic physiological responses is controlled by the forebrain suppressing the limbic pathways. So there's a friction between our rational mind and these impulses.

There's a famous, case of the guy that was working on the railways, every psychology student learns about this. Spike through his forebrain. It went through orbital frontal cortex. It's prefrontal cortex. What happened? Well, the story goes that he became sort of inappropriate. So if he didn't like you, he'd tell you. I don't like you. He swear at you. He went to church before. It was a real good guy. After that, he was, you know, screaming at people and caught profanities and things like that. There's a condition called Cluverbusy syndrome, which relates to a different brain area, but also the forebrain where animals or people will start to mate with inanimate objects.

Right? This is inappropriate behavior according to the limbic system, but they don't see as inappropriate because their forebrain is shut down. So limbic friction describes the tension in this neural circuitry between the forebrain and these reflexes. And remember it has two sides. One is the ability to suppress action, and the other is the ability to engage action when you would otherwise want to be relaxed.

And that's because some of the areas of the hypothalamus are involved in relaxation. So you want to stay in bed. I'll be honest, you know, for me, I hope for many people, there's a strong pull to stay under the covers and sleep longer, tell yourself that, you know, you heard on a podcast that sleep's important and all this stuff. You die of dementia if you don't sleep enough. And you have to tell yourself, no. No, it's the effort followed by the reward that I'll feel later. That's the ticket. And so that's an example of limbic friction that you overcome where the forebrain takes over.

Now you're in action. You're in forward center of mass. Or you're exhausted. So that's overcoming exhaustion or. So the limbic system can screw you in both ways. It could screw me in like I lose my temper and attack you and I end up going to jail because I, because I stabbed you in the neck because I lost my temper. It can also screw me by, hey, you know, you don't really don't feel like going to work out right.

now and you should just stay in bed because it's nice and comfortable here. Yeah. So your limbic system. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then you can rationalize that. Sure. And up there.

But that's a limbic system driving me to just want to stay in bed or want to, hey, you know, this freaking cotton candy tastes great and I should just eat more of it and just keep shoving it in my mouth. That's right. That's right. And a lot of treatments for phobias and anxiety disorders that are related to cognitive behavioral therapy are progressive exposure. So a person afraid of snakes, you give them a picture of a snake.

Then you have them imagine a snake. Then they're looking at a rubber snake. Then they're holding a snake. What are you doing? You're allowing them to get into small incremental steps of forward action. They get them closer and closer, but you're to the anxiety. But you're also ratcheting down the anxiety. What I'm talking about, and I think what the practices that you've talked a lot about really relate to,

is recognizing that friction of being tired but knowing that you should get into action or that feeling of being too amped up and knowing you need to calm down. means going against yourself in a way that is not incremental, sometimes can feel huge. This is why I think, you know, anyone who's going to try an ice bath, don't freeze to death, but, you know, start at 45 degrees and move your limbs around and experience what a lot of adrenaline is really like. And, you know, if you do it appropriately, you won't die. And you will come out of there, you'll get that dopamine rush. And the thing to think about is not how great it feels.

You want to think about how hard it is and then how great it feels. Those two things need to be coupled in one's mind. And the power of mindset is something that has been talked about all the time, the secret or on, you know, in social media. But I have a colleague at Stanford. It seems like I only refer to experiments at Stanford. But hey, it's a good place. If there is an analog to the SEAL teams in academia, can we borrow that?

Sorry. There are other good places, too. There's some schools on the East Coast I hear as well. I'm just kidding. But I do bat for the home team. But there are experiments elsewhere, of course. But my colleague Ali Krum, her name is Alia, but she goes by Ali Krum. It's a professor of psychology, tenure professor of psychology, former Division I athlete,

trained clinical psychologist, and actually her dad is a martial artist and has done some work with your community. And she has a few papers on seals, and I'll explain what those are. She studies mindsets and the power of mindset, and she studies the physiology. So none of this stuff is wishy-washy, and here's the interesting thing. You take two groups of people. she's taken two groups of people. One group watches a movie about stress. The other group watches a movie about stress.

The first group watches a movie about stress and learns all the true information about stress disrupts your memory. It causes deficiencies in decision making and blah, blah, blah, all the terrible things that stress can do. The other group learns all the positive things that stress can do. Can activate your immune system, can sharpen your focus, can enhance your memory if it's done in the appropriate way.

etc. Then you test people with a number of things like memory tests. You test their immune system. You do blood draws. You look at how much stress hormone they're making. Guess what? Whatever you learned and believe, that's what happens. They've done the same experiment with two milkshakes. Okay? You give one group a milkshake. You tell them this is a high calorie, high fat, high sugar milkshake. There's lots of nutrients in it. You give the other group a milkshake. You say, this is a modest, a low calorie milkshake. Then you have them, drink the milkshake, you take blood jaws and you look at the insulin response, you look at the amount of grelin, which is a hormone that's secreted in response to hunger. It makes you hungry,

basically. And guess what? It's the same milkshake and yet you get higher insulin response to the high calorie, the thought that it's a high calorie shake. You get lower insulin, you still get an insulin response in response to the idea that it's a lower calorie shake. The grelin response is suppressed. So your hunger doesn't show up for, longer if you have the so-called high-calorie shake, staves off hunger, whereas if you have the low-calorie shake, you're hungry again earlier, and ghrelin levels go back up really, all based on belief. And there are numerous things like this. And so Allie's words are the best words for this, and I'm probably not going to get them exactly right. But what we do and the

physiological consequences of what we do is the consequence of what we do, what we eat, how we exercise, but also what we believe about what we do. Now, this doesn't. Now, this does not mean that you can just lie to yourself. You can't say, oh, this, you know, four by four from in and out is only a hamburger and it's not going to have a big insulin. That doesn't work. But what you can do is... What is eat a protein style?

It's pretty good. Or there's the flying Dutchman, I've heard. You know that one? I haven't had the flying. I think that's just meat on a piece of paper. Oh, okay. So now all those carnivores are going to be, you know, going through. That's why I'd give Costello my bulldog.

I think they still use that. The off-the-menu menu menu. So basically, if you tell yourself the friction that I'm feeling of not wanting to get out of bed and the reward I will feel later actually is building a system within me, and that is a true statement, you will build that system within you. If you believe this is just overcoming pain so that I can drop those pounds so that I don't have to feel terrible about myself, well, you won't build that system. And this is the beauty and the mystery of the brain, which is that the forebrain can draw on all these contextual things. You can really give meaning to what would otherwise just be basic limbic experiences. Now, there aren't an infinite range of ways to do this. I can't cut myself with this little butter knife here and say, just kidding,

because I can't cut myself with this dagger that my fingers barely fill, by the way. Someone's got some big mitts. I can't put it through my hand and tell myself I didn't do that. There are limits to this. The laws of physics still apply. The laws of physiology still apply. But as we learn from the example of the milkshakes or the example about stress, positive or negative learnings about stress, there is a range of physiologies that we can experience according to something. I think this has important implications too for things like PTSD, interpreting the experiences of past.

Just telling oneself, oh, it wasn't that big of a deal, won't work. But telling oneself that there's no way to come back from that also is not true. Yeah. There's a couple things that I've been talking about for a while. The one I'm going to start with is this idea. I've been telling people for a while, hey, listen, you got tendencies. So we all have different tendencies. You might have a tendency, let's say, from a leadership perspective, that you're a micromanager.

And you've got to be aware of that tendency because if you don't, if you're not aware of it and you don't try and counter it, you're going to always end up micromanaging. Maybe you have a tendency to be hyperaggressive and you're too aggressive and you go and make, You try to run to the sound of the guns without really taking a step back. So you have to understand what your tendencies are. And then you've got to say, my tendency also might be right. So now I'm thinking about this from, and I also say, hey, listen, as a leader, you got to watch the crowd and you got to pay attention to make sure that the crowd is going in the right direction. When the crowd starts to get fired up about something like, yeah, we need to go assault that building. We need to go assault that building.

you should say to yourself, you should think to yourself the contrary. You should think, okay, wait a second, is that the right thing to do right now? Because it's really easy to get caught up in the crowd. And it's now I'm noticing a similar thing with our limbic system. Like there's a chance that your limbic system is correct. Absolutely. But you need to be aware of the tendency of your limbic system and make sure that what that freaking little tiny part of your animal brain is thinking, you need to put it in check.

And sometimes you go, yep, it's the right thing to do right now. I should get aggressive. I should go on the attack, but you need to run it through that check first. The other thing is when you're talking about milkshakes and what your attitude is, I mean, this is just so clear. When you, you know, from a leadership perspective, if we get told, hey, we got to go freaking do this mission and it's going to be a real, you know, a real tough mission, it's going to be a weather's horrible.

And that's how you bring it to the boys. Hey, guys, we got tasked with this mission. It's going to be freaking horrible. The weather's going to be bad. We're going to be freezing. If that's how you bring it to the boys, that's going to be the attitude all day long. If you come down and you say, hey, listen, check this out. There's a mission coming down.

It looks like a very tough situation. They know that we're the only ones that can probably be able to get this done. We're going to have this opportunity to go out there and get this, get this mission done. It's going to be hard, but it's going to have a big impact. Attitudes 180 out, right? So we have so much control just by what we're, thinking and then if you're in a leadership position the way you present things it's gonna it's gonna sway the way people think now I'll also tell you this if you

get told to do something horrible and you truly believe it's horrible and you go down to hey guys this could be if you basically lie to them they're gonna all know that you're lying like you can't fool you it's very difficult to fool a group of people into you know positive thinking well what's the the secret of the secret book right that's where it's like hey it's all coming out it's very hard to fool someone into that. But if you believe, hey, this is what we're doing, this is a huge opportunity. This is going to be a tough mission, but it's going to be worthwhile.

If that's what you believe, other people are going to get on board with that. And you really are going to have a totally different attitude going into it. As far as the PTSD thing, you know, I don't know when I heard this, but this impacted my whole, my whole thoughts on war. Um, it was, I, I want to say it might have been Bob Dole. You know, Bob Dole was a World War II guy who's wounded. You know, he never had, um, uh, I think one of his hands didn't work very well. But I remember hearing him say and I'm pretty sure it was him. Please don't.

I'm sorry if I'm getting some getting this wrong. But he said, simply put, he said, war made me better. And that is the 180 out of what. a lot of guys get told right now war is going to make you crazy it's going to make you depressed it's going to make you an adrenaline junkling it won't be any way to satisfy and guys hear that and you're going to have a hard time adjusting and we're going to have to try and assimilate you back into society because it's going to be so hard because of what you've seen whereas bob dole or whoever this veteran was like a war's going to make me better and i always i've used that

myself i've used that when people have said to me well i know do you feel was it hard for you She's saying when you look back and you've seen you've lost friends is like no all that stuff look it was horrible But my perspective is better I appreciate life more because I know that life can be lost very easily I appreciate freedom more because I know the price that was paid for it that didn't make me worse Actually made me better so I think we have to be careful of that kind of thing and you you can also then go down the whole road of like a social contagion where you've got people reinforcing behaviors or reinforcing mindsets and it starts to spread where now everybody's thinking, well, you know, if you went to war, you must be messed up. And then I think, well, if I went to war, I guess I must be messed up because that's what we're doing.

And this goes across the board with, you know, you mentioned the one guy earlier that was cutting the bottom of his feet, right? And you hear these horrible stories. That's a social contagion where these outbreaks of girls, primarily girls, you know, 12 to 16 years old would be cutting themselves and it's something that would oh, that's what we're doing was kind of this these things would spread and a You know we talked about one of our other podcast. I think it was believe Belemia right that started a guy wrote an article about it there had been some small number of cases ever Oh right. I heard about this a little while and then

He he he wrote an article about it and this is I want to say in the 70s maybe and all of a sudden they have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of cases because people said oh they they get this idea and look it is a real thing and that he was reporting or you know documenting people this really happened to but once people got that idea it was like oh that's what we're doing and you see this with a lot of a lot of strange things that are spreading right now in in in in America and worldwide where you go hey that's that didn't that wasn't a thing not too long ago right that wasn't the thing not too long ago and now it is

A couple of reflections, some that pertains specifically the SEAL teams, but what you're referring to is the fact that nervous systems are profoundly impacting each other. So your example of the group is getting really ramped up. We want to fight. Let's go, you know, swift violent action now. And you're stepping back as the leader and saying, wait, you're effectively acting as the forebrain over a group that's effectively acting as a limbic system. That's exactly what I was trying to say. And so nervous systems can be studied in isolation or in groups. It's harder to do that in the laboratory, although there are people there are starting to put two people into a scanner and having them interact and seeing how the brain areas interact.

It's harder to do for obvious reasons. Ali Crum's group actually did a study which simply asked, do you think stress harms you or grows you and measured physiologies, cortisol, etc. and there was only one group that across the board answered, stress grows you and it was seals. So she's done work on military communities and she's done work on civilians, and that's a published paper. You can find it on her website.

She runs our mind-body lab at Stanford, really a brilliant person who, I think it's the experience, the reason I listed off all her credentials or some of her credentials of her credentials of athlete, et cetera, is that she really understands the mind-body relationship from a first-person experience. It's not just a geek in a lab.

You know, it's not geek at all, actually, but very, very smart. The other thing is that is this notion of social contagion, and we are profoundly influenced by sensory experience. And one of the most intense sensory experiences are the words and actions of others. Some people are drawn more toward or are shifted more by other people's emotional states. We sometimes hold up empathy as this ideal. But empathy is very dangerous because empathy for the wrong in the wrong context, you know, your kid freaking out about an experience at school. If you freak out, if you experience true empathy, you abandon your own emotional state,

that's not effective parenting or effective leadership. So empathy is wonderful only insofar as it allows us to go in, understand, and then return to the context and make better decisions. And that's a complicated set of neural operations. but again, it all has to do with a confidence and an ability to leave your own emotional state, go in and be comfortable that you can get back out. So empathy is a razor is a double-sided blade, really. Interestingly, you know, I'll have the idea of empathy raised with me a lot through leadership.

You know, isn't it important to be empathetic? And I've always made a distinction between, well, what I really want to do is I want to be better at understanding what your perspective is. So I want to truly understand what your perspective is, but I don't really want to actually feel what you're feeling, because now I might have messed up what I'm trying to, what my perspective is. And by the way, I want to get as many different perspectives as I can

so that I can fully see the problem and understand it from the maximum number of angles, so now I can most easily find a solution. Whereas if I dive in to just looking and feeling the way you're feeling, That's not good. So, yeah, you can both drown. And, you know, it can both drown. It's the jumping into the river to save somebody and you can both drown.

I like this notion of perspective because an ability to see throughout the lens of other people is extremely important, obviously. But the ability to return to one's own internal state is obviously the one of the hallmarks of great leadership, as you know. The idea of groups and how to how bad things spread between groups is that there's, there's, this will explain a lot of what we see. on social media and in the press, there was a set of controversial but nonetheless important experiments done in the 1960s by a guy named Robert Heath. This was at a time when you could sign up for an experiment to have electrodes put into your head and you could, for a nominal amount of money, you could stimulate the electrodes located at different locations and tell Dr. Robert Heath what you're experiencing.

This is three papers, some of which were published in the journal Science, which is one of our kind of Super Bowl. We have the Super Bowl NBA Championship and Stanley Cup of Science and they are nature science and sell. Those are the three top journals. Science is a very good journal. He published this paper. Basically, subjects were allowed to stimulate a variety of different areas of their brain. In their own brain. In their own brain. Stimulate one area and the person, he'd say, what do you feel? They'd say, a little drunk. Stimulate another area. What do you feel? Kind of giddy. What do you feel? A little bit of anger, et cetera.

And then he would just tell people, you can stimulate any area that you want, but you have only 10 minutes to do it. So they'd play around on the keyboard. Again, couldn't do this experiment now, but really cool experiment. The area that all the subjects chose to stimulate the most, far more, more, excuse me, than other areas, is an area of the midline thalamus, for what it's worth, and the subjective experience that they all reported, mild frustration and anger.

You know, what is going on here? Why would human beings want to feel frustration and anger? Well, it turns out that this medial thalamus area is linked up with the dopamine system. we may not like limbic friction of the sort like overcoming fatigue to go exercise or stress and needing to calm down, but human beings seem to love the feeling of being pissed off just a little bit. And I mention this not because I like this result. I kind of hate this result, but I guess that just speaks to the result itself, which is that there's something about it

which feels motivating. Anger feels good at a low level because it puts us into a a state of activation and we like states of activation and relaxation. And guess what? It puts us in a state of activation without us having to do anything. We're right back where we were before. Dopamine hits without any effort. Being angry is a dopamine hit without having to do anything. And people will sit there all day.

And I confess there are times, you know, no one's ever put a negative comment on our comment in my Instagram. I'm just kidding. And you find, why do we orient to those? Well, we could say, oh, it hurts. It's actually, frankly, unless it's something I really need to pay attention to, I don't really care, right? Because typically they're of a nature that's not really meaningful that doesn't come from a place of understanding. I don't like misunderstandings.

I do read comments, but you want people to understand things. But when people are just mean-spirited, we'll find ourselves orienting towards those because being a little angry turns out to be a dopamine hit. And I am, and I've become very conscious of this because I'm, I've become very conscious of this because I think social media is a place where we can all get drawn down these paths where you can spend all day in a battle in your head that doesn't mean anything. Or worse, you can respond to things in a way that can sink your whole career. You see this. I mean, the chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia University was fired for a tweet that was just a very insensitive tweet.

It wasn't an anger-based tweet, but that just tells me. What was the tweet? There was a picture of a model. and he made a very insensitive remark about her genetic lineage. I just don't even want to bring it up. I don't want to restate it because it was... How long ago was this?

It was recently. People can Google it. I don't know what went through his mind, but here's what I know. This guy's a psychiatrist. He's one of the leading psychiatrists in the world, and he couldn't think two steps ahead for whatever reason.

You know, it's interesting. We've been given a hard time to Instagram a bunch today, But now you start talking about, now we're starting to talk about Twitter. Because it is crazy. It is crazy that there's people that are, you can see it. When you read through what they're writing, they are feeling legitimate anger. Like, I'm like you. Like, I'll read something like, oh, it's kind of funny.

You know, even when people are saying. Yeah, person feels powerless. I can see it. I see their comment and I go, gosh, they must really feel powerless in this world. And I feel sad for them. But they are pissed. So they're getting a little dopamine hit by creating just friction and mayhem. And I think a lot of people show up.

I hate to demonize Twitter, but I have to say Instagram is a pretty kind place on average. I think there is a certain category of people that show up to Twitter to experience that form of dopamine hit. They are there to fight. But they're not there to fight outright. They're not going to meet you in the parking lot. They're not going to go toe to toe on a data point. They'd rather go through and kind of find little misunderstandings and then hijack misunderstandings. understandings to try and elevate their status within this so-called fight. And if you think about

the range of meaningless circular career and life diminishing behaviors, this would be at the top, near the top of the list. This is like the poor guy in the parking lot who's, you know, organizing leaves in the corner. And you go, he's lost his mind. You know, it's really sad, except these are people who arguably still have a mind to retrieve. So this is, you know, who knows. Arguably. Arguably. So, you know, when I saw those rights, you know, when I saw those rights, Robert Heath results, I thought, gosh, people don't like to be angry. People don't like to be pissed off. And yet that low level anger and frustration has direct links to the reward pathway.

And I think we would all be wise to know when we're drifting toward that because we are all capable. Listen, if this circuitry exists in us, we're all capable of it. I believe the Carl Jung statement, even though I'm not a psychologist, we have all things inside of us. Well, it's also, I'm sitting here painting myself very guilty because if you think about like listening to hardcore music. This is music that is fueled by anger and fuels anger.

And it feels good. Like the first time I ever heard like the crow mags, I was like, oh, this is what I want to listen to now. Like this is it. You know, the first time you hear agnostic front, you're like, okay, this is what I want to listen to now because you get that little, you get that hit. So that got me hook line and sinker, man.

But you channeled it into something. So that's anger and dopamine with. effort, but then you took that and you applied it to something. You listen to it while you train. You orient towards a mindset. The examples are very nuanced and particular to ourselves, so they're not even worth sharing, but there are songs and things in my head that I hear that allow me to show up a better person. And I'm actually not the first to discuss this. The great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about this. He wrote the book Awakening's and he wrote the man who mistook his wife for a hat. He was looked at clinical abnormalities and taught people about how the brain works and based on how it breaks in these beautiful books.

But he was also held the California State record for back squat. Check. Respect. I don't know about these books. You're talking about whatever. I don't know these psychological things you're saying, but record in back squat. Yeah. This is a guy who was serious about his physical training.

He talked about this. He talked about anchoring to emotional states through for him listening. to classical music, then being able to access creative works of writing. Being able to listen to angry, he talked even about things that evoke anger, and then being able to take that anger and bring that to his ability to work very long hours in the clinic to help people that were on wards of hospitals that no one would dare go down, let alone go in there and help these people. These are just, imagine the worst place to ever be placed as a Parkinson's patient or an Alzheimer's. These are torture chambers that he would go into and he would take people out of the hospital.

he did incredible humanitarian works. So he talked about channeling these reflexive tendencies toward good and toward building a career and a life. And so I think listening to the Chromeags, if you can put, you obviously put that into something useful, just sitting there in your room and just listening over and over endlessly and not leaving and being angry at the world or looking at what the Columbine kids did, just being pissed off at everybody and then going and just, you know, hosing a cafeteria with bullets. Well, obviously, it can go either way.

And so I think that learning to harness these more primitive states is very useful. We can't eliminate these states. We can't pretend they don't exist, but you can funnel them into real, not just benevolent, but really human species growing actions. Yeah. And I think this is like another, just to bring up this word awareness again, we got some awareness now of the dopamine and what that crash is going to feel like. And now we can start to put that into the calculus of how we're behaving.

And now we're talking about the limbic system and understanding and being aware of what the limbic system is trying to do and that it may or may not be leading you in the right direction, but you need to use your own brain to put that thing in check and either go with it or say, no, not right now. So these things to become aware of these things, very important. And well, you said this kind of thing has only been around for a limited amount of time. Most, you know, for most of human history, they just been, it's just been happening. Yeah. Well, the effort to get the dopamine reward has been there. There was a time in which violent battle was adaptive, and there are still times where violent battle is adaptive, and then there are times when it'll completely sink your life, right?

I mean, I think that we are in a very important time right now where we can trigger activation of all these neural circuitries sitting at home. We don't even have to get out of bed. But we see, I think, the explosion of mental illness, the explosion of anxiety and depression and ADHD is absolutely the consequence of ready availability of pleasures without effort, lack of understanding about how our own basic physiology works. I have great respect for the fields of psychology. Great respect. But thinking about your thinking is useful. But knowing that you can put a wedge in between. your thinking and your physiology is also useful. Not better, but also useful. And so, for instance, if you're somebody who suffers from anxiety, practice physiological size, long exhales. If you're somebody who feels a motivated, think about how much pleasure you're or sensory stuff and food

and stuff you're consuming without effort first. Start to embrace this idea that effort followed by reward, repeat, effort, reward, repeat is not just something that I'm saying. It's been the signature pattern of life progression in individuals, it's been the signature pattern of the evolution of our species. That was true a thousand years ago. That's true today and it's likely going to be true a thousand years from now. I mean, I love the idea that companies like Neuralink and stuff are going to develop little devices. You just trigger your motivation circuitry. But guess what? Dopamine is a non-infinite but renewable resource. If you just dump all your dopamine because you stimulate with an electrode, you're, you can, we know this from experiments in the lab. You keep

triggering those brain areas. You're not going to be a motivated person. person 24 hours a day, you're just going to deplete all your dopamine. So unless they have a plan to also put dopamine back in the system, there's no neurotechnologies that's going to overcome the technology of the brain completely. You can augment it, but you're not going to overcome it. You're not going to build a cyborg warrior that completely discards with the human element because everything that you've talked about in terms of leadership and self-control, all these four-brain circuits. And I've been describing the forebrain as one thing, like a break on the limbic. system or an accelerator on the limbic system.

But it's really like spinning multiple plates. The ability you use your forebrain, it feels hard, feels like effort, even if you're just sitting in a chair, because you have to spin a plate over here and then you have to spin a plate over. You have to think, okay, those guys are going to go there. Then they're going to arrive at this time. Then I'm going to arrive at this time. A lot of people just go, ah, they're like overwhelmed.

You have to calm yourself, as you know, and think, okay, then when they arrive and this, what are these plates that spin and give me a little bit more. These are, think about the forebrain circuits as working in parallel. You don't have one four brain. You have maybe five or six four brain circuits. A simple operation would be lifting up this drink to drink it. A more complicated thing would be trying to think about doing this every time Echo puts his hand on his chin throughout the whole podcast while we're having a conversation.

Now I have to spin multiple plates. I have to keep things going in real time. It's a trivial example because it's not important when he does that. But it allows me to demonstrate that we can contextualize anything. We can say, you know, every time that shadow moves, you know, every time that shadow moves, you know, to the left just a little bit. Did that shadow move? I don't know if that shadow move.

That's a lot of vigilance, but sure, you can occupy your whole forebrain with that, or you can do that while paying attention to how many guys are out on the ground or moving behind you. So your forebrain, it goes under high demand. When we sleep, we regain the capacity to do that multiple plate spinning type of operation. And when you go into non-sleep deep rest, when we turn off that effort, we reinstate that effort. I'll just mention one experiment. There's done out of a lab in Scandinavia.

They had people just lie down and do a yoga nidra type, or just you could go online and do nsDR, just do nsdr made for it. It's a free script. You can listen to this, do it for 30 minutes. They found that when people do that sort of exercise of just deliberate decompression, not engaging their forebrain, doing long exhales,

the amount of dopamine in a brain structure called the basal ganglia was replenished. That's very important. The basal ganglia are involved in directing go actions and no go. One way that people can get better at controlling their behavior and limbic friction is I do this actually. I'm slightly embarrassed but also proud to say 20 times a day I find myself wanting to do something like pick up the phone. I've been wanting to pick up that little paperclip this whole podcast because I like it for reasons I don't understand and not allowing myself to do it.

For reasons that are trivial, but what am I doing? I'm engaging the no-go pathway. So try and learn to overcome limbic friction by forcing yourself to do things that you don't want to do. try and force yourself to not do things that you want to do even trivial things. And what you're doing is you're building up these little circuitries. And the basal ganglia depend on dopamine. Different receptors for go and no go, but dopamine. The deep relaxation restores your ability to do this.

Remember, non-inflate but renewable. So the more plate spinning, the more go-no-goes you perform throughout the day, the more you deplete this circuitry, 30 minutes of a non-sleep deep rest or a good night's sleep, whatever that means for you, reinstates those dopamine levels. So it's at the end of the day, we're more than a bag of chemicals, but this stuff has been baked into us. So check this out, something I've been teaching a decent amount lately, and it just, it'll be very interesting to see how this overlays on your spinning plates. So we, I've been trying to teach people.

I got asked a question. I was up at an event. And at this event, some of my guys that worked for me in the SEAL teams were there, Laif Bab and Andrew Paul. And these guys happened to tell a couple stories where like, oh, you know, Jocko did this. He made this decision right here and it was great. And then, you know, Andrew got up and said, oh, this other time Jocko made. And so they painted me and made me look really cool. And, you know, I was kind of, you know, my eagle is inflating.

And then during one of the breaks, a couple of the guys that were there. These are business guys. They came up, you know, said, you know, you have just such great instincts. It's so obvious, you know, as a leader that you just have these great instincts. and I was kind of like, yeah, you know, it's pretty, I'm a problem. I'm really got really good instincts. And they kind of inflated my ego and I felt great about myself. And then I went back, we were out the woods and I went back to my, my little cabin.

And I started thinking to myself, wait a second. First of all, if the only thing I have is good leadership instincts and I'm just a good natural leader and that's what I have, and that's what I have, what good is it to me to be able to talk to anyone else about it if it's just something that I naturally have that no one else can have. That doesn't make any sense. And I said, and by the way, I know for a fact I didn't always have these things. So then I started thinking about, well, how do I actually make decisions when I've got a bunch of chaotic things going on? And I sat down and I wrote down what I do in my brain when things are happening, when things are going on, when there's an enemy contact, when there's a problem out on the battlefield. What is a business problem? What am I doing?

And I wrote down sort of these things that I think about. And I ended up saying, hey, this, we went back later that night. And I said, hey, you guys asked me this question and asked me about my instinct. Well, let me tell you, it's not instinct. I am running a loop in my head to check that I am going in the right direction. Number one thing I always think about is time. How much time do I have right now? Something's going on and I have to make a decision.

Do I have 20 minutes to make that decision? Do I have three minutes to make? Do I have to make a decision right now? I think about the fundamental laws of combat that we talk about all the time. Like, hey, are we going to support each other if I make this decision? Is it going to help us as a team if I make this decision? Oh, and by the way, can I communicate it simply? Okay, if I can communicate it simply great.

Hey, where does this fall on our priority list? What number priorities? Is this a higher priority that we've been doing? Do I need to shift priorities? Do I need to tell everyone to shift priorities? Or does this not fit the top priority? Decentralized command. Can I get someone can I delegate this problem to someone else? Can I give it to them so that I can then look up and out and I had this

So I went through this list of things. Hey is this part of the mission that we're actually trying to do? Because sometimes you're on a mission and you get distracted by something else and all of a sudden you get focused on that you you can't allow yourself to do that and I had this whole list of things of these thoughts that I will go through and the most important thing as I get done telling explaining this list of things to people is you can't You can't get caught on any one of these things. If you get caught on the time factor, you'll never figure out if this is actually part of the mission. If you only focus on, hey, is this part of our mission? You might run out of time before you make a decision. So in my mind, when you talk about these spinning plates, I get it. And what I realize, and when you were talking about looking at a shadow and paying attention to it, you do have to pay attention to that.

You have to check on it, but you can't forget about everything else that's going on. So this is an interesting dynamic when I hear these that my frontal lobe has these spinning plates. Well, I know that I can't really pay attention to them all at the same time. So I have to kind of like check this one, give it a little spin. Check this one, balance it. Check this one, balance it. And if I get focused on one, another one's going to get dropped. So that's what I do is I go through and I look, okay, let me check this, let me check this, let me check this.

And I keep going around in a circle in a loop. And this can all happen in a half a second. You can do all these things over and over again. But if you get stuck in one of these things, you're going to fall apart. And this goes back to you ever heard of the Oudalup, observe, or you decide and act. It's the same thing.

You have to keep it moving. And if you get stuck on trying to decide what to do, if you get, I can't make a decision, you're going to fall apart. If you get stuck in action, which some people think, oh, that'd be good. You're taking action.

No, but if you are taking action, but you're not running the feedback and seeing how this action is affecting everything else that's happening around you, you have to do the action, then you have to go back and observe how it's impacting this scenario and then orient yourself to where you are now and then decide if that was a good action or not. So this idea of spinning plates is very interesting to me because they're out there. I know that I know that there's times when I have all these plates spinning and I know that if I get focused on one of those spinning plates, I'm going to drop some other ones and then everything's going to fall apart. Yeah, it's what the examples you provide are really key because first of all, it's high demand work. You know, one can get comfortable, what we're referring to as spinning plates.

Some people experience overwhelmed trying to do two things. You know, we so value this notion of focus. And focus is wonderful, but we sometimes forget that the brain does not have one spotlight of focus. The way to think about focus is that we are old world primates and we can do something called covert attention. So I can talk to you, pay attention to you, but I can also pay attention to echo. I've got two spotlights. I can intensify a spotlight. I can start to pay attention to some specific feature of what you're saying or doing. And as I do that, he starts to disappear a little bit and then I can switch, right? These are the attentional mechanisms of the forebrain. If you want to play that game,

I assure you if we put you in a scanner, your prefrontal cortex will be lighting up like crazy, meaning high levels of metabolic activity there. I can also take those two spotlights and merge them to a single location. I can make them more intense. I can broaden them and I can make them more diffuse. We don't have three spotlights. We have two, but we don't just have one. And so if you understand attention as two spotlights, maybe one that's right there and one that's drifting, maybe two that can merge to a specific location. Or if you need to, when we talk about spinning multiple plates, what we're talking about is toggling back and moving those spotlights and knowing that at one point, as you described, attention will truly be off some element and which element it is off

of and what it's on is crucial in high stakes, high consequences, scenarios like you described, it's vital to survival. So we can learn how to do this, however. Learning how to sit down and read a book without any distraction, or I actually like to put my phone right next to me and do a bunch of no-goes. Every time that thing calls me, I just give it a little, no, F you. No, no. And I, you know, you're practicing the no-go pathway and reading a book. The other thing that's very useful for developing focus is something that people don't do often enough anymore, including me, which is writing in complete sentences. The ability to write and think in complete sentences is hard work. I have a colleague at Stanford, Carl Diceroth. He no doubt will win a Nobel Prize.

He's a psychiatrist and a bioengineer and incredibly successful in science, also as five kids, practicing clinical psychiatrist. I asked him, what is your tool? What in the world are you doing? And he says, well, at least once every 24 hours, I sit down in a chair and I force myself to stay completely motionless and think only in complete sentences for about a half an hour. I tried doing this for about five minutes. It is really tough. I invite anyone to try and only write in complete sentences for five minutes when they journal, as opposed to and texting. We tend to use, you know, descriptive clauses. And, we tend to do fragments now. Now, the brain thinks in kind of fragments and symbols,

and that's very efficient. We wouldn't want to only think in complete sentences. But by writing in complete sentences, by forcing that pain of writing or that pain of thinking in a structured way, you are building up, you are reinforcing the neural circuits that support the so-called spinning of multiple plates, the ability to move the spotlight to a single location. You're learning it to harness the spotlight at one location.

And so I think a lot of people don't realize they can train these circuits related to attention. You might say, well, how could writing complete sentences help me multitask? That doesn't make any sense. You're still taking control of these attentional systems. It's like learning how to operate any vehicle. Of course, it's not going to allow you to operate that vehicle in every context and in every way that vehicle could be operated. But you're learning the basic mechanics of attention when you force yourself to write in complete sentences, to think or speak in complete sentences.

This is why I do the long podcast. I do these two and a half hour podcasts by myself, and it's hard. And I think, oh, this is hard, but I can't just say a half a sentence and then just drop it because I know the rest of what I wanted to say. It's work, but it feels good. And this is the other element,

which is that over time the dopamine system can be woven into the systems that control effort. I guess the notion of growth mindset is, you know, learning to couple, Carol Dweck's beautiful work is learning to couple the notion that effort is good for us, but neurochemically we can start to experience friction and think, ah, this is growing me. You know, in any other context, it would be corny, but in this context and because of a Leocrum study of Navy SEALs,

I can appropriately say, learn to think about effort like a seal would, which is, this is growing me. In that thought, you are releasing dopamine in response to effort. In other words, the more friction, you always say good, more friction good. I actually think about that a lot. I've had some trying circumstances recently, uninteresting for sake of this podcast. And I thought, God, this is either going to make or break us. And I thought, what if I just decided that the more stress now, the better it's going to be? And it's instantaneous.

But then you have to keep doing that. And then when you wake up sleep deprived, you have to do it again. And when someone triggers, you have to do it again. So I love the Oodaloupe. And I love that you raised, for the first time I heard you. someone raised the udal loop not as something that's done once, but it's done over and over and over. So it's udaloups, plural.

Yeah. And I think we always hear about it as a unitary thing, but it's udaloups like you're in observation over here and you're in action on this one. Yeah. And so it's multiple udal loops. Yep. Yeah.

And by the way, you're running like a tactical, low level, like real time, short term ud loop for what I'm going to get out of this right now, but at the same time you're running a bigger oudal loop or you should be a strategic oudel loop that's looking at like, well, how is this going to affect me? you know, six months from now. And then you've got an even bigger one that's going in five years.

That's the access. And you've got all these different oodle loops going on at the same time that you have to be running. Yeah. Forgive me, I didn't mean to interrupt. That's the four, I was just too excited. I got too excited. I couldn't,

I didn't suppress my forebrain. The interrupting is a forebrain limbic friction glitch. Forgive me, that's your forebrain accessing the library of past, present and future. You know this, when you talked about, Here's another interesting crossover.

So a lot of times when I talk about people taking a step back, taking a breath, looking around, it's the word I use for them for doing that is detach. You have to detach from the chaos and the mayhem. You have to detach from your own emotions. Well, interestingly, another thing I will tell people, when they've got more of a, let's say, a slow burning problem that they want to figure out a solution for, one of the things I recommend they do is they write down what the problem is, write down what some various solutions are. And what that does is it literally detaches you from the problem because

now you're having to think through really what this problem is and how you're going to articulate it on a piece of paper for yourself. And then you're going to look at it from a detached perspective. You're going to read the words that you wrote. And it really does allow you to see a new perspective and hopefully find a solution. Another thing I've been saying a lot lately is the solutions to your problem are not in the problem. When you have a problem, the solutions are not in there. If the solutions were in there, you just, it wouldn't be a problem.

You just solve it. You have to get outside the problem. You have to figure out how to take a step back, how to see it from a different perspective. Because if the solution to the problem was in the problem, you would just execute on that thing. It wouldn't even be an issue. So we have to take a step back. And one of the best ways to do that if you have the time and the opportunity to do it in

usually in what we call in the military and administrative situation, meaning there's no bullets flying, sit down, write down what is going on, what the problem is, maybe what some ideas are about viable solutions. But I think it's even better just to really detail what you see the problem is because if you start trying to write down solutions, you're already trying to impose solutions on it. Write down what the problem is. Look at it. Take walk away from it. Come back and read it again.

And you're going to start to see that you're going to have a better chance of finding a solution than if you're living inside the problem. Yeah, I love that. I need to do it more often. I used to journal all the time. One of the problems with the phone is that it includes the ability to write down a quick note. I'll use the notes function where I'll put something into my voice memos. But anytime I go back, it's very fragmented. I think that writing and writing in complete sentences or diagramming is enormously powerful.

I also, there was something you said that I need to think about in terms of this ability to zoom out. We don't really know what that is, you know, the feeling of being in, we wake up every day and we know, we recognize ourselves in the mirror. It's amazing if you think about it. And we never wonder if we're somebody else, if provided we're not psychotic. Wait a second. Let me catch up with you mentally here because I'm trying to figure out why it's amazing that I realize and recognize myself in the mirror. Why is that amazing? Well, we don't really know where the notion of the self sits in the nervous.

system. And yet we go through life always experiencing things from a frame of reference of ourselves. A few people experience out-of-body stuff. There's a big effort now, of course, to use ketamine-type therapies and dissociative anesthetics to help people move out of trauma. This is a work that's being done in clinics. And I've never tried these things or been part of these trials. But every time I hear a patient's report about it, they say, I experience myself as getting out of the car, seeing myself in the car of myself. Like, you know, normally we wake up and we're in our body and we go. I think that's amazing. But I think I'm a neuroscientist. I wanted to understand where your perspective is, yeah, I get it now. Yeah, it's, it's incredible because it's, and we don't know where that sits. There's

no brain region or brain circuit that's, there's no clinical syndrome that people dissociate from self in that way, maybe multiple personalities, but that's more rare than most people believe. but dissociative states are rare. And so we go through life mostly from this perspective of me, me, me, me, me. And one thing that's been very helpful to me, at least, has been a colleague. Again, Carl Diceroy said, you know, most of the time, we have no idea how other people feel. In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel. We don't even know how to, we don't even have a language that can explain feelings.

I don't know if how you feel right now, it relates at all to my understanding of how you feel. we can start really drifting into the weird and abstract. And as you've noticed up until now, I'm a pretty nuts and bolts guy. I like physiology. I love physiology of the nervous system and hormone systems. That's mainly what I've worked on. But I like actionable tools. I like, you know, in the military, right, it's, I have to assume that before a gunfight,

you can't just say, all right, guys, be brave and go in with a full heart, right? You need, like, this is what happens when X happens. You need plans. You need protocols. And in science and in neuroscience, there are now protocols. We've been talking about those. But then there are the more abstract notions of the self and others and how to do that. And I think that's really where the future of neuroscience lies, is in trying to parse some of those deeper understandings.

I don't have any knowledge to shed on that. All I can say is that we all are very self-oriented. We all tend to approach life through the lens of self. And so I'm struck again and again when I read your book and when talking today, your ability to this notion of taking others' perspectives. I think that's probably hard work for most people. And that occurs to me as something that's probably just as important to practice as writing in complete sentences. Yeah, I have a couple triggers that I use when you approach me with your plan and your plan doesn't make sense to me. That immediately tells me, okay, he sees something I don't see.

I need to try and get in his head. I need to try and figure out what his perspective is. when you're mad, you come into my office and I can see that you're mad. I immediately, I'm not thinking what's wrong with him. I'm thinking, what does he see that I don't see? And yeah, that's a critical part of not only just leadership, but just interacting with other human beings. You know, if you, when I'm married, I've been married for a long time.

When my wife, I can see a look on her face, she's not happy. I think what is happening? What is she seeing? what's her perspective on this that's making her not happy right now because it's not going to benefit me to have her continue down this path and it's usually something that I can make an adjustment on pretty quickly and allow her to see maybe some of what I'm seeing or allow her to see a little bit of a different perspective so yeah extremely important don't you ever do some things like even as a as a scientist where you're running an experiment and you get done and

it kind of like felt like it was a like it was just kind of happening like you weren't like you know they say I definitely have felt that way I feel like you know if I'm doing jiu jitsu have a good role man I'm not in there I'm kind of watching uh you you you want to do that you want to be able to detach do do you have that in the in your business yeah that you know people talk about flow states uh I'm friendly with Stephen Kotler and so I like to joke about flow that the the most thing that The most that we can say about flow at this point in history is that backwards it spells wolf, meaning I don't think we really know how that's generated in the brain. Because some people describe it as a sense of losing time and being really in the experience.

Other people describe it as being kind of third personing the experience. And so this is more of a call to action for more definition about what flow is. There's probably five different kinds of flow. I've certainly had the experience of automaticity where I'm like, who's actually doing this stuff? you know, you get into these action patterns that are so trained, you're just watching yourself. You know, for me, it would be really nerdy stuff. Like, I can dissect a retina like nobody else. Let me put it that way.

If you need me to take out an eyeball and put a retina on anything, get under a microscope, like I'm your guy. I've done it so many hundreds of thousands of times and so from so many different eyeballs, everything from human eyeballs right down to, you know, a marmoset eyeball. So I'm the guy for that. But typically, I think I'm not used to third. personing quite as much. Certainly situations. I try and look at situations. I tend to do it by assembling a small team. So if there are data that don't make sense or with my podcast team, I love working in this small group of guys and we, you know, whiteboard, what do we want to do? How do we

want to structure things? So I tend to outsource my forebrain. One of the things that you see in, and I'm not describing myself here, but in creatives, they need handlers. People that are very creative, learn to put those spotlights into their creative endeavor so much so that making toast is work. And so they tend to, as they achieve more success, dedicating more and more of the everyday things to other people in an effort to try and get in that narrow trench. And so they're really taking, instead of trying to spin multiple plates related to multiple things, they're like, let's get all the plates spinning in unison and just focus on this. And that could be very beneficial, but it does tend to take away that ability to outsource and be a multitasker.

And so I think success is a dangerous thing in that way because the further up you go in science, the fewer experiments you're doing and the more you're just focused on narrow things. And there sometimes people will bring me data and I'll say, oh, that means this. And I'm like, no, that means that. And I'm like, well, I've been doing this a lot longer than you have. And I'm blah, blah, blah. I'm the professor at Stanford. And then I would think to myself, way to say they're a lot closer to the data than I am.

And so we sit back and look at it as a group. So I tend to do it through groups. But I'll be on the lookout for this. Anytime you've described third personing or this notion of good growth from stress, great. Now I know why you say that. I think we can put a neuroscience definition on that because more stress equals more growth, something that most people don't believe in Allie Crum's work, research on the seal teams, indicates, if not proves, that they believe this.

More stress equals more growth. I think that's something that I'm certainly trying to adopt more and more in my life, especially as I get older. We tend to get a little complacent and set in our ways, right? No. Well, not you, but we, no, not you either. People in general, some of us tend to default towards the things that feel good and move away from friction. But if friction is the lever for growth and more friction equals more growth and absolutely it does, well then your statement, good, makes complete sense. So what do we what are we doing food wise?

How deep are you into diet food? What are we doing? Let's say let's let's go back to you know we woke up in the morning. We got some we got some light. We did some workout. We haven't taken any caffeine yet. Maybe we hopped in the cold bath. Now it starts, you know, now the day is moving along.

At what point are we eating? 11 a.m. Very similar to me. What are we eating at 11 a.m.? I'm laughing as I, in size, I say this because recently I've, you know, if you want to engage those neural circuits for battle online, just talk about nutrition or training. Oh, yeah. You know, so people will be like, this guy's a neurosite. I'm going to talk about what works for me.

And I'm 46, and I'm happy that I can run far, not too fast, but I can run far, and I can lift. objects that certainly are not the heaviest objects in any environment, but I'm comfortable with my strength and endurance, and I feel good. That's what matters to me, and that I can focus, and I can work even after I train. So when I wake up, I'm going to hydrate 90 minutes to two hours later. I'm going to drink caffeine, which is typically Yerba Mote, pour over Yerba Mote, not the smoky ones. Turns out the smoky ones are loaded with carcinogens, so as bad as smoking. That sounds bad. It's really bad.

But I like that stuff a lot. And I'm not just saying this to make you guys happy. I'm loving these energy drinks. I've been drinking them for a few weeks now. So loving it. Also, because I don't like sucralose. Oh, yeah, you did the ingredient check. I did the ingredient check.

And it's not be, I don't dislike sucralose because I think it's going to kill my microbiome. I'm not trying to be catastrophic about it. I just don't like the way it tastes. But I think monk fruit stevia to me are fine. I'll occasionally have some aspartame. I'm not a big consumer of aspartame. But yeah, the fact that it's sweetened with monk fruit I like. No, they're not paying me to say this.

I really like this stuff. Although I'd be happy to work with you guys. I think I want to just be clear. The alpha-GPC is something that I take in supplement form, unless I'm drinking something that has alpha-GPC in it. There are good data on it. Alpha-GPC is basically a chlorine donor increases acetylcholine, which is a molecule release from the nucleus basalis of Minert.

Minert was the anatomis, that helps enhance the intensity of those spotlights to put sort of a general description on it and the ability to engage those spotlights. That's why we put it in there. So Alpha GPC is something that, you know, and there's some evidence that it can offset some age-related cognitive decline and those kinds of things. So there are a number of things in there that I like it. So I'll drink some caffeine.

I train in the early part of the day. And that I can just quickly say that. Or we can talk about training separately. But I hit the weights every other day. I do, I run on the days I don't train with weights. And I do all workouts for about an hour. Very basic, but I've been doing that for 30 years. Check.

Okay. I train, you know, I can get into the details, but, you know, anyway. The food thing is basically after I train, I can last about an hour or so before I'm really hungry. And then I'll typically have some fruit and some starch if I've trained hard. If it's a glycogen depleting workout, you know, hit the weights, then I'll have a big bowl of oatmeal and some fruit and I make sure I actually like throwing a little bit of butter and some fish oil in there and, you know, some fats and a protein drink at 11. And then around 1.30 or two, I want a real meal. And on the days when I don't train with the weights, I typically don't

have that oatmeal protein drink meal. Instead, I'll have a real meal right at 11 or so. And typically, it's a piece of meat, a piece of grass-fed meat. Usually at steak, I do not like chicken. I don't know why. It just doesn't appeal to me. I'll eat it if I have to. I might have a piece of salmon, but I'm not crazy about salmon. I'll have a piece of grass-fed beef, like a rib-eye or a hamburger patty or two and a salad. And maybe I'll have a slice of bread or something, a good bread, usually not.

And then through the afternoon, I'm good. I typically will work anytime I'm not training or eating. I try and just eat and not do work at the same time, but oftentimes I'm usually. eating while I'm training, oh, while I'm eating while I'm working. So I have lunch and take care of some email. And then in the afternoon, I will do after lunch, I'll typically lie down and do an NSDR, get a little nap, wake up. Where you sleep, sleep, where I'll go under into the state of deep relaxation for 10 to 30 minutes. Do that. And then I can really do another work about in the afternoon. So I do some work in the morning, obviously. I work out in the morning. I eat at 11, the post workout and then a lunch,

or just the lunch if I didn't work out with the weights. And then I will do a little bit of deep relaxation, 10 to 30 minutes. Get up from that. Hydrate. I'll typically take a quick walk outside. So none of that takes more than about 15 minutes. And then I try and drop into another work bout. And throughout the after.

Work bouts. Yeah. I like that. Because I think of these as 90 minute bouts of work. The brain functions in what are called ultradian cycles. We have circadian, which means 24 ultradian, which is 90 minute cycles. All your sleep is broken up into 90 minute cycles. all your waking states are broken up in a 90 minute cycles.

With some training, you can teach yourself to focus really hard on something for about 90 minutes. But sometimes it's email. Sometimes it's writing. Sometimes it's data analysis. Sometimes it's podcast prep, et cetera. But after about 90 minutes of intense work, I try and take a minute, view a horizon, relax, walk around. I try not to look at my phone. And then I'll go back into another bout of work.

So I'm getting three or four intense bouts of work throughout the day. And then I'm not easy. in the afternoon throughout that afternoon. I had one or two meals already. And then I typically will eat dinner depends, seven or eight p.m. And I tend to put more carbohydrates in the evening. I know some people gasp at that, but come through, I should, I'm not saying, I'm not saying this to you guys, but you know, if you do a workout of the sort that I do in the morning, I mean, it sets typically to failure. I'm training not real quick, but you know, you're pleading that glycogen. I'm fine to have a plate of pasta.

I'd have a little bit less protein in the evening because I find it very hard to get good sleep in a low carb state. Yeah. See, I will, if I want to sleep or let's say maybe something happened where I didn't have a hard workout during the day and I know I'm going to have a hard time falling asleep, I might get a little bit of that rice going in up in the system. I might have some spaghetti going up in there because I'm going that carb. Oh, yeah. Damn, you know, coma. Yeah. Well, you know, I'll do that.

But we're not talking enormous volumes. Oh, I am. So some rice or some pasta, some risotto or something. I'm fortunate that my girlfriend's a really good cook. So she'll say, what do you want? And then I'll tell her and she'll cook it. She was a professional chef for a long time. And she's fast.

So basically she says, what do you want to eat today? And that kind of thing. And so that's what I get. And I'm very lucky in that way. The one thing that I make sure to do. You know what? We can edit that out. You don't want to give up that kind of leverage in this scenario.

We can edit it out. I'm really big on that evening meal being mostly carbohydrates, also vegetables. I happen to really like vegetables and less protein. So I might have a small piece of fish or some broth, a soup or something like that. And keep in mind that I'm not usually eating anything until 11 o'clock the next day. And I'm likely going to train again in the morning or run again in the morning. And so I want my glycogen topped off. I'm not looking to walk around at, you know, 6% body fat or anything like that.

It might I keep a relatively low body fat percentage and have for a long time. I feel good where I'm at, you know, ebbs and flows, depending on the season. But I have zero appetite for sugar. And that's a recent thing. A few years ago, I just started, I stopped having the half glass of wine just because everyone else was doing it. I stopped having dessert just because, and I noticed that I didn't like it. and just didn't make me feel good. And I'd much rather consume calories from clean sources like rice and meat and fish and

vegetables, this kind of thing. I do eat some fruit. I'm not huge on dairy, but I'll have a little bit of really good cheese, really good parmesan cheese or really good fermented cheese. One thing that's very clear from the scientific literature, this is the work of Justin Saunenberg and Chris Gardner at Stanford, that fermented foods, low-sugarmented foods, sourcrow, kimchi, low sugar kombuchas, Greek yogurt, unsweetened Greek yogurt, enhance the gut microbiome, these trillions of gut bacteria that actually make the sort of neurotransmitters

that cross into the blood-brain barrier and create the substrate for things like dopamine and epinephrine and et cetera, and can reduce inflammation markers. They call this the inflammatory It's like looking at your genome. They looked at inflammatory markers in people that consumed four servings, which is not a lot, four two ounce servings of low sugar fermented foods per day, compared to increasing their fiber. Now, I'm not disparaging of fiber, but what they found was that people who ate a lot of fiber either increased inflammatory markers, maintained or decreased. It was all over the place. Mainly the effect of eating a lot of fiber is you increase the number of enzymes that you make that digest fiber. The people that

ate a lot of fermented food, low sugar fermented foods across the board reduce these inflammatory markers. I feel better when I'm eating some kimchi, sourcrow, et cetera. And we started making our own, meaning she makes it. I don't make it. And to do that, we went to Tim Ferriss's for our body book. There's a recipe, or for our chef, excuse me. He describes in there a way that you can cut up cabbage and ferment it with some salt water. You have to do this properly because you can get some harmful bacteria. But if you do, you cover it with a cloth, you put it in the dark, you take it out, you skim off the bad stuff. It's kind of fun. And the reason for doing this is that a lot of live culture fermented foods can get pretty expensive if you have an appetite like mine. I love to

eat. And I'll just eat it by the bowlful. And pretty soon you're dropping $10 here. If you're down in kombucha left and right, you know, you're drinking some of the most expensive fluid. It's more expensive than petroleum. So we have big vats of kimchi and this kind of thing. And I like hot sauces. So she's figured out how to make fermented hot sauces. You can do all this stuff. easily. And so I'm always eating fermented sauces and foods throughout the day. Kimchi's okay, although I think if you don't do it right, it can be pretty foul to be around. This smells pretty intense. And yes, occasionally I'll have a slice of cobbler, but that's like once or twice a year. I just don't have an appetite for it. I really look forward

to the post-training meal, a big bowl of oatmeal, or yes, occasionally if I'm training at a gym someplace, I'll be like, how do I get some glycogen back in my system? It's two bananas and a few bagels. Yeah, I've done it before. We cast you out. Exactly. Well, on the internet, you're like, oh my goodness. You know, it's, I don't know why this topic of nutrition has people so up in arms. And I, and the extremes, I've not tried the pure carnivore thing. I understand you can repack glycogen with gluconeogenesis, protein converted to other fuels.

I've not tried the plant-based thing because I would just be thinking about cows all day. and I like the animal, but I would just be craving meat. My dad's Argentine after all. And I don't tend to do cheat days anymore, that kind of thing. I shed that in my early 40s. But yeah, it's pretty basic. And there's caffeine in the early part of the day. Hydration is really key.

I mean, I think for the brain and for the body, hydration is key. And then we're not talking so much about supplements. But if there were one supplement that's really been shown to be useful for physical performance, but also where most of the data point to is for brain fuel is creatine. You know, the forebrain system depends on a phosphocreatine type fuel in addition to glucose. And so I do five grams of creatine monohydrate a day. I will do the alpha-GPC in an energy drink or before training. A lot of people forget that energy is not just caloric.

There's neural energy, dopamine, noraphyrine. And we talked about the meat. If meat is rich with tyrosine, tyrosine is an amino acid, red meat especially, that's the precursor to dopamine. Carbohydrates and white meat turkey are rich in the amino acid tryptophan, which is the precursor to serotonin. And so as I say this, it probably all makes sense that you can generate states of alertness and states of sleepiness depending on what you eat. I will say, however, if you eat an enormous volume of anything, you will direct more blood to your gut relative to your brain. And so if you have five rib-eye steaks or two rib-eye steaks, depending on how big they are, yes, you will have a lot of tyrosine in your system.

You also have a lot of blood in your gut, and you'll be tired and you want to go to sleep. So you can't beat the system completely. But, yeah, that's pretty much how I eat. And I maintain some flexibility. I mean, we're in San Diego right now. I miss tacos. Taco Tuesday in San Diego is a special experience. Occasionally I'll have a white tequila margarito, which I love.

Every once in a while, I'm not a super extreme guy on this stuff. and I would loathe to be pure carnivore or pure vegan. Sorry, Paul Saladino. He's a friend, and I have some vegan friends like Rich Rohl. I just, I don't want to live that way. And I'm probably going to get assaulted for saying this, but, you know, one group will come after me with celery sticks and the other group will come after me with raw meat. But all I can say is, you do you, and I love those guys.

I'll keep going the way I'm going, and we'll see how good. Well, I like the fact that you said you have vegan friends. You know, you mentioned, you know, sugar, the habit of sugar, and you don't drink or don't take much sugar anymore. And, you know, one of the podcasts that you've done is about habits, making habits, breaking habits. Give us some high level habit forming and habit breaking neurological strategies we can utilize. Well, we've already talked about how dopamine puts you into an action state and the serotonin system tends to bias you toward a more sedative state or calm state, maybe even a more creative state, which is associated with calm states. If you are trying to build habits and you look to the neuroscience of habit building, you would be wise to put certain habits at the early part of the day and certain habits at the later part of the day. I call phase one of the day from zero to nine hours after waking.

That period of the day, assuming that you're getting that sunlight exposure and a little bit of movement, but even if you're just getting some sunlight exposure, it's going to be associated with high epinephrine, high dopamine, slightly higher cortisol, certain habits we could call linear habits. These are things that you know how to do and you just need to do them. Other habits, and so those sorts of habits would go, well in that zero to nine hours period that I call phase one, zero to nine hours after waking, phase one. Then phase two, and these aren't absolute phases, but go from about 10 hours

till about 16 or 17 hours after waking. We tend to be a little bit sleepier. We tend to be a little bit calmer, at least, not necessarily sleepy. It tend to be a little bit calmer. It's clear that other habits that have to do with what we call nonlinear brain operations, things like creative writing, brainstorming with a group, brainstorming with yourself. analytic work where there is no clear right answer. It's not plug and chug. It's more exploratory. Go best in the second phase, phase two.

I was thinking about rolling jiu-jitsu earlier. I can't even call it rolling jiu-jitsu. I've only done it once, but clearly there's a lot of moment-to-moment creativity and kind of sorting things out. Whereas weightlifting, it's sets and reps. You're trying to complete a certain amount of sets and reps. You're trying to cover a certain amount of distance running. linear versus nonlinear.

And then, of course, there's the 17 to 24 hours, which is phase three. And during that time, you want to be engaging one set of habits, which is sleep. Okay, roughly. It could be 16 to 24 hours, et cetera. So try and put the habits you're trying to form into the times of day in which those will actually be easiest. This sort of violates the earlier rule of try and access limbic friction. If there's something that you're really trying to adopt more exercise and that exercise is running a certain distance in a certain amount of time, put that in the early part of the day. If you're trying

to do creative work, doing the second part of the day. If you are trying to develop a new skill that's exploratory, second part of the day, if you're trying to learn a skill that has defined steps already, it's linear, early part of the day. People will just find that it's simpler to do it in that fashion. The other thing is that if you look at the science of goal setting, there are clear data, there's a woman at New York University, Emily Belcettis, or Balsettis, I think is the correct pronunciation. And she's described that while we like to think about envisioning success as the best way to set goals and develop new habits, it turns out at least the research shows it's far more effective to imagine the catastrophic effects of failure.

It's, you know, it's the darkness none of us want to embrace, but fear is the more powerful motivator, but provided you can still think clearly, you don't want to put yourself into a state of panic. So goal setting of if I don't do this every day, I'm looking at diabetes and early death is going to be a much more powerful motivator than imagining you're going, oh, I'm going to be, you know, 10 pounds lighter and, you know, I can, you know, bench press 15% more by Christmas this time a year. It's great to have goals. It's also great to have motivators that are based on real world fear. Fear.

That's what the data say. I was having a conversation with a buddy mine that's at a big medical company. And we were, I was saying, yeah, you know, when my cow was kind of, I was kind of professing guilt because when my kids were younger, you know, I did say, oh, you know, can we get some ice cream? And I said, sure. You want some type two diabetes to go with that. But this dude, no kidding, would have like needles.

and stick the kids so that they could get used to getting, oh, you want to have some ice cream? Cool. Go get the needle. We're going to stick your finger so that when you have type 2 diabetes and you have to do an insulin draw. Oh my goodness. I was like, man, this dude, one up to me.

I don't get one up that often when it comes to being stupid, but it seemed to pull it off. That's intense. I can't comment on parenting. We should also recall the dopamine reward system. The best way to reward yourself for a job well done is random intermittent reward. We've always talked up until now, or we've been talking up until now, you know, effort, reward is the cycle. Reward that cycle.

Effort reward. But if you want to keep, remember, dopamine, non-infinite but replenishable, how about not spend it at all? How about use what the casinos use in order to keep yourself into a state of motivation? So if you are checking off the boxes, I did this behavior, this new habit, that new habit, that new habit, great, do that. But don't celebrate every win. Celebrate random intermittent wins, right? So celebrate. How do you do that if you're in control of it? Well, don't reward yourself with external rewards very often. So make the training its own reward. So if it's I'm going to train and then I'm going to have the pancake breakfast, great. Do it every once in a while. But don't do it. every Sunday, don't do it every workout. So it's not so much about the frequency as much as it is how the pattern, what we call the schedule of reward. So, you know, and you can see this in sports teams and some of the challenges over the years of, you know, everyone gets a trophy. I mean, nothing is more undermining to the dopamine system than that idea. I mean, I don't know what

happened with that, but I and I don't want to punish anybody because I also don't know who it was, but that group or person who made that decision that everyone gets a trophy clearly did not read the literature about how the neuroscience of reward and the psychology of reward works. You actually diminish the role of rewards in every way and you take away the ability

to access the reward system in the future. You're creating not creating soft versions of people. You're actually creating people. They're just like the rat with no dopamine. It's a really sad state. We have a name for that in humans. it's called Parkinson's. You deplete dopamine system,

people get shaky, they can't move. That's in the motor system, but people with Parkinson's also experience extreme lack of motivation and depression because of lack of dopamine. That's the characteristic feature of Parkinson's is lack of dopamine neurons. So you want to, every once in a while,

reward yourself for reaching a goal. One way to do this and that we've structured on the podcast, but I can just describe really easily, is set three or four habits that you want to create for yourself in a list of six. So find six habits and decide every day you're going to do four, but never compensate day to day. There's reasons for doing this. You would say, let's say one day it's train if you're not, you know, run if you're not already doing that, write if you're not already doing that. You can list these off. Gratitude practice, NSDR, and then let's just come up

with one. I don't know, eat a vegetable or just making these up. So you're going to list those out on your calendar. And then every day you're going to do at least four, but as many as five. But If one day you only get one, you don't carry over and do 10 the next day. If you understand the dopamine system, you'll understand why. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to train up a circuitry for giving yourself random intermittent reward for performing these habits on a regular basis. So people will go do these heroic workouts or they'll do a ton of stuff and then they'll reward themselves and they've just undermined the whole process of being able to do that consistently.

If that wasn't clear, it's a little complicated, but the way that reward schedules work is you're trying to teach the circuitry to work regularly be rewarded only every once in a while and at random. So if you were technically going to do this, I would have to make a bucket with a bunch of ping pong balls in it. And most of the ping pong balls didn't have anything on them. But then some of the ping pong balls had, you know, a chocolate chip cookie. Perfect. And then every time I get done with my workout, I'm like, hey, I did the workout. I did a good job.

I'm going to grab a ping pong ball from the bucket. Nothing. Next day, nothing. Next day, nothing. Next day, chocolate chip cookie. That's what I would have to technically do. But I had to do the workout to pull one of these things out of the bucket. Perfect.

And how many rewards to put in that bucket versus how many blank ping pong balls? You could say maybe one third of them should have a reward. But remember, it's random. Right. And so that exactly describes the way we would do an experiment on an animal or human in our laboratory. And then with humans, we do it in a very particular way. We actually pay them, real money. We have people do hard work for money.

Varying amounts of money? Often. And you can record from the brain. You can record from dopamine centers or other centers. What happens is people start trying to create the most rational strategy. You get these maniacs that will just try and get as many reps as possible. This is not a discussion about learning and plasticity. We may get into that, but it's very clear that errors or the anticipation of a reward and then no reward, while it leads to disappointment, it also increases attention and the ability to focus on the next trial.

Think about this. What do you guys call it behind glass? You're shooting. Right? And you're like, you're missing. Every time you miss, the next trial is the one you're paying the most attention to. When you hit, you'd think, oh, the next one, I'm good. No, the next one, why would you be good?

Why would you, why would you, you just succeeded? Why would your nervous system pay attention to what happens next? When you succeed, your nervous system goes, oh, that happened that way. It's a little relaxation. It's a little relaxation. So errors we know cue up the forebrain and it increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. I've only done this, never, I don't get behind glass up, but I've thrown darts in a bar. And you're up there, there are people watching and you're, we used to do this in graduate school.

This is a little bar in Davis and we'd throw darts and, you know, and you miss, you know, you're really, it's almost that. that little anger and the next one you're completely dialed in. But then you're like bull's eye, bull's eye, you know, off the, off the thing, ah. And when you make it, the next one, you're not paying as careful attention to your motor patterns. So you might get lucky, but you're not learning. So errors are key to learning and the proper ratio of errors to successful trials for optimal learning is very clear from machine learning and from human learning is the 8515 rule. How difficult to make a task should be 85% of the time you're performing it correctly, 15% of the time you're performing.

for me incorrectly, more or less, plus or minus 2%, if you want to optimize learning. 85%, you get it, 15%, you miss. Yeah, that's about the right level of difficulty for motor skill learning, cognitive learning, etc. Any more than that, you're putting too much of a demand on the attentional systems, any less, you're putting too little demand on the intentional systems. That's what the machine learning shows in humans. That's what the machine learning algorithm is based on human learning.

that's what the animal data show. And of course, there'll be some variation on this. But if people are saying, oh, I want to teach these kids Spanish or I want to teach people how to shoot, well, make it difficult enough so that they're about 15% error rate. Or jiu-jitsu, I guess, I suppose. Well, jih-suitzoo.

Unfortunately, when you start jih-sih Tzu, you're getting 100% error rate because you're getting tapped out all the time. That's why it takes a lot of effort to get over the hump in the beginning. Look, we've been going for a while. I do want to, you've touched on this a little bit, but before we, before we wrap,

and I can already tell if you're okay with it, hopefully we can do some more podcasts in the future. I'd love that. I'd love to have you on my podcast. I'd love to sit down and chat with you guys in need time. Let's do it. Let's get people ready for bed, ready for sleep. You've already talked about what we're doing,

what our temperature is doing. how we how we getting ready for bed at the end of the day after our three bouts of work i've always called them that dude that's legit i'm in you know you got to have that it's a mindset thing right you're like okay i need to i need to get rid get in the game forward center of mass yes if you sit down and try if you sit down to any cognitive task and or physical task and pray for focus you're going to be praying a long time it just doesn't work that way the brain You need to recruit the attentional systems. We're doing this.

Yeah. We really need to recruit the attentional systems. And I get concerned about people trying to leverage too many tools, even though I talk about a lot of tools. At some point, you've got the work. You're there. Caffeineate. You're hydrated.

As you would say, go. Shut up and go. When I write books, which I've written a couple, I write a thousand words a day. And it takes about an hour. and I rarely will write more than that. I almost never miss. Once I'm in the zone and I got a book, I won't miss. But I like the attitude of going in of, hey, this is about, like I'm about to go get it on.

And I need to just bring the heat for an hour. And I like that. That's a good idea. Yeah. I learned it in graduate school cutting. There's this thing called a microtome where you take a brain, it's frozen, and you slice it off like a deli slicer, one little piece at a time. Is this a Hannibal Lecter scenario? Yeah.

Well, I got a lot of stories from the lab that since you guys are not afraid of blood and guts, you know, we can get into that. But you're putting these little thin slices of tissue into these little wells of liquid. And it's very delicate work. And some of these specimens were very valuable either because they came from human beings that had interesting experiences like the loss of one eye or something. Or because the tissue had been created through a number of experiments that lasted months, if not years. So it's really important stuff. And what was taught to me by one of the perhaps the greatest neurophthalmologists at UCSF, Jonathan Horton. And he said, the moment that microtone blade hits that tissue, a nuclear bomb could go off in the building.

And you're not going to increase the speed of the pull because the slower you can pull it, the better the quality of the tissue. But you can't stop. And so I learned to just lay down through these brains. And some people will put ice on it and go have lunch come back. And it never quite cuts right when you come back to it. So how long would it take to do a slice? For a small mouse brain would take, you know, maybe an hour. You can get.

Why did we not make a machine that would do it? The machines can't adjust the temperature and speed. Actually, the way you adjust the temperature, kids don't do this. You lick your finger and you put it on there and get it. There's just a texture of like very cold butter that's just right. It's a feel thing. The machine will crack the tissue. It doesn't know when it's screwing up.

Oh. So I've cut through macaque monkey brains that took me somewhere between seven and eight hours. And it's a single pull. As a single pull. Well, you're doing a pull and then repeating and then pull. Okay. Got it. I've done that and I've done a, you can't do a whole human brain, but I've done a block of a

human frontal cortex of all things and human retina where I think the longest I've gone is something like 11 hours of cutting. And in that case, you know, just to be clear about how this works, you've got a little bit of food next to you, you've got your portable bathroom next to you. Sometimes you have to urinate during these things. You handle it. And you typically do this alone in a room. And you finish off that thing.

and you get those things into tissue wells, and there's almost nothing is satisfying. There are things more satisfying. How thin is each slice? About anywhere from 20 to 40 microns, so a millimeter is divided into 1,000 microns. So credit cards approximately 200 microns thick, so very, very thin.

You can see through it. It's translucent. And it's so much fun. And then you stain them and you put them under microscopes. And my career was built on this work, too. So you're also thinking about you're collecting the crops of your form, so to speak. It's so pleasurable.

It really is. You wouldn't get any third person personality, what were you calling it? You wouldn't get any detachment when you're doing that, kind of get in the zone? I didn't really listen to audiobooks back then. I would listen to a lot of rancet. Listen to a lot of Glenn Gould is a classical pianist. If ever you need to do work and you want to listen to classical music and you're not really into classical music, Glenn Gould is just perfect for that background brain state.

and just an amazing piano player. So I would do that. And so I guess the point is that we can train ourselves to focus, and it feels so good. It reminds me of my bulldog chewing on something. And, you know, I'm going to say, I wasn't going to reveal this. When I got him, I got him from a guy named Elvis, so I named Costello. But there was a moment, because this was about the time, I thought about naming him Jocko.

because you guys both have big necks, you know? So anyway, it's, I got him earlier, but there was always this question, do we keep Costello as his name? Because I didn't name him. Someone had said it. And I was like, maybe we keep Costello. Anyway, there was a debate in our household at one point.

Costello won out, sorry. But hey, someone out there has named their dog Jocko. And hopefully it's because they have a thick neck. There's quite a few dogs out there named Jocco. There's a couple of kids out there named Jocco. There's some police dogs out there named Jocco. Are there jaco tattoos? Yes.

There are some jaco tattoos out there in the world. Yeah, if you talk about, like people get good for a tattoo, people get Displicated Freedom for a tattoo. Those are pretty cool. Yeah. So there's some of that stuff going on. Has anyone gotten any, you know, Huberman Lab tats yet? Not that I'm aware of, but I will say this. If anyone gets a tattoo of Lex Friedman's face, I'll be happy to have a one-hour Zoom with you to discuss any topic of neuroscience you want.

So if anyone wants to get a neck, and if you get a neck tattoo of Lex Friedman's face, face, then we'll do it two hours, Zoom. I was on Lex's. I was on Lex's podcast. Please don't. I was on Lex's podcast, and it was an interesting interaction, we'll say. And he's an awesome guy. It was just like, I don't know.

It was a little strange, but, and somebody actually nailed it. They said, this is like the Terminator from the second Terminator movie interviewing the Terminator from the first Terminator movie. Because he was asking. asking me questions and I was giving him like one word answers for whatever it took a while to get like a flow going you know it's kind of funny he's a good friend of mine I I I know I want to do it again I want to I want to I got to do his podcast again where we where we have a little bit of a because now I kind of know him and we've had some other we actually the last time I talked to him on the phone we were actually just laughing our asses off about a couple things that was one of the things I told him hey I read this comment about when you when you interviewed me and he was just laughing because he was so asses It was kind of funny. Maybe you guys should roll jujitsu. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can just settle it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just what, I don't think there was any friction, but maybe you guys just, if you rolled jujitsu, then it's like, no, there wasn't, there wasn't any friction. It was just, uh, I think he, you know, he, he started off with some question like, are you afraid of death? I'm like, no.

And it kind of went from there. It was like, okay, you know, if you, he's like, do you want to expand on that? I'm like, I'm not afraid of death, whatever it was, but it was fun. It sounded funny afterwards when I listened to it. I was like, man, I don't know what happened. I listened to that podcast. I really enjoyed it. Yeah.

Like I said, and I really like Lex, and I really like his podcast. And yeah, and the other funny thing is we were kind of chilling. Like we met, it was in L.A. We're talking. You know, we're just talking and we sit down. And that was another thing. It kind of like we were just talking like whatever. And then all of a sudden he's like,

And he doesn't he wasn't making eye contact with me and he goes are you afraid of death like just We're talking about whatever news are you afraid of death? And I was like wait no and then I guess that was the start of the podcast that goes getting a kick out of those straight to the deep end So true that's right. Yeah Lex You guys should do it again. You guys know who knows? Maybe I'm sure I'll get down to down to Austin at some point and hook it up Talk to Lex again and hopefully I can be this is by the way this is just like because I was just I don't know I don't know what what I messed up but I'll do better I'll do better next time I won't be I won't be like a Terminator robot I guess I'll try not to be but but your response about the death question will be the same yeah my response about the death question will be the same you know and are you afraid of death no we keep on definitely a non-sequitur there yeah So back to sleep.

Yeah. To wind this initial podcast up. What do we, how are we getting ready for sleep? Okay. View some sunlight in the afternoon before the sun goes down. Why? It adjusts your retinal sensitivity in a way that allows you to get to view a little bit more artificial light at night without disrupting your melatonin. Beautiful study published in scientific reports shows this.

It adjusts that sensitivity so that bright. light from screens isn't going to really mess you up quite as much. I call it your Netflix inoculation. However, dim the lights in the evening, especially overhead lights. These neurons in the eye that we were talking about before that set the circadian rhythm and generate states of alertness, they're more or less in the lower half of your eye and they view the upper visual field. Makes sense. They're there to extract sunlight. So if you're going to light your environment, which you should, obviously you need to move about. Put lights. You know, use a, you know, use a lot of light. You know, lamps or table lamps or if you want to get really extreme stuff near the floor. If you're really

into this, you could get red bulbs and because red shifted light is actually going to be less disruptive to your circadian rhythms. In fact, there's a nice study looking at for shift workers, red light isn't going to increase cortisol late in the day. And shift work is something obviously, thank you shift workers. We realize that much of what we talked about, you can't access because you're doing the important work at night that all of us depend on. I have a whole episode on shift work that people can get tools for that. There's long discussion. So dim the lights, set them low in the room,

red lights if you're really extreme about it, put on blue blockers if you do that sort of thing, but or just dim the lights. Cool the environment. In general, it's not good to fall asleep within two hours of eating a big meal, but if you can fall asleep, it's always good to get sleep.

So, you know, some people are really neurotic about this. Like I won't eat within two hours of bedtime. I'm fine, but if you get home from work two hours late because of traffic, are you going to not eat and then not sleep? I mean, just be a human. Eat dinner and then try and give yourself a little bit of time before you go to sleep. So in all seriousness, I would hate to see people obsessed too much. Hydrate, but of course, don't drink a ton of fluid before going to sleep because there's a direct circuit from the bladder to the brainstem. This is why you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to go to the bathroom.

So don't overhydrate at night. And if you do a hot bath or a sauna or something like that, obviously hydrate, but remember, the cool off after that will help drop your body temperature even further. Then in terms of your sleep environment, there's a really nice paper that just came out in proceedings in the National Academy of Science is showing that people that sleep in a room where there are ambient lights, there's lights on, even if they're pretty dim, some of that light actually gets through the eyelids and disrupts metabolism and morning glucose management an insulin secretion.

So try and keep your sleeping environment as dark as possible. Don't obsess about one little light or something. But if you've ever been in the hotel with a bright blue light, it's really annoying. You know, the one bright light in the corner. And here's the other thing. Some people,

like me, have really thin eyelids. Don't ask me why. Some people have thick eyelids. So some people can see light through their eyelids more than others. Dang. Yeah. So wear an I mask if you want to,

but keep it dark. So there are a bunch of different things. And if you are, the one really important thing that most people are not aware of is that work from Chuck Eisler's lab at Harvard Medical School is shown. Wait, Harvard? Where's that? It's this little school in Boston. They have a couple campuses and they have good people. Some good people came out of there. That's an amazing place. It's a tough place. People are the training there. There's a lot of, it's rigorous at many, many places, but Harvard's reputation of, they really like the old school

academic grind. They do modern science, but they really like, they like to add friction. Do you go out there ever? Yeah. Yeah, I've got a lot of friends at Harvard Medical School and at the undergrad campus and I have good relationship to all of them. New York's got its neuroscience. We call it the New York neuroscience mafia. They all have tickets to the opera. They all are very cultured and they do neuroscience. Boston, they just live academics. I mean, the town of Boston's amazing. I mean, students everywhere, everywhere in Boston, someone is pursuing something. The punk rock bands in Boston and work harder than anywhere else. It's just, it's a, they, they like friction.

They're, they're, you know, built on friction. Boston, yeah. Yeah. Bay Area and Stanford, especially, it's about, because of the technology sector, it's about the future. We care about the lineage of the past, of course, and our nobles and all that stuff, but it's really about what's next. The students want to start companies. They want to change the entire world.

Other places, too, but Stanford, there's a, there's this idea of the future is where it's at. The past, you know, an undergraduate one said to me, you know, I said, oh, yeah, this guy downstairs from me discovered the structure of RNA and his dad discovered basically RNA. And it's Nobel Prize. I'm like, does he have an app? You know? And it's like what, you know, I mean, that work is transformative in, you know, many ways.

But it's just, well, how is it impacting the real world? That's one reason I really like being at Stanford. It's about real world impact now. So, but Harvard's great. So basically you want to, Chuck Seiser's lab at Harvard Medical School. showed that about an hour before your natural bedtime, you're going to be very alert for about an hour. There are evolutionary theories about why this would be

that you're going to tamp down all your village resources. You're going to make sure you're safe. Set security. Set security. Set security. Right? You've got to go to bed. You've got to set security.

I set security at my house, just like you're saying. Right? You get ready for bed at night. It's like, go go make sure that the external perimeter is secured. Make sure the locks are locked. Make sure the alarm systems aren't. Make sure the dog is rabid and ready to eat people. Make sure your magazines are loaded and you're good to go.

Booby traps are set. Yeah, we are vulnerable in sleep. As the vampire shift of ops knows all too well, right? Hit them while they're sleeping. So you want to respect that and not worry about it. A lot of people freak out. Why am I wide awake? it will pass.

And I wish more people knew about this because everyone experiences this. And then the other thing is, light inhibits melatonin, and melatonin is the molecule of sleepiness. So viewing bright light will quash your melatonin. That's why you want to dim the lights in the evening. And if you wake up in the middle of the night

and you need to go use the bathroom, that's perfectly normal, but don't flip on lights that are super bright. Use a night light. Don't use bright overhead lights. Don't go into a super bright environment. you will suppress your melatonin. Now, a lot of people go to bed around 11 or 12

and wake up around 2 or 3 and can't fall back asleep. And one more prominent theory in the sleep science community now is that those people should have gone to bed at 8.30 or 9 p.m. And that their melatonin is running out, basically. So play with your bedtime. I, for instance, have learned, we're talking about this before we started that a, going to bed for me at 10 p.m.,

I'm up at 4 feeling great. If I go to bed at 11 p.m. or midnight, I can sleep till 7 or 8 and never feel quite right. And part of that is because I'm waking up two or three times in the middle of the night. So you have to figure out where you're optimal to sleep time is. And that will change across the lifespan. Young kids sometimes want to stay up later and sleep in later and need more sleep. And as we get older, supposedly we need less sleep, but we become early risers. People obsess a little too much about this, you know, morning person, late person thing.

you got to figure out when your best to bedtime is. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you want to go back to sleep and you cannot, I recommend listening to that non-sleep deep rest script. You'll at least keep you from scrolling through social media or thinking about problems. You're better off doing non-sleep deep rest than being wide awake when you want to be asleep.

Okay? And you're better off being asleep when you want to be asleep, obviously. So one way you can get better at sleeping is to use an app like rest. Every R-E-V-E-E-R-I. This is based on research at Stanford. There's a sleep function in there. They will allow you to try it for free.

There is a nominal cost after that. And it's hypnosis for sleep. And it's not someone hypnotizing you. It teaches you to relax yourself into a state where then you drift off into sleep. And the clinical data and the scientific papers on this are very strong. So is it, if I put on the app right now, what's it going to do? I'm ready to go to sleep. What's it telling me to think about this?

Yeah. Is it A-S-M-R? What's it? Is it come to A-S-M-R? ASMR? Like the scratch in the microphone. I have this weird obsession with ASMR. So there's a state of mind we call hypnosis that involves being very alert but

focused on internal state. So normally it's hard to be very alert with your eyes closed. And some people can access this state better than others. And in this state, you are very suggestible. And some people can be more readily hypnotized than others. There's a colleague of mine at Stanford David Spiegel. He and his father are MDs. His dad's dead now.

But they develop this field of hypnosis for psychiatry and for reprogramming the mind and pain management, trauma, but also sleep, et cetera. There's a simple test that we can do and anyone can do. If you can look up. You do this with Rogan, didn't you? Yeah. If you can maintain upward gaze and close your eyes, you are highly hypnotizable. If you have a hard time maintaining upward gaze with your eyelids closed, you are less hypnotizable. It's a one to four scale.

Now keep in mind if this sounds wacky, how do they evaluate concussion based on the size of the pupils relative to one another by shining light in one or the other eyes? So the eyes as two pieces of brain are the neurologists and in this case the psychiatrist's primary tools to assess the brain without putting you into a brain scanner. So it sounds wacky because it's like look up and then close your eyes. We can do it with you. If you look up and then keeping upward gaze slowly close your eyes. Yep, looks like you can do it. Yep, see how you sell the whites of his eyes? And so what does that mean?

It means he's highly hypnotized. Now, why? That makes sense to me completely. So you could try reverie and that will help you fall back asleep, that sort of thing. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, you know, and you, the worst thing you could do would be to look at any bright light or screen light. That would be a terrible idea because you're going to quash your melatonin. You're going to start bringing in new sensory stimuli. I mean, just think about how unusual that is.

normally you wouldn't bring in new sensory information in the middle of the night. Now you're accessing information from Nova Scotia, Africa, you know, and Texas all at once, and you're watching the Lex Friedman podcast. You know? So those are the things around sleep that are really useful. And then, of course, there are some supplements that if you're doing all the other things correctly and you're still not sleeping well. The supplements that a lot of people benefit from are magnesium three in eight,

T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, or magnesium bisglycinate. Those forms of magnesium help speed the transition into sleep and the depth of sleep. They are interchangeable with one another, bisglycinate or three-n-eight seem to be equally effective. Some people also benefit from taking something called Apogenin-A-P-G-E-N-I-N-I-N. It's a derivative of chamomile. 50 milligrams of apigenin will help you. A lot of people kind of turn off their thinking. It's non-addictive.

It has high safety margins. Obviously talk to your doctor. you know, if that's important to you. These things are readily available. I don't have a relationship to Apogen and company. Swanson makes it. I have no relationship to Swanson. Mag 3 and 8, the cost varies tremendously where you look.

I've seen it very expensive and I've seen it less expensive. I can't tell the difference between the different sources. So my wish is that the expensive companies will bring the price down, but I've noticed a ratcheting up. And then some people will take, oh, and it's 144 milligrams of magnesium for whatever reason they always charted out. is 144. About 5% of people will get some gastric distress from Mag 3 and 8. But it is distinct from magnesium malate or magnesium citrate. Magnesium citrate is a terrific laxative.

Magnesium malate seems to be better for muscle soreness and on and on. There are these magnesium jockeys out there. They get really nuanced about this. But Mag 3 and 8 or bisclacinate will help. And then there's theanine, T-H-E-N-I-N-E, which many people take also before sleep 100 to 200 milligrams or so. It will give you more vivid dreams than you would otherwise. So if you're a sleepwalker or you have night terrors, don't take it.

But you can take that. Theanine is now showing up in energy drinks and in coffee because it's a slight, it pushes back on the systems that cause stress. It reduces the jitter. So you can drink a lot more coffee if you're also taking theanine. But everything I just described would be taken 30 to 60 minutes before bed. And then if you want to bring out the really heavy guns, which I haven't talked about before in a podcast, but there's some.

interesting data and I've been looking at and researching enositol, 900 milligrams of enositol, wow, that's a sedative, I mean, if there ever was a sedative. It also is... What's to do with anastol? Enositol is hitting these gabaergic transmitter systems in the rug. No, it's a supplement that it's, you know, it's a in the vitamin pathway that will reduce anxiety. 900 milligrams of myoenocetal is the form that you want to seek out if you're going to try that. this. I did it for a while. I slept very, very well. I replaced the other stack with Inocetal. Again, no relationship to Anasetal company. The problem was I felt so mellow in the morning. I didn't like it. For me, our podcast photographer, he doesn't do well with Mag 3 and 8. It disrupts his stomach.

So he took Anastatol. He's like, what is that stuff? I slept 10 hours. So, you know, different sensitivities. But Enosotol seems to work well for people that are on a low carbohydrate diet and have a hard time getting into sleep. So I think we can expect that the anastitol market is going to start to pick up some momentum soon because it really does work quite well. But to me, better than Ambien or prescription drugs. You know, always go behaviors first, then supplements if you need them, and then the prescription stuff, if that's your thing and you have a doctor that's going to help you with that.

But my goal has always been to rely on as few prescriptions of anything as possible by doing the right behaviors, avoiding the wrong behaviors, and diet and supplements. When you were a kid, you were going to that therapist and they maybe thought you were a little jacked up psychological. Did they put you on anything back then? Nope. And I'm so glad they did not. Do you think the tendency now is that they put people on stuff a lot quicker? Absolutely.

That is right? Absolutely. And there are cases where this is vitally important. But I am so grateful that I went through all that before the massive SSRI phase. Before I don't think I had ADHD. If anything, I have a bit more of an OCD, as you guys can probably. tell I get into a pretty narrow trench and I, you know, we'll just keep going until people say stop. But, and always have been that way. But when I was a little kid, I had a little bit of a grunting tick.

And my family physician was smart enough to know, just wait, it'll pass. Those four brain circuits of suppression are starting to develop. Nowadays, they'd put a kid on Tourette's medication. So I am very wary of, I mean, you're blitzing these neurochemical systems. And again, there are cases where people really need it. Suicidal depression, please get on an antidepressant and get talk therapy. Severe ADHD, please talk to a psychiatrist and a psychologist, get the diet right too. But I would just, my wish for humanity is that we, you know, someone told me, I'm cutting myself off on purpose, a psychiatrist colleague at Stanford told me that more than 75% of the psychoactive medication that's consumed in the world is consumed in the United States. It's us.

no one to blame for this except ourselves and it's not like we have like the extremely rough environment that we're in america you know we created in here yeah yeah what was up with the the gun school suicide because i did i did uh read a little bit about that when i was doing a little research on you and i just happened to happen to happen to click into that what was going on with that like what was it 2017 they had four suicides they had four suicides they had have a really high suicide rate? What's going on with that? Unclear, but you know, when I went to gun, it was academically rigorous. Our football team was terrible, probably still is terrible. But there were some good sports there. So it wasn't a lack of physical activity. Music and orchestra stuff is

pretty big there. So we know that now the kids are under significant pressure for academic performance. There's a, there are train tracks not far from there and a good number of the suicides were by train. It became a, you know, a bit of a spreading phenomenon. A little social contagion. A little social contagion. There is the idea that people were pushing their kids too hard in terms of academic performance. Who knows? We can only speculate. There was the idea that you know, if you create an environment that's such high pressure and demand, and, you know, I think they've now forbidden the kids from meeting before school to do study sessions. They were meeting, you know, 6, 7 a.m. and studying, you know, and I don't think we can point our finger at any

one thing or one collection of things, but yeah, what a terrible situation. And I think it's hopefully resolved itself now over time. Someone from Gunn, actually, someone related to gun, a parent actually contacted me at one point because they saw on their Wikipedia that I attended there and asked what my thoughts were on this. And I said, listen, I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I went to that school. I certainly had my challenges at that time. Give them tools. Please, you know, tools matter. Talking, you know, the telefriend or if you suspect, absolutely, you know, call people, but give people tools to understand. when their mind is drifting off course.

And I think most of the tools that we've talked about today, certainly the behavioral ones, they absolutely pertain to adults and to kids. You know, I think if our young people can learn how to self-regulate in both directions, ramp up and ramp down as needed, overcome limbic friction, recognize limbic friction,

understand the dopamine reward system. I do hope I have this fantasy that it will help them know when they're on track and when they're drifting off course. One thing that I think is very cool about your story is, look, I mean, I got four kids, you know, two of them in college now. That pressure of this academic success being, it can be psycho. And I think it's cool. You're an example of someone that barely passed high school, took a little while to figure out what you wanted to do, was able to get on a path. So maybe to all the kids out there, if you're under some hyper academic pressure right now, man,

Man, you can get there. You can get there. You know, this guy right here barely made it out of high school, and now he's a tenured professor at Stanford. That's pretty awesome that you are able to do that. And, you know, some of these kids, they don't get into whatever college they wanted to get into, and they think it's the end of the world.

And look, when you're young, of course, you break up with your girlfriend at the end of the world. You know, you lose a football game. It's the end of the world. There's all these things when you're working, world is small, there's a lot of things that look like the end of the world. But I think you're a great example of the fact that, look, you got time to figure out this stuff. And I'm the same way. I join the Navy. I was a rebellious young kid, didn't did shitty in high school, wasn't a great athlete.

Okay, join the Navy. Start going down the path and start to figure things out. And the same thing as you, work hard. So if you're a kid out there and you're feeling the pressures that the whole world's going to fall apart because you missed some random hurdle about getting into college or whatever you got on your SATs, which by the way, I don't even take SATs anymore in California. I heard they don't have physical education anymore either. They do have physical education. They still do have physical education. I would say it's probably not as rigorous as it should be.

I'm sure you've seen those videos of like what? There's some school in the 50s or 60s that they put this regimented physical education in and these kids. You see, have you seen those videos I'm talking about? Echo Charles? Yeah, the one they're doing, they drop to the push-up. Yeah, they're doing push-ups, but like it's a troop, and these kids all look like freaking commandos.

It's pretty awesome. And that's how it should be. But yeah, I think you're a great example of, hey, you can, you don't have to have a perfect path to being very successful and doing what you truly want to do. And there's another thing that kids get messed up on. They think they should know what they're want to do, what they want to do with their lives.

when they're 14 years old and what do you want to be when you grow up I don't know and they feel bad because of that that's actually perfectly fine take a little time to figure it out now I will say this and you already said this as well go to school try and get good grades don't do freaking drugs don't get in trouble because then your options will be broader when you do get older but none of these things are the end of the world and actually I'm talking about kids I'm not just talking about kids you can be 38 years old and figure out oh you know what I'm going to I'm going to get my shit together right now and I'm going to start moving in the right direction. I mean, you talked about a bunch of skateboarders and I knew a bunch of hardcore kids that didn't square themselves away until they were 37 years old.

And so we all have options out there. And you're not going to, you're not going to nail it, man. No one nails a perfect game. It doesn't happen. No, it doesn't. And, you know, if you can start early great, but develop great work habits, but learn how to toggle between work and rest. and I always say find non-destructive ways to renew yourself. You know, so many of the forms of renewal,

not just when kids are in college or in high school, but also I look at the corporate world, and this is an issue that I actually had with academia for a long time. It was like, how are we going to rest after a hard week of work in graduate school? They're going to do beer hour, and you've got people just like tying one on. Okay, sure, like I have nothing against people having a couple cocktails, if that's their thing or beer or whatever,

but people are just finding absolutely destructive, ways to learn to rest. They don't learn anything in that case. So have non-destructive ways to recover yourself. That could be a long jog or a hike on the weekends or go swimming or go watch a movie or do something creative, draw. I mean, spend time with people, whatever it is. You know, and I realize I'm coming across is kind of, you know, it's, it sounds a little corny, but at the same time, you will go further and faster than everybody. Yeah. And what's important about what you just said, and this is tying back to something you talked about earlier with these dopamine systems that we have, it's a cycle. And you can get yourself moving on the right cycle, but that first

step is hard, right? That first, you're going to get a reward when you go for a run. You're going to get a reward when you get done with squats. You're going to get reward when you get done with jiu-jitsu. You're going to get a reward. But that getting there, you have to impose that first part yourself. You have to make it happen. And that's, there's going to be, you know, your limbic system is going to be giving you friction about how comfortable you are right now and maybe just another donut will be just as good and that's kind of an reward right now. Don't listen to it. Take action, go out and step into it and you're going to start yourself onto a cycle that is way more positive and it's going to have much better results in the long run than listening to your

limbic system, which is telling you to eat another donut, have another beer, get some immediate dopamine from something that takes no effort whatsoever. Yeah, or sit back and just scroll to your death. Oh, yeah. Listen, probably a good place to wrap it up. We're approaching five hours.

Anybody that's listened to this that wants to go deep, look, there's probably some people that are thinking, oh, he kind of went deep on some subjects. No.

This was like Andrew Huberman, the shallow zone, right? Cliff note. Yeah, this is the Cliff Notes version. His podcast, you can find, it's everywhere, right? Anywhere podcast.

Spotify, yep. It's Huberman Lab, Huberman Lab podcast. He's going to take everything that he mentioned today for four minutes or six minutes. He's going to talk about for two and a half to three hours with a bunch of scientific data to back it up. Awesome to listen to. And you can figure out they're very, very efficiently titled, hey, this is the subject of this podcast. Here's what you can learn.

And I touched on some of these things today, habits, stress, you know, hormones. Like you've got all these different topics. It's just awesome information. Also, they can find you at Huberman. You say Huberman? Hubermanlab.com. This is kind of a good access point for everything. You're on YouTube and Facebook.

Both of those are Andrew Huberman. And then you're on Twitter, on Instagram, sucking people into the algorithm, bringing out the anger and the hatred. Collecting data on who's frustrated and the anger system. Both those are at. So Twitter and Instagram at Huberman Lab. Echo, you got any other questions? Of course.

What do you got? I'm going to try to keep it short. So the variable reward, what was the random intermittent reward? Yeah. So doesn't that kind of illustrate the value of playing hard to get in like dating and stuff? Oh, it does. I was wondering if you were going to ask about this. Some people understand this intuitively and they catstring people, right?

They, you know, they don't reward everything. It's amazing the tactics that people will come up with in order to get the text response if they're not getting it. Here's what we know. A picture is worth a thousand words. Use your imagination. Some people realize, ah, you know, when I text them, they don't respond. But when I send a photo of a particular kind, their response is instantaneous. People learn people's response schedules very quickly.

this harkens back to childhood, and we could do a whole episode on this as a child, one of your primary, the brain's a prediction machine, or it's trying to make predictions. That's what it wants to do. And young children learn to engage in certain behaviors to predict and control the caretaking of their parents. This is important. It's not manipulative. It's vital. And adults do it too. And they do it in the same machinery that's designed for infant caregiver or attachment is repurposed in adulthood. So when we want something from somebody, then we tend to pay careful attention to their movements and when they respond and their non-responses. And random intermittent reward is what a lot of people use to keep people along for the ride. Now there's a positive version of this where to keep the intensity high in the positive sense in relationship. Yeah, it's good to miss someone. It's good to take some breaks. You don't want to overdo the dopamine system because it will deplete itself. Time together, time apart is useful.

The cozy parts of love and the more intense romantic, lusty parts of love are both vital to the arc of a relationship. But one, you could imagine how time apart could reset some of the dopamine. People seem more attractive and exciting when you've been apart from them for a while. And a lot of people kind of suffocate their relationship with serotonin, so to speak. too much time together. We'll give you all the warm, cozy stuff, but it's antagonistic, as we say, to the dopamine system. But yeah, people manipulate using these systems.

And that's unfortunate. But, you know, I'm not an expert in how to counsel them on that. Well, it is, you might not be an expert on how to counsel them on it. But if people are aware of it, they can do a better job combating, becoming a victim to those scenarios. Right. And I always say, you know, you should be very careful how much you attach your dopamine to something that is not under your complete control. You know, if you give your entire dopamine system over to somebody else's responses or availability, you're setting yourself up for a pretty rough life, even if it's a great relationship. Because either whether or not by

decision or by death or by circumstance, if that relationship were to go, what are you going to do? So I think people tend to get overly focused on how much dopamine someone else can provide them. I I think it's great. I have a statement about addiction, which I think matches the scientific mechanism very closely, which is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, whereas a good life involves a progressive expansion

of the number of things that bring you pleasure. So try and continue to derive pleasure from, for instance, time with friends. We all know the guy who's got the new girlfriend and then disappears and then comes back six months later. It's like, hey, you know. So I told you so, you know, it's okay to miss one another. It's okay to miss one another.

It's okay to not text all the time. When you're with friends, spend time with friends. Be available for emergencies, but spend time with friends. This cuts both way, women with women, men with men. And assuming the standard relationship model, the, you know, when you're with your guy, friends, be with them. Ladies, when you're with your girlfriends, be with them. And you are missing one another is great because you're keeping that dopamine system ready. Yeah. So the, I mean, on a kind of a more positive note, you can kind of use it as like in the courting phase, we'll say.

Sure. Like, don't just throw yourself at somebody because you kind of jam their system up a little bit, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, at some point you don't want to game things too much, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This gets right. This gets into some deeper issues about power and dynamics and relationships, right? You know, is giving tons of gifts to someone a sign that they're in charge or that you're, in charge. Well, I don't know. It depends on your relative finances, right? In one case, you could be the person saying, I have resources and I can take care of you forever. In a sense, you're in the power position. In another case, you're just showering them with gifts in a desperate attempt to get them to like you. So there's a lot of context of this that makes it tricky,

but I would say that giving to get is a very dangerous thing. Pure giving without the expectation of a reward in exchange for that is great because then both people get to accept. experience that as a positive thing. And, you know, giving to get, it puts you in a very vulnerable place. So essentially with great power comes great responsibility. Absolutely. That's how guys get friends on, though. That's how you get friends on.

You can be like a, what do you call, like a catch, but you give too much too quick. You get friends on. Yeah. I mean, I confess I have a few close female friends over the years. Most of my friends are men and have a relationship with a woman. And so that's just how it's been organized. I haven't developed many close friendships with women. So friend zone is a bit of a foreign concept to me.

But I hear it exists. Yeah, it's like, yeah, basically the girl doesn't have like sexual attraction to the guy, even though the guy is like the perfect guy. But it's usually because the guy positions himself below the girl, like he worships her too quick or something like this. And the girl's like, oh, he's not like a challenge, you know. Dating sounds complicated. Put too much serotonin in the scenario.

Too much, red. I'm a big, I think it was Tim Ferriss, our mutual friend, Tim Ferriss, that a long time ago said, you know, the quality of your life is largely reflective of the number of really difficult conversations that you're willing to have. And I love that because I'm not very good at difficult conversations. Who is? That's why they're called difficult. But I think the person concerned about being friend zoned should sit down with the person and say, listen, here's what I really want. what is the probability that's going to happen in the next week? And if it's a, well, the 25%, okay, well, hit the rip cord.

And if it's a 75% or I've been waiting for you to say this, like, let's go. You know, I mean, it seems like direct communication is lacking in this scenario. Okay. We're about to go. We're about to open up a whole other scenario here. Yeah. I'm not sure I'm the best person. When you, you know, if you've got the, let's say you got a girl that you're trying to talk

and you think you might be in the friend zone, sort of assaulting her with the, hey, where am I at? I'm going to say that might not be the best call. What I would probably do is assume we're just friends and behave that way. Don't assume that you're going to, don't assume that there's a chance. You just assume, hey, you know what? She probably doesn't really like me that much. That's the assumption you make.

Back off if she ends up actually feeling that way, then she's going to come and let you know that. So your behavior should be, oh, she just wants to be friends. Cool. Don't box her into a corner with the Andrew Huberman freaking direct assault. Hey, where are we at, girl? Where are we at? I'm not even sure it has to be a verbal communication.

I think it could just be a, you know, is this relationship over romantic sexual relationship or is this a friendship? And you don't, there are numerous ways to have that conversation. But obviously it should be consensual, age appropriate, context appropriate, species appropriate. But we don't have to go there for this one I'm telling you. We don't have to go there, man. But listen, what you're describing to me is foreign territory because I'm not, I just not of the ilk that is in the habit of having a lot of, you know, friendships aside for male friendships. I understand. It just hasn't happened.

He's, this is a, was I think I just got a humble brag. I think we got to, he's like, listen, I don't know what you're talking about, this friend's own thing, never been there. Not a thing. I like it, bro. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's hard for me to imagine that anyone would find themselves in this position. I mean, also be a scientist, the data or the data, right? I do believe if somebody wants to do something, they're basically going to do it.

If they don't, they're not going to. Check, check. Going back to a little bit more serious, no, what you said about, you know, you shouldn't give to get. This is something I brief leaders on all the time. If the reason you're taking care of your team is so that you're. you can get something out of them, they're going to see that. And it's not going to work out well. So very similar, very similar thought pattern there.

Andrew, do you got any closing thoughts before we shut her down? Just really want to say thank you for having me here today. It's truly an honor and a pleasure. I don't say that formally. I say that sincerely. And as a listener of your podcast, this has been a thrill for me. I've learned a lot from both of you guys. And while I'm not going to roll Jiu-Jitsu, because I don't know how, maybe someday.

And yeah, thanks so much. Well, thanks for coming. And back at you, you know, as a listener to your podcast, it's awesome to be able to sit down and drill down on some of these things. And, you know, really a really important thing. I would say there's a theme that I've taken away from your podcast, but then that I absolutely reinforced today. I talked about it a little bit. The fact that the things that you're talking about really allow us to bring awareness to what's happening in our bodies, in our minds physiologically. And therefore, we actually have more influence than we think over what our thought patterns are and the way we behave, which ultimately allows us as people to take more ownership over the way we feel.

The way we behave and those are really important things and I think just understanding the nature of our own physiology Better is a huge step forward in people living better lives. So Thank you for coming down and joining us and and thank you for taking that information and passing it on to people for free You know you you do this stuff for free your podcast is is free and you've invested obviously a ton of time and to try and learn these things and and the fact that you give it back to people for free is just a testament to the kind of person you are and I appreciate it and I hope you keep getting after it man thanks for coming down thank you and with that Andrew Huberman has left the

building he rolled out echo did you gather any good information yes a lot of stuff going on a lot of stuff going on you can see there's probably going to be follow-on podcasts yes bro you could have like one of those questions that you kind of like said and like do four hours just on that not to mention the stuff that you probably wouldn't even understand that's like another what 12 16 hours probably let's face it check no uh great guy great information definitely cool to talk to and you know even just when he was leaving you know we'll definitely get some stuff done do some more stuff in the future um yeah man i really i really i really do the point that I was making kind of throughout the podcast and that I kind of closed out with like look just being aware of these things makes you better off

Then you realize that you can influence the way you feel the way you think the way you sleep the way you be way more influence You know you know you don't have to wake up in the morning go man I don't sleep good night I don't know why you don't need to do that You know you don't need to do that you can say oh I don't feel like working out right now because I expended a bunch of dopamine on something early this morning But you know what it doesn't matter it doesn't mean I'm a bad person just means I need to go and get it started take ownership of what's happening you know so I thought that was well worth the price of admission oh if you're if you're at the tail end of a four-something hour podcast right now I think that right there was worth the price that you just paid maybe two X did yeah maybe you listen to

it at two X speed right now something like that yeah it's possible what do you think what percentage of people go to X speed when they're listening well depends on what portion you know sometimes I suspect that sometimes they do 2x, sometimes they do 1x. With this one, I don't know, man, this is the kind of word, right, you don't want to listen to a 2X. You want to get,

some of that stuff is going to go over your head, I think. You're going to want 1X on this one. Yes, for sure. I'd say a lot of our podcasts actually are 1X scenarios. Yeah, it's true. I was surprised, though,

as you probably could tell, that he wasn't as familiar with the idea of the friend zone. Because I think, this is just, this is my hypothesis. My neurobiological hypothesis that the friend zone Yes, sir.

The friend zone is a direct result. But hey, wait, was the friend zone a thing when you were a kid? Yeah. Oh, okay. So was it called that? Oh, the expression. No, okay, but it was a thing that you were in a lot. I think he was just kind of saying.

To be honest, I remember one instance where I was in the friend, well, put it this way. I had like one foot in the friend zone. and one foot out of the friend zone where I was surprised on how little influence I had over the scenario. And then thinking back, I was in the friend zone. So because I was this person, man, if I understood this variable reward scenario,

better. I would have had more influence over that. But it's true. I think it's a direct result of this, of not understanding the variable reward. If you're just like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to do everything that I think this girl wants me to do. That in and of itself creates a lack of variable reward.

That's a problem. Yeah. We're considering this to be a problem. So she's going to keep you around for that whatever, the seroton. Yeah. But there's no real dopamine because of that phenomenon. Just flooding it with serotonin. It's too much.

Too much. Not enough dopamine. So stay out the front zone. Just tell the friend zone, though. Especially someone like you that apparently spent a lot of time in the friend zone. That was a long time ago. Hey, thanks for listening. We sorry it went long, but you know what?

That's the way it happens sometimes if you want to support the podcast. And you want to support yourself. You want to get some. He was down for the discipline go. Yeah. And if you notice with knowing. No one really made a thing out of it, but he mentioned theanine, right? when he was like, and he said, oh, I like,

the ending, I like it. Some people mix it with coffee so you don't get the jitters and all this. Ooh, I was about to say, well, well, but I didn't want to interrupt. Yeah, yeah. Plus then it sounds like you're trying to hard sell something. Yeah. Well, actually, we did. I don't want to be that guy.

Exactly. But yes, we have the ultimate formulation for energy. Energy for the ultimate formula. We kind of have the ultimate formulation. Yes, sir. And think about it. And he said he straight up takes alpha GPS. takes it as a supplement except when he's drinking the goat because alpha gpc he mentioned the

and all the benefits or whatever hey look we kept it cool we're not going to make a big deal out of it but it just happens we kind of got you covered on all fronts so that's awesome uh if you want to get some of that go to joccofuel dot com you go to wawa and get some of it you can go to vitamin shop and get whatever you can get mulk by the way which is which is Look, I'd love to tell you, hey, you need additional protein, and you do. I get it. But you also need something that tastes a hell of good. Get yourself some milk, get yourself some joint warfare, some super krill.

I've been noticing you've been saying hella good lately. Really? That's like the third time you said in the last three days, two days. Really? Yes, sir. Hmm. It's kind of an older, like an 80s expression, isn't it? If I'm not mistaken, it's a northern California expression.

For sure. Hella. Because in Maine, we say wicked good. Yes. Those of us that know about Maine. Yeah, we know that. But I think that's a hell of good is like, like when you first said it, I was like, wait, what is the reason for that? But I don't know.

It still remains a mystery. Nonetheless, you're correct. Yep. It is hell of good. Vitamin shop, wah-wah joccofuel.com. Get yourself some supplementation that's going to make you bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. Smaller. Pull nine yards.

There you go. And balance. chemically too yeah because we didn't talk that much about the sugar old we did talk about the crash right you get all these crashes you start doing all this stuff to your brain chemistry you get these crashes don't really jam me up right you don't reason for this you don't got to deal with that kind of stuff anymore no dracofield dot com check our origin USA dot com you're probably gonna need a gie right because we're training jiu jitsu look I would love to tell you could wear that

gie down to the market out to the club you can't we know you can't you can't It's probably going to get you friends owned. Don't let that out. It's fair possible. No, you might have a female. Let's say you're a male. You might have a female that's real into Jiu-Jitsu, which is super cool. And maybe she's down, you know?

Maybe she's wearing geese out. Maybe that's what we're doing. Just do it sometimes. How about that? But that might not be the case. You might need a pair of jeans, right? We got your jeans, too. Made in America.

Made in the United States of America. DIY. Do it yourself. self. You know, only because Andrew kind of mentioned this DIY mentality that you get from the punk rock, the hardcore scene. It's kind of like do it yourself, right? By the way, that's why Jocko publishing exists.

That's why we have Jocko fuel because we're making stuff. We don't go, hey, you know, we'd really like to do this. So we'll just, you know, hey, hey, hey, hey. No, we're doing it. That's what we're doing. I don't want to split hairs here, but this might be small tangent, but I think it's important. it. DIY has like a contextual element to it.

It's short for do it yourself. Yeah. But so put it this way. DIY doesn't mean do it yourself. And do it yourself is DIYIY, but not all D.I. Y means all the things that do it yourself mean. Okay. So if you say,

because I'm already like ready to move on. This is the technicality that may or may not mean more than it. DIY When you say DIY If I say hey If Jocko you say Hey can you give me some water And I say do it yourself

Okay so let's do it That is one of the many Do it yourself DIY means like Usually it's done Not like as a favor But like as a production kind of a thing

And then you just did it yourself Like kind of makeshift It has a makeshift Like kind of quality kind of feel to it So I'm saying You good Yes, sir. Okay, let's go to jocco store.com.

So, Jocko store, which started as a DIY scenario, but it's not anymore. It's a well, you know, varying levels of man, oiled machine. Check. Right now. Got some good stuff on there. Got some discipline equals freedom, shirts and hats, hoodies, merch, if you will. But it's good quality stuff. It's not just some cheap stuff.

It's good quality. arguably the most wearable clothing that seems to be the consensus kind of around yes many people when I say many I mean for real like countless not the kind of like three like countless people have said it's my favorite favorite shirt not just because of the design and the representing on the path but because of how it fits what about when they get a shirt locker shirt same it's all the same and they think man there's only a few people that have this shirt like Andrew was talking about he was talking about the Thunder Trucks shirt.

It's limited. That's why he saved. He still has it to this day. He has it to this day. You get a shirt locker shirt. You're kind of in that arena. Exclusive and limited. It's true.

So what that is, if you don't know, it's a subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month. Here's the thing about that shirt that he was talking about. What did it say? Something about something, something and I only got this.

I'm sponsored by Thunder Trucks and I only got this T-shirt. This lousy T-shirt. This lousy T-shirt. Okay, so this is why I remember that because there are other shirt companies that do, you know, like the kind of shirt companies that make fun shirts, like, that are knock up, like a, they almost borrow like the concept and the design from like Coca-Cola, but it says choke. Instead of Coke, it says choke, you know, like that idea. Like, there was a few that I saw that had that same thing. It said, I'm something, something, something, like something real impressive. And then it said, but I only got this lousy t-shirt.

It was like, that's how I remembered it. That was the thing, you know? I ran the Boston Marathon and all I got was this last year. I went to Bulgaria and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Yep. There you go. But yes, some shirts are exclusive. That's just the nature of the game.

All those things that we just said are a little bit lame, right? Unless it's from Thunder trucks and it's limited. And then all of a sudden it becomes kind of rad. You are correct. Kind of hype. Subscribe to this podcast. And don't forget about the Jocco Underground. We've been rolling those out.

Talking about some detailed information, giving lots of Q&A. So there's a way to access us for questions. If you want to ask a question, we can answer it on jocco underground.com. Go and check that out if you want to support us. DIY. Right?

Because you can't let the man control everything. You know what I'm saying? You can't give power to the man. No. You can't. You don't want to. You've got to create your own. platform over on the side in case you have to escape out the side hatch so we're ready jocco

underground dot com you want to kick in a little eight dollars and eighteen cents a month it's cool we appreciate it we'll be ready so that's that youtube channel subscribe to the youtube channel don't forget about origin USA they have a YouTube channel uh flipside canvas dot com Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your walls got a bunch of books I've written a bunch of books If you want to check those out, check them out. You can get them anywhere. You can also check out joccopodcast.com. And you can go to books from the podcast

and you can find all the books there. So that's for books that not necessarily that I've written, but books that we've covered on the podcast. There's like an email thing to sign up for too on the podcast. joccopodcast.com. No, that's on jocco. That's more the store. Yeah.

The podcast's pretty straightforward as far as information. surrounding the podcast. Check. You just go to the website. Check. Good to go. We also have Eschonfront.com. This is a leadership consultancy.

We work with all kinds of companies and we teach the leadership principles. Some of them you heard me talk about today. But if you have problems in your organization, they're leadership problems. I'm here to tell you. So if you want help with that, go to Eschalonfront.com for details. We also have some live events. We got the muster coming up. We got battle.

field we go and walk Gettysburg. We go and walk little big horn. Get the lessons learned from those. So check that out, Eshtonfront.com. Also, we have a training academy to be better. To be better in life. Extremeownership.com. You want to take ownership of your life?

And if you want to ask me a question live, go to extremeownership.com. We got a bunch of courses on there. It's going to make every aspect of your life better. It's going to make you better. So check that out. ownership.com. If you want to help service members active and retired, gold star families, check out America's mighty warriors.org. That's Mark Lee's mom, mama Lee. Great organization. Also heroes and horses.com. Check that one out. And don't forget for Andrew Huberman.

You can find him at Hubermanlab.com. And on YouTube and on Facebook, he's at Andrew Huberman. and then on Twitter and on Instagram he's at Huberman Lab and as far as Echo and I go we're both on Twitter we're on the gram We're on Facebook I'm at Jack 1th look no matter what you're going on there for Just just watch your back

Because the algorithms can sneak up We learned a lot about that today That dopamine hitter You're trying to get that dopamine hitter Next thing you know you're a dope So be careful and thanks once again to Andrew Huberman for coming on. Really, again, he's putting a lot of great knowledge out there,

and we definitely appreciate it. So thanks, Andrew, for driving all the way down here to make this happen, and I look forward to returning the favor in the future. And, of course, thanks to the servicemen and service women out there on the front lines who make it possible for us to sit back here and get educated and learn and live our. lives thank you for what you do and also thanks for the service of our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border

patrol secret service all the first responders out there you all do what you do so that we can do what we do and we appreciate it and to everyone else out there everyone else out there look there's a lot of ways to get better we learn today that you can become a way you you should have become more aware of things you should realize you have more influence you realize you have influence over the way you feel the way you think you could take ownership of that learned a lot about that today and you know what knowledge and learning and understanding are great but you know what else they don't mean anything without action so yes learn and educate and enlighten yourself but

also don't forget to go out there every day and freaking get after it and until next time Zeko and Jocko out