The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Andrew Huberman: My Exact Routine To Optimize Brain & Body, I Do All Of These Every Day!

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Stanford Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman returns to reveal the truth about GLP-1s, peptides, and the testosterone collapse, and the 10 protocols he uses every day to fix his sleep, stress, and focus! Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is host of the world's No. 1 health podcast 'Huberman Lab', and is also the author of his upcoming book, 'Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body'. He explains: ■ His 10 protocols to become the healthiest version of yourself ■ Why high cortisol first thing in the morning is actually good for you ■ The eye-movement trick to fall asleep instantly ■ A neuroscientist's take on God, prayer, and religion ■ The simple trick that lowers your blood sugar spikes after you eat Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:21 Introducing Protocols 00:03:44 When High Cortisol Is A Good Thing 00:06:42 Why Hydration Matters 00:07:55 Why Morning Sunlight Matters 00:13:18 How Light Can Boost Metabolism 00:18:49 Why Sunlight Is A Powerful Health Tool 00:20:53 How To Offset Night Shifts And Screen Time 00:23:58 The Best Exercise Routine For All-Round Fitness 00:25:56 Do Ice Baths Raise Cortisol? 00:28:48 How To Build Willpower And Tenacity 00:31:18 What Does Calming Your Nervous System Mean? 00:35:48 The Comfort Crisis: Do Hard Things 00:38:31 What Should You Actually Eat? 00:41:28 How Starchy Foods Can Calm Stress 00:43:29 Cortisol Is Not The Stress Hormone 00:46:20 How To Reduce Stress Fast 00:52:08 How To Increase Your HRV 00:55:44 The Eye Movement Trick To Fall Back To Sleep 01:00:24 Ads 01:02:26 Could A Peptide Improve REM Sleep? 01:03:47 The Truth About Peptides 01:12:55 What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Reality 01:18:25 Do You Believe In God As A Neuroscientist? 01:28:14 Could Religion Be An Antidote To Modern Suffering? 01:36:43 Ads 01:37:52 How To Create The Ideal Sleep Environment 01:39:29 You Need To Do Effortful Work Daily 01:47:52 How To Tap Into Your Unconscious 01:54:27 Glymphatic Drainage: Can It Reduce Eye Bags? 01:58:39 Do You Really Need Supplements? 02:03:44 The Benefits Of A Post-Meal Walk 02:07:22 Why Metabolism Doesn't Have To Decline With Age Follow Andrew Huberman: X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/DExmJwB Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1ACSEfP Huberman Lab Podcast - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3mXpbNy You can pre-order 'Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body', here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9j6yBxC The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: LinkedIn Marketing - https://www.linkedin.com/DIARY Function Health - https://functionhealth.com/DOAC

Here's the diabolical thing. The risk of dying early, if you have bright nights, goes up immensely. There've been a lot of studies on people after 6 p.m. on devices, getting artificial LED exposure. They live shorter lives. Cancer rates go up. They're metabolically unhealthy. But here's the really scary thing. We have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick.

They cling to their iPads. They're on devices. But the problem is the most things are designed to make people do less of what's good for them. And we don't talk about this enough. And Andrew, you're one of the most trusted voices in health today. And we've waited many, many years for this. Protocols and operating manual for the human body. Yeah, these 10 protocols are well established.

They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and performance. Okay, so let's get into it. So protocol number one, you want to get sunlight because exposure each day to the skin, increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men, and is important for libido. And then the second, and this is really key,

is to reduce stress fast. And I'll explain how to do that in a moment. And then number three, working out with weights for 45 minutes, taking your sets near to failure, it will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels. But a lot of people have been told, don't spike your cortisol. It's the stress hormone. But it's a preparation hormone. You're preparing for adversity, but also great things.

The next thing, and this is one of the most valuable skills. If you do it for five minutes per day, you will experience a significant improvement in mental and physical health. And then sleeping on your side, very important for offsetting dementia, getting rid of bags under your eyes. But, Stephen, the number one thing that you need to know about is the moment I started, My life got so much better. And I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles. Andrew, I have this outstanding question that I have to ask you. You don't really talk in depth about supplements.

Oh, I do. I go ham. So you can only do five for the rest of your life. Oh, gosh. I highly recommend getting it. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. It's the algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Andrew Huberman, we've waited many, many years for this. And now it has arrived. This is your long-awaited book called Protocols and Operating Manual for the Human Body. And inside this book, I counted roughly 50 different protocols, split across seven different areas, sleep, exercise, stress control, nutrition, light, focus, motivation and learning, and personal growth. You've written 10 of the protocols you want to focus on sharing today.

Can I ask, why did you choose those 10? They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and quote-unquote performance. Your life will be so much better if you do them. And do they cost a lot of money to do the 10 that you've picked? No. They could be done either at completely zero cost or on an existing budget. And do you do these 10 things? Every day.

Every day. There's one on there that I don't do every single day. I take off one day per week. But every single day without fail. And when you wrote them, did you write them in order of sequencing? Yeah, throughout the day. From start to finish. Because this is the other thing.

Protocol synergize. They ratchet together. How well you slept last night is dictating how well you feel now. These are gears in a larger system. One moves, the other ones move. And while there is a place for pharmacology and supplements and things that you take, ultimately these gears fit together based on what you do. Okay, so let's get into it.

What was the first thing that you drew? Because I saw there was a picture there. Okay, so in my unelegant drawing, but I am a biologist, so we're allowed to do this. I mean, there's essentially a plot of where you wake up in the morning and then where you go to sleep at night. And these are not hours of the day. These are the different protocols. three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay, so this line represents the healthy cortisol curve. Most people don't realize that, but you wake up because of a rise in cortisol. It's literally

called the cortisol awakening response. If you've ever woken up one minute before your alarm clock, it's because the cortisol awakening response is heavily entrainable, meaning it can be matched to external stimulant. You want this peak in cortisol as high as possible in the first 60 minutes of your day. Everyone thinks you want low cortisol, but here's the deal. High cortisol in the early part of your day is what provides for elevated mood, focus, attention, your ability to learn. It's also what establishes low cortisol in the afternoon and at night, which is a requirement for falling and staying asleep. So this peak sets up this trough. So you want high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol. These represent melatonin, the hormone of sleepiness, as we know, if you've slept the night before,

then melatonin essentially is low at morning. And the dashline is adenosine, which is a downstream product of the use of ATP in your cells. The more you're awake, the more activities you do, the more you think, adenicine builds up. That's why you get sleepy. So what's very interesting is that when you spike your morning cortisol, and I'll explain how to do that in a moment, and you do that within the first hours of your day, you also establish a case where these little blips are stress, stressful text, stressful event, but they're brief. We always hear that cortisol is bad, but our ability to have big inflections in cortisol stress out and then they come back down to normal is very, very good if this peak was high. If this peak is not as high and this is kind of like a medium

or flat, what they call a flattening of the cortisol curve, you see shorter lifespan, less recovery from every kind of illness and the stress bout last a very long time because they're riding on a higher baseline. So if your morning cortisol level is lower or flat, then if I get that stressful text during the day, it will be a longer cortisol spike, more stress. Bigger and longer. Oh, wow. And not only that, but there's an indirect but very important interaction between cortisol and melatonin. Your sleepiness hormone doesn't come on and function as well. And so sleep gets very disrupted. So a lot of people think, oh, I don't want my morning cortisol high. And a lot of women in particular have been told, don't spike your cortisol. It's going to lead to excess visceral fat, moon face,

etc. There's this condition called Cushing Syndrome, which is a massive overproduction of cortisol. Very rare condition. I mean, it happens, but most people are not dealing with that, right? Most people's morning cortisol is too low and their afternoon and nighttime cortisol is too high. How do they know this stuff? Like, how did they test this? This healthy curve, as it's called, was measured through just consistent blood draws around the 24-hour cycle. And then it's been looked at in response to everything from caffeine to cold plunges to exercise to sunlight. And there's this very, so protocol number one is hydrate. Okay. Your mind is exceedingly more sharp when you're well hydrated. And it actually helps boost your morning cortisol. There's a very interesting interaction between when the bladder being

emptied, usually after people wake up, they use the restroom, they urinate, and then hydrating. And there's an, I'll talk about this a few times, but there's an ACE. ascending pathway along the vagus nerve that serves to wake up the brain, and part of that has to do with hydration first thing in the morning. You awake from bed to urinate in the middle of the night because of an arousal phenomenon of hydration and the bladder being full. When you say hydrate, do you mean electrolytes or just water? 16 to 32 ounces of good clean water is fine. If you want to add electrolytes, great. How much is that? Is that a cup or is that? This is 16 ounces, maybe 18 ounces. Okay, it's like a big hug. You want to consume about 80 ounces of water throughout your

It's a lot, but you don't want to, basically everything you want to do in the early part of the day, you want to do less in the evening part of your day. The next thing, and this is really key, it could have gone first, but you want to view sunlight or a 10,000 luxe artificial light. I could spend three hours talking about this, but I'll keep it really brief. When you view sunlight, there's this beautiful phenomenon that activates these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells, you know, the major focus of my work for many, many years. So I'll resist saying more. they literally extend physical wires that we call axons into your hypothalamus. Your master circadian clock resides there. We call that your super chasmatic nucleus.

And when you view low solar angle sunlight, sun low in the sky, there's an abundance of yes, UV, but it's lower when it's low in the sky. You actually can look at the morning sun more easily than you can the overhead sun. Why? The morning sun looks more yellow, orange, or even some red tones compared to the overhead sky. Well, the light coming from the sky is the same, right? but the specific wavelengths of light, as we call them, that are coming from the sun when it's low in the sky,

are the optimal stimulus for these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive cells that tell your central clock, it's time to wake up. The day is beginning. Okay. There's also something incredible that happens if you get bright light in your eyes in that first, ideally 30 minutes, but even 60 minutes of your day,

which there are two pathways by which your brain circadian clock wakes you up. one is it sends signals through peptides it releases and neural signals but it's able to activate what we call the HPA axis hypothalamus pituitary gland which is sort of hangs outside the brain and then adrenals you release adrenaline there's a unique window that passes after about an hour following waking where your superkizmatic clock can trigger an alternate pathway that literally goes down your spinal column and triggers your adrenals to release additional cortisol in fact viewing sunlight in the first hour of your day takes this peak. Here's what it would look like if you didn't view bright light in the first hour of your day. It would be here, which is bad.

And your stress responses then would be bigger and longer. This increase in cortisol is driven by viewing sunlight. Now, when I say sunlight, people say, especially in the UK, they'll say, there's no sun where I live. Okay, this could easily say daylight. Why? Because there's always daylight out. If you look at how bright it is on an overcast day in the middle of December, even in the UK at 8 a.m. versus midnight the night before, it's different. You know, it's obvious. When there's overcast skies, less of the long wavelength like the oranges and reds are coming through. But you want daylight in your eyes in the first hours of your day. Go out on your balcony if that's all you can do. If you're in a car, roll down the window. It's not good to try and do this

through a window or windshield. There's so much data showing that spiking your morning cortisol this way establishes low cortisol and high sleepiness hormones, let's call them at night, which is great, buffers stress, and moreover, kickstarts your immune system to protect you against bacteria and viruses you can encounter during the day. It is great for your metabolism, mood, ability to learn, and on and on. And in the book, I explain a number of different ways how this peak relates to this trough if people are interested. But if you don't have access to sunlight or daylight. Using a 10,000 luxe artificial light

can be very beneficial. These 10,000 luxe lights have been shown to significantly offset the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder, et cetera. But what we're finding from this huge study from the UK Biobank is that you want bright days and you want dark nights. And they're additive.

So having bright days is great for your mental health and physical health along a huge number of parameters, significantly improves them. but having dark, even if you were in dim light all day, making it dark at night, people are healthier. The risk of dying early, if you have bright nights, goes up immensely. And we don't talk about this enough. If you don't have access to enough daylight, like you wake up before the sun comes out and you're up for two hours, let's say, before the sun comes out. I highly recommend getting a 10,000 Lux artificial light.

And last time we spoke, you took me outside after the conversation and you had an app on your phone. Right, light meter. I have no relation to the app, but I use it. And that is able to tell you how much lux of light you're getting at the moment. But it's additive. So one thing that's important to note is let's say you miss a day, right? The next day, get outside for twice as long. How long should you do it on a very clear morning with the sun rising?

And by the way, you don't need to see the sun cross the horizon. You can just wait till it's elevated, but it's low in the sky. People who are concerned about UV damage should know that when the sun is low in the sky, the UV index is much lower. And there's a reason for that. It's a phenomenon called relay scattering. sunrises and sunsets are very beautiful and colorful. When the sun's overhead, it's hard to look at.

It's this big ball of light. It's so bright because you're getting all the wavelengths, the UV all the way out to the infrared coming at you in more or less equal intensities. When the sun is low in the sky, the UV is not completely scattered, but not as much of that is reaching your eyes. Much lower risk of sunburn, much lower risk of eye damage, and so on. So here's the diabolical thing. Your screens are not nearly bright enough to keep.

kickstart this increase in cortisol in the morning, but they are very capable of increasing your cortisol levels at night because this low level of cortisol makes you vulnerable to big increases in cortisol. It's a little bit of a detail that I explained in the book, but... I was going to say, on this point, is it just exposing my eyes to the light or does my body need to be exposed to it? Great point. And one of the protocols in there, it's not one of the 10 I listed, is about the importance of getting sunlight on as much of your skin as possible, as is socially appropriate. beautiful work from Glenn Jeffries Lab at University College London. You know, I can believe this.

They do a glucose tolerance test. So they fast people, they have them drink a glucose drink. They measure how fast blood sugar rises. And if they shine red light, so long wavelength is red is long wavelength light. Like that like that? Yeah, like this would be medium wavelength because it's yellow. A red would be, so this is probably, I'm guessing, somewhere between 500 and 600 nanometers of light. And red would be probably somewhere between 580 and 700.

and then infrared goes out further, you know, into the 800s and thousands. The sun emits all of those. Okay, so this is long wavelength light. Okay. So they shine a long wavelength light on people's backs, and they do the glucose tolerance tests, and they observe a more than 25% reduction in the peak, and they also look at the rate of rise of blood glucose. It's buffering blood glucose rise, which we know is a good thing.

Just to summarize, they shine red light on someone's back while they have a glucose shot, and their glucose spike is lower. That's right. And you can do this onto bare skin. in or you can do it through a t-shirt. Turns out that these people's metabolism rose significantly. Why? How?

Well, long wavelength light can actually go into and through your body. It gets absorbed and it can go about eight centimeters into the body, red light. Long wavelength light of infrared can pass all the way through the body. They show that beautifully in this study. So that's not good. No, it's fantastic because along the way, it makes conformational changes in the way that your mitochondria handle the electrons, basically. This long-wave-length infrared light that comes from the sun is the heat that you feel from the sun or from a long-w wavelength light device, allows,

is so amazing. It actually allows your mitochondria to function more effectively, more efficiently. Now, it's not to say that short-wave-length light, blues and greens and ultraviolet light are bad. We need ultra-violet light. We need it on our skin to make vitamin D. What you want is full-spectrum-balanced light, but not so much UV that you get a sunburn, and you don't want a lot of short wavelength light in the absence of long wavelength light. Best way to do that, sunlight in the early and later part of the day

because the UV index is low. You're getting the full spectrum. Indoor LED lights like this, which we all spend a lot of time under. There are now evidence from Glenn Jeffries lab and others that it actually may damage the mitochondria. We talked about melatonin coming from the pineal gland that makes you sleepy at night.

You also have melatonin in most all of the cells of your body, and there it doesn't make you sleepy. It serves as an antioxidant. But it's sort of captured, and the way to liberate it is through long wavelength light. So you have a protective mechanism that's kicked on

with long wavelength light that protects you against the oxidative stress and damage to cells. And this has many, many positive effects. So Glenn's lab has done experiments where they literally take it a light like this,

and they have people look at it like this for one to three minutes a couple times a week. They look at people at different ages, different eye conditions. He's a serious vision scientist, right? He's not, he's not a biohacker. He's not, he has no interest in commercial products, actually. Although sometimes they wish he did. People over 40 who experience age-related vision loss, we all do a little bit, experience improvements in vision when they do this simple thing. And why would that be? Well, it turns out that your photoreceptors, which absorb light and convert it into electrical signals that allow you to see are the most mitochondrial rich and metabolically active cells in your entire body. Now, biologists love to play this game where they go, your tongue is the most metabolically active.

Then they go, no, everyone makes a claim on this. The photoreceptors, my friends, are the most metabolically active cells in your entire body. So they have a ton of mitochondria, and they need to protect themselves against the oxidative damage that comes with generating a bunch of downstream products from ATP. So long wavelength light is what protects us in this. So you can see significant improvements in vision for people that view long wave length light. couple times a week, but only in people older than 40, and get this, only in people that do that in the first three hours of their day.

What? Yes. Your eyes and your body and brain are not the same at this first third of your day versus this middle third of your day versus the last third of your day and at night. They're not. Your sensitivity to bright light causing bad effects on you after sundown increases, not immediately, but it increases gradually. your need for bright light in your eyes in the early part of the day is immense.

You need this. You want this. And if you miss a day, get out the next day and view some more light. You asked, will light to other parts of the body work? Not for setting this system in motion. But it's a great idea to get out two to three times per week when the UV index is low. You can just look on your phone. What's the UV index?

And in general, it'll be the earlier or the later half of your day when the UV index is lower. And to get out and get some light onto your skin. You don't have to be naked or in a swimsuit. Great if you are, and that's appropriate. But you can also just wear a T-shirt because the long wavelength light will go all the way through. So Glenn Jeffrey and Roger Schwell, he's a physician who talks about the immense benefits of getting sunlight onto the skin for getting over disease, for enhancing immune system function, and on and on. Can you, because there's going to be a lot of people right now that are going to go buy a red light lamp. Not necessary.

Not necessary. No, sunlight. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd. past sunlight through a prism, it bends the light, and you see the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue,

indigo violet. But also in that sunlight is ultraviolet light. Some UVB exposure each day to the skin increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men and is important for libido. It actually reinforces romantic relationships

for reasons other than sexual interactions, attractiveness, et cetera, strong effects. So sunlight has it all. What you don't want is to go outside when there's so much UV that you get a sunburn. And you don't want to think that, you know, red light's the only light you need.

You want that warmth from the sun. And it gets better because I notice I'm sort of like, it gets better like a salesman. I'm selling nature. Okay. I'm telling you, when you go outside and there's a lot of greenery, greenery reflects long wavelength red and infrared light. Throw on some infrared goggles and you're not going to do this. But you look and all that stuff would be glowing white in those goggles.

greenery reflects down infrared light. How do you know it reflects light? I'm stealing Roger's words as I say this, but where's the coolest place to be on a hot day under a tree? Why is that? Because it's reflecting the heat, the infrared light. But when you're out in greenery, you're getting all that long wave length light

and it bounces around and it goes through you. So get out into nature. Walk outside. If you work and live in a city, get outside, take off a brim tap, because you do want the sun getting down onto your face. People are so terrified about accelerating aging based on UV, but we're not talking about baking yourself in UV light all day. The health benefits of this are immense.

There's a Swedish study that actually showed that the more sunlight people got, the longer they lived. In fact, smokers who got a lot of sunlight, this isn't my favorite study, but we have to admit it's there, live longers than non-smokers who didn't get enough sunlight. And there are other things, too, like exercise, et cetera, but don't smoke, but get sunlight. There'll be a lot of night shift workers listening. I have a section specifically for night shift workers because here are the two scariest things. Night shift workers live shorter lives. Cancer rates go up. They're metabolically unhealthy and it's very hard to mitigate.

But I provide some tools specifically for night shift workers and for jet lag by the way because people travel. Here's the really scary thing. You and I qualify as night shift workers because the studies are, night shift work, barring some of the more extreme ones, was most of them were on how many people after 6 p.m., right, are on devices, getting artificial LED exposure or doing activities besides eating and socializing with their family or in bed. If you work at night at home, you're still a night shift worker. You don't have to work all night to be a night shift worker. So we have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick. And I don't like to be one of these like fearmonger people, but here's

a cool thing. I'm going to skip, because we're on to this, I'm going to skip to number six. Okay. Okay. As the sun is going down, you don't have to watch the sunset. That would be cool to watch the sun. Everyone loves sunsets. But try and get some daylight in your eyes in the late afternoon or evening. If you're going to be working indoors from like after lunch until nightfall, try and get near a window, do your best, go out on a balcony, take a quick walk around the building, do what you can to get some sunlight in your eyes without sunglasses. When you get some sunlight in your eyes in the late part of your day. Let's just say in the last third of your day. And the clock times don't matter here because we all get up and go to sleep at different times. You buffer those cells in

your eye against the negative effects of artificial light at night. This is your Netflix inoculation, as I call it. Like you can be on your computer at nine or ten at night without it damaging your melatonin levels quite as much, without it disrupting your blood glucose levels and your sleep. if you get some bright light in your eyes in the later part of your day. But there's one population of people for whom this doesn't work and it seems to be adolescents.

You can't buffer them against the negative effects of screen light at night. What happens if you view screen light at night? You get big bumps in cortisol and people say, well, I can fall asleep just fine after being on my iPad or screen. True, some people don't have as much of a negative effect from blue light at night,

but the blood glucose effects and the next morning cortisol effects are the problem. Remember I said high cortisol sets you up for low cortisol? Yeah. Low cortisol sets you up for high cortisol. So you've got a population of people, kids who have their cortisol is slightly but significantly higher in the evening and at night because they're on devices. And the next morning, their cortisol levels are struggling to get up. You know, this is a tough one because teens socialize that way and you don't want to take their phones away and they cling to their iPads like, you know, like my new bulldog strummer clings to a challenge.

chew toy. You know, it's like, you take it away from them, but like they hate you for it. So I said view daylight, because you can't always see the sun, but even if it's overcast, just get out for a few minutes and take a walk. Your sleep will be better. I feel like I'm giving a lecture in class. That's amazing. That's what I want. So we said hydrate sunlight. And then number three, I know everyone's heard it, but if you can exercise in the first three to four hours of your day, you could do it in the afternoon without problem, but there's a huge advantage to doing cardiovascular resistance training in the first three hours of your day. Cardiovascular or resistance training. Yeah. And in the book, I devoted an entire chapter, chapter two, to exercise. And I explain what I think personally is the best way

to structure an exercise program for somebody who doesn't want to be the most jacked, but wants muscle and definition and strength, somebody that doesn't need to run a marathon for a record time, but wants endurance, somebody who wants to be able to sprint reasonably fast, and has middle distance ability to. And it's basically structured you either lift or do cardio on alternating days. Three days total of lifting, warm up, reasonably low volume of work sets, two to three worksets per exercise, emphasizing compound movements. So not like a preacher curl or a tricep kickback. Those are fine, but you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck if you're doing pull-ups, rows, dips,

multiple muscles at once. Multiple joints moving at once as a compound extra. Some hip hinge movement, so it could be squat, hack squat, some dead lifts. And I talk about how to

get specific aesthetic effects in there too. I mean, I'm by no means in exercise physiologists, but I've been resistance training since I was 16. I'm now 50,

I'll be 51 in a month. So I feel great. Cardio at the start if you're doing resistance training or not at all? I warm up for five minutes of cardio and then resistance train, but I do the cardio

on alternate days, three days total of cardio. One day of, Cardio is long and slow for about an hour. One is about 30 minutes at moderate intensity. One is a short one like I did this morning, jumped on the aerodyme bike. Pedal, easy for a minute, then go all out for 30 seconds, easy for 10, 30, 10, 30, 10, and then you're off the bike. Basically, max heart rate training.

And the day after leg day, if you do your legs right, take a rest day. Yeah. But here's the interesting thing about exercise. You notice I didn't say deliberate cold exposure. You want to blow some minds. I will go toe to toe with anybody on the internet or off the internet. Deliberate cold exposure does not raise cortisol this much. It's amazing to me that the same people that are suggesting moderate to high intensity exercise

are saying that deliberate cold exposure raises cortisol. It's simply not true. Not true for women because a lot of people said, is your book going to be for women and men? I distinguish between data when there are data showing that it's different for women and men. I acknowledge when there's no data in women. and the data are very clear in women and men, trivial increases in cortisol,

magnificent, huge increases in adrenaline, norapinephrine, and dopamine from deliberate cold exposure. And those so-called catacolamines are great to have rolling into your day. They're the things of alertness and focus. The appropriate stressor for cortisol, appropriate meaning the one that you want,

is a psychological stressor, we know that, working out with weights for 45 minutes, taking your sets near to failure, going for a run for 30 minutes. So the point being, if you do this exercise in the first three hours of your day, you're getting a big inflection in cortisol. Again, this is what you want. Now, some people can't exercise first thing in the day. They either don't want to or they can't by way of schedule.

And if you're going to exercise in the later part of your day, that's fine. Your cortisol will come back down. You can do some long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. Andy Galpin talks about that. Take a hot shower, which paradoxically lowers your core body temperature and then helps you. you sleep. When you heat up the surface of your body, you have a thermostat in your brain called the medial preoptic area, and it goes, oh, the surface of my body is warm. I should probably cool my core body temperature down, and you fall asleep better. You know, this is like the putting

socks on effect or the hot bath effect, right? I assume a massage or something like that also. Great. You have access to that in the last hour of your day, like, we need to learn more about your life. My fiance used to be a masseuse for many years, so she... Awesome. So when you exercise for a few days, early in the first three hours of your day. Let's see you do that two times. The next morning you wake up feeling a little bit more willing to exercise. Did your willpower change? Well, in some sense, yes, but what happened was your cortisol entrainment mechanisms changed. Your super-chaismatic nucleus all day is clocking what you're doing. Let's say you eat like 9, 12, snack at 3 and 6.30.

You have a food anticipatory signal. You have grellin is secreted, makes you hungry. We are clocks, and the synchronization of those clocks is very, very important. When you exercise at roughly the same time of day, early in the day, you will have more energy to exercise in the first 15 minutes before that. You'll notice you kind of start stirring around. Yes, part of it is cognitive, but a lot of it actually is your brain is anticipating. Exercise is coming. Oh, cool.

I teach neuroanatomy, so this is fun. I have a brain here in front of me. It does open up in case you want to open it up, but you just reminded me of something. Yeah. You reminded me of something. that I saw you talk about, which was the anterior mid-singulate cortex. And I think you described this as being one of the most interesting discoveries of neuroscience. So, singulate cortex, I mean, it's not directly exposed here,

but the anterior mid-singulate cortex would sit somewhere like there. This is an amazing structure, right? I mean, just to remind people, like, when we feel some sort of pressure, social pressure, physical pressure, traffic that we hate, and we decide, I'm going to lean into this, like I'm going to compete or I'm going to push through this internal or external resistance. Neurons in the anterior mid-singulate cortex are just firing away. And if that area is stimulated, my colleague Joe Parvizi at Stanford showed this, is a neurosurgeon, people say, I feel like a challenge is coming on and I'm going to lean into it.

This is the brain area of tenacity. And the amazing thing is it has connections all, over the brain with reward systems, et cetera. So it's collecting information about when it gets activated, what's going on in the world that makes you feel pressure, when you feel like pushing back when you don't. But the best part is, it is highly subject to plasticity. People who diet successfully, their anterior mid-singulate cortex gets bigger and more active. People who embark on a new exercise program, adding some component of exercise. For me, it's mobility work, because I've got a little stiff over the years. I know. So when you do something that you don't want to do, that you don't

reflexively do, your anterior mid-singulate cortex gets bigger and more willing to engage in challenging things going forward. Yeah. So that's the key point, which is that sets you up to be able to do more challenging things in the future. That's right. Why would you do deliberate cold exposure? I'll tell you why. Because your ability to sit calmly or even not so calmly when your system is flooded with adrenaline and noropenephrine and to be able to trigger that with cold water safely like cold shower getting into a cold ice bath it's safe as long as it's not so cold as long as you're not hyperventilating beforehand on purpose that carries over to your ability to keep your head straight when other things trigger adrenaline you don't get 10 stress

systems you get one and stress looks like your adrenaline goes and it comes down slowly there's a hallmark of stress cortisol goes up goes down right so the you're you're You are prepared, my friend. My goodness. You should be a university professor. You want to teach with me at Stanford? So I came up with a model for arousal, right? People hear arousal and they think, oh, it's got to be romantic arousal.

It can be, but arousal is really just how alert or sleepy you are. So you can be really sleepy, like in a coma, or you can be in full-blown panic. Nobody wants that. But a seesaw is the right analogy here because we have this thing called the autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system is made up of two parts, parasympathetic. and the sympathetic nervous system. They're in different parts of the body. They both connect to most every organ,

but in general, when you are relaxed, that's what we call the reflection of parasympathetic tone going up. When you're stressed, it's the reflection of sympathetic tone going up. But as you get sleepy, your parasympathetic nervous system starts to dominate a bit.

And as you get really sleepy, it dominates more. When you wake up in the morning, and then if you do the right things like hydrate, get sunlight, and some exercise, well then your cortisol goes up and you're going to be more alert. The ability to navigate stress of all kinds

depends on your ability to do what I call is control the tightness of this hinge. When you train your ability to think, breathe, stay calm when your system is flooded with adrenaline, and that happens later in a way that was non-voluntary, something happened that you didn't want to happen, your brain immediately flits to the understanding of that place and you are able to maintain thoughtfulness. You can know to not speak.

That's often the best thing you can do. You know to react or not react. In fact, when you get into a cold plunge, one of the beautiful things about cold is that your prefrontal cortex that's involved in strategy setting and making meaning out of what's going on, its activity is greatly suppressed for the first 20 to 30 seconds. Know this about every stressful circumstance.

In the first 20 or 30 seconds, you are brain damaged. You are brain damaged. You are in that mode of like you could react physically. Sometimes that can save your life, but most times you just don't want to do anything. Step out of the way of the car, get away from the aggressor, whatever. But most times, you're best off not saying a darn thing. And then your prefrontal cortex slowly starts coming back online. And then you're back again because you're ruminating.

This is good relationship advice. Very good relationship advice. I wish I had learned it long ago, right? Actually, last night I looked on Twitter and I saw something that was both perplexing and a little bit upsetting to me. And I went to sleep. Like, I know how to deal with this. Some long exhale breathing, which will slow your heart rate. And we'll talk about that.

But I woke up this morning. Turns out it was a complete misunderstanding. And everything was reversed. But last night, I thought about sending a text. But I thought later at night, the prefrontal cortex is already diminished. This is why stress feels so much harder to deal with at night. And prefrontal cortex, we should describe that's being logic and stuff. So frontal cortex, so here it's logical.

You have the frontal and motor areas here. And prefrontal cortex is basically a big patch of real estate behind your forehead that in humans is greatly expanded compared to in other mammals. I don't like calling them lower, but they have less prefrontal cortex. So they're more driven by their impulses. One of the most incredible things that every child and adult needs to develop is what's called top-down inhibition. You feel an impulse, but you resist the impulse. In fact, the way I've mostly trained my dog's drummer because it works is I taught him at nine weeks of age, put down a piece of food. Of course, he goes for it.

He loves food. And you teach him weight. And he sits there and you teach him to look at you. And then now he, I can have a moving toward a piece of food. And I say, wait, and his nose can be this far. And he'll just stop. He has great top-down inhibition. Is it about food?

No. Am I trying to torture him? Of course not. It's so that if I say wait, he can suppress his arousal. This is one of the most valuable skills, and people with frontal damage show an inability to do that, which is why sometimes they're violent or they say inappropriate things. People who are tired, stressed, drunk, prefrontal cortex activity is suppressed, get in a cold shower, first 20, 30 seconds. It's kind of fun. You're like, here I am with less of a brain than I had getting in.

and then 30 seconds later, you're like, I can do this. This explains why you shouldn't do things tired. Don't do things tired. When you haven't slept, absolutely. Impulse control is way worse. So when I heard you talk about the anterior mid-singular cortex, and there was this part of the brain that was kind of like the willpower, or you described it then as the tenacity muscle, it completely changed my relationship

with hard things because it made me realize at some sort of like, I guess some conceptual level that every hard thing I overcome is better equipped me, like when I, you know, curl weights in the gym to do harder things tomorrow. Yes. When I heard, oh, there's like a neurological, I'm making a neurological investment in my future. And then you talked there about doing voluntary, difficult things like the cold plunge, whatever. Or learning a new language.

It can be cognitive in nature. It can be learning to dance if that's stressful for you. And it can be anything that creates some resistance for you, internal resistance, anything of that sort. This is a beautiful structure because it's wired into cognitive capacities and our ability to build them and challenges with that to emotional challenges. We're kind of optimizing our lives towards comfort, though, aren't me? That's like a winning formula is more comfortable things. I think Jack Dorsey said it best.

There's this great video of him online. It was a small lecture that he was giving where he said any time we exchange ourselves, our money, our time for convenience, we are almost always giving up something that's like fundamentally useful for us, neural. And it's okay to do. I order food on DoorDash because there's great food and I don't have a lot of time to cook. I'd like to devote my time to other things. I'm trading for convenience. But if you're aware of the trade-off, you're much better off. And the real question is what you're going to do with that additional time. While I'm against, you know, over-optimization to the point that it pulls you out of life, like it diminishes life, I am all for striving and optimization, quote-unquote, in ways that allow you to lean into the rest of your life with more vigor. I think Arthur Brooks says it best, you know, I mean, we are wired. And meaning comes from striving. And within striving is some struggle. And within struggle is also the release from struggle.

And that's also very satisfying. Here's the over-optimization thing to me in a nutshell, which is there are people for whom doing two of the things I described for five minutes each per day will experience a significant improvement in their mental and physical health. There are people for whom they're sort of like junkyard dogs. They can live on anything. They have a ton of vigor. And they can be like, yeah, I didn't feel that much from like drinking some water and getting

something. Cool. I got you. You're one of those people who can fall asleep in front of the screen, get up and just keep going on a, you know, sugary muffin and something like, great. But everyone can afford to take a look at what they're doing now and try and move the needle toward more vigor, well-being, happiness, peace by doing certain things. Do you become more sensitive to the thing when you stop?

Doing the thing? Depends on the thing. Okay. So, for instance, if people, like, I talk about nutrition in there and all, it's one of the cards, I actually cover everything from the all meat diet to vegan diets to really go into the literature so people can choose. But really, if you look at what most people could benefit from doing, and you could do this with vegan or vegetarian, it's a little harder, but the best diet is going to be the

following, right? Not too many calories, not too few. That's individual. You can calculate that. It's an easy thing to do, but I provide a way to do that. you need to get what's what are high complete protein to calorie ratio proteins. This is a concept I came up with because if you look at the literature, yes, we need the essential amino acids. So that's a complete protein.

But you can get that from beans and rice. But to get 30 grams of complete protein from beans and rice, you're going to consume about four to five times as many calories as is required if you get it from a chicken breast. So this is the factor that's kind of obvious, but no one ever talks about. So you want to eat some high complete protein to calorie ratio proteins. So, you know, eggs, lean meat, fish. And then everyone knows you need fiber, right? So vegetables and fruits. But what I will say is that many people who remove us starches entirely or remove vegetables entirely

will find that they're autoimmune issues resolve. And there are reasons for that. And we have to acknowledge that. But most people should be eating some vegetables and fruit for micronutrients and fiber. low sugar fermented food is very clear Justin Sondenberg's work from Stanford very clear lowers the inflammatoryome in fact when they had people eat more fiber for many people inflammatory markers went up no one likes to talk about that especially not the vegans but too much fiber can be noxious for some people and pro-inflammatory so low sugar fermented foods like

sourcrow kimchi beet kovas is delicious problem is they tend to be expensive but you can make your own and there's recipes online to do these things. I don't want to get into the seed oil debate. Just eat, just use olive oil. It's delicious. It's relatively inexpensive nowadays to get real olive oil. Small amounts of butter. Okay. Like, why are we even debating seed oils? It's so dumb. It's like the seed oil debate is like the fastest way to kill neurons that I'm aware of. You know, it's like so dumb. It's like because studies are not well done. You're comparing a processed food diet that includes seed oils versus or you're talking clean seed oils versus a high meat diet with processed meat.

It's a mess. It's like, as a scientist, you just look at this and you go like, this field sucks. Like, someone wants to have a magnificent career in science. Go into the field of nutrition and do some really good studies because the studies are lousy. 90% of them, like, you can look at it. You don't even have to be trained in nutrition.

You go, there are five different variables here and four over here. There's like what you would call a bad experiment. So olive oil, the data are great. It's impressive. then starches are great for fueling muscles and glycogen and brain, but you don't want to overdo them. And the way that people tend to overdo starches is by eating starches combined with a lot of fats. So sourdough bread is great. Sourdough bread with butter is even better if you ask me.

Sourdough bread with equal amounts of butter and bread, you're starting to get into problems. It's very hard for people to go from like to overeat starches unless they have a lot of fats with them or sugar with them. On starches, is there an impact, I think I've heard you talk about an impact on your sleep with what you eat late at night? Many people who don't eat enough starches find that they have sleep issues. And there are reasons for this because we talk about comfort foods. Typically people think junk foods when they think comfort foods. But foods that increase glucose, lower cortisol. Hmm, that's weird. Starches lower cortisol. And you want your cortisol low at night helps you fall and stay asleep. Now, you don't want to eat too close to bedtime. You also don't

want to have gnawing hunger at bedtime. We talk about that. But here's the interesting thing. What is cortisol? I should have mentioned this earlier. What is cortisol? Is it a stress hormone? No, it's a hormone that's released during stress. But cortisol's job is not to deal with stress. Cortisol's job is to mobilize energy in the body. When cortisol goes up, glucose is mobilized and other fuels too. So when you eat starch, is you buffer cortisol. There's a very clear relationship here. So people who are not eating enough starches who then allow themselves that bowl of rice or a bowl of pasta in their final meal of the day or a little bit at lunch and at dinner, maybe even a bowl of oatmeal breakfast, they feel more even psychologically. They have more physical energy. Sometimes people with chronic stress issues

notice they stop shaking. People with autoimmune issues, sometimes resolve those because your cortisol is buffered. Because your blood glucose is elevated. And so your body isn't tapping into the survival system to try and mobilize glucose. So I have this outstanding question that I have to ask you. It goes back to the picture that you drew of the graph. Where is that one? You said high cortisol in the morning is a good thing. Yep.

So what if I pick up my phone first thing in the morning and I look at my worst emails? In some sense, from the perspective of spiking your cortisol, like, it's a good thing. But can you do it outside while getting sunlight? I was wondering if it matters like how the cortisol comes. because what if I stress myself out in the morning? It doesn't matter. The problem is the rumination that comes with stress. Okay.

Right? So, you know, the nice thing about physical stressors that we control, like a workout or a cold plunge, is that they have an onset and an offset. And yes, they start faster than they end, right? You have stress and it kind of carries over, you ruminate. But psychological stressors tend to bang around in our brain a lot and late at night, and they tend to come back. I will say this.

I think 2027 is going to be. the year that we close the coffin on this cortisol is bad thing. So how should I think about cortisol? Because right now I think of it as the stress hormone. It's to mobilize energy. Okay. So you can use it. And if you're going to sleep at night, you don't need to mobilize energy so you can use it.

You need to rest and reset your body. Okay. Cortisol is an energy promoting hormone. So if I walk up on stage, my cortisol level, like before I go up on stage and there's a big audience, whatever, my cortisol level is going to go up then? Yeah, if you're stressed about it, maybe a little bit more. but it's a preparation hormone. You're preparing for adversity, but also great things.

There are these beautiful studies from a guy named James McGaugh and Larry Cahill, which showed, do you know that if you want somebody to learn something? You know what you do? You spike their cortisol before, during or after that thing. Should work. Why not? Trauma does that, and you never forget. All you do is work on trying to remove the emotional load of that traumatic thing.

Wait, so does that mean that someone who's listening to this podcast right now in the gym is going to have better knowledge recall? of what we talked about than someone who's listening in bed. Great question. So I have a chapter that's all about learning motivation and plasticity. And we've all heard, exercise makes your brain better. How? Why?

Turns out it's very important to understand there are two ways it does it, or at least two. One is it raises your levels of arousal. Exercise doesn't make you smarter. Exercise makes you more alert coming out of the exercise so you can go learn things because it turns out you have to be alert to learn things. In particular, you need adrenaline and cortisol. is all elevated to learn things. So when people say, you know, weightlifting is good for your brain, cardio is good for your brain, turns out long, slow cardio, my endurance friends aren't going to like

this, not that great for your brain. It's not bad for your brain, but it's not that great for your brain. Turns out an intense weightlifting session or high intensity interval training session, in the four hours after that, you are primed for learning. Why? You got a lot of stimulatory molecules in your body, and you can focus better. What about if I'm a podcaster, and I want to want to be able to ask good questions and use my mouth and my brain in that context, but not necessarily just learning, but performance of my sort of cognition. So the performance curve basically is inverted you. If you're not alert enough, you can't do what you need to do.

If you're too alert, you can't do what you need to do or learn. So you want to be at the top of that inverted you. And a lot of what learning is about and a lot of what the anterior mid-singulate cortex is about is getting from, I don't want to do it, up to the top of that you. Then it's usually about not getting too stressed. Now, I learned the best trick for this, like the two best tricks. And in fact, that will take us to number five. You can use any time of day, which is use physiological size to reduce stress fast.

Okay, so I have a chapter on stress mitigation, and it's got essentially two components. One is how to limit stress in the moment. Okay. Very, very important to know how to limit stress in the moment. And here... Why is it so important? Oh, gosh, because meditation, great night sleep, massage, social relations, being well, fed, hydrated, all of that helps you buffer stress. But when something happens and your heart rate

is too high or you're shaking and you can't organize your thoughts in the way you want, none of that helps. You've gone over the line. You're too far on the arousal spectrum towards alert. And it was about 2016 that I realized I'm going to take a significant portion of my lab and work on this problem. I want to find real-time tools for mitigating stress. So I started hanging around with people from special operations who sit in ice baths in cold water. And they don't actually do ice baths, by the way, in the SEAL teams. They spend a lot of time in cold water during their training. And I started talking to people in performance fields, in particular neurosurgeons, people who

deal with life or death circumstances for many, many years and maintain immense calm. One of my closest childhood friends is you should have him on this podcast. His name is Dr. Eddie Chang, and he's a neurosurgeon at UCSF. He's the chair of neurosurgery, and he's brought people out of Lockton Syndrome to speak through AI. He's also a bioengineer. He's also been my friend since we were seven years old. And we talk three times a week these days about science. And I actually visited his laboratory and got to see him take a golf ball-sized tumor out of a guy's forebrain while the guy was awake. Wow. Eddie is the calmest guy you'll ever meet. Why? Because a movement of less than a millimeter in the wrong direction for him

could cost a patient's life. People have ways to calm down in real time. So I teamed up with a colleague. his name is David Spiegel. He's our, at that time, he was our associate chair of psychiatry, and he studies hypnosis, but clinical hypnosis for smoking cessation, pain management, and anxiety. And I should say, mainly Melis Yelmaz Balban in my lab did a study. She built this stress lab with VR and stress and that's a whole other thing. And then we did this study where about 100 or so subjects were fixed with trackers that measured heart rate and heart rate variability and sleep. And people were in one of four groups. They either meditated for five minutes a day or they did box breathing, inhale, hold, exhale hold for five minutes. Okay. Like four seconds each or something.

There's a way you can measure it, which is the carbon dioxide tolerance test. Like how well you can control an exhale will tell you a little bit about how stressed you are. When you're stressed, you tend to blow off carbon dioxide very quickly. And when you're less stressed, it tends to shift towards long exhales become easier. So one of the groups, and then I'll say what the mechanism is, did cyclic hyperventilation. Some people call this Wimhoff breathing, tumo breathing, Pranayama breathing.

It's big inhales, passive exhales, repeated for five minutes. Massively spiked adrenaline, which isn't a bad thing. You're controlling it anyway. Does not spike cortisol very much, incidentally. And when you do those exhales,

you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide, so it shifts your internal state intends to make people very alert. Or they did. There was a fourth condition where they did a double inhale, long exhale, repeat, the so-called physiological sigh. So Jack Feldman at UCLA and some other folks in the 1930s had observed that animals and people, when they're very relaxed, would do this kind of strange pattern of breathing where they would go

to double inhale, long exhale. Jack's lab discovers there's a brain area called the parapacial nucleus, which is specifically there to generate this double inhale exhale pattern in animals and in humans. Wild. Well, nature doesn't make mistakes like that. It turns out there are two breathing centers. One is called the pre-bot singer complex named after a bottle of wine. Pattern of breathing where you inhale, exhale, that you alternate. This other structure, the parapacial nucleus, which we all have, is involved in any time you double up the inhales or exhales. And it's involved in breathing while you speak or sing or eat and it generates these physiological size which it turns out get triggered

in environments where there's not enough oxygen or when you get claustrophobic or when you get very stressed carbon dioxide goes up your brain senses that and it triggers the gas reflex that double inhale maximally inflates the millions hundreds of millions of little sacks in the lungs and then when you exhale you offload the greatest amount of carbon dioxide so if you just go you're not offloading as much carbon dioxide, but if you, that second short inhale takes these little sacks in your lungs, which are like balloons at a kid's party, and they're empty, but they're fluid lined on the center.

So there's some surface tension inside them. They're sticking together. So you go, it's the double inhale that opens those up, and then you offload the carbon dioxide. Now, that's great, but the real magic of deliberate long exhales is that they slow your heart rate down through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. This is like the most important thing

for anyone interested in stress, exercise, sleep, and wellness. Because the wild thing is, we have this vagus nerve, everyone likes to talk about the vagus nerve. It's a massive nerve bundle that collects sensory information and chemical information from the organs of the body and sends it up to the brain. Cool.

And it's classified as parasympathetic. calming. But you know what's funny? Neuroscientists, when they want to wake up a person during an experiment, like a neurosurgery experiment, they stimulate the Vegas. A treatment for depression is to stimulate the Vegas. Guess what that does? It makes people more alert. So it's a mixed nerve. But the really cool part about the Vegas is that it's not all ascending. 85% of the information is going up from the body through the Vegas, but there's another pathway to and it goes down. And it goes down to your heart.

And it controls the slowing of the heart rate when you exhale. Heart rate variability is the slowing of your heart rate when you exhale. You want to increase your HRV? Do a few deliberate exhales during the day. People go, how do I get my HRV up? Well, yeah, you do some VO2 max training, right? Like, you know, obviously you do some max heart rate training, some hit workouts, etc. you really want to increase your HRV in sleep and while waking,

just do some deliberate exhales during the day because that's the parasympathetic, the calming arm of the Vegas, pushing down on your heart rate. And all of the groups I described saw benefits, but it was the people who did these physiological size that benefited the most. So then I started exploring, well,

how fast does heart rate slow down with physiological size? And turns out you don't need to do it for five minutes. Do it once. You just go, okay, your feet, feeling stressed, you're going on stage, you're waiting for a diagnosis, you're, you don't feel, you feel too alert relative to how you want to feel for whatever reason, good or bad. You're about to get married, right? You know, whatever. You just, until your lungs are empty. And it's immediate. And I, for me, that was immensely gratifying. Yes, because it's fun to publish papers. We publish it

in cell reports. And Melis gets, let's, the lion share the credit for that. There were other people on the paper, but she did so much hard work from that and analysis. I was, so gratified because I'm like, oh, finally, like if I didn't sleep well or if I'm something stressful, even though I slept well, I can calm myself down like that. I thought real-time tools for stress are what we all need. The interesting thing is that you can also raise your stress threshold. And a lot of the stress mitigation chapter is also about how to do that. We need to train for discomfort so that the little things don't feel so big. This is also important in survival situations, right? You need to be able to think very clearly about what order of operations to take, what direction to escape through.

This is not about like setting yourself to tolerate more pain and abuse. This is about the exact opposite. So this is about safety. This is about self-protection. This is about noticing when we're alert but calm, we can notice the subtle ripples in people around us who needs our attention, who we really don't like. But we never really realized it. You can notice that stuff. A lot of people, they wake up at like 2, 3 a.m. in the morning.

Yeah. In the middle of the night. And they don't really know why. They don't know how to get back to bed. They start worrying and remunerating. Very, very common. Yeah. So they can use this as a tool in that moment.

Definitely. 10 long, long deliberate exhales. There's also this really crazy trick that I put in the book. It has indirect scientific support. You want it, like, best way to fall back asleep, you want to hear this crazy. This is so nuts. To fall asleep or to fall back asleep, you need to stop thinking about your body position.

Hmm. Turns out there's a direct relationship through through a few steps, but there's a dedicated circuit, I should say, between your eyes, their movements, and your cerebellum, which is involved in proprioception and balance and a number of other things. We call the cerebellum the mini brain, but it's this guy back here who really get nerdy, these hyperfoliated lobes back here. Foliators are just folds. It's just nerd speak for foldy bumpy. It's involved in balance. It's involved in learning. It's actually very important for generating and responding to the error signals between what you're trying to do and what you can do. That error signal turns out to be one of the most important things for generating learning to make errors through genuine attempts.

And your cerebellum is critical for that. It's also involved in timing. So you need to kind of turn off your recognition of your own limbs to fall asleep. How do you do that? You know what works with babies? walk back and forth at a particular pace, and this was defined in this Japanese study, and have people swing the baby back and forth just gently as they do it, and the baby falls asleep. Guess what?

Parents figure out the exact cadence with a very small margin of error through trial and error to figure out how to get their kid to sleep. It's like a natural experiment. It's been looked at in the lab. Turns out when you rock back and forth, your eyes move.

This is a very, very ancient system that exists in all jaw, animals, including us, that as we move through space, walking, running, swimming, whatever, the world is gliding by what we call optic flow. You would see the world blurry, but you have a compensatory eye movement that unbeknownst to you, because of a connection between your eyes and these brainstem areas, whose names aren't important right now, and your cerebellum, creates a visual slip error, and your eyes automatically offset that error. So when I go like this, the world seems stable.

And it turns out there's a pattern of eye movement that can shut down the proprioceptive circuits in the cerebellum, which make you forget your limb position. And it greatly facilitates the speed at which you fall back asleep. Okay, you're gonna close your eyes. Great. You're gonna move your eyes slowly to one side underneath your eyelids, then to the other side,

then up, then down. Now you're gonna move them counter-clock, clockwise in a circle-ish, and then clockwise in a circle-ish. And now still with your eyes closed, you're going to kind of point them towards your nostrils, you're not going to cross your eyes and you're going to do a long exhale. Great. That done two or three times generally has people waking up the next morning and like wild. What happens?

What happened is your proprioceptive circuits are shut down. Now, that's kind of fun to do and you'll see and it costs nothing and it generally works. Some people, if they're really, really stressed, it might not work. But this is what I do if I wake up in the middle of the night. I usually go to the bathroom, get back in bed, do long exhale breathing, and I do that, and I wake up the next morning. It really works well. So well, in fact, that there's a company based on work done from two MIT scientists.

They have a sleep mask that generates this pattern of eye movements through a little electrode behind the ear. It's just like, and it stimulates the extraocular muscles in just the right patterns. And I tried it, and you fall right asleep. You're joking. No. And it monitors REM. You know, we monitor REM through like an 8 sleep or a whoop or some other device through changes in heart rate and breathing. This is direct monitoring of REM.

It's wild. And it can control your eye movements to induce more REM if you want more REM. There will be a time very soon, like within the next 12 to 14 months, when because of devices like the one they and others are making, when you're going to be able to say, you know what, I want. two hours of deep sleep. I want two hours of REM across a six-hour night because I can't afford to sleep my ration of eight and you will be generating those eye movements during sleep in order to facilitate, not force, but facilitate those patterns of sleep. I've spent the last decade building and investing in companies and so often the conversation around marketing budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved, but then the

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slash DOAC to join and use code DOAC 25 for a $25 credit. Did I hear you say that there's a peptide that can help your REM sleep? Yes, I have no affiliation to it because it's called pine nylon. I will tell you, in the book, I do not talk about hormone therapies, peptides are psychedelics. The book is about what I know for sure. Hormones, peptide therapies, and psychedelics are at the front edge right now. I'm very much involved in looking at the research, talking to the people that are doing these things, and yes, I dabble in these things, right? I'm very interesting.

I experiment on myself, and I'm an adult I can do that. So pinealon is very interesting because I found that if I took an it it, e-de-bitty-bit-bit, every third night. I tried this experiment for about a month. I got massive amounts of REM sleep that night, but also on subsequent nights. I hosted a Dr. Abud Bakri on my podcast, who's, in my view, is the most knowledgeable physician on the topic of peptides. Oh, I saw that episode. It's amazing. He's amazing. And I think you guys would have an even better conversation, frankly. But in any event, he tells me that Pineelon is potentially involved. There are some data supporting its use for encouraging pinealocyte health.

So the actual health of the pineal gland. Yeah, the pineal gland, which makes melatonin and it does other things too. So I think pineal on is a great tool to use sporadically. I don't use it regularly. You know, as long as we're talking about peptides, I do think that there's, I mean, I'm peptide curious is, you know, I'm from the Bay Area. I've got peptide curious. I have not tried any GLPs yet, but I'm getting curious about very, very low dose

terseptide or retitruti. I'm peptide curious, but I'm scared. Yeah. I'm scared because you've got to inject most of them, right? It's a tiny little thing, you know. What's your take on peptides as like a cat? It's a big category, isn't it? Bloody everything seems to be a peptide these days.

Here's my opinion. It will be popular with some people, unpopular with others. But obviously, as with hormone therapies or anything else or supplements, like sleep, hydration, sunlight, exercises, nutrition. Like, you need all that stuff. The behavioral tools are the foundation. Great things can't happen when you build on a foundation. Okay things can happen when you build on non-foundation, but it doesn't last long.

But the combination of the two can be pretty awesome, especially if somebody has the means and the interest. So the GLP's, which are the weight loss drugs? The weight loss drugs. I think Reda True Tide is amazing. It's not just a GLP. It also hits the glucagon and GIP pathway. This is the one that Lilly invested, Eli Lilly invested hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, into researching. And it went through phase three.

people lost one third approximately of their body weight in about a year or so. Is that a good thing for everybody? No. So what's happening is people are, okay, so the psychedelic community talked about microdosing. That microdosing phrase has been now incorporated into GLPs and people realize they could bypass a lot of the side effects and the cost by microdosing GLPs. These are anecdotes.

So I want to be clear. and I'm not pushing peptides or selling peptides. I say quite comfortably. I have a friend who's very, very skeptical about anything that's not fully FDA approved. I don't want to hear about your biohacking nonsense, this kind of thing, but she has chronic fatigue syndrome. And she talked to me about, like, what can I do?

She's seen all these physicians. Mind you, these are physicians at Stanford. These are physicians at UCSF. And she's a very smart, nuanced person. But she has a wall there. She started taking a very low, very low dose of terseptus of terseptide once every 10 days. And treasipiside is...

It's one of the GLP drugs. So we could talk about Mujaro Zempic, but it's not touching GIP or glucagon. It's mainly just increasing levels of glucagon like peptide, which is this thing that suppresses hunger and appetite, but also seems to lower inflammation. Yes, there are concerns about vision loss in people who have certain structural abnormalities of the eye.

Yes, there are concerns about apathy if people take too much of them. You know, it seems to reduce alcohol craving for people that like alcohol and sugar craving more generally and it can reduce craving for everything if you take enough of it.

Keep in mind, these drugs are ramping up levels of GLP thousandfold or more. A thousandfold or more. The body has never seen this level of glucagon-like peptide in the history of humans. And remember, this whole thing was discovered

because a smart biologist was studying why Gila monsters, these reptiles that I think are ugly, he probably thinks are beautiful, only have to eat a couple times a year. It's because they make a peptide called Extendin, which turned out to be homologous to glucagon-like peptide 1 in humans. The reason these reptiles don't have to eat very often

is because they always feel satiated. Why? Because they have very high levels of glucagon-like peptide circulating. We don't. And it works through two mechanisms, tells the brain, mechanisms for satiety to ramp up their activity, and so your brain is telling you, I don't really want food.

And it also makes people feel full, which is the basis of some of the side effects of nausea and other things. So she will tell you, oh, my God, my energy's back. My inflammation markers are way lower. I'm not cured, but I feel so much better. Very, very hard to dispute that kind of experience if you're the patient. We could talk about safety and sourcing and, you know, et cetera. But anyway, so people are trying to realize they can microdose stuff,

but you won't see randomized control trials that are going to push this kind of notion. You can tell it's terrible for business, right? So then there are things like pinealone. for sleep epitalin perhaps for DNA repair i haven't dabbled with that one yet and then there are the so-called growth hormone secretagogues so we're talking about tessa more ipermorel and cjc 12995 these will promote more growth hormone release and sleep they will have a negative feedback effect where they're going to shut down some of your own production and people get a bit leaner and they claim their deep sleep is better and it can increase insulin sensitivity i'll tell you i've tried surmerellin

I've tried a few of these other ones. They nuke my REM sleep. They give me a ton of deep sleep. I don't like them. I've tried pinealine. I'll take it now and again. I don't do it right now. And BPC is the one that gets everybody talking because body protection compound 157 is made in the gut.

People claim and I do think their claims are accurate that they feel, notice what I said right there is they feel as if their recovery from injury was accelerated. And I believe them because I've spent a lot of time with the animal data, whether it's an Achilles, tendon transsection or nerve regrowth or or tendon or ligament regrowth and vascular yes it does seem to accelerate healing across the board but the concern is you could vascularize tumors now would i take it no i don't have an injury right now i don't have any reason to take it so i don't think people should say should i take peptides you should ask what effect in your life are you trying to achieve right and then maybe bbc makes sense maybe it doesn't you're not going to find many clinical trials on it it has a very

very, very high, maybe infinite, you know, LD-50, meaning no one has really figured out how much can kill you, but that's not a good kind of way to run your life. And, you know, it's somewhere between a drug and a supplement. I think this is one of the concerns or one of the conversations I often hear around GLPs at the moment is that they've just not been around long enough for us to know the side effect profile over a long period of time. Is there any truth to that? Well, do you want to be in the experiment or out of these? You want to be in the control group or you want to be in the experimental group. Well, for somebody who has, like, serious obesity issues, the terseptides and Monjaro's and Ozempix and Reda Trutod could potentially save their life, okay?

Vision loss is a serious consideration, although I'll go on record, you know, vision is my home, and I'll just be direct. I don't tap dance at all, and I'm not trying to start any battles, and David and I can talk about it directly. David Sinclair recently went on Rogan and said, you know, the amount of blindness caused by GOPs has doubled, which scared everybody. I heard that. But there's a structural abnormality in the eye of a subset of people for whom that's true.

And it's a great idea to get your eye scan. But yeah, so as the... Ah, comes apart? Yeah. Oh, man, this is fun. It's good thing you only come on here every once in a while because I do this. I'll do this all day, every day.

So, you know, light obviously comes in. You've got that corny on the outside of the eye, and the lens focuses the light onto your retina, which is this pie crust-like structure that lines the back of your eyes, an amazing structure. You know, three cell layers thick, catches light, absorbs light.

The photoreceptors turn that into electricity through photo-transduction, amazing. Then that electricity is cast forward to a set of cells that line the inner part of the retina that we call retinal ganglion cells, and then they send their wires, their so-called axons, out the optic nerve, into your brain.

They course along the bottom of the brain and they enter your brain, including your circadian clock. You get vision, you get sleep wake rhythms, you get hormone regulation by light, it's just incredible. Well, where they exit the eyes called the optic nerve head.

And if the optic nerve head is a nicely shaped and sized tube for them to exit, great. Too big, that's not good, but too tight's not good either because those wires get pinched off. This is part of what happens in the disease glaucoma,

which is, the eye pressure goes up and those axons die away, these cells die away. And it's a second leading cause of blindness in the world. So in some people who have a structural abnormality, a structural feature of the optic nerve head here where these wires leave the eye, it does seem that the GLPs put them at greater risk

for causing some cinching off of those cells and there have been cases of blindness. But the thing that wasn't really cool, David, is this. He is developing some very very, very potentially impressive tools to rescue vision in glaucoma, etc. But meanwhile, GOPs are not making many people go blind, okay? You know, that's about as true as masturbation is making people go blind. I'm not saying you should do either one.

That's your personal choice. But the point here is that he scared the daylights out of people, pun intended, telling them that they can make you go blind. But everyone should get this area of their eye image. And it turns out it's very easy. You can go to your ophthalmologist or optometrist. Ask for an eye pressure test. Usually insurance covers it, but definitely worth paying for.

That was number five. We got into peptides. Yeah, we've done quite fun. Good thing we're not talking about psychedelics. We'll do that another time. Oh, gosh. You won't do them another time. I don't do psychedolics.

Listen, I'm open-minded. I didn't care. Not as open-minded as you be if we do psychedelics. No, I don't know. You took DMT? In a faraway land where it was very legal. Because, you know, I sit here and talk about these things on psychedelics. And I actually did work in a psychedelics company for about a year. But it was

deeply, deeply fascinating. And the reason I was compelled by it is the efficacy as it relates to mental health and the studies being done out of London around things like, you know, psilocybin and Ibegain and DMT treatments. And I just thought, wow, you know, it's unbelievable some of the clinical data. I'd love to learn more. So I did a psilocybin and then I did DMT. And it was really just... I've not done DMT. You've never done DMT? No, no, I've done clinical MDMA and psilocybin. I think I'm done with that, not because I had a negative experience,

but I got what I wanted out of it. And I found it to be immensely beneficial. Cilocybin? The combination of therapy going in, therapy during, and therapy coming out, of combination MDMA psilocybin. Do you know what? It's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion, was having a D&T experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable

from this reality in terms of the vivid. and the realness of it. And me just pondering this, this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality. So therefore, I concluded that my material reality is literally, but I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong, is a small amount of chemicals being uninterrupted. Does that make logical sense? Yeah. So I think about this way too much. I guess we are going to talk about psychedelics, reality and religion. A couple short statements about this. I'm fascinated by this. I'd love to hear you talk more about it. But here are a couple ways that I think about it. In a non-dismissive way, most all of biology is just compartmentalized

chemistry. So whether or not it's the flow of electricity along neural circuits to generate tenacity, for instance, or learning, you're just guiding chemistry in particular ways. Okay, that's not a way to trivialize it. It's kind of a way to think about it. There are two ways that you can change brain function, behavior, and chemistry. One is mechanical. I can breathe differently. I can get a massage, right? I could poke myself with a knife.

Okay, so there are mechanical forces that change our physiology, and then there are chemical forces, pharmacology, things we eat, and chemicals within us, serotonin, et cetera. That's really it. There's no other thing. In many ways, you're absolutely right.

It's compartmentalized chemistry and mechanics and other chemicals are what control that chemistry. And I think organizing one's thoughts sometimes in that way can be helpful because you realize the stress response is really just a bunch of chemicals happening in certain places and so on.

I personally am intrigued about the idea of things outside of our conscious understanding and biology that maybe things like DMT give us access to or maybe just prayer gives us access to or faith gives us access to. And it comes from my recognition, both as a neuroscientist and just a human who's been alive for 50 years and some change, that our biology and psychology, let's mold those together, are extraordinarily good at accomplishing certain things. But there are certain things that are outside the abilities of our psychology and biology. And if we are asking our psychology and biology

to satisfy something that our psychology and biology simply cannot satisfy, we're going to miss out on a lot of potential meaning in life. And to be very direct about it, like at the point where I decide to really embrace the idea of faith of a God, right, that there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful.

Everything got better. It relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally. And I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us, some people call it God, the universe, right? Some people might think it's Jesus. Some people might think it's something else might actually hold some power in how we could potentially behave, be better, be. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there's this thing planted in us or some of us, which is a question about things outside of us that if we were to embrace could allow us to get to a better place as a species?

Why would we think that a technology like AI would do that? AI is wonderful, but why would we think that it would come from computers? That's of us, right? Why would we think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do? To me, embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which by the way is about having, having doubt but still doing the things, the practices, prayer, is like to me one of the most liberating and educating thing, not just about stuff of God in the universe, but about the human brain. Okay, I've got some questions. Yeah, I mean, it's like we're not meant to solve this

on our own. Do you believe in God? Absolutely. When did God come into your life? Very early, but I was very good at suppressing the notion that it was real. Like I would pray in private. I would hide it and not just in bad times. And then I think I lived enough and observed enough hardship. We've talked about some of this on a previous podcast. I talked a little bit about that in the book, but I observed it out there too,

not just in my own life, that I started to realize, especially if you stick your hands in enough brains and you see my good friend Eddie Chang record from the brain of a awake human and remove a tumor and save that person's life. And you also realize that brain areas are controlling things because when they're stimulated, that person feels and responds in a certain way. You realize that we're not all meat and potatoes in there. There's something else. But I'm not sure that it all comes from us. It's sort of hard to explain. The best way I kind of wriggle out of this is that I brought my

dad on my podcast. My dad and I for many years had a choppy relationship. We have a great relationship now. He's 83 years old. He's super vigorous. He loves ideas. He's into quantum computing. He's theoretical physicist, right? And I asked him to explain quantum mechanics. I go, yeah, like, tell my audience how relativity works. He worked on chaos theory. Okay. Tell us how chaos works. And he said, I'll do that. But you have to understand that one of the most important things, about understanding quantum mechanics, is that early on you are told and you learn that the human brain

can't wrap its head around quantum mechanics with logic, with human understanding. You have to rely on the math. And he says, anyone who talks about the quantum field who can't show you the math, can't show you the proofs, is lying. He loves it when people are like, oh, the quantum this and the quantum that

is often is in like the meditative communities, but others too. And he goes, people throw this word around because very few people actually understand quantum biology. There's gaps in there's some logic, but there's gaps in their logic that the math doesn't line up with. And the math doesn't lie. So what he was saying, and we were having a discussion about God, and he said, yeah, at some point, if you're going to have faith in a higher power, God, you have to depart this notion that your logical brain can go from A to B to C and boom, you're there. But in quantum mechanics, it's the same thing.

But on the basis of quantum mechanics, you can build stuff. You can engineer stuff in the real world like that red light or a rocket. Are you saying that you don't know all of this? There's no math to prove this thing that I call my existence of God. There's no math. And it's not worth torturing yourself over. What I believe is worth torturing yourself over. And there's also great beauty in there is embracing the practice of prayer,

embracing the questions and like opening the aperture of your beliefs just for a moment going maybe I'm going to just believe in God for 10 seconds. See what that's like. And I started to experience beauty and experience peace around not trying to control things that obviously were not under my control, not just within me but in other people. And I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles. And by miracles, I mean, I would pray for some indication of what the right path might be on something where it wasn't clear to me.

and then two or three days later, something would happen, which would, like, seem almost completely unrelated, and the answer would come in that thing. And then I just locked in. I'm like, listen, I'm a disciplined guy when I really want to be. I'm going to pray every night before I go to sleep.

If I fall asleep, I'll get out of bed and pray when I, if I wake up in the middle of the night. I've not missed a night in nearly three years. I was recently invited up to Stanford to give a talk with Arthur Brooks, who's a lifetime Catholic. He's in mass every morning. You know, he and I have very different experiences.

of God in religion. My family was mixed religion. I got to sit up there and just say, listen, I'm going to tell you that I, for sure, am the person who's least knowledgeable, least versed in this room. But what I can tell you is my experience with prayer. What I can tell you is what I've observed in myself when I open the aperture for faith. The reason I did that talk is because our former director of neuroscience at Stanford had written to me and said, I think you should consider talking to this group. And he did some. of the most important experiments in the history of neuroscience, linking neuronal activity to perception, really show that if you stimulate certain brain areas, people perceive things a certain

way regardless of what's happening out in the world. Like, there's a brain area I could trigger right now, and I could show you a movie of a bunch of dots moving up, and everyone here would be like they're moving up. And if I tickled the right neuron in your brain, you'd say, they're going down. I'm like, that's wild. Then I turn it off and you'd say, oh, yeah, of course they're going up. your understanding of the world is an abstraction that occurs inside your skull on the basis of photons that come in through your eyes, sound waves that hit your ears,

mechanical forces that hit your skin, and chemicals that go in your nostrils and in your mouth, and then you create, you abstract reality in here. Now, the laws of physics dictate how those things, like photons have properties, sound waves have properties, and those are converted, they're transformed into six, but then you abstract the world with enough accuracy that I can pick up this pen, okay, and not miss it, at least for now.

So if you understand neuroscience that way, and then you go, we don't see infrared in this room because we don't have the sensors, but a pit viper does. Does that mean that there's a God? No, not necessarily. That alone doesn't prove that. But what it does prove is that we only have access to the physical, events in the world that we have the filters within us to extract, which is a kind of mealy-mouthed

way of saying, you can't see it because you can't see it. You don't have the sensors. You can throw on infrared goggles and then you can see it, but that's a technology. I don't think there will ever be the God goggles. The emotional goggles, so to speak, come from this thing that we call faith. Faith is the infrared goggles of human understanding about why we're here. And And the challenge for people is, I feel like people come in three categories. They either, at least three. They either would force religion in a bad way, so they hate it. They never had access to it in a way that made them gently pulled toward it.

Or, you know, they were like, it was like people knocking on their door. It felt like a disturbance. And, you know, I'm not against proselytizing if it's done kindly and with, you know, delicately. Or they are absolutely convinced that it can't be, which I look at as sort of a spiritual anorexia. You know, there are regions of the brain that when stimulated, people get a god-like experience, the experience of God, not as themselves, but they feel it. You had this idea. And so people have said, oh, well, then there's a God region of the brain, and it's just a brain region.

It's just a brain region. It can't be. But we have brain regions. Arthur says this much more eloquently than I could. There are brain regions for thirst, which in the philosophical way, again, this is coming from him, not me, would say, well, that proves the existence of water. The thirst proves the existence of water, right? So I have a thirst circuit for gaining understanding of this thing that we call life and whatever comes after it. And in that thirst, I decided to open the aperture to the idea that it's, that the thing, the stimulus, the water, the photons, I'm not able to extract that through thought through my eye, through my ears,

just like my dad couldn't come to understand quantum mechanics by thinking really hard about it, you have to do the math. And there are gaps in my reasoning here. Like, it's not a perfect one-to-one, but also life's just so much better, man. I don't think anxiety sticks in us very long. If we're feeling anxious, you pray, God, please, like,

help me remove this. It's not do this for me. It's help me put energy in me to do the right things today. Put energy in me to serve people. I prayed before I came in here. Really? On my knees for every podcast. Guest or a host, and I prayed.

I prayed for, I just said, please help me move my ego out of the room. We all have an ego. Help me move my ego out of the room. I would hope that people could learn useful information that might help them and that they would propagate that information. Please make sure that I maintain humility,

maintain, like, help me strive for clarity. And I also said, and help Stephen and I do something that we're not predicting that would happen, but you want us to happen that we don't understand. And maybe that's this part of the conversation, right? Like, you know, I don't know. And the point is not to know. It's also fun as a scientist who loves mechanisms and cells and circuits and neuromodulators. And it's enriching to have a part of life that, like, I can just explore in. Like, it's, I like mysteries. Like, science is about mysteries. And it's about solving mysteries, but it's also about being in all. of the mystery. And I'm all in, man. I mean, I'm different all in than other people talk about being all in. And I don't tell people what to do morally. I'm really just trying to navigate my own path. But it is one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's so liberating. And life is still plenty hard. But I love it. It seems to be an antidote that a lot of people are reaching for now based on the way that we've kind of designed our lives

over the last couple of decades. The sort of individualism, the loneliness, the, I don't know, nihilism, the me, me, me, the material success, the, you could say, like, low-level narcissism of being on social media and trying to get as much many followers as you can. And we've become islands. And I've been thinking a lot about this idea of, like, God and meaning

because it does appear to me that we are meant to be, like, anchored to ourselves and our family and then like I don't know our community and then maybe our city and then maybe our country and then maybe the planet and then something above.

I mean you're an ambitious guy. Go bigger man. I'm not trying to push you like no no please. The biggest thing is that is a non-human force in the universe that wants goodness

and can exemplify perfection and you and I if I may by virtue of being human, by virtue of having circuits that, I mean, the famous studies, like people get to stimulate different areas of their brain. You know the area that people like to stimulate a lot? The area that generates frustration and anger, that arousal. I saw that result and I was like, oh, man, that's disappointing. Why not beauty, giddiness, or even feelings of being drunk, though they found that too, but they were not as interested in that. You know,

are we bad? No, we're not bad. We are wired with an animal part of our brain and we are wired with a conscious, thoughtful part of our brain. And it's a lot of work to ascend. I know that word is like in the looks maxing thing now. But like it's a to ascend as a human to a place where you're living in a controlled and thoughtful and peaceful way with yourself and with your pursuits. And you're trying, striving to put goodness in the world and take care of people. And to do that with.

a little less friction. I know from experience that comes from trying not to control every aspect of every process. And somehow everything just goes much better. So, you know, people will be like, oh, he really drank the Kool-Aid. Like, I don't know. I actually think that this was pumping in my veins from go. Yes, I worked on a lot of topics, stress, vision, et cetera. But I studied neural development for a long time. And, you know, sperm meets egg and cells start dividing and you get a human. And yes, we understand induction factors. I teach development owner about cell migration,

acts on guidance, you know, mesoderm, ectoderm, et cetera. Great. Like compartmentalized chemistry can give you a human. But there are gaps in our understanding and there's magic in that orchestration that goes beyond what the science can even begin to understand. and it's nothing short of spectacular. You just, like, also, who doesn't want more awe in their life?

It's like, Dr. Keltner is like the awe guy at Berkeley. Like he said, yeah, awe is when you go from small aperture to big aperture and from big aperture to small aperture. That transition induces awe, and you can hear it in sound too. Like when you walk in off the street and you go into, like, Stanford has this incredible church. Memorial church is unbelievably beautiful with this giant organ, And you walk in there and people change, not just because there's this high ceiling,

and you're like, wow. Like, this is incredible. And of course I know humans made it. Like, I'm not an idiot. But day aperture to holy aperture. Like these, and you can get this other ways, right? I'm not saying you can't get this other ways, but I like the idea that if we dial out really far,

that there's something much greater than us. And I don't know exactly what, exactly what form it takes or exactly what shape it takes or exactly what ways that it God would exert influence over our minds. But you don't need to. You don't need to. This is the thing that I think I have to come to terms with is I go, okay, this is really interesting. There's lots of meaning and benefits to my life. You know, if we're just thinking about benefits, right? And then I go, okay, so which which Bible have I got to believe? And then I start looking at the Bibles and I'm like, okay, Noah's Ark. Look at a bunch of them.

I think one will call to you more than the others. Listen, it may end up being atheism for some people. But when I said spiritual anorexia earlier, anorexia is the most deadly of the psychiatric illnesses. It's incredibly deadly. And something happens to the neural circuits where people with true anorexia feel some sort of sense of, quote unquote, reinforcement is better than reward.

Reinforcement from avoiding food as opposed to eating it. So that's very, like, runs against our evolution as a species, right, and our health. But the desire for food, as Arthur would say, proves the existence of food, right? The desire of thirst proves the existence of water. And there are atheists who are like, yeah, I don't need it, not for me. And then there are atheists who have a kind of spiritual anorexia. It's almost like they get their spirituality is not believing in a God. And I look at them and I go, well, you're kind of on the, like the same.

like extreme. It's almost like it wraps around so far that you, the truly religious people and the atheist kind of meet right here. They both have the same sort of thing, but there's kind of an inversion of the circuit right there. And so, I don't know, someone will work out the neuroscience or not. I'm going to keep praying because my life is that much better. When you, when I heard you talk about it, I started praying a little bit. Oh, right on. Not all the time. But there's several moments where I thought, do not now be a good time to just pray. Someone like you saying that you do it gives a lot of other people permission to try and to investigate for themselves because, you know, like if I'm in the Huberman camp, maybe I'm someone that really cares about scientific rigor and precision. And then

if you, if you change that camp to also be open-minded to spirituality and religion and these sort of other pursuits, I can still be sort of ideologically who I believe I am while also investigating these other things. So it was really impactful for me to hear you talk about prayer because it impacted my, it gave me permission, I should say. at some weird level to also investigate. And yeah, like I report the same findings as you that. It helps. Yeah, it helps.

My former chair and director of neuroscience is at Stanford, who encouraged me to do that talk at Veritas, where I mostly talked about how ignorant and naive I am on these topics. He's a brilliant neuroscientist. He has faith. And I respect him and I respect his mind. I also think there's maybe a kind of fun analogy here that just came to mind. You know, it happens in every dimension.

like audience and podcasters, but this happened during the pandemic with the health community and we're seeing the long tail of that now. But, you know, when you're a kid, you think your parents are everything. You think they can do no wrong. And then there's this thing called

being an adolescent teenager, and you catch them, like lying or saying things occasionally or doing things. You go, wait, you said that. And it's like this. And all of a sudden, you're like, you don't know anything.

Then you gain some, hopefully, some agency see in some velocity in life. And you get to this point where you think you know everything and you accept that they don't, but you're really the one that understands. I think that as adults, we eventually get to the place after that where we go, wait, it's outside of me. I'm going to look outside of me and then you go, no, every, like all these adults, we were

all, they went through it and we went through it. And the real like, oh, it's going, oh, wait, no, no, I'm looking to humans for something that doesn't, isn't going to come from human beings. We're all flawed. We're all imperfect. And so the notion, the belief that there's, that perfection exists outside us and that we can strive for certain things

through works, through practices, that's not just compelling. That's just like downright, fantastic to me because you would fully embrace the woes and the beauty of being human. In embracing God, it's kind of a weird thing. So listen, more power to the atheists, If they can pull it off without all that great.

But, you know, meanwhile, I'm going to keep at it. Amen. This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Dyer of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable

because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down, into tiny small steps, and we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back,

but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So, if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, that I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Okay, so we haven't done number seven. And what's number eight?

We haven't done number eight. Yeah. And we haven't done... Well, we sort of did this. So at night, once you're asleep, try and keep your sleeping environment as dark as possible. A good eye mask is useful. Some people like earplugs too. If you wake up in the middle of the night, do some long exhale breathing or do the, you know, this wacky eyes to the side, eyes up and then, you know, counterclockwise and clockwise.

So at night, dim the lights. Why bright light stimulate cortisol release. You want your cortisol low at night. Everyone says, yeah, dim the lights because it suppresses melatonin. That's true. But that's just half of the story. The other reason is it increases cortisol and you want your cortisol low at night. What about this whole conversation around phones at night? Yeah. And blue light. dim your phone or triple click program it to go to the red screen oh yeah yeah just do that i think in the last let's be reasonable the last 30 minutes before sleep no screens first 30 minutes after waking you should be looking at the sun and exercising hydrating and doing that kind of thing and truck the partner out the bed i've had i've had some really oh you're sleeping baby i'm joking i'm the opposite i'm a spooner so am i read some studies i sleep best is big spoon yeah with a human I have no choice.

Yeah. I didn't hear a study that, you know, it does impact sleep, but who cares? I don't know. I mean, the bed cooling thing is very helpful because I tend to run warm. So having another person in there is like really warm. It's like sleeping with a hot. It's so funny. I don't want to diminish.

You're going to do a giant hot water ball, but she runs really warm. So having the cooling mattress helps. But, okay, you really want to do these two things. These actually go very well together. You need to do a bout of warm. work of 90 minutes to two hours. You like you got to strive and try and learn something. Do something hard every day mentally. This is critical for your ability to focus. And by the way, you asked about phones. Awesome study came out. They had people with their phone off upside down on the table or in their

bag underneath their chair or in the opposite room, a separate room. And what they found is people can focus just fine in all three conditions. But if the phone is anywhere in the room, the amount of cognitive flexibility they have with the material they're focusing on is diminished. In other words, requires more energy to focus, even if they're not getting calls and notifications. There's a subscript running in the brain, apparently, that's anticipating that this thing is going to reach for me. It's going to call me. So it's calling you even if it's not calling you, which is pretty cool. And so the way to increase focus and cognitive capacity is actually to just get the phone out of the room. That's a big part of it. And actually, visual field matters a lot, too.

You know, like the kid in school with the hoodie who's not asleep, like, that actually is helpful. I talk about some of the history of tools for focus, pharmacology, but also physical devices. You know, they used to design helmets for kids to, like, try and focus the kids that had trouble's trouble. The problem is now with the phone, you've moved to the whole world right in front of you. So focusing just here doesn't work. But get the phone out of the room and do some effortful learning bout. And it should feel like a fight. Keep in mind the friction you feel trying to learn something.

that's adrenaline. Remember, how do we block learning? We block adrenaline and it's downstream effects with propranolol. Being alert but calm or a little stressed and making errors through deliberate attempts to do something, not just throw away errors. That's how you learn. Why? If I can reach out and grab this pen, my brain doesn't change. One of the biggest lies in public education about neuroscience is that every experience changes your brain. By time I'm done saying this, your brain will be different. No, that's absolutely not true. That's a bunch of hooey. I studied neuroplasticity. I teach neuroplasticity. I'll tell you, you know what induces neuroplasticity? Being a baby who's trying to learn or being an adult who's forcing yourself to try and learn and you can't do the thing.

The error is what stimulates the plasticity. So if you and the appropriate level of difficulty, say the computational modeling is somewhere around 15% on average. Now, what does that mean? There's two kinds of practice. One is practicing doing things I already know how to do. There, you're aiming for 100% performance, right? You're reinforcing what you already know how to do. Talk to a great dancer,

and they'll tell you they drill, drill, drill, drill, drill the things they already know how to do. But when you're trying to learn the new language, the new emotional skill, the new physical skill, the new cognitive emotional skill, you need to make genuine attempts, and you need to fail some of the time,

and those failure signals are relayed to your cerebellum, and your cerebellum propagates through networks that say change. So there's a set of conditions in the chapter on plasticity that say you need to be alert. So I talk about all the ways you can get alert, including pharmacology supplements and behavioral tools. Then you need to be focused. I talk about all the tools for focus, which you can devote to anything, not just learning. And then I talk about the conditions for plasticity. And you need to get this friction and these errors.

and then you need to stop, you need to come back a day or two later, do it again, and then you need to make sure that you reinforce what you learned. Here's where AI is going to be a wonderful tool, already is a wonderful tool. The best way to learn is to not forget. Meaning, if you test yourself mentally

or you could use any one of the LLMs, but I'll go into chat, GABT, and I'll just say, generate a short test of a graduate student at Stanford level, questions about neuroplasticity. And I don't just, and I go, and I remember this. This is, and there's just one thing I don't remember. That's how you maintain and build knowledge over time.

Self testing. Self testing. People hear the word test. They think of external tester. You're the test taker. Self testing. That's a really interesting idea for this podcast episode, which we should have definitely run team.

Should we generate a quiz? Yeah. So we can take the transcript and we can turn it into a test. Cool. Of the 10 protocols that you've talked through. And we'll link it below if you want to take. the test. Awesome.

Yeah, chat GPT is great at doing this. You can change the difficulty, and you can actually say, I'm a professor of neuroscience, and I want a 15% error rate on average. Hit me. So it's pretty cool. You know, the study I love that really backs this up is there have been a lot of studies of learning where they have students read the same passage one, two, three, or four times, and then they also have them highlight or take notes,

or they just have them read it once and self-test. and they look six months and two years later. Reading it once, no notes, no highlighting and self-testing, you know, about a week later, and looking up what you got, couldn't remember or got wrong, led to much more stable learning over time. Awesome. Now, this doesn't work so well for physical endeavors because there you have to, like, actually do the physical thing. You have to test yourself physically. But I love that set of experiments because it tells us everything we should be doing.

So I think in doing this, for me, it could be a book. It could be lately I've been podcasting and recording my audio book. Have you done a book? Yes, and I did the audio book, which was horrific. Are you due for another one? I am. I've actually written it already. I finished writing it last year, but I...

Oh, man, what's it about? It's called Just Fucking Do It. I asked the audience multiple times what... I showed them multiple covers of books, hundreds of them, and asked them what they wanted. And that was the one that most of them tried to buy. Okay. And so it's really just a breakdown of how to do the thing. And actually, I reference you in there in the chapter about the anterior mid-singulate cortex and what you said about it.

And so, yeah. Well, to be clear, I didn't discover that structure, but I'm happy to expound on all its incredible abilities. I just quote what I heard you say about it in your podcast, but I'll show you what I write. Cool. I'll get a copy. I'm late to the train, obviously. So I think it's enriching as a person. It's not about optimization per se. It's about being a human being and learning and effort that's followed by learning and reward. especially for things that you might, well, including things that may not immediately benefit you, but just to enrich your mind is cool. Like if you're interested in the history of medicine, read a hard book, The Prince of Medicine about Galen.

If you're interested in light, there are a bunch of cool books about sunlight coming out now from people other than me about how cool sunlight is. And there's just like cool books out there. But this is linked to brain health and dementia, these kind of things, no? To some extent, yeah, I mean, the data on dementia say that people who stay mental, and physically active and are socially enriched, do much better. In fact, Massoud Hussein, who's this brilliant neurologist

from Oxford, has been talking about patients who, it turns out, live a very long time, have lots of plaques and tangles, the signature anatomical features of Alzheimer's dementia, but no dementia. Oh, yeah. And these people are exercisers, and they are people who stay very avidly engaged in learning.

So there are a lot more people with, quote-unquote, with Alzheimer's walking around, they have all the diagnostic features of Alzheimer's, except the memory loss and dementia. So this says that to some extent, the physical ramifications of Alzheimer's and the consequence of those changes in neurons are somewhat separable.

We want to be fair. I mean, he also told me that there are patients who have Parkinson's who can't generate smooth movement, but if they have to escape a burning building, they can, which is interesting, a little frustrating, as a message because it sort of sends, could potentially send the wrong message. Like they're just not motivated enough,

but it points to the fact that if motivational systems are high enough, that there may be alternate motivational systems in the same way that kids with very severe ADHD, if you give them a video game they love, they are locked and loaded. They're in a focus tunnel like this for two hours, which tells you they can focus,

but not on things they're not really interested in. And a lot of life is about forcing yourself to be interested in things you don't really want do. So that's number four. We've got one left. Number 10 is it? Yeah. So number 10 to frame this a little bit, the last chapter of my book is on personal development. I thought a lot, like, am I going to write a book last chapter on like relationships? That seemed like a no. Not because I haven't had them, or not because I haven't had some great ones, but because I think people who like work on that as their academics, you know, fundamentally should do that. Then again, I had a chapter on

nutrition and exercise. But in any event, I decided to write about relationship to self. And then I thought, no, personal development is something we're all trying to do. And here's the key question set up at the beginning. I talk about grief and what the science of grief is and how to navigate grief. But early on in that chapter on personal development, I sort of set it up the following way. I look out on the landscape of all the personal, psychological, and relationship development stuff out there, online, in books, in papers, et cetera. And it looks like there's sort of two bins. One is how to find what's important to you,

do what's best for you, and be the person you're supposed to be, for the world, and maybe for you also. And then there's this other bin, which is that we need to be very careful about pursuing things and fulfilling roles because we can get very far off track from our core, like what Martha Beck would call our essential self.

And I'm a huge fan of her work. if in no small part because she talked about that in her books, which were very, very impactful for me. But she also has three degrees from Harvard. So this isn't somebody who like can't get stuff done. And she's a mom and she's navigated, complicated life landscapes. So I was like, okay, this is this kind of it. And then I hosted James Hollis,

this 84-year-old Jungian analyst on my podcast. And he just wowed the heck out of all of us. And he basically said this, here's a really good life. Mind you, this guy's written books like the Eden Project on relationships. He's written books like Under Saturn Shadow on the healing and trauma of men. He's a brilliant thinker. And he said, look, there's three things you got to do every day.

And he encourages his patients to write this on their refrigerator or carry it around with them. He says, first, shut up. I'm like, I thought it was going to be like this nice young and analyst. He goes, shut up. He goes, there's always somebody suffering more than you. you have to have gratitude. You have to have a gratitude practice. So I spend some time talking about what that really looks like.

Because there's a science of gratitude and then there's the common understanding about what that is. It's really about receiving gratitude. Or, yes, having a gratitude practice of all the things that are good in your life. But really, it's about giving gratitude and receiving gratitude. And that's a, I talk about that and how to accomplish that. Second thing, he said, so I go, okay, now he'll kind of soften up and he is. He says, um, suit up. you're not going to be able to do well in anything in life unless you prepare get up in the morning

take care of your health do what you need to do to shower brush your teeth get organized this sounds a little bit like jordan peterson's clean your room but it's even like edgier than that it was like how in the world could you perform well on an exam or in a relationship or in a sport or at work if you don't actually do your homework i was like oh man this guy's like some like boomer knowledge right here and then he says and show up he said happy people fulfill outward roles for the world. They fulfill roles. Father, mother, sister, brother,

they look at themselves, and this is not the totality of it, but they look at themselves as somebody who needs to fulfill roles. Teacher, mechanic, whatever, engineer, podcaster. But you have to shut up, suit up, and show up. You need to fulfill roles. There is no human being that doesn't have to do stuff for the world.

You can't freeload. But then he said there's this other bin, which is if you carry on like that for 10, 20, 30 years, you can end up quite happy. But most of the time, if people just do those things, they end up pretty miserable. And I was like, oh, man, like. And he said the other pieces, once a day,

you need to get out of role fulfillment. You need to get out of preparation, suit up. And you need to get out of trying to be more grateful. You still need to do that, but you need to get out of that and you need to go into what he called exiting the stimulus response mode of being, which could be sitting quietly in meditation, it could be drawing, listening to music. You're not trying to accomplish anything.

And you're just letting your unconscious mind feed you information about what he called your deepest heart desires. And I was like, yes, this is why we go camping. He said, yes, you can take longer extended breaks. You can go backpacking. You can run. You can do that. you can allow this to happen in any number of ways, but once a day,

take some space for yourself and just touch in with self. Now, if you're sitting there going, okay, what do I want to be when I grew up? It should happen. It's not the way it works. Your unconscious mind speaks to you in emotions, in analogies, and it sets you up to go back into life, to be able to see connections

and start navigating in new and interesting ways, ways that are unique to your heart's desires about what you like and what you don't like. And to know that those choices are in goodness and in keeping with who you are. I can't tell you what your deepest heart's desires are. Only you can come to that clarity. But you need to do it through a practice

where you're not trying to be the football coach, the mom, the best this. You need to listen to yourself. But you also need to keep fulfilling those roles because he and I both agree, and I mentioned this several times because I get asked all the time, how do I find my calling?

You find it while working your butt off doing something else. That's how. You don't sit around going, oh, that's my calling. You work your butt off doing something else and you hate it. So you do something that you hate a little less.

You do something you hate a little less, maybe. And eventually you get pulled forward to this thing that is your key self. And there's not necessarily a, because people often, when they talk about finding a, find your passion, passion is a word happens to be singular, which can be somewhat distorting. Yeah. Because then you think, almost like an Easter egg, I have to go search for it, and there's going to be one of them somewhere. I can handle five-year chunks. Maybe this just reflects my years and years of, like, getting degrees where it's like three to five years for this,

then three to five years for that postdoc, graduate school, et cetera. I'm navigating from 50 to 55 now. That's what I know. I know what I'm going to carry forward. Exercise, faith, hydration. I know what I'm going to carry forward, but I don't know what's coming next. I've never been 60 before.

So the end of the day, and there were two questions that I had for you here based on some of the research. The first is, I'll say it's a technical one, but sleeping on your side? I heard there's different outcomes for your brain based on how you sleep at night. When you sleep, you have a washout

of waste products from the brain. Very important for offsetting dementia. Very important for feeling rested. And if that's not enough incentive, very important for getting rid of bags under your eyes. You know in the morning when you're, have you ever seen yourself after one night's shitty sleep? Oh my gosh.

Right. Sleep two nights well. You see yourself. Yeah, you know, what the hell? Yeah, you're your handsome self again, Stephen, you know. So what is that? That's accumulation of lymph and other fluids and waste products here. That's fleshed out.

Yeah. Really? So during sleep, there's this glymphatic clearance. And it does seem it can be slightly but significantly improved by sleeping on your side with your head slightly elevated. We used to think it was slightly inverted, now we think it's slightly elevated. When you get up in the morning,

I'm actually a big fan. I got one of these inversion tables, but most people won't, you know, where you lie back and you go upside down. Oh, okay, okay. This feels good on my back. But some people will get the shaker, some will do some jump rope.

You can just kind of shake out and move because the lymphatic system is really incredible. It's one-way valves stacked up from me. your feet all the way up to your brain. People think about the role of lymph and lymph nodes in immune checkpoints, an immune system. That's all true, of course. But the lymph system is taking liquid and it's dumping it back into your blood circulation and it can accumulate when you're lying or when you're, you know, this is lymphedema, is swelling of the lower limbs, et cetera. So you need to move. When you move, you're essentially squeezing the lymph in these one-way valves up to dump back

into the general circulation. Your brain doesn't have that mechanism. So miraculously, in sleep, you get the astrocytes, the glial cells, actually create a bit of extra space in the brain between neural tissue that allows the waste products, the glimph, as we call it, glia lymph, glimph, to flow up and out towards the surface of the brain and then it dumps out of the brain, still in the body, of course, and down and out. Actually, the puffiness of the eyes, the interior chamber of the eye, some of the cloudiness of the eye, these systems are shared. And actually, some of it actually comes out through the nose, which is wild. But get upright, move around. There's a bunch of ways of, like, you know, these, like tapping, shaking. It looks

silly. It looks kind of crazy. Looks like you've been in California too long if you do these things, but it can help move lymph out. But sleeping does that clears glimph. The other thing that's, there's a recent study published in Proceeds in the National Academy of Sciences that I do detail in the book, which is a short meditation, believe it or not, increases glimphatic clearance in the daytime. Now, this is super interesting because folks like you and me always want to figure out how we can get by with less sleep and still feel awesome and not short circuit our health. Turns out that the regular meditators are probably able to shave an hour off their sleep, 20 minutes a day meditation, because they're getting the glimph clearance during their meditation. And so in sleep, the timing of

sleep and how long you sleep has a lot to do with body temperature, but also there seems to be a drive for glimph clearance that says you need to sleep longer, which is one of the reasons why when you're sick, you sleep a lot more. One of them, there are others as well. So I'm now back to meditating, and my meditation practice is pretty feeble compared to many, but here's what I do. I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is 10 breaths of meditation. I tell myself, if I can't concentrate for 10 breaths without my mind going elsewhere, what kind of day am I going to have? And also, what kind of human am I if I can't organize myself for 10 breaths? Then I get out of bed. I usually go straight to the bathroom, pee, then I go hydrate, then I get sunlight, then I try and get some movement,

although these days I, because of the dog, I get a walk in, then I come back, drink some caffeine exercise. And the 10 steps starts all over again. We are this rhythm. No human being has ever escaped these circadian influences in cortisol and melatonin. Do you take, you don't really talk in depth about supplements or recommend supplements. Oh, I do. I always get asked, what should I take? I talk about alpha-GPC, L-tyrosine. I talk about fion. I talk about theonine's use with low-dose caffeine for enhanced task switching, which is a very interesting literature. I talk about ways to improve sleep, everything from tart cherry to apigenin to quivivic, which is one of the Dora's, one of these orexin drugs. I talk, oh, I, I, but what do you take every day? You got another three

hours? Oh, really? Is that a lot? No, not really. What do you like if you had to pick five, if they said to you, Andrew, can only do five for the rest of your life? What five supplements would be? Well, if somebody's sleeping terrifically well, I'd say nothing for sleep. If they're not sleeping terrifically well, I would suggest they, they try magnesium three and eight or magnesium bisclisonate. They're interchangeable for sleep. Okay, that's one. I'm a big believer in getting at, least one gram per day of EPA omega-3. Okay. I suggest getting it because it's now available generic and cheap, but prescription form, lovaza. EPA would say that form of omega-3 that's that you want for brain health, probably also for cardiovascular health and reduced inflammation.

How do I know if that's the omega-3 that I have? You need a prescription. Oh, you need a prescription. But here's what's awesome about it. It's a very high-concentration EPA, and it's cleared of all heavy metals. Okay. And it's very, very inexpensive. So the challenge is getting a doctor to prescribe it for you. Just tell them you want Lavaza or else you're going to take a bunch of stuff over the counter. You might get mercury poisoning. There you go. Right. Don't threaten your doctor, but you get the idea. So that's for mental health, physical health, big believer in boosting omega-3s. Also, I don't eat fatty fish. I don't like salmon unless it's sushi and like I'm just not good at eating seafood. So that's two.

Vitamin D. Vitamin D. 5,000 to 10,000 I use per day. People will be like, oh, you don't know that. You need to blood test. You don't want to over it. Okay, don't take 25,000. But most people are underdosing vitamin D.

And also, I'm not, and I know it pisses people up, but I'm not trying to, like, hit the RDA, okay? Just like I. The recommended daily allowance. Yeah, I'm not just trying to hit the RDA. I'm also not trying to, like, blow a gasket by taking too much. Like, let's be rational here, right? I'm trying to get to a point where I can derive safety, but additional benefits.

And it's clear that dosing of 5,000 IU per day has some additional benefits that go way beyond conventional benefits of vitamin D that are discussed. For instance, hormone health. Like I can see my blood's getting better when I take 5,000 as opposed to 3,000 IU of vitamin D and I'm not changing anything else. So vitamin D and I get sunlight. Maybe 10,000 was a little high, but I take 5 to 10. So that's three. And then the other two would be if you're going to exercise or work intensely late in the day, or if you're going to, if you really want a stimulant to go with your caffeine. By the way, 90% of the world consumes caffeine every day. So that's a foregone conclusion that they're already taking it. I am a big fan of Alpha GPC. I am 600 milligrams or 900 milligrams of it. What's that? It increases chlorine, which increases acetylcholine. Oh, I've got like a cedocoline in the cupboard.

Yeah, which can increase your ability to focus. I'm a big believer in this, not for everyone, but rather than going straight to a prescription stimulant. And I'll tell you why, there are very, very few things that can increase focus and energy that don't damage your sleep. But even better, Alpha GPC gives you more REM sleep. Nobody wants to hear this, but it's absolutely true. But the other thing, the important caveat is that it can increase something called TMAO,

which can increase cardiovascular risk. So a simple way to mitigate that is you take 600 milligrams of a garlic capsule, and it doesn't smell like garlic. So I kind of tuck that in with it. And you can take it anytime same day. Is that five? That's five because I threw garlic in there. No, because we said it was magnesium bisclosinator 3 and 8.

We said omega-3. We said vitamin D. And then I said alpha-GPC would be my preferable thing to nicotine or prescription stimulants. And I'm, but caffeine is great, great data on caffeine. In fact, 200 to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day has been shown to offset dementia in meaningful ways. Meaningful ways. It's not causal, it's correlative, but those data are covered in there as well. So I'm, I'm going to continue drinking my Yerba Mote and my coffee.

And then, so I suppose the last one, you know, that's kind of like, you get, oh, creatine. Yeah. Yeah, so I was going to say dealer's choice, but creatine seems to work best for, cognitive enhancement when you're a bit sleep deprived or stressed, this kind of thing. I don't know. I've been taking creatine since I was 17 or 18 somewhere in there, five to 10 grams per day. I like it because I mean, I'm trying to maintain or build strength and it puts water in your muscles and it makes you stronger and it feels good to be strong. And you got train, but that's why I take it. Okay, the last thing I want to ask you about is I saw

a clip. I think it was one of your most viral clips of all time where you just talked about how going for a walk after you eat can have a really big impact on your body. Yes. Most people don't realize. Most people don't realize. There's a section. I think walking is necessary but not sufficient for health. You know, I don't think you need to count 10,000 steps per day, but I think 7,000 to 8,000 steps per day should be the goal.

You can do it. I'll pace while I'm on calls. I finish a podcast with my team, we take a walk. I'm always trying to take stairs. When I travel, I take stairs, not the escalator. You arrive a little sweatier to your plane, but you're also rucking your bags and this kind of thing. So walking is incredible

because those low-level repeated muscle contractions really help buffer blood glucose, especially after a meal. But there's this wild study where the soleus muscle, the one that gives the calf width, width, you know, when you do ceded calf raises, right? It's this muscle underneath the gastrochneumias, right? that muscle is about 1% of your total musculature,

but it has an outsized and significant glucose utilization. Interesting. So in this study, which is not practical, they had people do what they called soleus push-ups, which are basically non-weighted, seated calf raises while sitting, and they had them do it repeatedly. And they looked at blood glucose regulation, and that powerfully regulated blood glucose increases.

It buffered the peaks, and it turns out that this is related to walking. So I'm not suggesting unless perhaps you're stuck on a plane or while in the office that you, you know, if you're a knee bouncer, rejoice, you know, you're doing yourself good. But this movement really seems to help blood glucose management. Now, some people say, oh, yeah, this is so silly.

They're talking about all day you're going to do this. Yeah, some people probably accuse us of this. No, what I'm saying is walk. Because when you walk, you're getting that low level repeated muscle contraction. It's a slow twitch muscle. And it seems to be, I don't want to call it a sink, but it seems to be an unsuspected furnace for glucose utilization. And why does that matter?

You don't want big peaks in glucose. You can manage them. I mean, you get more insulin will be secreted if you have a big peak in glucose. That's why insulin's there to make sure that glucose is managed. You don't want it too high. You don't want to be hyperglycemic. In fact, that can be deadly. You don't want to be hypoglycemic.

But when people eat, they experience an increase in blood glucose. And while the peaks are manageable, if you're buffering, So you're sort of flattening out those peaks with, you know, five to ten minutes of walking after a meal. You will have fewer energy crashes. In theory, over time, your metabolic health can be better or at least can not get worse. And, you know, there's Dr. Rhonda Patrick has pointed out there's a sort of a comparison study where people either walked after meals or for 30 minutes or so on per day or they did, you know, 10 air squats every 45 minutes or so. stand up and do airs. And it looks like they were comparable. Maybe the air squats were better. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to stand up and do air squats in a restaurant or when I

get out into the street of New York, if I have the great, you know, experience of having dinner with you and James Sexton again. That's the last time I'm going to share to me. I'm not going to do air squats. Oh, we're going to walk. So I think I'm not being disparaging of Rhonda. I think she was pointing out a mechanistic feature, not a, not a protocol, but necessarily. But if you're stuck on a plane, you could do some air squats, you could, you could, you know, bounce your knee. And, you know, non-exercise-induced thermogenesis is a massive calorie burn. You know, people who move a lot tend to be rather thin. They tend to be lean. The studies on those, I go back to my undergraduate days when we worked on metabolism and physiology, like Rothwell and stock and some other folks,

scientists who figured out that there were people who could eat a lot more than you would think they needed, but they always stayed lean. Turns out they're moving a lot during the day, burning up to 1,800 calories a day. Now, that's extreme, but some people who just move a bit more are 1,000 calories per date. And there's this paper published in the journal Science, which is a great journal, not as great as nature, but the Brits get the cake there. And people will argue, but it's true, that the decline in metabolism that we all associate with aging, like, oh, metabolism slows as you age. Turns out that's not true. Turns out that if people maintain muscle mass, that doesn't happen. you say, okay, well, then aging is muscle mass loss

is reduction in metabolism. Actually, no, people are moving less. And I've been, as everyone else has been absorbed with this longevity thing, I look at older people, and particularly people in their 80s, and you know what I see a lot of? A lot less spontaneous movement

and a lot of mouth breathing, which at rest is not good. We know this, that deprives the brain of oxygen. It's not good. You can mouth breathe during exercise, physiological size, et cetera, but you don't want to be a mouth breather in sleep or in wakefulness. And then you host people like James Hollis or Twyla Tharp,

who's, I don't know her exact age. I think she's in her early 80s, but choreographer, world-class dancer, who deadlifts a lot and works out for two hours a day at five in the morning, who boxes, who choreographs, they're so mentally sharp, they're physically lean. There are other examples I could rattle off and you go, what is happening?

Mike Snyder, my colleague at Stanford, who's not that old. but he's in his 70s. You look at him, you go, what's going on? And they're moving all the time. They're moving, they're mentally active. They posture like you.

They're exercising, sure, but they are moving, moving, moving. The spontaneous movement is burning calories. That's one piece, but it's also the glucose regulation. It's the fact that they're not sitting stagnant in their own. You know, there's Lane Norton has pointed out quite beautifully, actually, that what's the problem with caloric excess? Okay, there's the fat aesthetic piece, right? body fat aesthetic piece, but that aside, it's that you have a toxicity of energy.

The world's expert in mitochondria came on my podcast recently, Jared Rudder. I mean, he's phenom in the biochemistry and the genetics of mitochondria, and he will tell you, he's like, when you overload a system and therefore a cell with calories, the mitochondria, the whole system gets sick, the energy management system of a cell gets sick. and your metabolism, this thing that you call your metabolism, is the collective makeup of all these trillions of cells. So you jam too much fuel in there, like they don't work as well. And caloric restriction at times might be beneficial,

caloric maintenance, maybe a little bit more at times, a little bit less. This is good. So movement, movement, movement, because it's obviously calories in, calories out. You know what this is, right? You tell me I need to stop. No, no, no, no, no. This is not a clock. This is a CO2 monitor.

I thought it was a lux meter. Okay. Okay. Oh, we have a lot of CO2 in here. Yeah. It's something that we always have in the studio because I think I learned over time that the higher this got, the more sort of tide I felt. And obviously, because there's not great ventilation in this studio here. We started at 600 and we're now at 1,700.

And we're under short wave length light. But before we came in here, what did we do? We went outside and we got a blast of full spectrum sunlight. Sunlight. Yeah, I think about this a lot now when I'm trying to do good cognitive work because I've read some studies that if this gets above a thousand parts per million,

cognitive performance starts to go down. Well, if your cognitive performance gets any better, we're all hosed because you're... You're very kind. Andrew, thank you so much for so many reasons. It's such an honor to get to learn from you, but I, you know, there's... I'll be honest, there's no books that I'm waiting for.

There's no books that I've been waiting for. Is there any book in my life that I've been waiting for? No, there's not. This is the only book in my life that I've been waiting for, for years now. And I say that to say because I believe in your approach. I believe in your approach, your scientific rigor, the nuance you apply, the stories that you tell, the experiences you've had, the unbelievable, almost like mesmerizing ability you have to remember things. Remember,

you didn't reference one study without referencing like the author of the study. And I've like never seen how's thinking how the fuck has he done that? Like how do you know all the names of all these people? Years of years of training and advisors who drilled into me that attribution is important. It's remarkable. There's so much information out there around health and all the things that we've graced today. But I was waiting for your book because I'm not very good at reading books, right? Well, there's an audio version, too, if you prefer.

It'll be a long run. No, I'm trying to build the anterior and mid-singular cortex, Andrew. So I'm going to, I always said to myself, whenever he publishes that bloody book, I will read the whole thing from cover to cover. And this is the first book in the world, I believe, that's been printed. Yeah, this is an opportunity to say what I've been waiting, this entire podcast. to say the copy you're holding in your hand is the first, the very first and the only hardcover copy that I have or have touched or have seen and I'm gifting it to you. And I'm gifting it to you.

I want you to have the book. Seriously. I want you to have it. And I'll sign it if you want or not sign it if you don't. But it would be an honor for me to be able to do that because I've learned so much from you. You've been an amazing colleague and friend and supporter, but also just really, you're an amazing human being. You're a truly good human being. And I've spent time with you on and off, Mike. And you know, the number one thing that you need to know about Stephen is he is who he appears to be. He's a super kind, curious, loving person, flawed like the rest of us. I'll be less flawed than me. That's clear. Um, But you really are a great human being and you're trying to do great things in the world for everyone around you and for the world.

So it's a vastly lesser token of my gratitude to you for all those things than it could be or should be, but I'd like to gift it to you. No, it's such an honor. I was like thinking of ways to steal it. So I'm so glad I'm giving it to you. I'm gifting it to you. And now I'm going to go read your book. And I look forward to your next book. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's such a such a. beautiful book and I'm really glad that it netted out at the size that it did as well. It is, I think, the perfect size. And I think you've done a wonderful job throughout as I was flicking through as you're speaking and jumping to different sections. I think you've done a wonderful job of making it really accessible because, you know, I'm not the smartest cookie as it relates to science, but I was able to understand everything. And I think that's a really remarkable thing.

It is also gorgeous. There I say, and I'll probably get fucked up for this, but I think sometimes the British version of books is a good looking. and the American versions are always wonder why they're a little bit uglier. The aesthetics in Britain, you know, like, people dress really well in Britain. They take care, they like pay attention to these little details, like in their shoes and things. Like, what do you call it smart? Like, they dress really smart, right? I'm a big fan of, like, Ben Sherman and Fred Perry clothes and things like that.

And I like, the details are what make those look so cool. Well, this felt like a very sort of European-designed, beautiful book. And also your podcast is incredible. I have to say, so many of the guests that I've had on here are because I listen to your show and I get mind blown by the guests that you have on your show. And then I'm like to my team, oh my God, this person is unbelievable. He said this one. And I'm sending your podcast all around.

Whenever someone in my life is really struggling with something, I go out and search, usually on YouTube. And then I stumble across your channel and find an episode that you've done about that particular thing. And I'm always sending them around. So I highly recommend anyone that subscribes to my channel to go and subscribe over on your show as well. I'll link it below so everyone can get it. So it turns out Huberman Lab is a sort of gateway drug to diary of the CEO for science and health content. Literally.

Literally. It's worth being honest about it. And you've got to get the book. It's finally here. It comes out September. So this episode will air in September. So it should be out now for pre-order or order. You've got to go get it.

It's for me the definitive book on this subject. Thank you so much, Andrew. Thank you, Stephen. I appreciate this conversation. I hope to have another conversation sometime soon. Yes. Thank you.