The Resilient Mind - Dopamine Detox Explained: What Works, What’s Fake & What to Do Instead - Dr. Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Andrew David Huberman is an American neuroscientist and podcaster. He is an associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has been the host of the popular health and science focused podcast Huberman Lab since 2021.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Chris Williamson. For more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisWillx🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Dopamine Detox Explained with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Dopamine detoxing. Yeah. So dopamine detoxing is something that apparently today my short-term working memory is off. I swear I can't.

Well, Yerba Mate, get that in you. I can't think of any, caffeinate. I can think of any pharmacologic reason for it. but no excuses. So dopamine detox, I would have thought was not something real. It seemed kind of silly to me, actually. And I'll tell you why it seems silly and why it still seems silly,

but why it may have some utility. But then Anna, Dr. Anna-Olemkey, told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media, certainly from any addictive drugs. That's the treatment for addiction, and restore those dopamine levels to baseline. Now, the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the Bay Area where it seemed a lot of tech types we're talking about it was in terms of

I heard something like, oh, people aren't even looking at other people's faces. You know, they're really kind of living in this like monkish lifestyle, like no food that they really enjoy, no anything. That to me seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme. I mean, I can understand not ingesting a lot of highly palatable foods, you know, eating somewhat blander foods. I can understand not, certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine, caffeine increases dopamine receptors, which makes the dopamine that's available

more powerful at evoking the dopamine response. I can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors, but the idea that you weren't going to look people in the eye because there's going to be too much dopamine, I mean, I guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much their look positively arouses you. But the fact of the matter is that that's not, that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox. But staying out of, you know, high-intensive, highly rewarding activities, I think could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance. And everything we know from Anna's work is that dopamine, you know, if you drive those dopaminergic states too long, addictive drugs, et cetera, people can do this with sex, food, drugs,

gambling, social media, all sorts of things, pornography. You know, what ends up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and pretty much is traversing into the territory of pain. And then people, again, are back to this thing where, you know, they're scrolling internet porn eight, nine times or hours a day. And then they're wondering, like, why this isn't effective for them anymore, whereas it was before. And there's an initial issue with pornography, which is not often discussed,

which is that remember guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine. And if I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that, if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else, right? Especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography,

the brain is learning sexual arousal to other people having sex. So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur? Yeah, or just create challenges in sexual interactions with, you know, with peer, with a real partner. Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics, and the second law of porno dynamics is the law of phap entropy. It says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time.

And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever-decreasing stimulus that comes back. Yeah. And, you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology. I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in it in any way. At least not, I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the, but the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good.

What I'm saying is it, in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food. extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release. And Anna will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline. So again, it's not these things aren't good or bad. They just have to be controlled in a way because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them, Typically, it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often. And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and there may be an ability for yourself,

your system to reset. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be superposed onto real sex, right? That one also has to be cautious there, right? But the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states, dopamine fasting as it were,

but maybe just low dopamine states. These are natural rhythms that existed in the nervous system. We had to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted, the design phase, but we know as a generic form of motivation in pursuit, you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty. It needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true.

You need energy in order to get the thing to eat. So our nervous system has energy also. That's dopamine and epinephrine. yes, we use glucose and glycogen, et cetera, when we're pursuing things. But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track. So you go down that track and then, ah, there it is. You know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this.

Or you get to kill the prey and eat it. And then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every, every species, but certainly humans, have two innate desires built into them, whether or not they decide to actualize this or not, is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that. Even if people don't have children, in general, people care about children because of what they represent.

Very few people dislike children. I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children, but you always worry about those kinds of people. You were talking earlier on about the fact that dopamine can be really really, least when you set yourself a little goal and then achieve it. And one of the ways that you encourage your grad students is to give them a little bit of reward earlier on so that it keeps them motivated. Is this the same mentality that works during an endurance event when you want to say, I'm just going to get myself to the next lampo, so I've just got to get myself to that

hill over there. Is that the same dynamic? Yeah, we can call it milestones. You just set some milestone. And the key thing here is that, and this is the beauty of the dopamine system, just like the stress system is generic. The fear system is generic. It's designed for a bunch of different scenarios. The motivation system is also generic. It can be to achieve the next lamppost as a milestone, or it can be five miles as the next milestone. You get to control that. And so it's completely arbitrary, right? I mean, one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me by an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple. And yet, I do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself is that it's all internal, right? If you finish a marathon in first place,

no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, you self-generate that. It's all internal. It's all about your internal representation. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life, but the fact of the matter is that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there, if you allow yourself a moment to register that win, you get energy to then set the next milestone and achieve it. That energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine, into adrenaline. And this is why you hear these incredible heroic stories. I mean, I think the movie, sorry, I hate to say it, but the movie was less good than the book, but like lone survivor, the Marcus Littrell story. And the actually, I think today or yesterday

might be the anniversary of Operation Red Wings. So all those guys sadly died, except Marcus. And, you know, in the movie, it's like fast forward to where he, I don't want to give it away, but where he basically is the lone survivor. But in the book, it's crazy. I mean, the guy dragged himself on elbows and knees for

miles and miles and miles, right? You know, that kind of ability where you hear about people walking on stubs to, you know, these incredible feats of human endurance and willingness to persist, I mean, those people were able to

to do that not because of glycogen or they drank their goo or whatever the triathletes are always using. It's because of nervous system energy, the ability to continue to manufacture adrenaline and keep going. And the extent to which that can continue is no one will ever know. I do believe that humans have a tremendous capacity to endure and persist, but that few human beings actually know how to tap into that system except under conditions of extreme survival. And you also hear from really good physicians, ones that aren't into Wu biology or Wu psychology at all, that to some extent, yes, there are people that unfortunately die in their battle against cancer, no matter what, but that the desire to continue living is a powerful force in of itself. There may be spiritual

components, that's not the business I'm in, you know, and how I don't know the experiment I would do to test it, but almost certainly setting of milestones and the ability to generate dopamine and adrenaline is what allows people to persist and live longer. There's no question about that. One of the best books that I've read this year is the expectation effect by David Robson. So he is a science writer from the UK and he looked at a whole bunch of studies, the placebo effect, which everybody is familiar with, right? There is a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication

and lo and behold that outcome manifests. He found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about. So my two favorite studies from this, so interesting. He realized that gluten intolerance, self-report gluten intolerance, has increased from 3% to 30% in 10 years. This is why there's so many gluten-free options on the menu? They've got 30% of the population to serve, yeah, so people need it. And he was wondering, well, what is it?

Human biology hasn't changed that much. Is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that? that or is it maybe some sort of expectation because the type of news stories that are hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us and inflammation and all this sort of stuff, maybe it's that and people are expecting it. So they brought people into a lab. And they sit them down. These people do and do not have self-reported gluten intolerances and they give everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that it's got gluten in it. It's got no gluten in it. After a while, people who don't have a gluten intolerance by a lot,

who haven't eaten gluten, have diarrhea, they have hives, they're breaking out in inflammation, they're having to run at the bathroom. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting. He did another story that he spoke about. V-O-2 max tests that they were looking at. Apparently there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off CO2 and upregulate oxygen in a better way. They brought people in even numbers of people that did and did not have this genetic trait, split them into two random groups. So there was a mix of both do and do not have the trait in each. First group was told, you've got the right genetic trait. You should be really, really good at this. Second group was told, sorry, you don't have it. You shouldn't be too good.

No surprise, perhaps, at the group that was told that they did. They ended up performing better. But when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people, they found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation but were told that they did had a lower overall lactate threshold. They had a lower overall heart rate. They were blowing off CO2 more effectively and upregulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation

but were told that they didn't. So he coined this term that said your expectations are even more powerful than your genes. I love that. I'm going to read that book. That's a remarkable example. And I think that a lot these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things. But this is almost in the different direction.

This is a psychophilious. physiological response. I find this kind of thing, to be honest, among the more fascinating and interesting aspects of neuroscience, if not the most interesting lately, those examples are tremendous, so I can't counter those at all with anything more spectacular. But the work of Dr. Alia Crum at Stanford, she runs the Stanford Mind Body Lab. And she's done simple experiments, but they're really elegant, instructing people one group all about the terrible effects of stress. It destroys your immune system, et cetera, et cetera. Other people telling them also true things, but all the positive effects of stress,

it sharpens your ability of function, you can remember things better, et cetera, et cetera. You see exactly what you are told, basically. Now, you can't lie to people. You can't tell them things that aren't true. It's just about the subset of information that you get dictates the response you get. And perhaps the most traumatic was they gave two different groups of people, and then they actually each got the opposite condition to a milkshake. One group is told this milkshake is very high calorie. It contains a lot of fat and sugar, et cetera. Another group is told the milkshake they're getting is very low calorie.

It's very nutrient sparse, et cetera. Then they measure hunger. So how long it takes for them to get hungry again after ingesting it. They also look at insulin. And they also look at ghrelin, this hormone that is secreted as you get essentially makes you hungry. It's associated with hunger. other things too, but you see exactly what you would expect, which is that people that get the

nutrient-dense milkshake are satisfied for longer. Their ghrelin is suppressed and their insulin is higher. You see the opposite in the group that had the so-called low-calorie shake. Turns out it's the exact same milkshake. This is remarkable, right? Because this is not simply the placebo effect. I think it's the placebo effect plus the expectation effect plus a real physiological effect, because that's what you describe as well. And the way that Ali, doctor, Ali Krum as she goes by. The way she describes it is that any event causes a real physiological response, but that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding

of what the response ought to be to create the actual response. So it's sort of real plus perceived equals your reality. Exactly. And so I love this kind of thing, as you can tell. I'm eating up the example that you can. gave. I think it's spectacular because what it means is that no, we can't lie to ourselves. We can't tell ourselves that, you know, drinking water is going to sustain us just as food would for five days. We're not going to be hungry. But to some extent, if one understands that, well, you can survive a

long time on just water. Yeah. And you don't need to eat. Then you might experience less hunger. That's the way the nervous system works. Well, you can definitely survive longer on just water if you believe that you can survive longer on just water. There is no reason not to believe this. So I was really, really averse to the whole Ronda Byrne, the secret woo, sending out messages to the universe. And David positions himself very anti that as well in the book. But you can't deny the fact that the positive thinking has a real physiological impact on what you do. He was talking about, they did a study with older people that were past retirement and they asked them to use what sort of words do you associate with getting older and they split these people into two

different groups and the sort of words that people used perfectly mapped onto how long they were going to live so the people that used the sort of words alone frail fragile injury death they were the ones that lived the shortest the people that said um happiness freedom liberty connection maturity those sorts of words were the ones that lived the longest so your expectations can literally impact your longevity. There's, I, I'm yet to read the book in detail, but I've talked to a guy named Ethan Cross, he wrote a book called chatter. He's been on the show.

Oh, fantastic. Okay. I think that internal chatter world is a very interesting one that neuroscience will eventually have something to say about. I think the most powerful mindset, at least to me, is one that, again, I learned from Ali Crum. This is a mindset that in her peer-reviewed studies of different populations, it's clear exists universally in people in the SEAL teams, but less so, or is perhaps even absent from

the general population, sadly. The idea that stress grows you, that challenge grows you, but isn't the only way that you can grow, I think is a very powerful mindset. What do you mean by that? So what they did is she surveyed a bunch of different people, different professions, and asked, you know, what's your view of stress? Do you think it grows you? It diminishes your ability, etc. So this isn't giving people information. This is asking them for information. And the only group that said stress grows you, the more challenge, the better you get, et cetera. The more stress you experience, the more likely you are to succeed was this group from the SEAL teams. I don't know if they were

new recruits or if they had been in a long time, but that was the group. I would add to that that yes, if you adopt the mindset that stress grows you, you're going to be much better off, but also that stress is not the only way to grow in life. Right. There's a this idea, you know, we have this, and again, there's sort of a gravitational pull of this, like stress grows, you know, forward center of mass or, you know, always be in friction, limbic friction, limbic friction. How about a more expansive or nuanced version of that might be stress grows you? So if you're under stress, you're back on your heels from something, you think, okay,

how can I get flat-footed or even forward center of mass? You tell yourself, stress grows me, stress grows me, stress grows me, but that doesn't mean stress is the only thing that will grow you. Right, learning to cycle between periods of hard work and deep, what I call non-destructive, deliberate reset, right? That's what really works over time. I can attest to that. You know, people who just really go out and tie one on in order to recover, you can only get

away with that for a few years before your body and mind start to give out, right? So find non-destructive ways to reset and also adopt the mindset that stress grows you and adopt the mindset that, you know, there are other ways to grow that don't involve stress. And I think you're set up to have a pretty fantastic life. That's my, you know, simple view of the way these things work. Speaking of endurance and suffering, what have you learned from Lex Friedman since he's been friends with him? The guy works a lot.

You can text and recall him at pretty much any hour except the early morning hours that he happens to be in because he's likely to be asleep. You know, Lex is a really interesting one. because, you know, like a lot of scientists and engineers, he has that ability to really drop into the trench, which is certainly not unique to scientists and engineers, but is really helpful. I think, you know, Lex comes at things from at once a very engineering physics perspective, which, you know, obviously computer science, robots and all AI and all that. He loves that stuff. But, you know, there's a phrase that he's used over and over again in our conversations, and he's talked about this publicly. And I've started to pay a bit more attention to, because he says it so many times, which is, you know, approach life with love in your heart, you know, which is weird, right?

You think about an engineer who's thinking like, this goes there and this is what's going to predict the best outcome and then you think like approach things with love in your heart. And I think he's right because, and I think that is very powerful because there are so many pitfalls. And by pitfalls, what I mean are energy sinks. You know, across the day from the time you wake up until you go to sleep at night, There's so many places for you to put your energy. It can go into online battles.

It can go into, you know, texting five different people. It can be investing in one person. It can be, there's so many things. And so much of success in any domain is about, yes, maintaining focus. We hear about that a lot. Focus, focus, focus, focus. But what is focus? Focus is really about not allowing energy to dissipate into these kind of meaningless

trails. So I think about Lex and I, as I do for all people, I think, you know, what animal does he best represent or what animal best represents him. I think of all people like this. I have this kind of weird process where after I spend some time with somebody, it just pops to mind. Like I can't tell you what animal comes to mind yet. You might see that after the ice bath later on. We'll see how long I'll stay. You might be a polar bear. Super comfortable in the water, the cold water. But I think that, you know, at some point I realized that that Lex's gets very fixated on things, very, very, very fixated. But he also knows how to disengage. And he really

really avoids energy sinks through this and losses through this kind of love thing that he's really into because anger is very energetically demanding it's great fuel but it's not efficient fuel overall right it's like having a gas tank full of fuel but there are a lot of leaks in it whereas i do think that doing things out of genuine desire there's a calm sort of energized balance that comes with that and you feel like you can go forever so this is starting to sound a little bit woo. It sounds like, oh, you know, the heart is more powerful than the adrenals. And, like, they're both powerful. The adrenals can keep you alive and enduring for a long, long time. But if you do things out of anger and friction for too long, your immune system will crash.

We know this. But it is essentially infinite how much energy you can derive out of genuine desire to engage with something or somebody. What animal is he, then? You know, Lex, well, his hair makes me think he's some spiky thing. He's sort of like, he sort of has the, like, the persistence of the porcupine. But he has, he definitely has, I think he, as much as I don't want to admit it, because I wish it were me, not him, but I think the animal that best captures Lex, because he's also a bit of a loner, is the Wolverine. I've spent a lot of time thinking about actual Wolverines, not the Hugh Jackman version

of Wolverines, but the actual Wolverines. They're very solo animals, unless they pair up to mate. They are incredibly strong. He is freakishly strong. I've done jujitsu with him. I'm not good at jujitsu. He is. He's a blackbell jiu-jitsu.

But he is freakishly strong. So if I had to pick an animal, I'd say probably the Wolverine. What's interesting about him? I went to Thanksgiving with him last year, which was my first time of enjoying that holiday here, which is a fantastic holiday, I actually think. We don't have something in the UK where people sit back and do that gratitude, reflection period, except for Christmas. You know, people will do that end of your review.

But I really think, and especially the time of yuritin, it's perfect. So we were talking and he was talking about the fact that he was working hard, but he feels this gap between where he is and where he could be, which I sounds like Lex. Sense is a common pattern, yeah. And he was saying that a lot of the friends that he speaks to will say, you know, you're doing well, you're working hard. And he looked me in the eyes and he's like, I don't want them to say that.

I want them to tell me to suck it up. I want them to tell me that I need to stop being such a pussy and keep going. I was like, it takes an unbelievably singular person to work as hard as he does. I don't think that the internet, whatever people know about how hard he works is only a small sliver of just how obsessive and committed he is. And for him to say that he wants to be around more people that push him in that way, it made me realize that perhaps I could be offering more to my friends as well, that offering them just sort of support in the form of acceptance and presence

and I'm hearing you and dude you're doing great or whatever reassurance in that way maybe isn't always the best way to go about things so yeah that was it's just something that's stuck in my mind it's something it's a little model that I've kept with me where I'm thinking look does my friend need me to tell him that he's doing good or does he need me to tell him to suck it up and get his nose down because I know that you can do it sounds very much like lex I'm learning about your internal workings a bit too. There are three kinds of reward. Two of them are often discussed.

One is rarely discussed, but is pretty powerful. And I think it's useful to think about toggling between these different rewards, whether or not for ourselves or whether or not in trying to stimulate and motivate other people. One, of course, is reward. You did great. Congratulations. That was awesome. Loved that podcast.

Great that you got an A plus on your report card or B plus because last year you got a C, whatever it is, reward. Then there's punishment, right? This is obvious. You screwed up, like, you take something away, or you take the anticipation of reward away, whatever it is. You screwed up, you're punished, you're grounded, et cetera. You're not watching TV for a month or whatever it is,

no screens for a month. Then there's the third kind of reward, which is the reward that you hang out in front of somebody at a distance, like a carrot on a stick out in front of them, which is not reward for what they've accomplished, but reward that they can anticipate if they accomplish something. I think this could be very effective in the context that we're talking about it, which is, how would I do this with Lex?

I'd say, you know, I really loved this particular interview. If only the next time you have that person on, you also ask them this, right? That's not a punishment. You're not saying it sucked because it didn't include this. You're not saying it wasn't great. you're saying, if next time you were to do that, I think it would be even better. So you're hanging a potential reward out in front. And I think that can be a very powerful motivator. So you can, you know, we could build up a number of different examples around this. But this is not often talked

about in sort of reward punishment schedules and motivation. We always think reward and punishment, but we think immediate reward, immediate punishment. Now, in terms of building habits and goal setting and goal-seeking. We know that visualizing failure is, for better or for worse, is a far better motivator than visualizing success if you want to get people motivated to start, right? To start. Now, getting people to continue involves regular rewards for reaching milestones. However, and I should have said this earlier, I want to make sure that we do emphasize that the best schedule really is random intermittent reinforcement. So if you're setting milestones on this run or in your intellectual pursuits or business pursuits or relationship pursuits, if you set a milestone and you

get there, you do want to have a little bit of an internal celebration. Remember, it's all internal. So internal celebration, not extrinsic celebration and reward. But every once in a while, it's good to just not reward yourself. Now, at what ratio should you do that? Well, the computer modeling data say that the optimal ratio of success, successful trials and unsuccessful trials for learning and motivation is going to be about 85% of the time to reward yourself and about 15% of the time to not reward yourself. So random intermittent lack of reward is another way to think about it. And I talked about this with Jocko a little bit and he thought, oh yeah, probably what we should do is have workouts where it's a big fish bowl full of ping pong balls and about 15%

of them are marked with reward. But the other ones is you do something. and you get to go take a ping pong ball out. And if you take that out, then you get some reward if it's marked and if it's not, then you don't. And rather than every time you accomplish something, you go reward yourself. So here we're talking. We're getting kind of into the weeds of reward schedules. But I think if you really want to support a friend, punishment you should use very judiciously,

although if they really screw up, a good friend, as they say, we'll put the friendship ahead of the friend or the friend ahead of the friendship. Excuse me. The friend ahead, like you're going to tell them what they really need to hear, even if it compromises the friendship. if you really believe they need to hear that. Other times reward, like that was awesome congratulations. And then occasionally, if it's warranted,

that was great-ish, but it would be so much better if the next time you did this. Or that was great, but, you know, honestly, I think it was a mixture of good and not so good. So I think those are three powerful ways to reward and they can be mixed up and toggled back and forth according to whatever schedule allows that person to continue.

Around about 30 years ago you took a real hard turn in life. It seemed like you drastically altered the trajectory that you were moving on for quite a while. And I'm very interested in how anybody manages to make severe life changes like that. I think that many people can, they believe that they have control over maybe their daily habits and little things here and there. But they don't have huge global control over their life direction, certainly not in the way that they want. reflecting on that now, does it almost surprise you, sort of the ability that you have to be able to change that direction? It seems so unbelievably rare. Right. So I don't know. I like to think everybody harbors it inside themselves. I can say without going into the whole backstory, because I've done it before. I mean, at 19, I basically just looked at myself and decided that I was a loser, right? I mean, I was able-bodied, which is helpful. I had to be able-bodied, which is helpful. a mind that could remember things, which was helpful. I was interested in a few things,

but none of those things were setting me up for career or ongoing progress. And I had a lot of maladaptive behaviors, right? At the time, I was getting involved in fighting. I just, I just didn't, I wasn't completing my schoolwork. I was just really in a bad place. And it was really fear and desperation, mostly fear, that inspired the switch. Along the way, I haven't talked about this publicly, you know, to any great extent. But along the way, I hit numerous roadblocks again. And again, sometimes they were situational like people close to me dying and the grief that came with that. Sometimes it was my own kind of feeling like I was getting pulled back toward a state of mind that wasn't healthy for me and so on. But I think what I've been good at,

at least good at, not great at, but at least good at is finding really good mentors that would allow me to get to the next node, the next milestone. And I should say that some of those mentors were real people that I didn't say, can you be my mentor? Not that that would be a bad thing, but really tried to model my behavior after people that I respected. And sometimes those mentors were people that I didn't know at all. I mean, I'll just say this right now. I mean, I'm an embarrassing by saying it. But, you know, I was a junior professor, meaning before I got tenure, running a lab. I had a bulldog puppy, a laboratory, and a home for the first time in my life, and feeling

very, very overwhelmed and distraught. And I made many of the things that I heard Tim Ferriss say sort of central to my way of doing things. I didn't go four hours a work a week, but I did start to get extreme about organizing my schedule. So he was a big influence on you, Tim? Huge, huge. And I know Tim a little bit.

we have some common friends and I feel very fortunate that now we're in touch because gone on his podcast and gotten to know one another, which is huge. I mean, like there were no organizational forces in my life for me at that time that could help me navigate through this landscape of, you know, I'd never been a professor before. I had taught it now. This was many years ago now, but I knew how to do science. I felt confident in my ability to take an empty room and a budget and create buy the right equipment and do the experiments higher the people.

I'd no problem with that. but how to regulate my time and my energy and how to communicate with people. I mean, he had these little things that I don't like the word hacks. I hate it because hacks are implies that you're using something for a purpose that it wasn't intended for. That's a hack. But he had things like instead of asking people, you know, like what's up when they come in your office, asking them, you know, what specifically, you know, what can I do for you?

Like, what do you need, right? Really cutting to the chase because time became a valuable resource. things like that, tiny things on the surface that translate into huge conversion in terms of time and energy. And even just setting aside some savings and things. It's not that I'm not dumb about money, but I wasn't, I've never really taken the time to think about how I was going to invest money or doing anything. So Tim did a tremendous service for me without realizing it. And I've thanked him now a million times. I'm going to thank him a million times. I'm thinking, thank you, Tim. I'm thanking you again. Things like that. So it was selecting mentors. Then eventually when it came time

to start podcasting. I mean, Lex, whether or not he knows or not, you know, just thinking, oh, here's another guy who's a scientist, he's MIT, the fact he always wore that suit, that I'm going to copy them and just always wear the same thing because I don't have to take the guesswork. I can take the guesswork out of it. There were little things that were super deliberate that just saved me time and energy. And I think that that's helped me along the way. And then the other thing is I have really tried to adopt this idea that when it's inevitable and it will inevitably arrive that stress grows us, that it really sharpens decision-making. It really sharpens decision-making.

And, you know, if you have a very stressful event and then you recover from it, the worst thing to do is just go and keep going. You need to take some time and reflect about what led into that. So I think I'm very good at leveraging fear into positive change. If I really think about most of the major shifts in my life, it was I'm scared as hell to remain in the situation. and I'm very good at broadcasting fear into my future. You know, if I've ever been in a bad relationship, it was clearly if I stayed in, it couldn't have been so bad that I felt like I had to leave.

So I would broadcast and project, you know, how horrible it would be for my future children. And I might even build that up a little bit in my system. Now, one could say, well, maybe you could have navigated successfully. I'm better at projecting fear into my future. And that has led me to make, I think, better and better decisions over time. That's it. much of the old Andrew still rises to the surface today. I know that the music that you tend

to listen to when your training is still pretty punky. And when I work, yeah, I mean, I have two very polarized versions of music. I do love, you know, I love Bob Dylan. I love Joe Strummer acoustic. I like, you know, I like melodic music too. But yeah, I'm listening to Rant's stiff little fingers. I mean, I'm the first ever gig I went to. Siff little fingers. I'm jealous. I've never actually seen them play live. I'm a huge stiff little fingers fan. Huge stiff little fingers fan. Huge against me fan. Huge rancid fan.

I mean, you know, for people that of my generation, they probably remember it. People were younger, probably think, oh, that's all 90s stuff. But a lot, to me, I mean, I have huge collections of like 80s and 90s music, 70s music, second wave punk, third wave punk. I collect a ton of that stuff. I love it. I mean, how much of me still exists. I believe that we are all born fundamentally with some gift, and it's our job to reveal that

gift ourselves. And here I'm, I want to thoroughly acknowledge someone else who's been a great mentor without ever meeting him. It was like Robert Green, I think, is a wonderful. Fantastic guy. Fantastic. I've never met you, Robert, but I'd love to meet. I mean, it's one of these things where I used to put you in touch. He's been on the show twice. Amazing. I used to suggest the book mastery to graduate students and to undergraduates, like, you know, learn this process of finding a mentor. And in science, we have natural mentors, graduate advisors and post-talk advisors. And I made sure, I will say this, I should have said this earlier, when a mentor has sort of arrived in my life, either virtually or in reality, I make the most of that relationship.

I really nurture those relationships. I mean, I still go to visit the children of my dead graduates advisor kids, you know, because I care so. I mean, these people are like family to me. How much of it still exists? Well, the energy has always been the same. The energy is I have an absolute obsession from day one. This maybe was what I was kind of born with to, I like to learn things.

share them with the world. I was six years old giving lectures on Monday after reading about medieval weapons or, you know, goldfish biology in class. I mean, my parents thought it was crazy and they took me a psychiatrist. And I'm like, no, he just really likes learning and really likes telling people about that, about what he learns. So, and I had a little bit of an underlying Tourette's when I was younger. I had a grunting tick. And when I'm tired, it sometimes emerges a little bit. And for me, learning and kind of seeking kind of calms that somehow. as does training, as does skateboarding. I did boxing, of course, head damage isn't good,

so I stopped boxing. But that's always been in me. That's how I'm, that's how my nervous system kind of tilts left in that way. The energy, I would say I'm able to turn the dial. I'm able to tap into kind of some old hurts and angers as fuel, but I really try and orient towards things in a very Lex Friedman-ish way from a place of like love.

Show them love. Show them, do things from a place of love because it's a more continual resource. I really believe it's this dopamine epinephrine cycle, positive feedback cycle. I really do. And so that's all there. You know, I have pretty much eaten the same way I have since college. I've really, I haven't really changed the way I eat that much. I mean, I probably ate more junk every once in a while, ice cream and pizza and stuff.

Now I have less of an appetite for it. But I still am the same. I still train every other day. I love music. I love movies. I love nature. I love the flora and fauna of life. I mean, I have this kind of obsession with fish tanks,

freshwater fish tanks. I love, and listen, my ex-girlfriend is a, she's a florist. I developed a love of flowers, you know, in those years. I love, you know, I'm probably the one guy who was like wandering around in college. I would go to these like orchid festivals and some of them look like aliens.

And I just love learning. And I love digesting. novel information. And now, you know, I have to say I'm in a place where the people that I'm closest to, I mean, thankfully really kind of support that and I can indulge it through podcasting. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.