The Tim Ferriss Show - #660: Dr. Andrew Huberman — The Foundations of Physical and Mental Performance, Core Supplements, Sexual Health and Fertility, Sleep Optimization, Psychedelics, and More

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Starting point is 00:03:17 select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Tim to save $250 on the eightleep pod cover. The Tim Ferriss Show. And I am thrilled to have Andrew Huberman here with me. So great to have you here in person, Andrew. So Andrew Huberman, who is this Andrew Huberman? Dr. Huberman, PhD, on Twitter at Huberman Lab, is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neuroplasticity.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford Medicine has been consistently published in top journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell. For those who don't know, that's like having a sweep at the Oscars. But back to the bio. Andrew is the host of the podcast Huberman Lab, which is often ranked as one of the top five podcasts in the world by both Apple and Spotify.

Starting point is 00:04:42 The show aims to help viewers and listeners improve their health with science and science-based tools. New episodes air every Monday on YouTube and all podcast platforms. You can find all things Andrew at HubermanLab.com on YouTube, that is Huberman Lab, Instagram Huberman Lab, and also on Twitter as mentioned at Huberman Lab. Andrew, nice to see you. Great to see you. So happy to be here. I want to say I grew up listening to your podcast, although I think I was in my thirties when I started listening. So for me, I'm really tickled to be here because so much of how I ran my laboratory when I first became a professor was based on principles from the four-hour workweek. Now, mind you, my work

Starting point is 00:05:22 weeks were like hundred-hour work weeks. I actually lived in my laboratory with my dog. My students and postdocs can attest to that, but I incorporated a ton of the principles. I was following four hour body, slow carb diet. I was training. I had my cheat days and on and on and on. So for me, this is kind of being transported forward and back in time. I can't say enough positive things about you and your podcast and what you've done. And as you know, this is not just because I'm sitting here in front of you because I text you all the time. In fact, I will say this. I have a notebook that dates back over a decade where at the time I was pretty lonely. It was just me and my dog. Eventually the great girlfriend at the time came along, but I was running my lab

Starting point is 00:06:05 and there's a lot of social buffers between professors and students, understandably and necessarily. And so I was pretty lonely and I thought like, who are my friends going to be? I was in a new town, didn't know many people. And I have this list and I read the list the other day. I'll send you a photo. And the list was of about five or six people that I really admired and whose principles and work I was trying to incorporate into every aspect of my life. At the top of the list is a guy named Tim Armstrong, lead singer for Rancid, who I've recently become friends with. That's another amazing story. Joe Strummer, who unfortunately I never met, the great Joe Strummer, which explains my attire. He always wore a button

Starting point is 00:06:45 down black shirt in his adulthood. So I decided to do that at some point and much more related to your name because of four hour work week and your podcast, which eventually came along Rick Rubin, who I've had the, you know, the great blessing of having on my podcast and learning from and then Oliver Sacks, who unfortunately passed away before I ever had the chance to meet him. But anyway, I had to tell you that, that you were already my friend before you knew who I was. And I did that because I would look at that list and think, okay, who do I want to try and embody in terms of ways about going through life and trying to do things right in my professional and personal life? So that was my short list. And I'm very proud of that short list. I still have it. I sent

Starting point is 00:07:24 Tim the list the other day and he was like, no way, man, this is pretty wild. I'm like, you think it's wild for you? This, imagine how wild this is for me. So anyway, to set the context. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, man. And I've been incredibly impressed, not just with your research and academic bona fides and what you've accomplished there, which is a lot in and of itself. And of course, we've spoken before. But the incredible focus and force with which you have just blown the barn doors off with the podcast, which is really a service to people. So I am happy to have you here. Thrilled to be spending time in person after COVID and recording remotely. So we have a ton to dive into and hopefully I will not be the hero with clay feet. It's all downhill from here as far as what I can do in the conversation. But I thought we could begin with perhaps revisiting in some

Starting point is 00:08:20 respects our last conversation, not to rehash it, but to simply ask the question, since we last spoke, which was a while ago, I guess it was about maybe two years ago, what have you changed your mind on and what have you doubled down on? If you have answers to both of those. I'll start with what I've doubled down on. I've doubled down on the idea, which perhaps I stated last time we spoke and perhaps not, but I certainly believe that our state of mind and body at any point in time is strongly dictated by our state of mind and body in the hours and days prior to that. And on the one hand, people are going to hear that and say, well, duh, you know, if you're sleep deprived, you're going to feel like garbage. And if you're well rested, you'll feel great. That's kind of the top contour of it. But when one looks at the neuroscience, for instance,

Starting point is 00:09:13 of sleep, you start to realize that, you know, the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you're going to get in any 90 minute bout of sleep, because your sleep is broken up into these 90 minute segments more or less is strongly dictated by the ratio of slow wave sleep aka deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep that you had in the previous 90 minute bout and then when you start to look at the research in terms of waking states you start to find that your ability to be focused say for a bout of work in the morning or the afternoon or a creative brainstorm session or, I don't know, to maybe drill into some personal issue that you're dealing with during therapy or just on a walk or while journaling is not a square wave function. You know, none of us should sit down and expect ourselves to to move into that state effectively, whatever effective means, right, whatever the target or goal of that bout, as I'm calling it, is, is going to be dictated by what happened in the previous moments and hours. And so when I zoom out from that, what I've doubled down on is this idea that there are just a core set of foundational things that we have to re-up every 24 hours. You know, I think thanks to the incredibly hard work of Dr. Matt Walker at Berkeley,

Starting point is 00:10:32 the sleep diplomat on Twitter, right? It's such a great name because it's so appropriate. I mean, a decade ago or so, you know, it was like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. That was the dominant mentality out there. And yeah, sleep's great, but you know, getting stuff done is more important. I mean, Matt has really impressed on everybody that our mental health, our physical health, and our ability to perform is so strongly dependent on our ability to get quality sleep. Maybe not every night of our life. I mean, we have to be realistic, but that sleep is vital. So, you know, a hat tip is insufficient, but so sleep is critical, but sleep is just one of about, I would say five things that really set the buoyancy or the foundation upon which our nervous system is able to accomplish these transitions that I'm talking about at all.

Starting point is 00:11:16 And those five things are sleep in the absence of quality sleep over two or three days, you're just going to fall to pieces in the presence of quality sleep over two or three days, you're just going to fall to pieces. In the presence of quality, sufficient sleep over two or three days, you're going to function at an amazing level. There's a gain of function and a loss of function there. It's not just if you sleep poorly, you function less well. You sleep better, you function much better. So sleep, I would say, is at the top of the list. Nutrients, you know, and there you can think macronutrients. And so your carnivores are only eating meat and your vegans are only eating plants and your omnivores, which is, I think, probably 90% of the world is eating a combination of

Starting point is 00:11:56 those. But, you know, quality nutrients. I think when I look at all of the nutrition literature and arguments out there, it seems that everyone can agree on one thing, which is that probably 80% or all of the nutrition literature and arguments out there, it seems that everyone can agree on one thing, which is that probably 80% or more of our nutrition should come from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. Minimally processed would require some cooking, but could survive on the shelf as opposed to packaged foods or highly palatable foods. So you've got sleep, nutrients, but then we should also put in micronutrients. And this is where

Starting point is 00:12:23 maybe we'll get into a discussion about supplementation. I think that there's supplementation or supplements is a bit of a misnomer because it implies vitamin supplements. And people say, well, can't you get all that from food or that whey protein? Isn't that just food? Wouldn't you be better off with a chicken breast? Okay. Well then when you talk about convenience and the, you know, absorption, okay. But then there's this huge category of things, you know, ranging from the kind of esoterically named things like ashwagandha and shilajit and tongali and fadoja grass, right? I mean, it sounds exactly all the herbal stuff, right? You're not going to get that from food. So should we call them supplements at all? So let's just say the second thing is nutrients and that includes macronutrients and that includes micronutrients as well. So those two things. Then the third would be movement. And this has also been an enormous transition in the last, I think, just five years,

Starting point is 00:13:11 which is not just for people interested in bodybuilding or powerlifting or for competitive athletes, but now it seems everybody, including the elderly, understand that you need a combination of cardiovascular exercise and you need resistance training, whether or not it's with body weight or weights or machines, et cetera, that you need both. I mean, not a week goes by without seeing an article in one of the major publications out there, standard media, let's call it traditional media. We'll be nice to them. Traditional media that highlights some studies showing that, you know, resistance training in elderly people can offset Alzheimer's or as our friend Peter Atiyah has pointed out so many times that many of the end of life

Starting point is 00:13:48 creating injuries are due to people, older people stepping down the eccentric movements. Okay. So, so you need movement. That's the third category. Fourth, I will argue, and I like to think that maybe I've helped this movement, if you want to call it that, is light. In particular, sunlight in the early part and throughout the middle of the day, and trying to minimize the amount of artificial light that you're exposed to in the evening and late night hours, most of the time, because you have to live life. Just fundamental. I think the last category that's important is social connection, aka relationships. Let's just call it relationships because that can include relationship to self. So those things set up the core foundation. And I think one way to

Starting point is 00:14:32 think about them is just as a list. Another is to think about them in terms of a schedule basis. And that's how I've really doubled down is I realized that every 24 hours, I need to invest something into each one of those things. So I think that 10 years ago or five years ago, or even two years ago, I used to think, okay, like what's the workout split or how am I going to eat for the next couple of months? You know, what am I trying to optimize for? Is it muscle? Is it fat loss?

Starting point is 00:14:58 Is it just maintaining the energy? Is it focus? That's all fine and good, but sleep, nutrients, exercise, light relationships, those really establish the foundation of what I consider to be all of the elements that create our ability to move as seamlessly as possible between the states that we happen to be in and the states we desire to be in. And when I zoom out and I think about what are the major struggles that I, and it seems most everyone deals with, it's like how to get more focused. Okay. So we can talk about what do you take? What's the supplement, you know, but you have to say, well, how are you

Starting point is 00:15:32 sleeping? Have you done any exercise? You really always find yourself or I find myself taking 10 steps back and then moving through the sequence of five things before you can even begin to talk about whether or not taking three or 600 milligrams of alpha GPC and how often to do that and does it work? And yes, it works, et cetera. But those things really set the foundation. And so I like to think of those five things every single day. You have to re-up on sleep every 24 hours or try to. You have to re-up on movement every 24 hours. You can go a day or so immobile, but you better move the next day, right? And ideally you're moving seven days a week. It doesn't necessarily mean train to failure and running marathon seven days a week. You can Goggins your life or you can not

Starting point is 00:16:13 Goggins your life. For those of you who don't know, I'm referring to David Goggins there, by the way, who seems to never stop moving. Although I just learned meditates two hours every night, every night. And I'm inclined to believe when he says that, that he indeed does that. You need nutrients, even if they come from stored sources, even if you're going to fast, you're going to fast for a day or two. Okay, fine. I've done that. I know you've done that. I would put hydration under nutrients too. So you can drive nutrients from stored fat, protein, et cetera, glycogen. Light is, you're going to need that every 24 hours. You're going to need sunlight, even if through cloud cover. And you're going to want to avoid bright artificial lights at night. Not every night, but most nights of your life. And then

Starting point is 00:16:53 that relationships one is the one that maybe we can go into in a little bit more depth at some point, but it requires focus. It requires attention every 24 hours. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you have to see friends, talk to friends, text friends every 24 hours. Some people are far more introverted than others, but then you're working on your relationship to yourself in that solo time. And hopefully when you're spending time with others as well, that has some internal repercussions. So if I've doubled down on anything, it's the understanding that there is no so-called optimization. There is no real interest, at least from me in trying to layer in other things, unless I'm paying attention to each and every one of those things. Every 24 hours, you have to re-up on each and every one of those five things every 24

Starting point is 00:17:37 hours. And if you don't, you can get by for a day or two, but pretty soon you're going to hit that wall where you won't be able to do any of the things that most people are actually seeking to do. And the last thing I'll say about that is, you know, I think people hear a list of those five things and they think, gosh, okay, well, that must be nice for you, Andrew and Tim. You know, you wake up, you look at sunlight, you guys don't have kids, you don't have to worry about kids running around, you don't have to, you know, you can exercise. There are ways of layering in the protocols that re-up, as I'm referring to it, these five things every 24 hours that also include other people in your life, kids, pets, et cetera. Exercise certainly can include that as well.

Starting point is 00:18:19 But I would argue that there is no showing up properly for yourself and for the other people in your life unless these things are being handled. And it's not about becoming soft and cushy. It's about becoming quite resilient and effective. It seems so simple. But as our friend Paul Conti said to me recently, he said, you know, after all the analysis and pouring through things and the complicated notions of the subconscious, he's a psychiatrist after all, you know, in the end, really great mental health is about simple practices like first principles

Starting point is 00:18:50 of self-care to which I raised my hand and said, well, what is a first principle of self-care? I'm a biologist after all. And he said, aha, it's basically the things that we were just talking about is those five things. And so I I'm doubling down, I'm tripling down on those as essential to the point where nothing else really happens for very long unless those five things are tended to. Selecting may be a strong word, but underweighting, that you are now weighting differently, what would it be? And what have you done? What have you added or changed or subtracted? I'll have to pick two. Let's do both then. Yeah, the two are movement.

Starting point is 00:19:36 Really changed the way that I training and how to incorporate it into a week in a way that really works to build strength and endurance and feel really good in one's body all the time. probably reflects my place in life you know where i'm 47 now i've chosen to delay having a family but that's a primary focus but also having done a lot of personal work toward my mid-40s you know i thought i was quote-unquote there and then realizing that um it's a trap door it's a trap door and then realizing that there i guess here again i, I'll use a language that Paul uses, which is that there were some unresolved core conflicts. This idea of core conflicts is really, I think, the most appropriate way to put the important psychological stuff that people need to work through. Everyone has them. Many people have trauma. Not everyone has them. Many people have trauma. Not everyone has trauma, but as defined as an event that fundamentally changes the way that your nervous system

Starting point is 00:20:49 works such that you function less well in some or many domains of life. Again, I robbed that definition from Paul Conti and I'm far less eloquent than he is in delivering it, but realizing that there's still some core conflicts that I needed to resolve. And I've been going whole hog on that. And it's been interesting, to say the least. So let's start with perhaps the easier one. Movement. What have you implemented?

Starting point is 00:21:27 What have you embraced or cut back on in the movement category. And I'm very interested in this personally because I have really taken this as one of a few of those five to focus on myself in the last, I would say, year. I've done a lot of training, let's just say in the last 10 years, but I've not done a lot of competition. And I miss developing athleticism. And if I take as an assumption that we have largely evolved to move through space to actually move and navigate ski touring is just one example so putting on skins these are actually they used to be actual animal skins now they're synthetic but you put on skins on the bottom of skis and you effectively nordic track your way up the mountain with switchbacks and then you take them off you do transition you ski down you rinse and repeat but the experience of being if you choose your environments

Starting point is 00:22:16 in a location where you get lots of sunlight in the morning and early afternoon symmetrical exercise movement where you're not too heavily waiting one side or the other there's there are benefits to asymmetrical types of exercise but i have found this to just be absolutely i don't think it's an overstatement to say revolutionary for my physical and mental well-being and you also get in this particular case for me a degree of hip extension that i really just do not get in my day-to-day existence otherwise so i'm putting that out there just as an example and an explanation for why i want to dig a little bit deeper on the movement side so what have you ended up implementing well first of all let me just say that your statement about movement being so

Starting point is 00:23:05 fundamental to who we are as a species, the Nobel prize winning physiologist is really what he was. Sherrington said that the final common path of the entire nervous system is movement, which I sometimes think about because we often think that our emotions somehow impact the world, but they really don't, except insofar as we say things or do things. The other way to put this is that evolutionary biologists will say, you know, there is no fossil record for the brain. It's only what people actually did with the internal architecture of the brain. It all boils down to movement or vision, I would say, because I'm a vision scientist. But when you look cubic millimeter by cubic millimeter through the brain, if you take the circuits devoted to

Starting point is 00:23:48 movement and the circuits devoted to vision, you've got about 75% of the human brain. So that's a lot. The rest is important too, of course. Movement-wise. Okay. So we did a guest series. This was a six-episode guest series with Dr. Andy Galpin, who's a professor of kinesiology, Cal State Fullerton. And his laboratory does everything from muscle biopsy all the way up to working with competitive athletes, you know, so they'll do deadlifts or boxing or whatever it is, or students running on treadmills, huge range of subjects. And then they'll stab out some muscle and a little cork of muscle and Dubai. You've had this done, right?

Starting point is 00:24:19 This was in the four hour body. Yeah, I did. I did a muscle biopsy and videotaped the entire process in the Sports Science Institute of South Africa. Yeah, Tim Tartar is what I called it when it came out. So good. Turns out my muscle enzymes are,

Starting point is 00:24:33 if it's possible to be below some type of graph representing Homer Simpson, like citrate synthase and these various elements that would be very helpful for endurance, which I seem to lack. But you're, you're built for explosiveness. I'm built for very short duration explosiveness, which is ironic when you consider that I'm embracing ski touring, because I am, I'm not like Killian Jornet or any of these folks who would be very well built for

Starting point is 00:25:00 such a thing. But we make a good team because I've never, we'd make a good team because I've never had a muscle biopsy, but I assure you that when I start running distance, I can progress very fast. I'm not particularly strong. I'm not particularly weak, but I'm just not particularly strong in that very little explosiveness, very little hops, which is why skateboarding wasn't the right sport for me, despite my deep desire. It just didn't happen. But in terms of what I learned from andy a couple of key principles fell out of the and keep in mind these are peer-reviewed studies from his laboratory and many other laboratories of which he's an expert and i went deep into this literature with him

Starting point is 00:25:34 for that series concurrent training meaning getting better at distance and getting stronger is absolutely possible i did not think that was possible. You know, I'm a big fan of the late Charles Polquin and others who said, you know, you want to build muscle, build muscle. You want to, you want to be a runner, be a runner. And I think at the extremes, that's true. But the data really points to the fact that you can train for many things concurrently. I took a step back from everything I learned from Andy over the last few years in that series and re-sculpted my training program so that on any one given day, I'm training for something very specific with the understanding that one can make progress in a lot of different domains of fitness.

Starting point is 00:26:17 In fact, the way that Andy puts it, I think is better than fitness. He says techniques and methods are many, but there are only a few set of core adaptations that your body can make. So you're really just trying to create adaptations, whether or not you do with a kettlebell or a bar or a dumbbell or a hammer strength machine doesn't really matter. You're trying to create certain adaptations by using certain loads, moving things at different speeds, but that is also true of endurance and running. So what I figured out was that there's an optimal training schedule for me that allows me to target one specific thing each day. What are some of those specific things? Yeah. Endurance, strength, hypertrophy, VO2 max, heat and cold tolerance. I can talk about why

Starting point is 00:26:58 that is. And also I should mention each one of those days, and I can spell this out very simply for you. Each one of those days is also designed to indirectly support one of the other adaptations I'm trying to accomplish. So let me explain in short form. And if you want more detail, I can give you more detail. My training week starts on Sunday because Sunday sits leftmost on the calendar. Sunday, I make it a focused effort to move as much as possible, ideally outdoors. I'm thinking endurance. I essentially want to be like a mule. I'm just thinking, be like a mule. I actually have this shirt. That's going to be in the headline of this episode. I actually have this shirt that I sometimes like to wear on those days. It's not a black button down shirt, but it has a picture of a sloth and it's crossing.

Starting point is 00:27:48 It's three sloth fingers like Wolverine. And I get, that's like what I'm trying to embody. I'm trying to embody the sloth. So what I'll do on that day is because sometimes it's a social day with other people in my life. If I'm on my own, I'll throw on a eight or 10 pound weight vest. They have these thinner ones now that aren't these mirror vests that, you know, don't look like you're in law enforcement or you're trying to pretend you're in the SEAL teams, which I'm not, never was, but they have these thinner ones that sit a bit more flush. I forget the brand name now, but I don't have any relationship to them. I'll get it for you, but I really like this one. And I'll head out for a, probably a 75 minute to a 90 minute slow jog with some hills. And I'll try nasal breathe the whole time. I'll head out for a 75 minute to a 90 minute slow jog with some hills.

Starting point is 00:28:25 And I'll try nasal breathe the whole time. I'll often listen to a podcast or a book. Sometimes I'll just let my mind drift. That's if I'm on my own. If I'm with other people, what I will do is I'll fill up a backpack with a bunch of heavy stuff, usually some water in there too, and drink it as I go. And I'll do three or four or five hours of just hiking and just trying to be outside as much as possible. The specific goal of that day is endurance. Just keep going. And what I noticed

Starting point is 00:28:52 is because of the other things I do in the previous days, the 10 or 20 minutes, which they come at the start really suck. Like I either want to go faster or like these little aches and things. But what's amazing is somewhere in that 25, 30 minute period, you start to feel really good. You actually start to adapt to it right then. You can go, okay, this is about the heart rate I'll use. This is about the breathing rate. So what is happening at that point physiologically

Starting point is 00:29:16 or neurologically or both? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned neurologically. I think physiologically, they're the standard things that happen during exercise. You're getting warmer. So joints are more fluid. Your cardiovascular system is able to fuel the relevant muscles, but not, you're not shuttling too much fuel to specific muscle groups, et cetera, because of course I could be stressed when I start that. I could be relaxed. I could

Starting point is 00:29:38 be tired depending on how well I slept the night before. But neurologically what happens is really important. And we know this from data. What you're starting to do is you're starting to incorporate what are called central pattern generators. Central pattern generators are what allow you to engage in a repeated movement without voluntary attention to it. Very different than, you know, squatting or front squatting or doing curls or something where you're trying to focus on each rep. It's like the autopilot button appears on your steering wheel after 30 minutes. That's right.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And at that point, your mind can really attend to other things. And of course, as your body warms up, you're also able to achieve much more output. So you actually are getting better and more efficient as you progress. Now that's weird. Most exercise doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:30:23 It is weird, but as a intrepid pseudo endurance athlete, who's at least really embraced this ski touring. I mean, I did, I've done a lot of it in the last six weeks. The first 30 to 45 minutes are generally terrible for everybody. And then you click into a rhythm and you feel like you've accessed an extra set of batteries right yeah it's neural and i think andy would agree it's neural you're engaging the proper amount of what

Starting point is 00:30:53 are called upper motor you have upper motor neurons and what lower motor neurons lower motor neurons reside in the ventral spinal cord they're the ones that degenerate in als they're the ones that fortunately most people don't degenerate and cause contractions of the muscle fibers. They are directed by upper motor neurons, which are the ones in your brain that allow you to generate voluntary movement. However, the upper motor neurons and the lower motor neurons are happy to engage in a central pattern generator type circuit if you carry out something repetitively for long enough. So as you are able to take your mind off of the voluntary parts of the movement, it just becomes easier.

Starting point is 00:31:32 And what you end up finding is that your system becomes very, very good at doing, you know, for me, it's small steps or, you know, or jogging. I'm not going excruciatingly slow, but for some people it seemed really slow, but that run or that long weighted hike accomplishes the endurance piece. It checks off the box of the zone two cardio requirement, not all of it for the week, but a lot of it. And for the lay folks out there, zone two would be, you could have a conversation, but you really don't want to. That's right. As Peter might describe it to you. Yeah. And Peter's big on doing long Sunday rucks. He throws on a rucksack because he's tougher than me. Well, you're doing the same thing. You're just filling it full of water and other heavy things. I have

Starting point is 00:32:14 a feeling his rucksack is heavier than mine. Peter is, I've trained with Peter. Peter likes to push himself. These Sunday long, slow jogs or hikes are really for my mind as much as they are for my body. And I'm convinced that they also carry over to my ability to endure boring stuff during the week, but also just my ability to work longer for longer bouts. Okay, so that's Sunday. Also gets me outside a lot. And oftentimes on Monday, because of the constraints of the work week, I'm not going to be able to be outside as much as I would like. So you get a lot of sun and movement on Sunday.

Starting point is 00:32:47 You feel pretty terrific on Monday. And let's just kind of earmark what we, or go back to that earmark earlier, which is that the state that we're in on Monday has a lot to do with what we did on Sunday. So I'm trying to optimize for Monday in some ways too, but it's really about endurance. Then Monday is the goal for me is to train my legs just get a leg workout on monday first of all i just like the way that sounds to myself like leg workout on monday but it also sets up the work week really nicely here's why i'm going to train my legs the way that's always worked best for me for training which is a warm-up and then two to three maybe four hard sets kind of mike mentz or, Dari and Yates, not with four

Starting point is 00:33:27 reps and all of that. But what we're talking about is warming up and then doing hard sets that are heavier or more repetitions than the last time. And just so I'm clear, are we talking about multiple sets of the same exercise, single sets of four different exercises? What are we talking about? We're talking about two to four sets, but usually two to three of two exercises per muscle group. And I'll explain what that is in a moment. I should mention that the reason we're training legs is that everyone should train legs. So the large muscle groups, I'm trying to maintain

Starting point is 00:33:58 some lower body strength or build lower body strength and explosiveness. The data that I see on longevity and just simply ability to perform different sports and to just feel strong throughout the body is strongly rooted in the legs. So don't skip leg day, legs and hips. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:34:15 Feed the wolves. It's kind of funny how glutes have become the new biceps, you know, like this is like what I heard, like glutes are the new biceps growing up. This was not the case. You know, it was like a nineties.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Everyone was like these, like wavy, you know, I grew up with, I went to a school of like wafey hacky sack or dudes with like the flowy hair. I wasn't one of those, all the girls, like those guys, a bunch of skateboarders, you know, the skinny skateboarders. And it was the kind of wafer era, you know, I don't know what's what it is now. It doesn't matter, but train your legs folks. Like having strong legs is great. And I learned to hacky sack. I'm sure that's a great skill for the mind for other reasons so the 90s the 90s are coming back popular in a huge yeah you see the youngsters with nirvana shirts that's amazing it's all coming around amazing what was old is once new again exactly those are good years so good years bad clothes so monday is really about getting that leg workout in to make my whole body strong.

Starting point is 00:35:06 And what exercises do you perform? So it's walk in. Oftentimes I'll do calf work because unlike you, I need work there. Oh, I need calf work. I need calf work. That was the weak link in the chain for all of the winter sports I've been doing for the last six weeks. Yeah, I definitely do a lot of calf work. Actually, so I'll just walk through it.

Starting point is 00:35:24 I'm really big on tip raises. I start, I warm the last six weeks. Yeah, I definitely do a lot of calve. Actually, so I'll just walk through it. I'm really big on tib raises. I start, I warm up with tib raises. Training the front. Tib raises meaning like the tibialis anterior, like dorsiflexion, raising your toes towards your knee. Yeah, you'd be, so this is a huge addition. My program, I'm a huge fan of Ben Patrick, knees over toes guy, as he calls himself on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:35:43 I started doing tib work about two years ago, seriously doing tip work. So to be Alice raises, you can do this also leaning against a wall at an angle with your back against the wall and your feet out in front of you with your heels on the ground and touching your toes to the ground and then lifting them up for repetitions of 25 to 30. Or if you can have a to be Alice to raise machine as they're called, that great i warm up with tib work why training my tibs as they're called has tibs in the new biceps has uh definitely makes the calf work more effective never could grow calves or get my calves strong gotten them you know substantially bigger and stronger by training tibs but more importantly importantly, perhaps helps posture. Got rid of my right side

Starting point is 00:36:25 sciatica. I always had this right side kind of leaning in pain. I'm going to get teased for saying this for me. Anyway, I can run like a beast now. No knee pain, no back pain, no shoulder pain. I can just run and run and run. And so the training your tibs turns out to be key. And it turns out it has everything to do with the, we'll avoid jargongon here bring your toe closer to the kneecap as you generate your stride not having the floppy feet so if you lay down at night your toes are just kind of flopping towards the end of the bed your tibs are weak a lot of people with knee issues have weak tibs well hold on hold on so if you're in the bed you got your sheets and blankets on top and your feet are flopping forward are you sleeping like a gi joe figure with your toes pulled up to your

Starting point is 00:37:05 knees? No, I just mean that if your toes are in a state of kind of like flaccid relaxation, if your, if your feet are flaccid, flaccid toes, not good red light. A lot of people who run are smacking their feet against the ground. You know, Ben cued people to this tip work. Okay. Tip work is great for the calves. It's great for the knee. It's great for the hip. That's all very clear. And I think just a lot of people have over-trained their calves and not balance it out with Tib work. It would be like doing a lot of bicep work and a lot of tricep work or a lot of quad work,

Starting point is 00:37:33 not a lot of hamstring work. So you have to work both sides of the, of the limb. And I think our friend Kelly Starrett would agree. Tib work has changed everything for me. Posturally. I have no pain any longer. I just want to lodge a formal complaint against kelly starrett people should look him up because he is a large man very his quadzilla

Starting point is 00:37:52 he's 230 maybe former high level competitive kayaker i think he celebrated his 40th birthday by doing a standing back flip running an ultra and else. And he's a really good skier. I just want to say it really upsets me that he has no discernible physical weaknesses. It's very irritating. And a nice guy. Yeah, and a nice guy. And a nice guy. Yeah, he's very, very strong.

Starting point is 00:38:14 600-pound deadlift. Yeah, he's a strong unit. He's a beast. So, Tib work. So, I start with Tib raises. So, it's going to be a couple warm-ups, maybe a 12 rep warmup and eight rep warmup. And then I'll do, you know, three sets per tip of anywhere from six to 10 reps. Okay. Andy Galpin told me in the literature supports people like Brad Schoenfield and others have shown that for hypertrophy, for muscle growth, six to 30 reps, anywhere in there can get you

Starting point is 00:38:43 hypertrophy. If you go to failure and if you go hard i personally like to keep my workouts resistance workouts an hour or less so i make sure that i like to train in the more or less the five to ten repetition range for strength and for hypertrophy and i'm kind of going for a mix of both so i train tibs then i do sled or standing calf raises same, two to four sets, five to eight, maybe 10 repetitions. Are these sets to failure? These are sets to failure. And long ago I had gift of learning from the great Mike Menser. And these are sets to failure. Like I can't budge another micro inch, but I'm not quaking and I'm not breaking form. I'm trying

Starting point is 00:39:22 to keep everything nice and taut and rigid because I just, I can't afford an injury at this point. Not because I'm a competitive athlete. No flaccid feet. No flaccid calfers. Yeah. I'm telling you the tip work is a game changer and knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick is the one who's been teaching people that yes, everyone can dunk. Most everyone can dunk. He does like dunks into backbends and all this stuff and largely hinges on tip work and quality posterior chain work, like things like Nordic curls. So I'm training calves that takes about 10, 15 minutes total.

Starting point is 00:39:51 I try and move relatively quickly through that. So two to three minutes rest, maybe four, if I'm going for a heavy set, then I'm weaker in the hamstrings than I am in my quads. So I do two warmups and then two to four working sets of lying leg curls. Very standard stuff. Lying leg curls, meaning on a machine.

Starting point is 00:40:10 Yeah, on a machine. Not like reverse. Yeah, like a Nautilus machine or something. Not seated, doesn't work for me. Just lying leg curls. And not the hoist machines that move with you to make it easier. No. And maybe the occasional four strap if somebody's there to help me.

Starting point is 00:40:26 Then I go do two to four sets, but typically three of glute ham raises, which is an incredible exercise. The equipment isn't in every gym, but I'm doing three or four sets of glute ham raises going slow. And you know, this is basically like if you were going to do a deadlift, everyone knows what a deadlift is, but now take the ground and rotate it 90 degrees and make it the wall. That's what a glute ham raise really is. It allows you to do a deadlift is but now take the ground and rotate it 90 degrees and make it the wall that's what a glute ham raise really is it allows you to do a deadlift but then at the top do a leg curl so if you think about it that way like you just tilted the ground you just rotated it counterclockwise we'll get we'll get a link to the youtube video folks exactly glute ham raises are great lower back so entire posterior chain so then i'm done with calves and

Starting point is 00:41:01 hamstrings and then i'll do two or three sets of leg extensions so maybe a warm-up and then two or three sets of working leg extensions which for whatever reasons are incredibly painful I hate them but they work to isolate the quads and then two or three sets of working hack squats after a warm-up hack squats heavy heavy heavy heavy and then I'm done I'm out Monday's done now this is, going back to the kind of overall theme, the idea is to- Why hack squats specifically versus other forms of squats? Back squats for me, I always got like an internal hip pain. I had every squat coach in the world tell me how to do it better, even tell me I was doing it right. And then I ended up with the same thing. And I don't really care if I can squat X amount of weight. I'm doing it for strength.

Starting point is 00:41:44 You're not doing it for powerlifting competition. Doing it for strength and aesthetics. Aesthetics just because it's some balance. I'm not trying to get huge legs, but I mean, I'm 6'1", 220. I sit like more or less right there all the time. My body fat goes up for now. I might gain five pounds or lose five pounds, but like I'm kind of hovering around there.

Starting point is 00:42:00 I don't have any interest in being much larger or much smaller. I want to keep my strength, maybe build some as I get older. And so hack squats allow me to put a lot of weight on there and keep my nice right angle between the hip and my back. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1 by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1. I view it as my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended

Starting point is 00:42:32 it long ago in my 2010 number one New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, a multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when good whole foods simply aren't at hand or when you just want to ensure you are covering your bases. AG1 is the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy

Starting point is 00:43:12 scoop. And Athletic Greens is giving you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Go to athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You can check it out, athleticgreens.com slash Tim. They also offer a 90-day money-back guarantee if you are not 100% satisfied. Learn more, try it out, athleticgreens.com slash Tim. Can you describe for folks, just in case they're going to go searching for this, what is the visual of a hack squat? Hack squat, you're for folks, just in case they're going to go searching for this, what is the visual of a hack squat? Hack squat, you're sitting back, your back is against a sled, you're holding the handles up near your ears, and then you're squatting down, your feet are on a 45 degree, or ideally, if you can find it, a 30 degree platform below you. So you are, it's not a leg press it's a hack squat now for people that don't have access to these

Starting point is 00:44:05 and unfortunately a lot of gyms don't have them anymore or just don't keep them around for whatever reason weighted sissy squats as they're sometimes called can work where you're holding onto a plate and you're squatting down while holding onto a pole deceptively hard to do if you do it under control and with good technique and if you're doing your tip work great way to stretch your quads in ski boots too, if you're going up in. Yeah. Well, recently our podcast team took a little ski trip.

Starting point is 00:44:30 I was snowboarding and it's been a long time since I've been on a snowboard, but you start to feel how many of these movements translate, as you point out. And I should say that the sissy squats, you know, a lot of people think you can't bring your knee out over your toe. And this is what Ben Patrick

Starting point is 00:44:43 has really been trying to impress on people. Look at skateboarders land. Their knees go out over their toes, a foot beyond their toes. Look at the parkour gymnasts, Olympic weightlifters. This whole like knee can't pass the toe thing is just silly. So you can feel very comfortable and very strong at the bottom of one of these sissy squats or hack squats that way, you know? And so the whole purpose of that Monday workout is it's like the opposite of what i'm doing on sunday it's get stronger

Starting point is 00:45:08 maintain some size but really get stronger in the legs and just for people listening who are like for fuck's sake it's going to take us six hours to get to saturday part of the reason that i want to dig into this day specifically is because it's so neglected. People do not tend to exercise with a focus on their legs, but the direct and collateral benefits are so numerous that I want to just drill into this. When you look at the literature on cognitive improvements from resistance training, it's not from bicep curls. It's not from bench presses. I suppose it could be from things like dips, which are sort of like a upper body squat of sorts, especially if they're weighted or with rings or something,

Starting point is 00:45:49 but training the legs is key. And so, as I said before, there are two goals. One is to get the legs stronger. The other is that I'm trying to create a systemic anabolic effect on the body. I was just about to say, if you want to lose body fat, also the systemic sort of endocrine slash anabolic effect from doing this lower body exercise. It's real work is significant. It's real work and resting long between the sets, especially the hamstring and quad work, you know, four or five minutes. So you start to feel lazy, but you're going all out. You're breathing really hard during, after the set, you know, sometimes you feel like you're going to pass out. I haven't puked from a leg workout yet, people tell me means i haven't really trained hard i just say that i just don't have a weak stomach like the rest of them as kelly star i would say it's like 20 rep squats work just

Starting point is 00:46:33 great and you'll puke into a bucket but you're not gonna be able to do much else for the next week if you do them really intensely yeah i mean it's gonna hurt your ass every time you sit on a toilet seat so you're not gonna be doing a whole lot of basketball very well. Yeah. You know, I, I want strong legs. I want a strong body. I want a body that can accomplish endurance and I want the cognitive effects. So you get that systemic anabolic effect. There's another sort of practical reason for doing this on Monday, which is sometimes I might not train again until Thursday. And if you trained your legs properly, you can know that you initiated a number of good processes in your brain and body.

Starting point is 00:47:11 Made a down payment for the week. You made a down payment. Also, if you think about the neural circuits involved in generating the kinds of movements I just described for the Monday workout, they're fundamentally different than the kinds of movements required for, and neural circuits required for generating movements

Starting point is 00:47:23 of the Sunday long workout. They're both legs. You're running on your legs or walking on your legs, of course, but very, very different, different muscle fiber types, different motor neurons. Different range of motion too. Different range of motion and different mindset required. And keep in mind the entire leg workout takes 10 minutes of warmup and about 50, five, zero minutes of training. Tuesday is very different. Oh, and by the way, Monday is a very heavy work day for me. Typically we launch podcasts. I do all my own social media. So I'm, I post the assets. I really like doing that. Respond to comments, dealing with grants,

Starting point is 00:47:54 dealing with papers, dealing with, so money is heavy work day. So getting the leg workout done early on Monday is really key for me. These days I don't ever really do resistance training past 11 AM and ideally earlier in the day. And we won't go into whether or not it's fasted or fed or other, because I cover that. I have a toolkit where I list out some of that and how different processes layer together. And I can link to that. I would also say if people are like, but wait, I can't start until I know if it's fast or non-fasted, or if I should be swinging a dead cat over my head on Tuesday or Wednesday nights. Like, just get started.

Starting point is 00:48:28 You got plenty to get started. Yeah, I do it fasted, but I drink caffeine first and water. And listen, I usually eat a bit more on the weekend. This is great. Sunday night, you're putting in your fuel sources for your Monday workout. There are all sorts of ways this layers together. I'm not a cookie guy. Seriously.

Starting point is 00:48:43 It's like pizza is the i do love pizza no cheat days anymore for me however i haven't done one in a while i'm actually thinking of going back on for our body just try it and do it i said cookies i'll make a very embarrassing admission which is i am going to be going back on to strict slow carb okay and so i had these incredible cookies last night we're not going to spend a lot of time on this because we do need to get tuesday but it was sort of my last hurrah for locking down the fort so yes i'm getting back let me know i'll start i'll start lots of stories about cheat days my ex-girlfriend and we used to do the cheat days together and at at one point because i'll blame, we were in couples therapy.

Starting point is 00:49:26 They were asking like, so describe a week for yourself. And she's like, well, and then on Sunday we're eating like eight croissants. And then we're doing this therapist was looking at, excuse me. I'm like spitting here. Laughing is hard. Trying not to laugh. Like what in the world is this? You know, but we had a good time with it.

Starting point is 00:49:42 She was one of these mutants that could just eat anything, drink anything and feel fine the next day. And you know, I never put it on an ounce. Yeah. So the Tuesday is very different Tuesday. I don't want to call it a recovery day, but Tuesday I'm doing something really different. First of all, my legs need recovery. So what I'll do is substantial amounts of deliberate heat exposure and deliberate cold exposure. Yes, I do cold showers in the morning first thing nowadays. Yes, it is a bad idea to do cold water immersion after hypertrophy training. So just for the record, you don't want to get into an ice bath after hypertrophy training in the six hours after hypertrophy training because it can blunt the hypertrophy. It blocks the inflammation, which is exactly what you want to trigger the adaptation of hypertrophy.

Starting point is 00:50:28 But Tuesday is really about getting the maximum effect of heat exposure and cold exposure. And when I've done multiple episodes on each one of those, I learned about deliberate cold exposure from you. So thank you, Tim. I do a protocol, which is pretty intense designed to amplify growth hormone, stimulate a bunch of mood, positive mood, promoting hormones that last not just days, but weeks say the literature and just get better at it. So I'll do 20 minutes of sauna, hot sauna. What does hot mean? I'm up to like two 60 now, two 60, but I worked up to that. You know, you can check out the banya i'll give a plug to these folks they're spy 88 on wall street in in um in new york they're amazing they are incredible

Starting point is 00:51:11 they have a hot russian sauna very and archimedes banya in san francisco fantastic is great a couple of notes about that one it's clothing optional i wear my swim trunks but um when i go but how are you gonna show off those glutes you're working so hard, but, but it is to just know what you're getting into. It's co-ed and clothing optional. And it is in Hunter's point Bay view, which is a rough neighborhood. It's a rough neighborhood. I wouldn't go for a jog. Yeah. Don't leave anything in your car, but don't do that anywhere in San Francisco now. So 20 minutes in the sauna, very hot three to five minutes in the cold plunge up to the neck back into the sauna for 20 minutes back into the cold plunge for three to five minutes back into the sauna for 20 minutes

Starting point is 00:51:49 back into the cold plunge for three to five minutes it's work but it's amazing in the sense that you recover very well from the leg day you generate all the hormone neurotransmitter type of adaptations that one wants and And you get very, very good at tolerating heat and cold. And I should mention during these times, if there isn't someone else there, I'm listening to books. I'm thinking is that I'm putting this work and time to use. So there's multiple things going on there. Then Wednesday, I do one of two things. I'm either going to do a shorter duration than Sunday cardiovascular training workout. So I might do, I'm thinking about five minutes of warmup and then about 25 to 30 minutes

Starting point is 00:52:30 of usually running for me where I'm just trying to get out and cover as much distance as I can at a fast clip, but steady. So I'm not sprint stop, sprint stop. That's typically what I'll do on Wednesday. Although if my legs are still a little bit sore, that's when I'll train. And here the bodybuilders are just going to go, they're going to scoff I train what I call torso what do I do I try to get pushing through the chest and shoulders I'm trying to pull for the back I already got my lower back with the glute ham raises so what I tend to do is overhead shoulder

Starting point is 00:53:01 presses after a warm-up two to three sets, working sets, or maybe four. I like ring dips and dips these days. Those are hard for me, but I do work sets of those. So chest, shoulders, and I'm going to upset some people here, but I don't tend to train back every week. I do it every other week because just, I have some genetic abnormality where those grow really easily and I can throw proportions off really quickly but I might do three or four sets of chins or max rep chins slow with slow eccentric movements the lowering as well now slow eccentric four seconds ten seconds what are we talking yeah for usually about four or five seconds and then slowly pulling up contracting whatever muscle group so all of the movements are done trying to move as much weight as possible, as quickly as possible on the concentric phase, and then lowering it anywhere from two to four

Starting point is 00:53:49 seconds, got loading it like a spring and then trying to explode. I want strength. I want explosiveness and some hypertrophy sneaks in because I'm working in that five to eight rep range. So that's what I call torso because it's chest, shoulders, back every other week. I'll throw in those chins. And I think everyone has a muscle group like this, where if they train, it just grows like a weed. But I want to keep proportions, right? Strength proportions as well. And I do train my neck that day as well.

Starting point is 00:54:15 I know you wrestled. I can tell very easily looking at somebody, whether or not they need neck work or not, if your neck comes down right where your jaw is, you don't need to do a lot of neck work you don't look like a head placed on top of a little neck your neck is actually you know laird hamilton's neck is out to the lobes of his ears genuinely right danny way great skateboard too he trains his neck quite like broke his neck surfing and years ago so having a strong neck why

Starting point is 00:54:40 is that so important well it's important because you want a strong spine and it's the upper portion of your spine. The other thing that I noticed that it does is it completely changes my psychology to train my neck. I just naturally stand more upright. I find it easier to look people in the eye. It's not hard for me to look people directly in the eye when I speak to them, but I find I just have like my posture and presence is just better in a chair or standing when I train my neck. And I think it's because my head isn't, let's just use the word again. It's not flaccid falling of the chin towards the chest. That word just freaks everybody out.

Starting point is 00:55:11 You don't want flaccid feet. You don't want a flaccid neck. So neck work is very important. How do you work your neck? Yeah. I actually recently bought, I've been thinking about it for decades. I bought a four-way neck machine and it's actually, I got, you got the full four-way neck.

Starting point is 00:55:24 I was going to get like a hammer or one of these giant contraptions. bought a four-way neck machine and it's actually i got you got the full four-way i was gonna get like a hammer or one of these giant contraptions i actually bought and look do your homework folks because you can hurt yourself on these things if you get too aggressive too quickly i bought a four-way neck machine on amazon for 350 bucks i was like you know what let me try this before spending like five grand. Works great. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing fancy, but it works.

Starting point is 00:55:47 You have great proportions. I mean, why do I say this? It's not just about aesthetics. It's about, in general, balanced proportions are synonymous with balanced strength, which is synonymous with not getting injured. You know, one of the things that looks ridiculous and frankly is ridiculous to see these guys with big delts, wide shoulders, you know, long clavicles and their head is placed on this little neck. They look obstacle on a stick. Well, and they

Starting point is 00:56:10 look especially ridiculous. There's no other word for it in street clothes. It looks mutant and not in the good sense. So strong neck is great. Strong neck has helped me also avoid injuries in a number of sports. It's life insurance. If you do anything, any kind of martial art, or you drive a car, you know, I've been rear-ended a car and felt fine, you know, a little bit of neck soreness, but train the upper spine and lower spine. So I do some neck work at the end. And the way I do it is take a plate, wrap it in a towel. So you don't end up with an imprint of the weight number on your forehead. And I usually lie on my side and I'll do it somewhere in the 10 to 15 repetition range i'll usually do one light warm-up and then three works how do you hold it on your

Starting point is 00:56:51 head you just rest it there just hold it with your hand on your and on your side it also works your obliques somewhat um you're on a you're on a bench or on a bench yeah on a stair you have to be careful you know especially getting into and out of the movement that's how you often get injured and then i'll lie on my stomach and this is probably the most important one. And I'll put the plate behind my head again, wrapped in a towel and do head raises. You're trying to get your head sitting on top of your shoulders as it's supposed to, because everyone now is kind of bent over in this kind of C shape and no one's nerdy enough, except my good friend, Brian McKenzie, who cares enough about his posture. Shout out to Brian. He does amazing work and breath work and human performance.

Starting point is 00:57:26 When he texts, he uses his phone up near his eyes. I've seen that. So good. He's like, no one else does that, Brian. So the neck work comes at the end, but is absolutely critical. And whenever I don't do it for a week or two out of laziness or just some other reason, I start getting postural things. You start noticing elsewhere in your body. or just some other reason I start getting postural things you start

Starting point is 00:57:45 noticing elsewhere in your body I find and this could just be I don't think it's placebo because it's not something that I expect or maybe it is now but not initially fewer headaches just better circulation and better mobility also especially if you're spending a lot of time in front of a computer. My rotation, even though I'm not actively training with resistance, the rotational aspect, left, right, turning your head, the mobility of the neck sort of in all dimensions of the movement of the head seems to improve as well for me. And for folks, just one option I want to throw out there. If you train with someone or can train with someone,

Starting point is 00:58:25 manual resistance with a towel or just like pressure on the head and doing it really slowly, like super slow style, kind of like 10 seconds, 10 seconds is very effective also. I can't overstate the importance of neck training. Now for women who often don't want the aesthetic of a larger neck just use i would say lighter weights or or hand-based resistance you still want that strength and balance some women might want a big neck but in general the two things that can and you've done you put some of this in the floor a wig on laird hamilton that's my type just putting it out there ladies

Starting point is 00:59:00 one thing that in terms of aesthetics the two things that i think can really throw off the most commonly desired female aesthetic by women from what they tell me because i trained with a number of women is excessive trap work upper trap work because rounded shoulders and then larger neck some people might want that but in general that tends to be avoided for guys i think that neck work is it's so essential and for women it's essential for a strength and protection of the joints reason I will also say this and anyone who wants to challenge me on this will do it accordingly it actually increases your confidence and the reason is when you're upright you embody a different stance I'm a big

Starting point is 00:59:43 believer that the physical stances we embody have everything to do with the psychological stances we embody and vice versa. It's not just about standing up straight, being able to stand up straight, look people in the eye is something that is assisted by actually having a head that isn't flopping forward all the time. So this is a real thing from a number of standpoints. So if for whatever reason I do the cardio workout that I mentioned, the 25 or 30 minutes of running, that's what I do. But some people could might do it on the assault bike or something like that, or cycling or rower on the Wednesday, then I'll do that weight workout. I just described torso on Thursday or I'll swap them. So there's some

Starting point is 01:00:18 flexibility built into the week, travel, et cetera. By the way, the cardiovascular workouts can be done in the morning or the evening, but I always prefer to do them in the morning and just get it done with. Then Friday is a really important day because Friday is the day that I do a short workout, usually only about three minutes of warmup and about 12 minutes of training. And the goal is to get my heart rate as high as I possibly can. I learned this from Andy Galpin, just increasing VO two max, getting those really fast twist muscle fibers. My favorite way to do this is I'll get on the assault bike, which are the ones with the handles with the fan, which is not designed to keep you cool. It's designed to create resistance folks and do 20 second on sprint,

Starting point is 01:00:59 10 second rest, 20 second on 10 second Tabata type thing for six to eight rounds and then what I like to do is take a band and tie it to something like a chin-up bar or something and I'll squat down and jump and I'll do as high jumping as I possibly can but I actually control the eccentric I'm holding the band as I come down and so I learned from Peter Atiyah I've learned from Andy Galpin that our ability to jump and land is strongly correlated with physical longevity, or you could do broad jump. So you could do a bunch of broad jumps. You could do some HIIT workout, and then I'm just showered in out the door to go do my work or to work. So it's a really short workout. And then Saturday is the fun one

Starting point is 01:01:40 because I'm still enjoy this. I'll go into the gym in the morning. Usually it's mid morning and I'll do small muscle groups, biceps, triceps, rear delts. I'll do another tip and calf workout a little bit lighter than the one on leg day. Cause leg day is coming in two days. And the next day I'm doing that long hike. So that day is really to round out the smaller muscle groups that need work. And I have short torso, long arms. And so torso muscles grow very easily for me, get stronger, easily long arms, but you know, they require a little bit more work. So I like to do a dedicated day for that same way, warmup plus two to four work sets of two to three exercises. I always include dips at some point during the week, bench dips, tricep extensions with cables, basic stuff,

Starting point is 01:02:24 preacher curls, kind of inclined curls. So very basic stuff. But I just want to backtrack one step because I failed to say that Friday, the idea is to get that VO2 max up, but guess what? It's also designed to indirectly hit the legs. We hit legs on Monday and they've recovered. We now know that protein synthesis maximizes after these training workouts at about 48 hours and then starts to taper off. Now you read that, you hear that a lot, especially on social media and people think you have to hit a muscle group every 48 hours, but no, you hold on to the protein synthesis you generate for another couple of days.

Starting point is 01:02:55 So that Friday sprint on the bike workout or sprint on a field workout and jumping is indirectly targeting the quads and calves and hamstrings. And so you're keeping them online for hypertrophy. So when you hear all this, you might think, gosh, that's a lot of working out, but we're really talking about the long hike with friends or family on Sunday or by oneself, 90 minutes to three hours. You're talking about an hour workout on Monday morning, talking about sitting in the sauna and cold on Tuesday. He's talking about running for 20 or 30 minutes on Wednesday.

Starting point is 01:03:34 Talking about doing some dips and overhead presses, maybe some chins and a little bit of neck work on Thursday. You're talking about doing a 12 minute workout on Friday. And you're talking about going to the gym for an hour, hour and 15 minutes, more casual kind of, I don't want to call it what it is, but you could call it a vanity workout. I call it that to Joe Rogan. And he was like, that's ridiculous. Bicep is key muscle group. And I was like, give me an example.

Starting point is 01:03:54 And he's like, well, you know, when you're grappling and you're about to choke somebody out, you know, I was like, okay, well that's you, but he's absolutely right. You know, if you've ever fixed a, yeah, actually I chipped my tooth really hard once by, I was trying to fix something with a wrench and you're pulling with your bicep and your arm toward you and broke loose and, you know, chipped my tooth, but keep your head out of the way. But the, um. Good thing you trained your neck. Yeah. This is mostly a falsie, this one front tooth.

Starting point is 01:04:16 Um, and so the, yeah, exactly. Good thing I could have knocked myself out. But the, you know, there's a lot of things that, you know, bicep is good for, forearm strength is good for. So Joe's absolutely right. But I think that when you look at all of that, it's not that much time in the gym. You can do all of that at home. There are ways to do the leg workout, even at home or in natural terrain for the hikes and things. That's the schedule. And if you think about that schedule each day, you're accomplishing that endurance, leg strength, cold and heat adaptation, and all the neural stuff that

Starting point is 01:04:45 goes with that torso to keep the torso strong but here again we can say the torso work is indirectly hitting biceps and triceps then being able to run a couple miles is a good skill and what you find is that if you trained your legs properly and you give them enough rest and the cold and heat really help too you are so strong on that 20 or 30 minute run. Your tibs are strong, you know, no floppy feet, no back pain. You're running with, with vigor and you go, wow, like this is great. And so what I've noticed in the last 24 months or so is that I continue to get stronger and better in each of these areas. And supposedly that's not supposed to happen. I'm 47. Atiyah the other day said, you know, you and I were both far more physically robust when

Starting point is 01:05:26 we were in our teens. I was like, speak for yourself. I was getting injured all the time. My body hurt. I was unhappy. Then again, I was skateboarding then, so I was slamming a lot. But I find that this routine has really helped me because I think it takes into account a slower recovery that is just me.

Starting point is 01:05:44 My nervous system doesn't recover that quickly and it also embraces the fact that our nervous system and musculoskeletal system can train for different adaptations simultaneously across the week now the one cap on everything that's vital and again here a hat tip to charles polquin is if you start training for longer than 60 minutes with resistance training cortisol levels go up you start training for longer than 60 minutes with resistance training, cortisol levels go up, you start feeling lousy, you're not sleeping well, you can't, or you find you can't sleep enough and you don't recover. So keeping the workouts relatively short has really helped. And then the final thing is that I'm a scientist slash,

Starting point is 01:06:20 I guess now podcaster, and I'm not interested in being a competitive athlete. So I don't want to spend all my time training. I really want to be able to get the most out of my training routine to feel much better than I would otherwise when I'm doing cognitive work. And I'm a big believer that this workout schedule captures most, if not all of the neural circuits that one would want to activate. Perhaps the one thing missing from it is there isn't anything in there that's really about dynamic movement and multiple planes. I'm not doing jujitsu. I sometimes play badminton, you know, something badminton's fun. I'll do an hour of play type stuff, non-competitive, low stakes stuff. I'm a big fan of the book, Play It Away. I think I learned about that book from your podcast. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:02 Charlie. Charlie Hahn. Yeah. You know, having an hour a week where you're not trying to get fitter, you're not trying to burn calories or accomplish any adaptation. You're just trying to play and enjoy your ability to engage in low stakes, maybe competitive, but generally low stakes type movement where you're very focused, which is how I define play. That's also great, but that's not really exercise.

Starting point is 01:07:23 That's like. Yeah. and play that's also great but that's not really exercise that's like yeah yeah there's a difference between sometimes recreation and exercise if we're talking about provoking adaptations so i just want to underscore a few things one is you talked about nervous system or you know central nervous system cns recovery which is i just want to make note of that because I think a lot of folks think in terms of muscular recovery, but not nervous system recovery. And depending on what you're doing, I mean,

Starting point is 01:07:52 certainly that's very important question on a few things that I just took notes on. So Ben Patrick, knees over toes. I might need to connect with him at some point. I have questions about tib work but before i get to that maybe you can answer the question that i have you mentioned nordic curls in passing what the hell are nordic curls yeah nordics are a a great semi-substitute

Starting point is 01:08:18 for the glute ham raise glute ham raise allows you to fix your feet and then put your head down towards the floor and go up into a back raise and then into what's effectively a hamstring curl it hits the whole posterior chain and the lower back nordic curls are when you either brace your heels underneath a heavy piece of equipment or use a lifting belt and strap yourself to a bench or someone strong enough or heavy enough holds your ankles down and you're lowering down and you're touching your hands to the floor and coming back up. Or you can do the Ben Patrick, Ben Bruno. Ben Bruno is another excellent Instagram trainer and professional trainer. He trains Justin Timberlake and a bunch of other kind of famous, not kind of famous people. Justin

Starting point is 01:09:00 Timberlake's not kind of famous. He's famous. And he can do the cookie challenge, which is to put a cookie in your mouth and dip it in milk without putting your hands to the floor that's incredibly hard he's he's not it's interesting ben is deceptively strong because he's not that large but he's very very strong ben bruno training is his hand break dancers you want to see some strong people oh yeah deceptive yeah the yeah b boyss. So Nordic curls are great. They're, they're now machines that are an apparatus that you can buy the, where you can fix your heels under something. Do Nordic curls, even a portable one for when you travel, it goes under the door. Ben Patrick, AKA knees over toes guy. He has a system called ATG training. I confess I didn't subscribe to ATG

Starting point is 01:09:40 cause I'm, I've got what I need now, but a bunch of those portable equipment type things are available through him. And I think he's really changed the way that I think about how the whole body moves and works. He insists that he can get me dunking a basketball, which who knows, maybe that should be the challenge before our next conversation. So Nordic curls, I unbeknownst to me, because there's some other term for this particular exercise, but I have a piece of Sorenix equipment that actually is sits in my garage and is for this exact exercise. Great. If I had to pick just three exercises, I will never just pick three, but if I had to pick three exercises to do, and I could only do those, it would be

Starting point is 01:10:20 glute ham raise slash Nordic curl, something for the posterior chain. It would be ring dips, because then I could throw in some leg raises too or something like that. I could make it multi-compound movement. And I would sprint. Like if that's the only thing I could do, that's what I would do. Put me in a small prison cell,

Starting point is 01:10:41 knock on wood, let's hope that doesn't happen. That's what I ask for. Scientist slash podcaster slash inmate small prison cell. Knock on wood, let's hope that doesn't happen. That's what I ask for. Scientist slash podcaster slash inmate. Hopefully not. Listen, we talked last time. I've been behind locked doors before. It's not an experience I want to recreate. Not fun.

Starting point is 01:10:54 Not endorsed. No. So on the tip work side, this may be a question for Ben or someone more qualified, but one of the challenges that I've had for decades, shin splints. And my dorsiflexion is actually seemingly, from a strength perspective, pretty decent. Ankle mobility, also pretty decent, although the left ankle's been broken so many times

Starting point is 01:11:17 that it's a little crunchy. But I have done training with this fellow named Jersey Gregorick, who holds multiple world records in Olympic weightlifting, where he held. Also deceptively strong. Incredibly strong. I met him and his wife, right? Yeah, on yellow. She also has world records in Olympic weightlifting. And just to give you an idea, folks, he's got to be in his, I want to say he's probably 67, 68 now, and he can do a full barbell snatch, ass to heels, while on top of an endo board, which are those balance boards on top of a cylinder. And I don't recommend trying to replicate that, but he's quite a physical specimen. So the point of all of that is that my ankle mobility is pretty good. My dorsiflexion strength

Starting point is 01:11:58 seems pretty good, but I always feel like the front of my shins are about to explode. Someone could just pop them like a balloon with a pin. And I've not figured out a way to address this. Yeah. I vote to work. I used to have terrible shin splints and also pain in my shins just from skateboarding, taking so many shinners as they're called from doing a little bit of Thai boxing when I was in high school and college and, and thinking I was being smart by conditioning my shins with coke bottles like i heard they did it over in thailand just made a mess of my shins the tip raises have changed everything also given me i used to think i had flat feet but i have flat feet that's a source

Starting point is 01:12:34 of my problem and i'd do all this toe strengthening foot strengthening stuff all these people in the yoga community in san francisco were like oh i'm gonna train your feet turned out i don't have flat feet it turns out that the tip my tibs were. And so the foot wasn't resting in the right position. So for me, it's been a game changer. Also, you don't need any specialized equipment. There is that movement of resting your shoulders against a wall. You're going to plank your bank, your body rigid, your heels are on the ground, about a foot out in front of you. And then you're touching your toes down to the floor and then back up. And you're just doing that while you're on the ground about a foot out in front of you and then you're touching your toes down to the floor and then back up and you're just doing that while you're on the phone you do 25 or 30 repetitions of that your tibs will be screaming so it's as if you're basically a statue right you

Starting point is 01:13:13 can't articulate any of your joints minus your ankles right and you're just standing what like a foot and a half two feet away and then shoulders against shoulders then against the wall getting your shoulders to the wall but you're kind of you're leaning like a book against a bookend. Right. And then exactly moving your toes. All right. I'm in. Yeah. Count me in. Yeah. Cause I, I am also in the, apparently I think this is possible. The lying to myself about the flat feet part. Yeah. I was convinced I had flat feet. You want to hear something really wild that has nothing to do with fitness, but it has everything to do with metabolism and the obesity crisis. Wild metabolism obesity and tell me there's a very important paper published from the university of houston this last year where they had people sitting for a couple of

Starting point is 01:13:56 hours and every two or three seconds they would keep their toe on the ground and they would do what was effectively a seated calf raise think about the the jumpy kid in class or when you've had too much coffee okay they're doing it slowly and they're measuring the contraction of the soleus all right the longer flatter muscle of the calf underneath the gastroc yep turns out that muscle is very unique it does not use the same fuel sources as other muscles in the same way. It's not so much a glycogen-dependent muscle. It is designed, of course, to carry you very long distances. It's an endurance muscle. They had people do this while seated for a couple hours a day, and they looked at glucose uptake, and they looked at overall insulin management, and there was a significant and meaningful improvement in insulin sensitivity. Now, this is not about caloric burn. This is about essentially doing exercise while seated.

Starting point is 01:14:54 Now, I put out some stuff about this on social media and people understandably laugh like, oh, that's ridiculous. First of all, they call it a soleus pushup in the study. You're like, that's a seated calf raise, but most people don't know what a seated calf raises. So, you know, gym rats, you know, you're only laughing to yourselves. I throw that myself in there. I mean, you know, it's true. Most of the internet. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But what's very interesting is this is something that a lot of people can do who are trying to improve their metabolic status. Of course they should also exercise. But as the paper describes, it's no surprise why this works. You know, were we quote unquote designed to walk

Starting point is 01:15:32 around more, move more during the day? I don't know. I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but we were definitely moving around a lot more than we probably are now. But it's very interesting that this muscle small, it's only 1% of the body's total musculature can account for well over 15%, well over, it depends on the person, but at least 15% of your total energy expenditure during the day. That's insane.

Starting point is 01:15:55 So if you're on a plane, like this thing of bouncing your knee or doing this thing is actually a meaningful, it's not a replacement for exercise, but in terms of its metabolic impact is meaningful. I find that really interesting. And perhaps of all the things that we'll discuss today, if you're unwilling to try that, then, you know, then your bar for entry is just way too high. So have a few extra cups of coffee, folks. Bounce those knees.

Starting point is 01:16:19 Exactly. And don't get on kids about bouncing their knees in class teachers i was one such kid all right we've covered a bunch of exercise and a number of things as fundamental pillars that you've doubled down on anything that you've changed your mind on okay well one of them was the fact that i always believed that we couldn't that i had flat feet i also believed that we couldn't obtain multiple exercise adaptations at once right we can't yes because i track my numbers i'm not super neurotic but i keep a you know handwritten training journal or at the end of the day i generally can remember what i did in the gym and didn't do we're on a run and i'm improving over time so that's great i i thought i would kind of had hit my peak ability and I was, it was all downhill from here,

Starting point is 01:17:05 but I feel much better. How do you track? If you track like the Tabata, for instance, you're looking at wattage, are you looking at anything or is it more subjective? We're all, I tend to add another round or two, but just do a little bit more work or go a little bit harder. I tend to like to do things pretty subjectively when it comes to exercise. Like I, my calendar will say, for instance, like for legs, it'll say tip calf ham quad, and I'll put level anywhere from level one to level 10 level 10 would be the workout with like four straps and drops. That's just all out. I rarely have ever do those, but typically I'm trying to make that workout at least a level 7.5 to nine. And generally the shorter workouts are the harder ones. Occasionally just because of schedules or I'm not feeling great, I'll do that Wednesday run and it'll end up being a,

Starting point is 01:17:51 you know, 15 minute jog or something. And I'll just say level five lame or something like that. Like I didn't, you know, or something like that, you know, and then push a little bit harder the next day. So I'm kind of my own coach. I'm sort of observing myself rather than getting really deep into the metrics, but I'm always trying to put more. I'm sort of observing myself rather than getting really deep into the metrics, but I'm always trying to put more weight on the bar or go slower with the repetition or add a set or a rep or two or all three. So let's hone in on sleep, my perennial favorite and the bane of my wellbeing, depending on the quality. But last we spoke, I remember you spoke about, I think it was magnesium threonate, apigenin,

Starting point is 01:18:29 and there may have been one or two other lucky charms in there. Right, theanine. Are those still the holy trinity for your sleep, or do you have other things that you've added, things you've subtracted? What is your current cocktail? With the understanding that as much as people want to fix everything with silver bullets light exposure in the morning exercise all these

Starting point is 01:18:52 are contributors to good good quality sleep i still use the same sleep stack so it's magnesium three and eight spelled t-h-r-e-a-e-o-n-a-t theanine and apigenin and i've added every once in a while i'll take 900 milligrams of myo-inositol myo-inositol has a rich literature associated name myo as in muscle why myo that's a good question yeah it must be it must be so it's amino acid it can be a neurotransmitter mimetic it extensive literature on inositol for improving insulin sensitivity. There's also something called D chiro inositol, which is important for female fertility. We can talk about that. But what I've added in the 900 milligrams of myo inositol for is I do sometimes like many people wake up at three in the morning to use the restroom. And although there's a simple solution to that that I just recently learned that really works, and I'll share it in a moment. Catheter.

Starting point is 01:19:51 No. It helps me fall back asleep after that. And I am tracking my sleep because I sleep on an eight sleep. And that has good sleep tracking ability. What Atiyah has taught me that a lot of the wristbands and rings for tracking sleep while they can be quite good and are quite good whoops and auras being the two most popular ones they can get movement wrong because of movement of limbs whereas the eight sleep seems to really capture slow wave sleep rapid eye movement sleep ratios really well yeah i use both a sleep and aura at the moment right yeah so Yeah. So the, um,

Starting point is 01:20:26 the myonositol, it has helped quite a bit with that going back to sleep thing. One way to not wake up to urinate so much in the middle of the night, I learned from a colleague is it turns out that it's not just how much fluid you drink, which dictates whether or not you need to urinate. Cause that's sort of a duh. It's also how quickly you ingest that fluid if you gulp fluid down it actually because of the way fluid is absorbed it actually in the kidney the way filtration occurs in the kidney the way it signals to the bladder is that it makes you have to go to the bathroom fairly urgently so if you have your final beverage of the day sip it don't gulp it you know for morning hydration the opposite is true you actually want to gulp down quite a lot

Starting point is 01:21:04 of liquid in the morning you can absorb quite a lot of liquid in the morning. You can absorb quite a lot of liquid in the morning. I'm reading this really nerdy review in Nature has these wonderful review series on circadian rhythms in the kidney. Your kidney is not the same organ first thing in the morning as it is at night. So this is what circadian biologists have been shouting for a long time. Every organ is this way. But you want to hydrate pretty heavily first thing in the morning. And then over the day you can titrate off that liquid. So I'm going to ask you to pick some favorite children here. You got the magnesium threonate, L-theanine, apigenin, which am I understanding correctly that is effectively chamomile tea on steroids? High concentration chamomile extract.

Starting point is 01:21:45 All right, got it. And then the myo-inositol. Myo-inositol. All right. 900 milligrams, which turns out to be, it's a big pill, but it turns out to be pretty low dose. For insulin sensitivity, they give, and for depression, they give people up to

Starting point is 01:21:58 five grams of myo-inositol a day. But it's a mild sedative, so I don't know how people get away with that. I'll take the four, the four of those. I will occasionally be so tired before I work out. Yeah. Occasionally I'm so tired that I'll, I'll wake up with the pills in my hand or on the nightstand. So I don't think I'm dependent on them in any way. The question is if you could only choose two of those. Oh, easy. Mag three and eight and apigenin. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Theanine is not going to be good for people that have very robust dreams or nightmares because it will increase the, how vivid your

Starting point is 01:22:31 dreams are. So nightwalkers, night terrors, that kind of thing. Um, for those of you that have sleepwalking, um, nightwalkers, uh, night skinwalking, sorry. And I didn't mean to interrupt you. This is something I I'm working on. My colleague at Stanford, Carol Dweck, told me that it's a sign of enthusiasm for the conversation. Oh, yeah. No, I apologize. Oh, are you kidding? This is, I mean, I'm not going to throw stones in my glass house here. I interrupt constantly.

Starting point is 01:22:56 But you were talking about the kidneys. You're saying not the same organ in the morning as it is at night. This is what circadian biologists have been screaming from the rooftops. And now that's coming home to roost in these papers that you're reading, or maybe it's a meta analysis. I don't know. And you were saying sipping water at night or just slower intake, gulping in the morning.

Starting point is 01:23:19 And I, I threw your train of thought off the rails. All good. I mean, basically you want to look at the first half of your day very differently than the second half of your day. Morning part of your day, you want sunlight or bright artificial light. Why?

Starting point is 01:23:33 It increases cortisol 50% above baseline. You want cortisol high early in the day and you want it low, low, low later in the day. Not because it disrupts sleep, but because it's late shifted cortisol is associated with depression, screws up your immune system to have it late shifted beautiful work from bob sapolsky and david spiegel at stanford school of medicine have shown that so hydration caffeine sunlight movement bright light if you can't get sunlight early in the day though you really want what are called the catecholamines which are dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine and you want cortisol which is a glucose corticoid elevated in the early part of the day that's what's going to give you energy

Starting point is 01:24:14 focus alertness all that great stuff throughout the day and then you want to taper that stuff off as the day goes on now recent data have shown that if you want to improve your rapid eye movement sleep, why would you want to do that? Well, rapid eye movement sleep is when you get the unpacking of emotions from previous day memories. Yeah. This is your in-book. Read or listen to our usual friend, Matt Walker. Right. I mean, how do you get more rapid eye movement sleep?

Starting point is 01:24:39 High intensity interval training, early part of the day, or cycling appears to greatly improve different stages of sleep as well compared to running although running will do it as well i don't know i think it has to do with the central pattern generator thing high intensity interval training when you're pedaling on the bike or you're sprinting so it's repetitive but it's not repetitive for long enough you're engaging certain brain circuits and it's going to deplete different neurotransmitter systems it's going to engage the endorphin system rather than i wonder if it's just maybe it's going to deplete different neurotransmitter systems. It's going to engage the endorphin system rather than the dopamine system. city setting to sit on a bike. So if you have a hundred studies with bikes and you have five studies with running that maybe it's sort of a selection bias in some respect because there's just such a higher volume of studies. I don't know. I don't know. I love bicycling when I can

Starting point is 01:25:37 be upright. You know, I think your Dutch bicycle, you know, moving through a city, seeing things, optic flow, seeing which we know shuts down the amygdala to some extent suppresseses activity the amygdala it's beautiful you see things you see people how anyone in the world could want to be hunched over in a partial c position and pedaling as one is on a road bike i have zero minus one interest in doing that it sounds horrible and then i heard it gives you all these like prostate issues and it can give them erectile dysfunction i'm like you know because from the pain they now put grooves in the seats because, you know, I just think like, why would anyone be a cyclist? This is terrible.

Starting point is 01:26:08 Turns out having a pool cue shoved into like your perineum for hours at a time isn't good for you. No, hunched over like a seat. And I realized that, you know, I have many friends who are triathletes and cyclists. So I realized there's really an allure there. Moving fast through space feels really good, but also the danger of cars and like, yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:23 So cycling, riding a bicycle recreationally to me makes sense as does, you know, walking or running or skateboarding or whatever. But to me, cycling hunched over like that just seems like a dreadful form of exercise, but that's just me. So let's go from the dreadful to the sublime. Perhaps we mentioned a couple of supplements and I don't want to fixate on that, but I follow my own curiosity here and there's a list here. So on the omegas, because we discussed omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, DHA, and I increased my intake. I'm so curious to know because I do observe seemingly a very consistent improvement in mood and sleep however I've tried multiple brands and I've tried to do the homework and look at the various

Starting point is 01:27:13 like certificates of analysis to make sure that I'm not you know eating rancid garbage I end up getting mild nausea after like a week of, I suppose, higher intake. Maybe if I'm taking, I might be getting the amount off, but maybe two grams total, something like that. In liquid or capsule form? In capsule form. With food or without food? That's a great question. I probably wasn't even paying attention. Although I tend to take fat with food. So probably with food or maybe just before food. I'd be curious to know anyone on the internet, if you're listening to this, if you've experienced anything similar, because I see the benefits and then let's just call it five to seven days in, I just get this like

Starting point is 01:27:55 low grade nausea, almost like a motion sickness. And then I stop for a washout period and then I'm fine. And I'm like, God, this is a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. There's some, I mean, obviously some great high quality fish oils out there for liquid, the Carlson's brands, the ones that are lemon flavored to make them less fishy is going to be the most cost-effective way to get fish oil has to be refrigerated after opening, but that's definitely the most cost-effective way. And here we do have a, you know, supplement affiliate for the podcast, but that's just that it's not them, but that's just the truth. What is your dosage target for omega-3s or EPA specifically? Minimum one gram per day of EPA. Okay. Minimum, sometimes more. Do you take it in one dose or split doses? I take it,

Starting point is 01:28:40 it ends up being three capsules with my big meal of the day, which tends to be a midday meal. And then I take, I do take a tablespoon of the Carlson's oil and people gasp when I say this, but I actually like it on my oatmeal with salt. It tastes good. I, you know,

Starting point is 01:28:59 I, when I've spent time in like Iceland and Scandinavia, like I've had these little shots of like cod liver oil and so on. I can do that, but on top of the oatmeal. No, I'm telling you, it's really good. And I hate sardines. I despise sardines. I despise anything smoked flavor.

Starting point is 01:29:16 I'm really boring. And I absolutely loathe anchovies. Like fishy oil smell. Yeah, I can't eat anchovies. I don't even really like eating fish. I still like sardines. I like sushi. That's about it. But even there, I'm boring. Spoiled brat. I don't really like eating fish still like sushi i like sushi that's about it but even there i'm boring spoiled bread i don't even like the uni i'm a good person to go

Starting point is 01:29:30 to sushi with because you get all the eel all the uni you know i just want the yellow tail and the uh and the least defensive the least defensive fish available at least i'm not ordering chicken teriyaki all right and just so people are hearing it from you and not from me, not to say it's even the same thing. What are the primary benefits that you observe or that are supported by literature either or with the intake of say one gram minimum of EPA per day? Mood antidepressant effects. Absolutely clear.

Starting point is 01:30:00 And there are so many clinical trials supporting that people can get away with taking lower doses of antidepressants or even coming off antidepressants of course always check with your psychiatrist before you do that by increasing their omega-3 intake above one gram per day even as high as three grams per day okay so question for you i remember last time we spoke we chatted a bit about the ability for the gut let's just say some people refer to it as the second brain, to sense the intake of sugar, fat, and a handful of other things. What is the mechanism of action by which the EPA is affecting mood. Is that known? I think so. It's probably two-pronged. One, the EPA is a fundamental structural lipid for neuronal membranes

Starting point is 01:30:52 and for the neurons in particular that release neuromodulators, such as serotonin and dopamine. That's one. The other is that these neuropod cells in the gut, as they're called, sense, as you pointed out, sugar, essential fatty acids, and essential amino acids, and signal via the vagus to the dopamine centers of the brain. So your gut is subconsciously signaling to your brain what kinds of nutrients are coming

Starting point is 01:31:20 into your system. And when you have a lot of flavorful food and or high caloric food, but it's not high in nutrients, it sets that system totally out of whack because there's an increase in dopamine for sure from the taste of the food that's not matched by that subconscious parallel signal. And by the way, this is not woo biology. This is coming from the laboratories of Diego Borges at Duke university school of medicine. Charles Zucker, who's a Howard Hughes medical investigator at Columbia University, has done this for sugar sensing and a number of other laboratories. brain are driving an appetite for certain kinds of foods. However, when these neurons, these neuropod cells in the gut are quote unquote satisfied, they're seeing the nutrients they want to see. They signal to the brain dopamine release within the brain, but they also are

Starting point is 01:32:16 signaling satiety. And that's really what you want. So in many ways, we are a essential amino acid, essential fatty acid foraging machine. It just also so happens that, at least in the short term, sugar will trigger the same pathway. This is also why people who increase their intake of omega-3s get above that one gram per day of EPAs, or who take small amounts of L-glutamine, reduce their sugar cravings. You're activating the same neurons. You're giving the alternative stimulus. So the L-glutamine is vis-a-vis the neuropods.

Starting point is 01:32:53 Likely. Yeah, that hasn't been directly established, but it's long been known that increasing intake of certain essential amino acids can reduce craving for sweets. And whenever people say, how do I kill my sweet craving? Well, it's not a conventional approach,

Starting point is 01:33:08 but you could get a quality branched-chain amino acid or essential amino acid powder, which sometimes have some non-caloric sweetener or something and fruity taste and mix it in there. People find, oh yeah, I don't actually crave chocolate the same way. I mean, in my opinion, a little bit of dark chocolate is wonderful every once in a while. So I don't want to give the impression that you're never supposed to have sugar, but there are people who very much feel a slave to their sugar cravings. So giving

Starting point is 01:33:33 these neurons the alternative stimulus really helps and you're getting effectively the same dopamine release. This makes sense evolutionarily, why we would crave essential fatty acids and essential amino acids. This is also why you know i guess the meat eaters won't relate or the non-meat eaters won't relate but a really great steak is very satisfying despite the fact it has no glucose essentially there are people who are feel quite good whether or not they're healthy or not as we could talk about but who feel quite good just eating steak now i'm not one of people, but if you had to pick a food that would keep you feeling good

Starting point is 01:34:08 and would repair the tissues of your body and would give you enough fats to keep going and protein synthesis, et cetera, if you had to feed your children, you would give them a steak. You would not give them a sweet potato. And if you look at the amount of food that one eats when given as much meat as they want,

Starting point is 01:34:24 fatty meat in particular not gross fatty meat high quality fatty meat versus carbohydrates i mean you just look at you're quite satisfied after a certain amount of protein intake so i'm not pushing people towards a carnivore diet i don't follow a carnivore diet but i do think that our nervous system from the gut to the brain is a is a sensing and foraging system that subconsciously lets our brain know, aha, I've got enough of what I need, and now I can stop eating if I want to. So we're going to leapfrog from delicious fish. I think the move for me might be to go to just pure liquid, refrigerated.

Starting point is 01:35:04 Try that. I mean, who the hell knows but just to just to try something even if the expiration date looks fine maybe i just got a couple of bad batches who knows or maybe it's the capsules themselves i mean there's so many things go into these capsule formulas and then their shelf life and all of that gut health overall if it's hard for most people to do what they need to for their gut. In addition to all the things to avoid, like too frequent use of antibiotics and things of that source, it's pretty clear that one serving of fermented foods a day is not going to be enough, that you need three or four servings of low-sugar fermented foods. So natto for people that can stomach it.

Starting point is 01:35:42 Good luck. Sauerkraut kimchi you know a good bulgarian yogurt i like these really sour bulgarian yogurts they're so good bulgarian yogurt oh there's this amazing bulgarian yogurt you have to try this stuff it is so good except they don't have the full fat one in particular what what makes the bulgarian yogurt so magical i can remember the name of this brand we'll put it in the show it's so good um but i don't want people that i have they run out because they only put two or three of these in every whole foods and i'm buying those two or three

Starting point is 01:36:08 so the of the full fat ones but it's hard for most people to get that much low sugar fermented food per day and so most people just don't do it and then high dose probiotics are very expensive need to be refrigerated so that's why i think the age you want checks off a number of boxes there but if people can ingest low sugar fermented foods that's going i think the ag1 checks off a number of boxes there but if people can ingest low sugar fermented foods that's going to serve them really really well so so say the data from justin sonnenberg's lab and chris garner's lab enjoy your kilo a day of natto tell me how that goes that stuff is so slimy it's so wicked i mean that is there are two things that i've yeah i've lived in japan and was there as an exchange student and so on there are two things that I've, yeah, I've lived in Japan and was there as an exchange student and so on. There are two,

Starting point is 01:36:45 at least, well, let's say three food items that Japanese people find hilarious to watch foreigners try to eat. Natto is definitely number one. It's just like spider web, cobweb stink. It's so gnarly.

Starting point is 01:37:00 I can eat it, but it's not my favorite even to this day. Umeboshi and other types of like pickled super super salty plums and so on that's another one and then i would say uni also before especially before it was really making the rounds in the u.s like the first time a foreigner would go over and just get like the seagull poo on top of the sushi rice it's so hardcore uni is what i'm talking about just consistency wise it's very very similar it just feels like it's uh it's like a tongue yeah it's not my it's not my favorite uh i but people but people love it some people some people

Starting point is 01:37:34 do people are told that it's an aphrodisiac and that's why and so they put the best way to sell anything that's the way best way so i wanted to ask you because i have a couple of notes here there's tonka dali fadozia agis, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. But the one I want to ask you about first is actually, if I'm getting the pronunciation correctly, Rhodiola Rosea. Yeah, Rhodiola Rosea is an impressive supplement. have heard in my conversations with athletes over the years of people using this for various endurance purposes, altitude acclimation. So rhodiola rosea is a really interesting compound because it falls into this category of what people call adaptogens. But normally when you hear adaptogens, first of all, that's a very vague very vague term doesn't actually mean anything specific it

Starting point is 01:38:25 means an ability to adapt generally or specifically no one's really pinpointed what that means but typically the adaptogens are going to reduce cortisol so for instance ashwagandha is a very potent suppressor of cortisol there's some evidence it can indirectly increase testosterone but probably through suppression of cortisol since those are in the same synthesis pathway. Ashwagandha is an adaptogen. Ashwagandha, because it lowers cortisol, should probably be taken late day, not early day, because you want cortisol high. Ashwagandha, as a cortisol suppressing adaptogen, probably also should not be taken in high amounts, not low amounts, but in high amounts, meaning, you know, four to 600 milligrams prior to exercise, because the whole goal of exercise

Starting point is 01:39:08 is to trigger the adaptation through a spike in cortisol, or one of the goals. Rhodiola rosea is a very interesting compound because it's an adaptogen in that it greatly reduces perceived effort and allows for greater power output and endurance output, as you pointed out a moment ago but it does not do that by suppressing cortisol so 200 milligrams of

Starting point is 01:39:32 rhodiola rosea prior to say a resistance training workout or even on one of your these uh you will notice you have more vigor you can just go longer and your perceived effort is much lower. And it's kind of striking. What is it doing? And this is interesting. It's kind of striking how after the workout, you don't feel as depleted. Perhaps the main reason I started taking is I found I could train harder, but then I suffered quite a lot from a post-exercise dip in energy, especially if I ate a big meal.

Starting point is 01:40:03 I no longer experienced that. If I take rhodiola rosea 30 to 60 minutes before a workout. The effects of it last about four hours. So what's happening during that workout? It's clearly having an effect on the central nervous system by reducing the total amount of adrenaline that's released or the efficacy of adrenaline, epinephrine, during high-intensity effort or long-duration effort.

Starting point is 01:40:26 So what this effectively means is you're, in principle, one is able to generate the same amount of effort without the same amount of energy depleting neurochemicals. I mean, epinephrine, norepinephrine help you generate energy, but there's always a trough afterwards, always. And so if you can generate the same amount of physical output in the absence of x amount of adrenaline or norepinephrine then you're essentially better off it also seems to catalyze recovery better i would not take it more often

Starting point is 01:40:58 than just before training however because there are a few studies showing that the effects of it can kind of taper off if you're taking it all day every day now would that be true for say ashwagandha let's just say someone's taking it before sleep would they want to cycle off of that how would you think about cycling if recommended yeah low dose of ashwagandha you know 25 50 milligrams a day taking continuously no problem i actually think ag1 has low dose of ashwagandha in it, but when people are taking ashwagandha to offset high stress of mental or physical stuff, or both for a period in life, I'd say after about two weeks, you want at least two weeks off. You really don't want to suppress cortisol chronically, unless there's some clinical

Starting point is 01:41:39 reason for that. Rhodiola rosea is probably the best addition to my physical performance stack that I've added in a long time. And it's really striking. I mean, I think so much so that people could try it and it really does seem to work the first time and every time for me, if it doesn't work for you the first time, if you, you know, all other things being equal, you got a decent night's sleep, you're doing everything the same way you normally would. And you take Rodeo Rosea and you don't really notice much of an effect. You might try and increase the dose slightly and give it another go and what was the dosage range 200 milligrams 200 is what i is what i'll take and i found that to be really striking now i'm not going to take that before like a long sunday

Starting point is 01:42:19 jog or a hike because that's i mean i might but chances are I'm not gonna do it before the leg workout I'm gonna do it before a hit workout I'm gonna I'm mainly doing it to make sure that I can train really hard and then go do other things really hard too you know I again as a not a competitive athlete I loathe the experience of training really hard and then feeling like I gave everything to that training session and therefore I don't have much energy or focus to give to the other things. Anything else? Yeah. And I think most people are like that.

Starting point is 01:42:51 Are you still taking the Tongkat Ali and the Fidozia Agrestis? And for those who are not familiar, because I think we may have made mention of this in our last conversation, but just in brief, what are these two things too? Yeah. Tongkat Ali is an Indonesian ginseng. There's a Malaysian version too, but you want the Indonesian one. If you want to pursue these effects, which are, it's known to decrease sex hormone binding globulin, which frees testosterone, which is important in both men and women. It turns out in women,

Starting point is 01:43:17 there's more testosterone circulating in a healthy woman, post-puberty woman than there is estrogen. Peter Atiyah taught me this. If you normalize for nanograms per deciliter, women have more testosterone than estrogen. Healthy women do. So testosterone is associated with libido, ability and desire to generate effort, mood, et cetera, in men and women. Probably the best way to describe testosterone's effects are it makes effort feel good. Tongali ali frees up more testosterone so mild libido enhancer for some more extreme for others increases energy will increase feelings of well-being and typically the dosages are 400 milligrams a day in single dose or divided doses with or without food taken early in the day before noon or 2 p.m because it can increase

Starting point is 01:44:06 energy you don't want to disrupt your sleep there are a number of good sources of it we can provide links to a couple of those sources and fedogia aggressus is a nigerian shrub it's taken from a nigerian shrub and it stimulates the release of luteinizing hormone which is going to come out of the pituitary and in women will stimulate anything that comes from downstream of luteinizing hormone in the ovary so typically estrogen maybe even testosterone to some extent and in men it will increase testosterone output from the testes by way of increasing luteinizing hormone maybe subtle increase in estrogen as well this is important men hear that something increases estrogen they go oh i don't

Starting point is 01:44:46 want that well keep in mind that if you flatline your estrogen so if men are taking an astrozole or crushing their estrogen their libido is going to be zero their cognitive ability will be diminished estrogen is important in both men and women also cardioprotective isn't it cardioprotective the endothelial cells we think of our blood vessels and our arteries and capillaries as tubes, but they're really tubes. Imagine silly putty kind of rolled out, Play-Doh made into little flat sheets and then rolled up to comprise those tubes. So it's many, many endothelial cells that make up those tubes.

Starting point is 01:45:17 And the flexibility of those tubes is very important. Obviously, you don't want them rigid. You need them to expand and contract as needed. And estrogen is important for some of that signaling leading to that malleability of the endothelial cells. Fidogea agrestis is typically taken in dosages of 300 to 600 milligrams per day, with or without food. Doesn't seem to matter if it's early day, late day.

Starting point is 01:45:38 There's some evidence that in rats, it can be toxic to the testicular tissue, but that's in very, very high concentrations. It's interesting, the number of studies on humans for both Tonga Ali and Fidoja have greatly expanded since our last conversation. And especially for Tonga Ali, there's quite good support. Safety margins are good within the dosage ranges that we've talked about. I've heard of people taking up to a gram a day of Tonga Ali. That just makes me cringe. I think taking herbal compounds in very high

Starting point is 01:46:04 concentrations is going to be risky no matter what, because these things can trigger immune responses. So 400 milligrams of Tonga Ali, 600, 300, 600 milligrams of Fidojia taken daily should be fine. I don't cycle them and never have. Some people cycle the Fidojia because they're afraid. Why don't I cycle them? Yeah, because they just keep working well i mean louis simmons could have said that about like well like too yeah so a couple of reasons i do blood work twice a year liver enzymes are included there we can talk about fertility perhaps if you want today um the last year because of my age and the fact that i don't have children yet but i'm cognizant of the

Starting point is 01:46:41 fact that i do want them at some point. I got really down the rabbit hole, interesting figure of speech of, you know, sperm analysis, including everything from DNA fragmentation to how to increase sperm numbers and motility and quality and egg quality. I got really, you're a gambling man. If you're making your swimmers world class, but you don't want kids. Yeah. Well, um, right. Um. It's all about readiness, I suppose. So what is it in the SEAL teams they say? Like you fall not to the level of your... You do not rise to the level of your hopes, but fall to the level of your preparation.

Starting point is 01:47:15 That's actually a quote from Archilochus, who is a Greek poet and I believe philosopher also. But yes, also widely used in the special forces teams. So I've been monitoring sperm parameters, freezing sperm, because I might want to do IVF someday with somebody, you know, this kind of thing or conceive naturally. But, and because we're talking about, and I've talked a lot about tools, supplements, et cetera, as it relates to vitality and fertility, I think there is a way to optimize for both of those things. So I don't cycle them because I haven't felt a need to optimize for both of those things. So I don't cycle them because I haven't felt a need to, or seen a need to. Some people choose to just take a week off

Starting point is 01:47:49 from Fidoja every once in a while, or go five days on, two days off. People should do what makes them comfortable. You'll notice an effect of Fidoja. Males will notice an effect of Fidoja. It actually will increase testicular size somewhat and density. And that's just because of the increase of the LH, luteinizing hormone is going to stimulate. Avocado pits. It's going to depend on where you start, but it will do a number of things related to increasing luteinizing hormone. Similar, although not to the same extent as something like taking

Starting point is 01:48:18 HCG, human chorionic. Well, that's what I was going to ask. If you were to inject yourself with HCG, you would probably cycle at some point, or maybe not. I don't know. You tell me. Yeah, I've done experiments with HCG. I think you have too. I have too.

Starting point is 01:48:34 Yeah, I mean, it definitely will increase sperm volume. Significantly, yeah. Yeah, significantly. I mean, HCG is essentially luteinizing hormone. Oh, yeah. There's actually a movement within the testosterone augmentation world now. We don't want to go too far down this path, but so-called TRT, replacement therapy, a lot of people are interested in what I call TAT, which is augmentation therapy. So I think it's a safe thing.

Starting point is 01:48:57 That's a rebrand. You know, we were talking before, like the Patagonian toothfish goes to Chilean sea bass and taking roids goes to testosterone augmentation therapy. Yeah. I mean, I think every male should be aware that taking exogenous testosterone, like testosterone cypinate or otherwise is going to suppress your endogenous testosterone. However, there are people that want to do that. I think one of the goals for most people is to neither be out of range. You know,

Starting point is 01:49:26 there are a lot of people who don't want to be bodybuilders and take so-called steroids, but obviously even estrogen is a steroid and cortisol is a corticosteroid. So, but to be high end of normal range, right? High end of normal. So if the range is 300 nanograms, all the way up to 1200 or 900 in some countries, it depends, you know, being somewhere between, you know, 600 and 900, I think it's going to be preferable for most people. And Tonga Ali and Fidoge Agrestis, I think represent a good place to start if you don't want to pursue these other more aggressive. Well, Tonga Ali is particularly interesting to me because I almost always have very high range total testosterone, but my free testosterone is low and my sex hormone binding globulin is high. Which itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The 900 milligrams of myo-inositol

Starting point is 01:50:15 can also increase free testosterone indirectly through mechanisms that aren't entirely clear. There are also some other ways if people want to tickle these pathways, Shilajit, right? Fulvic acid, which is Shilajit is a mineral pitch. It's used in Ayurvedic medicine. I thought that was a 1980s lead vocalist. Yeah, okay. It stimulates the release of FSH,

Starting point is 01:50:36 a follicle stimulating hormone. Follicle stimulates, so you have LH and FSH coming out of the pituitary and LH will stimulate testosterone production via the lytic cells of the pituitary and LH will stimulate testosterone production via the lytic cells of the testes. The FSH is going to stimulate spermatogenesis by increasing what's called androgen binding protein, which is the protein that testosterone binds to, which then is going to give rise

Starting point is 01:50:58 to more sperm at risk of, I never want to do kind of a podcast plug on another podcast, especially not yours, but I did a four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility that goes through essentially the ovulatory cycle and the spermatogenesis cycle. And then all the do's and do nots for both men and women who wish to conceive either now or in the future, or who do not wish to conceive children, but want to use fertility as a proxy for vitality, which is something that, by the way, I have to say, I have to credit you for years ago. You said, you know, basically if you optimize for fertility, you're optimizing for vitality. So there again, I want to just thank you because that's an extremely efficient, but also extremely sage way to think about optimizing for vitality. So it's not just

Starting point is 01:51:40 about wanting to have kids. It's about maintaining all your biological systems that they're right. Tuning super helpful proxy, super helpful. In this case, what do you mean by vitality? Waking up feeling well enough to want to begin your day with enough energy to complete your day and to move back and forth along the continuum of driven and relaxed. Super, I mean, if you think about that kind of eliminating relationships to others as a component for the moment, of course it is a component, setting that aside rather. What I just described to me is the definition of mental health, the ability to lean into effort, but also to relax and restore your system and to feel good about what you're doing and being able to move from driven to reflective when these kinds

Starting point is 01:52:31 of things, so many people we know, I don't want to give a geographical, they all left the Bay area anyway, there, I just said it was a bear, you know, successful, but miserable. We knew a lot of those or people that can't seem to get enough energy to focus and get down a path of pursuit so you want both that's vitality to me and this is getting kind of eastern philosophy which is more your domain than mine i'm always eager to learn here but you know when you think about chi or kind of dopamine or life energy i mean the desire to create things in the world, including offspring, but just to birth ideas, birth businesses, birth relationships, birth podcasts, whatever it is, is essentially from the same place of having some idea in mind and trying to construct that overcoming

Starting point is 01:53:18 fear, your notions of fear setting become really relevant here, et cetera. And so vitality has a lot to do with the ability to generate effort with feeling like at least if not a fast upward spiral, at least a slow upward spiral, and certainly not a slow downward spiral. I'll take any of the upwards. Right. I mean, I think, you know, I I'm around a lot of graduate students and postdocs and you see how an early success, like publishing a paper early on in one's career creates an upward spiral around the whole concept of effort thereafter you see this in dating and relationships you see how an early failure can set people along a downward spiral and so i think that having drive comes from the catecholamines it's dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine and sure you need the serotonergic

Starting point is 01:54:02 systems and the opioid system endogenous opioid systems that smooth things out. But in the absence of that get up and go, I mean, we wouldn't be here. There's no, again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but you can be pretty sure that this is what allows any animal or human to move toward a milestone. So I'm going to ask you, yet again, a lazy but perhaps productive question that will satisfy my own curiosity. Omega's, Tongkat Ali, Fadozia Agrestis, and Rhodiola Rosea, you get to pick two. Which would you pick?

Starting point is 01:54:36 Tongkat Ali and Rhodiola Rosea. Okay. Yeah, especially since- So you dropped that. I was surprising. I thought the EPA would be a shoo-in. Oh, I'm sorry. EPA was included there? Yes. Sorry, sorry. So Omega's, Tonga Ali, Fiducia, and Rhodium.

Starting point is 01:54:49 I apologize. So then it would be Omega's and Tonga Ali. Okay. Yeah. If I think about fundamental kind of baseline supplementation, things that are hard to get from food, but that represent key micronutrients that really move multiple needles in the right direction, it's going to be getting above that one gram per day threshold of EPAs. So omegas, it's also going to be anything that moves the hormone system toward the green zone, which is going to be Tonga Ali. Now, of course, doing all the other things, right. Trying to get sleep, exercise, sleep, movement, nutrients, sunlight, all that. In fact, there's a really wonderful study out of Israel that showed that if people got 20 minutes, three times a week of sun exposure to their skin, their face, and they remove their shirts, or if it was women,

Starting point is 01:55:35 they wore tank tops and shorts for both men and women, three times a week, significant increases in free testosterone. And this was afternoon sun. It wasn't morning sun increases in free testosterone and estrogen and significant increases in libido. Also, if you chart out the amount of free testosterone across the months, even in places that aren't really far North, you're going to see significant variations in free testosterone in men and women toward the summer, spring and and summer months so we're somewhat seasonal and some people robustly seasonal depending on your your ancestry so that sunlight thing is real and the mechanism just so that people aren't like oh get sunlight he's just saying sunlight again is

Starting point is 01:56:14 that the keratinocytes which are a component of the skin signal through this for you nerds that like me the p53 pathway and impinge on the pituitary to signal luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone release it's so interesting because what we think of the as the skin which is protecting our organs and you know place to put tattoos and earrings and jewelry and stuff is actually an endocrine organ the skin is a hormone producing organ hence the vitamin d thing and everything else so a lot of fat cells too which a lot of people don't think about yeah so definitely the omegas and tonga ali rhodiola rosea is great to enhance workouts fedogia is definitely a it's a

Starting point is 01:56:57 boost on the hormone system for sure i have a friend who is single now he's in a great relationship we can't say it was because the fedogia but he was taking fedogia and he's like a great relationship. We can't say it was because the Fidojia, but he was taking Fidojia and he was like, I got to stop taking this stuff. Cause he was flying solo at that point. He was like, this is just really, it's really intrusive. And that- Wait, intrusive because he was just humping the walls or what? I don't know. It just wasn't, I think, I don't know if we want to go here.

Starting point is 01:57:18 You know, there's this whole online- Too many shiny objects, too much libido. Well, there's this whole online community now about semen retention and things like that. He's not part of that community, but there's this idea that, well, we'll just be, we're adults here. I mean, there's this idea that if you look in the journals of sexual health, I'm really interested in, in sexual health and urological health. There's a ton of interesting stuff on pelvic floor. This stuff just isn't often discussed, but you find is that masturbation for women turns out to their

Starting point is 01:57:45 self-reported notions of wellbeing, of mood, of immune system function, of quote unquote, knowing their bodies and what gives them pleasure, et cetera, all increase. If you look at the data in men in terms of masturbation, and here we're talking about masturbation to the point of ejaculation in men, they report lower mood, less willingness to pursue relationships. Shocker. ejaculation in men. They report lower mood, less willingness to pursue relationships. They're home watching porn, right? So we have to be very careful with statements like masturbation is bad or something like that. Cause that's not true. It's going to be genders. Well, we should say stay out of that discussion, biological sex dependent, because that's a, that's clear ground. We'll just leave it at that. And then there is this whole notion that a whole generation of

Starting point is 01:58:23 young males are becoming porn addicted to masturbation addicted, but can't look someone in the eye, ask them out on a date or learn how to navigate healthy, consensual sex. Right. And they're not doing neck work. So they can't look anyone in the eye. They've got flaccid feet and they don't do network. Yeah. I mean, and here I'm not trying to create notions of like hyper males. We're really just talking about a radical shift in the way that sexual health has evolved over the last 10 years because of the accessibility of hardcore pornography, its relation to the dopamine system. You know, so here I'm not trying to be evangelical or anything like that. I'm just saying these are serious neurotransmitter slash hormone systems. And a whole generation of males is making

Starting point is 01:59:07 themselves sated enough to not actually pursue a number of what used to be considered milestones toward the transition between young adulthood and true adulthood. And, you know, his birth rates are low. Dating is low. We're having less sex. You know, a few people are having a lot more sex. So this is great for the people out there who are comfortable in social interactions. Anyway, we don't want to go down that path too far, but these are deeply wired systems. Yeah. To they who have much, much will be given. Yeah. So for those of you willing to date and find relationship, what hopefully leads to healthy relationship, Fidoja. Fidoidojia. Thank you, Fidojia. So before we move on, I do want to ask you about,

Starting point is 01:59:47 because we were chatting a little bit before we started recording, psychedelics and your current and developing thoughts on that or any commentary you'd like to add. But before we get to that, since you were talking about fertility, understanding people can go

Starting point is 02:00:01 to the Dances with Wolves episode where you cover all things comprehensively but we're talking about a number of tools in the form of these supplements for lack of a better way to phrase it goosing the system right these are ways to augment certain endocrine functions or the composition, say, of free versus bounded testosterone, etc. Where did you end up after doing your research on environmental endocrine disruptors or things that we should be subtracting rather than adding? Because it's hard for me as someone who is, say, certainly a non-specialist in reproductive health to find the time or even maybe just the dedication to sort the signal from the noise with all that. Because there's a lot of hysterics too.

Starting point is 02:00:56 There's a lot of nonsense out there. Where did you land with what are important, if anything, to be mindful of or subtract? So for cutting through that four and a half of the dances with wolves. are important if anything to be mindful of or subtract. So for cutting through that foreign, I love the dances with wolves reference. That is a long movie. People should, well, hey, I love dances with wolves, so I'm not knocking it for the length. I think people should listen to this podcast,

Starting point is 02:01:19 but specifically just to hone in on this. No, it was designed for individuals or couples who are thinking about these issues and also for in particular for women who are interested in banking eggs yep i mean like most women don't know that cut off after which you can't freeze eggs you can only freeze embryos so in the california if you're 42 years old or younger you can freeze eggs you might meet someone later and decide you want to conceive children or use a donor. After 42, I think it's 42 and a half, you can only create embryos and freeze those.

Starting point is 02:01:56 They're just not, the eggs are, on average, are just too aged out. Males, if you want to be a sperm donor, you know know ideally you're going to do that before 45 now there is a significant increase in sperm donor or you might want to do ivf someday now there is a significant increase in the incidence of autism with each half decade for the father you know so as you go from you know 30 or 35 to 40 the sperm age matters but the increase is still incredibly small overall so it's not something you really point to and say oh it's the it's the sperm you know or it's the egg for that matter okay now do's and don'ts um we can now easily look back to the beginning of our discussion it's very clear that quality sleep on a regular basis, sunlight,

Starting point is 02:02:51 keeping stress in check, healthy relationships, all of that is going to support sperm health and egg health. No question about that. It's also clear that getting sufficient omega-3 fatty acids is going to support sperm health and egg health. I'll just point out that if there were one supplement that really seems to move the needle in terms of egg quality which is a morphological but also a meaningful physiological metric or sperm quality which is going to be shape motility you don't want what are called you don't want dead sperm they're always going to be some in a sample because of the age of the sperm etc and the way the sperm agenesis cycle go but you want forwardly motile sperm the other ones are called twitchers so you know they just twitch in place they can actually take twitchers and force them into the egg during ivf something called

Starting point is 02:03:28 ixi but in general the greater number of forward motile sperm i'm swimming them toward you yeah yeah i'm actually swimming them an angle away from tim um from but they so forward on our first in-person podcast date exactly can be greatly increased by supplementation with L-carnitine. So egg health and sperm health greatly enhanced by L-carnitine. Pretty remarkable results there. Injectable L-carnitine of about one mg per day. Now that has to be prescribed by a doctor.

Starting point is 02:03:58 And that's IM? That's intramuscular? Yeah. Or oral capsules are available over the counter. Then you have to get up to four or five grams per day wow i was gonna ask yeah and that can increase tmao and some other markers that aren't great for cardiovascular health because of the way it's processed by the gut but you can offset that by taking 600 milligrams of garlic because of the allicin in garlic okay

Starting point is 02:04:21 smoking cigarettes vaping cigarettes really good for sperm, terrible for sperm, terrible for eggs, smoking cannabis, vaping cannabis, also terrible eggs and sperm. People don't like to hear that 15% of women. I can't believe the statistic, but I've seen it over and over and to check my eyes, but 15% ingest cannabis at some point during pregnancy, probably not a good idea. idea now a lot of people say oh i smoke weed every day and got my wife pregnant you never know how healthy your children would have been you never you just never know i'm not saying your children are unhealthy but you never also gonna be there will always be edge cases who are like i smoke crack every week and never slept

Starting point is 02:05:01 for 14 days straight my kids are great and you, okay, just because you happen to be the one mutant. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. If you want to optimize for offspring health. Who can thread that needle. Exactly.

Starting point is 02:05:12 Doesn't mean you're a good model. Exactly. So L-carnitine can really help. Avoid smoking anything. The issue of tinctures and edibles is a different subject altogether. I think the big wow for me was something, again, I'm just going to tip my hat to you, which is that in 2015, I taught a class at, I was then a

Starting point is 02:05:34 professor at UC San Diego on neural circuits and health and disease. And I decided to do a lecture on whether or not cell phones inhibit sperm health and or testosterone level. The data were very mixed, frankly. There were essentially two good studies in rats, each of them taking a standard smartphone, putting it under a rat's cage, and then looking at some metrics related to testicular health, sperm health, et cetera. One showed increases in testosterone.

Starting point is 02:06:00 The other showed decreases. So it was kind of a disappointing situation. So I'd present both. Now there is an extensive meta-analysis. I can send you this for the, for the show notes, if you like an extensive meta-analysis of dozens of studies. I'll add it to the next reprint of the four-hour body. And it very convincingly shows that keeping the cell phone in one's pocket. So this isn't putting it to your head. This isn't putting it on the desk in front of you, but keeping it on and in one's pocket. And it does not matter if it's on wifi or you're using cellular. Decreases sperm quality, which means forward motility, number of healthy sperm

Starting point is 02:06:37 per ejaculate, et cetera, even ejaculate volume to some extent and lowers testosterone overall, which is perhaps not surprising given the known heat effects of the phone. So even though it doesn't feel hot to the touch, there are heat effects. Sperm don't like heat. In fact, the most promising male contraceptive that's out there that's not a condom, it's like a cough that goes around the vas deferens, which is the portal from the testes to the urethra that allows the ejaculate to leave the body that heats that i mean take a sauna will it's not a great form of contraception because it's not sure proof but it will reduce your total number of motels born by 75 or so when i go in the sauna because i do when i do hope to conceive children somewhere so i wear shorts into the sauna and i actually put a cold pack at my groin while I'm in there. It's actually when the sauna is really hot, it's also, it makes it a little

Starting point is 02:07:28 less unpleasant. It's a little painful, but you definitely don't want to do that on bare skin. But you know, I'm chuckling too, but heat is part of the problem with the cell phone, but it turns out yes. And here people are going to think I'm a crazy person, but they might think that already the EMFs, that business is real. Now, is it so real that it's giving us gliomas? Unclear. I'm not going to go there. The data aren't in.

Starting point is 02:07:51 But it is very clear that the radiation from phones, the EMFs, and the heat are combining to reduce sperm quality, motility, and overall testosterone. So it's a simple thing. Turn off your phone completely, or even better, just don't put it in your front pocket. If you have to put it in a pocket, put it's a simple thing. Turn off your phone completely, or even better, just don't put it in your front pocket. If you have to put it in a pocket, put it in your back pocket. Even better would be to put it in a shoulder pocket or a backpack. And I'm a weirdo,

Starting point is 02:08:15 perhaps, but I don't like keeping the phone to my head too long, but that's also because I don't like holding the phone to my head too long we don't know very much about the effects of emfs and heat effects on the different tissues of the body but we now know a lot about the effects of heat and emfs on sperm quality and it's not a good picture for the sperm where does airplane mode fit into this equation if at all in terms of between on and off i mean does it prevent or mitigate some of the effects it seems to yeah it seems to here's what's really scary about this meta-analysis their conclusion is that the total amount of time spent with the phone in the pocket is not a strong determinant that it's it's not all or none but that the threshold beyond which you start seeing these

Starting point is 02:09:03 damaging effects is pretty low so again here we're talking about a don't, not a do. And so it's pretty straightforward. You know, don't keep the phone in your front pocket if you're concerned with sperm health and testosterone production. Now, why is sperm health and testosterone production so correlated? And you say, well, duh, it's because, you know, testosterone and sperm. But if you're not interested in conceiving children, you might not think this is an issue. But remember that the two types of cells, those Lydig cells and the Sertoli cells of the testes combine testosterone and the androgen binding protein to give rise to sperm. So anytime you're seeing a reduction in sperm, you are definitely seeing that as a reflection of reduction in androgen binding protein, which means whatever

Starting point is 02:09:43 testosterone you have around is also not having the effect on that local organ that it should. In other words, the testes and the ovaries are very interesting organs because they secrete hormones into the body to go have effects, but they also have effects on themselves and it's self amplify. And so this just seems like such a straightforward one to me. And you said this back in, when was the four hour body published? Came out in 2010. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember you and Paula Quinn and a few other people saying like, don't keep the phone in your pocket. And I remember lecturing to about 400 students about this. And I would say about half, just by my read about half of the guys in the class took the phone out of their pocket when

Starting point is 02:10:20 they heard this. I think young people who aren't thinking about having children at all right now are absolutely the ones that should be most concerned. Yeah. Now it is true. You can, as they told us in high school, it just takes one sperm, but you know, it just takes one sperm. But in order to get that one sperm to the egg in vivo, you know, not IVF, but it's called natural conception. There's a lot of territory that needs to be covered. There's a lot of chemical environments that need to be dealt with. You want the healthiest sperm. So I would say also, having gone through this process with an ex to create embryos, even though you can say it only takes one sperm in IVF as well,

Starting point is 02:10:59 you want to stack the odds in your favor, which means you need good morphology, good motility, and you need a good count of non crippled sperm. Yeah. It's, I mean, sperm analysis is, it can be a humbling thing because you know, no matter what, no one's getting 100% motile, forwardly motile. Everyone, males and females learn a lot about their biology, what they're doing well, what they're doing less well when going down that pathway of IVF. I think, I think for women, one of the big surprises is that it doesn't take much ingestion of alcohol to diminish egg quality, you know, beyond two or three drinks per week, per week, you really start to see reductions in egg quality that are probably indirect through effects on

Starting point is 02:11:45 diminished sleep and changes in stress hormones. And so, you know, again, some people will be more resilient to this than others. People always like to make jokes about how alcohol facilitates the conception process, you know, et cetera. You know, I think that in general, you know, if women are having very regular cycles, whether or not they're 28 days long or 35 days long is less important, perhaps than they'd be fairly regular. Women in general tend to know more about their bodies and because they cycle than, than men. But I, if I could go back in time to my thirties, I sure would have banked sperm then.

Starting point is 02:12:19 And I'm fine. You know, I'm feel good about where I've gotten my parameters, but it's really interesting as you learn this, you, you just realize that freezing sperm, freezing eggs is a great idea. And freezing embryos makes sense if you have the appropriate pairing or situation, right? And that life gets so much easier for those wishing to conceive when you have healthy embryos frozen in the bank. Anyway, for those challenged in that area, it also becomes this incredibly expensive,

Starting point is 02:12:47 emotionally and financially expensive battle. Yeah, I will say, much to my surprise, that this is, I mean, within the last year, I suppose, prior to the breakup, of course, but going through the IVF, or at least embryo creation process, my sperm quality, because I have banked starting, unfortunately not as reliably as I would have liked, but probably starting around 2010 or 2012.

Starting point is 02:13:17 Oh, okay. Banking sperm. Sadly, there was actually a technical issue at this particular location in San Francisco because they were bought by some larger conglomerate. And I think a lot of the samples were lost. But the point I was going to make is that after trying to do a deep dive, taking copious

Starting point is 02:13:38 amounts of L-carnitine, adding in a few other things like maca and a handful of other basics, my sperm quality is actually better, seemingly better now than it was 10 years ago, which is shocking. Yeah. I mean, it's again, if one is doing the right things, I do think that we can perform physically probably in the domain of sexual health too. I think that's a misconception that, you know, like, you know, men peak in their 80s such 1880s i was like sweet no thank god at 18 you know that's i've looked at testosterone levels as a function of age and that there's a wonderful a book on this on behavioral endocrinology and you know there are some men in their 70s who maintain testosterone levels of similar to men in their 20s and 30s highly individual depends a ton on how much people

Starting point is 02:14:25 are moving how much sunlight they're getting how little alcohol and nicotine smoking nicotine not nicotine the substance but they bring into their system exposure to environmental toxins these kinds of things and we always think of bpas and receipts they are a problem handling receipts not good printed receipts but wait a second hold on but. That's the major source of BPAs. No shit. Oh, yeah. I had no idea. So BPAs, I always think, all right, like cans, bottles, this, that, and the other thing.

Starting point is 02:14:53 Receipts. Receipts. Why the hell are there so many BPAs and receipts? Yeah. Shana Swan, who's done a lot of the critical work on phthalates and their influence on urogenital distance, which is a marker of prenatal androgen and gets smaller. The genitals and the anus are closer together in females than in males of all species, including humans. Phthalate exposure, BPAs in particular, is progressively decreasing urogenital distance in males. Penis size,

Starting point is 02:15:20 in a somewhat contradictory way, there's a study that just came out of Stanford from Michael Eisenberg's lab. He's a urologist, an endocrinologist, showed that actually a flaccid, here it is again, flaccid, oh no, erect penis lengths have gone up 26% in the last 30 years, but testosterone and sperm counts are going down. So, you know, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:15:37 Really interesting study of tens of thousands of men. Yeah. I don't, I haven't read the method section. How do they explain that? Because it makes, though, kind of superficial sense to me, because if your swimmers

Starting point is 02:15:51 and your testosterone are just taking a nosedive, you need to get closer to the goal. Closer to the cervix. Those data are a little hard to explain, but they are very robust data. That study was just published. Yeah, he'd be an interesting... So the balls are getting closer to the ass, but they're very robust data. That study was just published. Yeah, he'd be an interesting. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:16:06 So the balls are getting closer to the ass, but the schlongs are getting longer. This is what happens. Not to get too technical. No, I think people understand that. Like, urogenital distance is not a great term for most people to digest or think about. But we think about BPA, so rece receipts probably more than plastics and things that sort but also if you look at the most the people who get the greatest exposure to these phthalates and that are impairing their endocrine system the most in males and females it's going to be

Starting point is 02:16:36 in rural areas because of pesticides yeah pesticides so we think oh people living in cities bus exhaust drinking you know at red bull sugar--free Red Bull from the bodegas in New York City. No, you're talking about rural areas of the country and airborne pesticides. Airborne? Yeah, airborne pesticides. So I thought I immediately went to groundwater. Dust cropping and this kind of thing. Yeah, I was over in Copenhagen to give a talk last year.

Starting point is 02:17:01 I would have totally whiffed that. I would have gone urban. I would have thought contaminants. Me too. And Shana Swan, who's, I think, can't remember if she's at Mount Sinai or one of the other, she's definitely at one of the big medical schools in New York city. So forgive me, Shana, but she's been the one, you know, really focusing on this when no one else really thought much of it and was thinking, Oh, that's crazy conspiracy stuff. And no, there's a real data funded by the NIH. So I think that, you know, avoiding plastics and things like that. Sure. But I think handling of receipts, especially because they serious endocrine disruptors and avoiding pesticides

Starting point is 02:17:33 and then alcohol, again, not trying to, you know, rain on anybody's party here, but past two drinks a week, you know, is when you start seeing some negative health effects in males and females. I did a long episode on this, by the way, I drink the occasional drink everyone saw. I like white tequila, things of that nature. The number two most shared podcast in the world in 2022. I did not expect that at all. What alcohol does to your body, brain, and health. I did not expect it to have that kind of traction. There's no agenda there. I think a lot of people think that I'm an AA or something. I have deep respect for that community, but no, I've never

Starting point is 02:18:04 had a problem with alcohol or drugs. It's never been my thing. There was no agenda whatsoever. I think that alcohol is a toxin, you know, essentially making a toxin for yourselves. That's part of it's the way it creates its effects. Look, it can be enjoyed. I also think that if people are going to drink more than two drinks per week, they want to pay more attention to the other things that we talked about at the beginning, nutrients, sunlight, exercise, sleep, et cetera. I'm not trying to say what people should or shouldn't do. They should just know what they're doing. Yeah. And talking about how the preceding 24 hours leads to the current 24 hours, which leads to the next 24 hours, a friend of mine, I won't give him credit because he probably doesn't

Starting point is 02:18:42 want it, but he was quoting someone else. So it doesn't really matter. But he said, alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Oh, yeah. And I was like, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. And I've never tried cocaine. But from what I hear, cocaine is borrowing happiness from 10 minutes from now. I spoke to a guy recently who is a former cocaine addict.

Starting point is 02:18:59 And I said, what does it feel like? And he said, let me just explain it this way. By the way, this is not a direct quote. I'm quoting somebody else he said that the first time he did cocaine his experience was one of wow that was terrible and when can i get more no god so that the gestalt of the experience was a peak and then a trough that we know exists the dopamine system drops below baseline i'm too afraid to try cocaine and especially nowadays with the fentanyl that's laced in oh um so many street drugs i know two people they were at a bachelor party in mexico otherwise very responsible folks but they decided to do it a lot of people do at such

Starting point is 02:19:38 parties and decide to do cocaine they each did one line not a copious amount these were not cocaine users both of them immediately collapsed on the floor one died and one ended up in a coma for a period of time fentanyl my best friend growing up also was given unbeknownst to him fentanyl died went fell asleep didn't wake up so be very careful out there, folks. Fentanyl is no joke. And there are other things as well. But many, many, many, many, many drugs are cut with fentanyl, including those that at face value you would think make no sense. Like Ambien.

Starting point is 02:20:17 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or cocaine. I mean, why they would cut fentanyl, which is essentially a sedative, into a stimulant like cocaine. Makes no sense to me. And yet, that's what's happening. So be careful out there, folks.

Starting point is 02:20:31 So to move from cocaine to maybe a lesser villain, I want to revisit cannabis for just a second. So cannabis in, I'm curious to know, because I have experienced incredible, there may be trade-offs, but benefits with respect to onset insomnia from low-dose edible, I could say cannabis, but in this case, you know, we're talking about in legal settings where state governments allow this, say 2.5 milligrams of THC. With CBD, it just takes too high. I mean, I would have to consume just kind of a mountain of it for it to subjectively help with that. What are the trade-offs, if any, with dosages in that range, if you're aware? Yeah, it depends on who you are. So I did an episode on cannabis. I also had our mutual friend, Nolan Williams, who's one of these

Starting point is 02:21:19 freaks of nature. He's a triple board certified psychiatrist, neurologist, neurologist at Stanford doing a lot of underachiever, a real underachiever doing a lot on combination of psychedelics with transcranial magnetic stimulation, talked about cannabis and I did a solo episode on cannabis, which means basically all I did was think about, read about and talk to people about cannabis for months on end. Here's the story with cannabis. It's, as you point out, it's going to be the ratio of THC to CBD. That's important. And for the real aficionados out there and boy, are they out there? Cause they let me know. There's also the terpenes. They're going to be the lemon, like terpenes and the other kinds of terpenes and chemicals in these,

Starting point is 02:21:56 these that are also going to matter. And then also it's going to be smoking, vaping, edible or tincture. So here's the deal. Smoking or vaping, or tincture so here's the deal smoking or vaping anything is bad nicotine or cannabis or worse for you than edible or tincture let's just move that off to the side high thc concentration cannabis of which now there is almost pure thc cannabis available is dangerous for the following reason and there i just pissed off some people but first of all it does have therapeutic applications for glaucoma pain management maybe even some mental health effects ability to help for the following reason. And there I just pissed off some people. But first of all, it does have therapeutic applications for glaucoma, pain management, maybe even some mental health effects,

Starting point is 02:22:28 ability to help certain people focus at low dose. But for, in particular, young males and their teens, early teens and 20s who take high THC-containing cannabis, there is a much greater, like 4X increase in probability of psychotic episodes later that don't ever reverse. In fact, when I spoke to the leading researcher on this up in Canada, she told me that the probability that a lot of what we see as kind of street homelessness now, what people appear to be schizophrenic,

Starting point is 02:23:05 was likely triggered by high-dose cannabis use. Now, I'm not trying to return us to the 1960s and talk about devil's weed and this kind of thing. It is clear that cannabis has therapeutic benefits, but very high-potency THC cannabis can be a problem. At the dosage you described, 2.5 milligrams, very unlikely to be a problem. Psychologically speaking. Psychologically speaking. I mean, I could be on 2.5. I'm not, but I could be on 2.5 milligrams very unlikely to be a problem now psychologically psychologically

Starting point is 02:23:25 speaking and i mean i could be on 2.5 i'm not but i could be on 2.5 right now and it would be it would not be susceptible dose it's kind of like micro dose i would feel it but it would not be it would not be externally obvious now the pure cbd cannabis is interesting too so-called charlotte's web i think is what's called mainly available in colorado I'm told, is a powerful anti-epileptic. In fact, parents of epileptic kids move to Colorado just so they can get Charlotte's Web CBD cannabis. In my mind, that should be available legally everywhere, given that it has essentially no psychoactive effects. There are a few perhaps, but so it's really that the percentage of THC relative to CBD that's important, the age of the user, whether or not there's a predisposition of

Starting point is 02:24:09 psychosis, you know, we might as well be talking about psychedelics, right? Might as well be talking about psychedelics. And I want to just pause for a second to say a few things. Number one, I don't categorize MDMA as a psychedelic. We may get to that, but just for a number of semantic and phenomenological like a fancy reasons I don't classify that as a psychedelic and I would actually categorize high THC content cannabis as a strong potential psychedelic and it has become i would just say the standard the baseline of strength has become such a multiple of what anyone might have been used to in the 90s it is almost beyond belief and i do know of one direct example this is the brother of an acquaintance who had exactly the experience

Starting point is 02:25:06 you're describing which is chronic short-term but chronic use of very high tc concentration cannabis and i should say in fairness that classical psychedelics can also expedite the onset of schizophrenic symptoms in those who would genetically be predisposed. So it's not limited to THC, but it is, I think, under respected and overused with the assumption that it's just cannabis. And that's, I think that's a mistake. It's a very, they can be so power think that's a mistake. It's a very, they can be so powerfully psychoactive. Yeah. It's interesting how the proponents of cannabis, which are a lot of smart people in cannabis medicine, including a lot of MDs always say it's not as bad as alcohol, which to me is just a ridiculous argument. I mean,

Starting point is 02:26:00 just say that something is not as bad as alcohol implies that, you know, you have to choose one or the other. I think that cannabis has been very beneficial for a number of adults who are through the so-called critical period of brain plasticity. So older than 25, they need some way to quote unquote, take the edge off in the evening. They'll do an edible on the weekend, this kind of thing. That is not what we're talking about in terms of psychosis. We're talking about kids, 12, 13, 14, taking a, you know, like a bong rip or smoking a joint or vaping a super high potency THC containing cannabis and just being high out of their gourd and feeling like it was a really good time doing that two or three times. And then, and I seen this over and over again, their parents reach out to me often, in fact,

Starting point is 02:26:44 for whatever reason. And then you hear about this person being 17, 18. There's a failure to launch component. They're amotivated. They're claiming ADHD. They're basically a stoner who relies on cannabis to relieve anxiety and hasn't done much else in the last five years or certainly has not managed to keep up with the mean and here i'm sympathetic by the way this is listening to somebody who barely finished high school we covered that in the last podcast so you know for other reasons but i do worry a lot about these

Starting point is 02:27:14 super high potency compounds i worry about super high potency anything i mean i worry but in the realm of hormone augmentation we're talking fedogia tong, not Diana ball, you know, in the realm of augmenting mood and focus, we're comparing very high potency THC containing cannabis taken in a youth to 300 milligrams of alpha GPC. This is night and day, right? It's chemical augmentation of a completely different beast. So I think that it's clear that no cannabis is going to be better for most people than any cannabis is occasionally used for an adult. You is going to be better for most people than any cannabis. Is occasional use for an adult going to be a problem? Probably not.

Starting point is 02:27:49 Yeah. Probably not. I will also say, to add to that a few things. Number one, I am deeply interested in the therapeutic applications of cannabis and all of its constituent parts. I think it is a very undervalued plant from that perspective. And I think it is severely underestimated in terms of potency. Just the standard available, particularly in places where you can kind of get baker's dozen of any number of strains colorado etc it's to believe that you are using something of almost no risk as compared to psychedelics if it contains a lot of thc is a mistake so i would just say consider it on par with some of these very strong psychedelics.

Starting point is 02:28:47 Just be informed and be cautious about your use. I do think that there are probably some really significant applications to sleep disorders. And I will add, just for people listening, I have also tried CBN specifically, which has been recommended to me for sleep and have not found it as effective. It probably depends on the specific variety of sleep disorder, but for onset insomnia, that is a product predominantly not of spike glucose, I guess cortisol and or than glucose levels, but rather rumination. THC seems to be one of the magic keys in very low doses. But let's segue from that to psychedelics. How has your thinking, any observations, commentary, beliefs around psychedelics changed over the last few years? My beliefs and stance

Starting point is 02:29:46 and also what I'm willing to say has completely changed in the last 24 months. This last week, Stanford Magazine, which is a magazine of the Stanford Alumni Association, goes out to many more people than just who attended Stanford, put out an issue of this, it's a very nice bound magazine

Starting point is 02:30:03 of the kind that you would, you know, say the dentist's office or, know on the cover and inside there's a feature article about psychedelics i could not believe it at first but it is essentially a guide to psychedelics it's not telling you how to do them but it explains what is ketamine now here they're broadly defining psychedelics okay so the classic psychedelics psychedelics, right? L-acilicidine, musculin, LSD are included there. Chemical structures, how they're used, the history, clinical trials happening now, known benefits, considerations and risks for all of those drugs, plus ketamine, plus MDMA. I was just shocked, positively shocked because three years ago, five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, a conversation like this would have been the

Starting point is 02:30:49 conversation that would have ended my career, at least as a university professor. My understanding is that thanks to the incredible work of the group with MAPS and a number of specific laboratories, Matthew Johnson's laboratory, Robin Carhart, Harris's laboratory, Roland Griffith's laboratory, and thanks to the philanthropy organized by you and others truly and also thanks to the public education efforts of people like michael pollan we are moving very quickly towards legalization of mdma as administered by either psychiatrists and or licensed clinical psychologists in the u.s ps Psilocybin, probably a longer road, but I'm told that we'll get there, quote unquote. Why am I framing it this way? Well,

Starting point is 02:31:31 I'll just be very direct. In high school, I took LSD recreationally several times, had not good experiences. The experiences were far too long, 11, 15 hours. I might've spent my senior prom in an elevator. May or may not, you know, cannot confirm or deny my junior prom. My senior prom was a different story. I definitely, and I'm not recommending people do this. I actually strongly regret doing that at a time when my brain was plastic. I did not know what I was doing. I didn't know the sourcing. It was, it was a terrible idea. Terrible idea. Even riskier now. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:32:02 And keep in mind folks, I was not a star student far from it. It took a lot of years to get my, my act together. Talked about this before on Tim's podcast, Rich Roll's podcast and others. So, you know, that certainly did not help. I don't recommend it. I tried psilocybin recreationally a few times. Didn't get much out of it. As an adult, I'm not shy about the fact that I did two and now three of the MAPS appropriate physician guided sessions for trauma using MDMA. I've found it immensely beneficial. I'm happy to talk about how each one of those sessions was different. Again, this is with a physician as part of a study.

Starting point is 02:32:39 So what I know now is completely different than what I knew two years ago, which is not just based on the legality, but in discussions with Nolan Williams, this incredibly impressive colleague of mine and friend of yours and colleague of yours, really, that the safety profiles on things like MDMA are actually quite high. I was taught that MDMA was neurotoxic. Why was I taught that? Well, there's paper published in Science Magazine looking at toxicity of MDMA was neurotoxic. Why was I taught that? Well, there's a paper published in Science Magazine looking at toxicity of MDMA, observing neurotoxic effects. Turns out, what were they looking at? Methamphetamine.

Starting point is 02:33:12 Oops, retraction. Yeah, retraction, except that never made the major headlines. That never makes it. Okay, so then you look at the data on psilocybin. Here, I'm just going to hit the high points because it is not my work. It's the work of Matthew Johnson and of Robin Carter and Harris at UC ucsf intractable depression people who are suicidally depressed nothing else

Starting point is 02:33:31 works talk therapy doesn't work antidepressants don't work tms doesn't work do two high dose so it's 25 milligrams of psilocybin that has to be translated for grams of mushrooms. But it's roughly like the 25 to 30 milligram of psilocybin, synthetic psilocybin B equivalent to, let's just say, a Terence McKenna heroic dose of five grams. I mean, you're getting enough for escape velocity. Okay. In upwards of 60%, maybe 70% of these patients that take that are getting substantial and ongoing relief.

Starting point is 02:34:02 That's an amazing result. So much so that the big pharma has moved in and is trying to create non-psychedelic psychedelics to extract the benefits of these drugs that don't induce hallucinations. Instead of raising interesting questions about whether or not the experience under psychedelics is really the trigger for the antidepressant effect, whether or not it's the inside or not, that's whole ball of wax and really i'm not qualified to parse that that's really the domain of robin and the psychonauts and that's an interesting set of issues so my stance nowadays is there is a compound out there that seems to have very high safety profiles very very high certainly for psilocybin that under the appropriate guidance and supervision during and after in this

Starting point is 02:34:45 so-called integration phase, one or two dosages of this stuff, yes, takes people through a phase of anxiety than a phase of deep introspection. This is also, I learned essential, there are two components that I learned are essential that were surprising to me. One, you have to be in the eye mask. Observing things in your external environment the whole time seems to bypass some of the introspective slash antidepressant effects later. That's interesting to me. It's not just about what you see, what you hear out there. It's really about going inward, this kind of trust, let go. Yeah. It's also important to standardize for trials, right? You can't have people looking at all sorts of different stuff. Somebody's watching, find a Nemo and another one's watching

Starting point is 02:35:22 Jaws or. Right, exactly. And then the other thing I learned from Robin recently is that music seems to be a key component. Now, they've never teased out music, no music, but having music that starts, as he described it, in the distance, you know, drums and pacing or something approaching music, then instrumentals, which raise people's emotional state while they're in the eye mask, and then some transition period out seems to be a critical component of all this and guiding some of the kind of funneling towards deep emotional introspection. I find this incredibly interesting. And again, I would have not felt safe talking about this a year ago, two years ago.

Starting point is 02:35:59 Keep in mind that in the late 60s, early 70s, there were professors at Harvard and Stanford mainly that were fired or at least asked to leave for having discussions like this. And now Stanford Magazine itself is printing this. And this is also, I'll use this as an opportunity to say this because it's really about the listeners. You know, our podcast, Human Lab Podcast is free on all the channels, but we do have a premium channel.

Starting point is 02:36:22 I'm not trying to solicit it here, but the premium channel is designed to, we do AMAs and things of that sort. Transcripts are available to those folks to raise revenue for research dollars for exciting work. And we have a donor that's very, been very generous to do a match for that money. And we're giving money only to studies working on humans, not animal studies. And two of the major areas that we're supporting are the sorts of work that Nolan's lab is doing. And Nolan in particular to combine transcranial magnetic stimulation with psychedelics and these sorts of things. I didn't know that about the premium option. Yeah. That's really what the premium channel is designed for. And this is, again, I'm going to

Starting point is 02:36:59 say this again, people are going to think that I'm just here, you know, kissing up to Tim, but I'm doing that over text all the time anyway, because this is yet another example where you got into science philanthropy early. You reached out to your connects. You were very vocal about what you felt was powerful and it worked for you and what you'd been observing. And I am absolutely clear. I've said this on Twitter. I'll say it again. When we look back in five years, 10 years, a hundred years, there's going to be a small subset of individuals for whom the transition of psychedelics from these like niche communities, hippie communities, carpet flyers, you know, devils, everything from devils, weed, you know, craziness to truly effective compounds for treating psychiatric illness. You're going to be on that list. Roland's going to be on that list.

Starting point is 02:37:44 Matthew's going to be on that list. Pauline's going to be on that list. Roland's going to be on that list. Matthew's going to be on that list. Paulin's going to be on that list. Robin's going to be on that list. And Nolan, I think is going to be on that list. There's going to be a small subset of people that we're going to go, listen, research takes money. It takes focus. It takes a bravery.

Starting point is 02:37:56 And it also takes the willingness to like take something that has been looked at as just like drugs, you know, and turn it into something that's therapeutically meaningful. So yeah, we're just, all I'm trying to do is, you know, raise some dollars through the premium channel. That's what we've been doing to pump into research studies. I mean, you can tell I'm super excited by all this. What I see happening now is that soon MDMA for trauma is going to be available to the countless numbers of people out there that have trauma. And I don't mean just take MDMA and have a great time.

Starting point is 02:38:28 I mean, people developing empathy for themselves. I mean, people really working through the barbed wire stuff of their past, much of which they had no control over, that sets this transgenerational thing that's been going on for so long. I mean, really, you know, you've used the language, you know, bend the arc of history. Like these compounds are going to bend the arc of history in the right direction. And if people out there are listening and saying,

Starting point is 02:38:55 okay, well, this is like recreational stuff and it's very precarious. I do not know a single major, let's just call them what they are, CEO or company founder. We're talking about people that kind of billionaire what they are, CEO or company founder. We're talking about people that kind of billionaire level that are hyper creative, hyper creative and hyper functional in their life. We're not talking about mystic creatives. We're talking about people who

Starting point is 02:39:14 I don't want to name names, but every single one of them already knows this is true because they've all done this stuff already. And I was kind of late to the train because I had such a terrible experience in my high school years and saw so many friends, dead, suicide, drug addicts in jail, like wrecked their lives. I had so many challenges taking myself from essentially a loser with nowhere to go to a trajectory within academia and taking good care of my body that I was like, no drugs, no drugs. I don't even put psychedelics in the category of drugs. And here I'm lumping MDMA in there, provided it's done with a licensed physician or clinician who can guide this stuff. It's been immensely beneficial for me. What were your different sessions like to the extent that you're willing to share?

Starting point is 02:39:58 The first one I can just summarize by saying was extremely somatic, waves of intent, a lot of shaking. At the beginning of the session, I walked in feeling like I could think and feel things from the neck up. I could think and feel things or not think, but I could feel things from the waist down, but that my body wasn't integrated as a system. I left that session feeling completely comfortable in my body as a whole system and far more in tune with my emotions, far more comfortable having emotions, far less afraid of what emotions might do to me, whether or not they were evoked from inside or from outside. As a consequence, I felt much braver in the world. And I felt a kind

Starting point is 02:40:39 of a healthy adaptive level of fearlessness because I felt like nothing can hijack my internal emotions. And even if they do, I'll be okay. And that was a significant thing. The second session, very different. I expected everything as I did in the first, never works that way, was one of deep, deep, deep acceptance around resents that I had for people that I felt had neglected me or did not do what they needed to do, or that I felt a lot of, and you might be able to sense a little bit of emotion here. It's, it's hard because I can still sense the ways in which thoughts about that are painful, but mostly because it seems so senseless to me now. And yet I have truly zero resent. I look for

Starting point is 02:41:22 it often to just check myself, no resent, like complete forgiveness, which has given me tremendous relief. And then the third session was interesting. Third session was a higher dose. I'd never taken the booster, the MAPS booster, took the booster and I lay completely still for about eight hours. And it was very introspective. And I think I left that session, everything I've described, by therospective. And I think I left that session, everything I've described, by the way, I feel I've maintained years later. Now the third session, which was more recent, I felt I finally understood and kind of sealed up what I can only describe as like boundaries that other people can have emotions and experiences that are truly separate

Starting point is 02:42:02 from me. I tend to be pretty affiliative. I think that came out of an early, especially with friends, you know, and in relationships that came out of an early need to feel some sense of family where I didn't feel that as much as I would have liked from my biological family. And there've been times when I've been unable to really keep in touch with kind of how my life is distinct from and my emotions are distinct from other people's a little bit too much of empathic blurring sometimes and it felt like that was just sealed right up and mind you each time i went into these sessions i was afraid of all the standard things losing my mind having a heart attack now granted if you have heart issues tell your physician you

Starting point is 02:42:39 don't want to do mdma it is an amphetamine in there, but I was afraid of all the standard stuff. Each time I felt like the window on introspection and plasticity lasted much longer, weeks longer. And each time I just felt like I got better and better at self-care, which in my mind was always a very selfish thing. I always thought self-care is selfish. You know, even working out, I used to hide working out when I'd go to conferences because Cause I thought like no academic, like goes to the gym and lifts weights. And I really liked doing that, but I realized how much stronger I was mentally when I was taking care of my physical body. But I think that things have changed now. So the third session was very meaningful for me because I felt like it kind of sealed something up where I go, okay, like I'm, I'm good. Like things can happen around me and I'm not going to get pulled into it in a way that

Starting point is 02:43:26 compromises my wellbeing. Of course, I still have a lot in there and work to do. And Robin Carter Harris said to me recently, he said, well, you know, psilocybin is really the honest psychedelic because there you don't have the empathogen that's woven into the MDMA. So you're really going to see whatever darkness still exists within you. And I thought, oh goodness. But you know, I am. Spoken as a true psilocybin researcher. I know.

Starting point is 02:43:52 So, so they hear, you know, you hear about people like, is it calling to you? I'm afraid to do psilocybin for that reason. I definitely worked hard to kind of suppress some of the dark clouds in my head. And yeah, but the fact that I'm still a bit afraid of them is probably the reason why I should do it. It also, I think means you're coming to it from an intellectually honest place. If someone has absolutely no concerns or misgivings about extremely powerful psychedelics, I mean, you are playing with psychological nuclear power. Yeah, revealing the unconscious. I mean, I didn't even know what psychedelic meant,

Starting point is 02:44:25 but it, I mean, Robin taught me, it means revealing the unconscious mind. And I still do, you know, extensive amounts of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I look at that as just like going to the gym. I'm fortunate that my insurance can help pay for that and I'm able to pay for it. So I understand not everybody can, but I, I still feel that, yeah, if we don't actually take the time to figure out what's going on in our heads, how can we really trust that we're on the best path? Yeah. Or just representing reality to our benefit in a sense, right?

Starting point is 02:44:54 Because we're perceiving, but also constructing reality. And sometimes if you think your glasses are scratched or smeared or foggy or whatever you need to take them off and look at them but there are very few ways to do that with your own psyche there are very few tools that allow you to do that and i would recommend for folks if they are interested in and thank you for being so forthcoming with describing your experiences Getting a good overview of how MDMA specifically can help with, say, complex PTSD and why it has become such a focal point for many, many researchers and practitioners, I do recommend the Netflix How to Change Your Mind miniseries that Pollen was involved with based on the book of the same name and specifically the

Starting point is 02:45:46 mdma episode i thought was spectacularly well done i need to see that still it's very well done and includes a lot of case studies and interviews with research subjects and there's also documentary that i helped bring to well outside of israel called Trip of Compassion. This was probably four or five years ago, which contains session footage as well. Production value is going to be a bit lower than Netflix, so you might want to try that first. But there are a number of forthcoming books coming that will be focused on these topics.

Starting point is 02:46:18 A lot of good stuff happening in terms of investigation. There are risks. There are very non-trivial risks and that is part of the reason why the fundamental research is important which is why people like i have to mention roland because he was my gateway into so much of this roland griffiths and robin and nolan and others are doing very, very important work because there's the commercialization, there's the development of derivatives and perhaps non-psychedelic options. And I think that they hold promise in certain conditions like cluster headaches, for instance. However, I do firmly fall into the camp that believes there are these mechanistic

Starting point is 02:47:08 receptor level effects and many other physiological measurable effects that exert or impart some of the benefits that we document in trials. But I am firmly in the camp that the content matters deeply. You know, Rob and I and Nolan and I also discussed things like Iboga, Ibogaine, 22 hour long psychedelic journey, no hallucinations with eyes open, close the eyes, see, drop into very vivid imagery of previous experiences. That doesn't interest me so much. It seems a little bit much. It's going to be hard also to do clinical studies on that. As Robin pointed out, one of the reasons why most of the trials are being done with psilocybin or MDMA is because the sessions are four to six hours with some aftercare. LSD, double or triple that. And of course, we should point out that street

Starting point is 02:47:58 MDMA could very well be and is often laced with fentanyl. So the sourcing here must be through MAPS. I think they're the only ones that actually have the clean sourcing of MDMA. I know people out there and be like, I know a clean source, but nowadays I think people need to be exceedingly cautious about fentanyl because it's deadly. There is an organization called Dance Safe, which I encourage people to check out, which provides kits because I know that you can tell kids abstain, no sex, no sex, just no sex until you're married. They're going to have sex anyway. So I recognize people who are listening are probably going to use drugs from unclear sourcing, or it will be a game of telephone. It'll be from five different, 10 different, 12 different, a hundred different hands to theirs.

Starting point is 02:48:41 DanceSafe has kits. I'm not recommending that you use drugs in that fashion, but people are going to do it anyway. There are kits you can purchase, which will help you to detect some of these contaminants. So at the very least, do that type of due diligence. Yeah. So you asked how, you know, how do I feel about these compounds done in the clinical setting and how has my stance changed? Complete 180. complete 180. I'm super curious. I'm super excited. And least of all for me, I'm excited about what my experience, it was very positive all around, but I'm most excited for the, you know, millions and millions, maybe even billions of people out there. Billions of people certainly have trauma,

Starting point is 02:49:18 but the millions of people who are impaired in terms of daily mood and basic functioning because of depression, anxiety. I mean, there are psilocybin trials for fibromyalgia, for anorexia nervosa, the most deadly psychiatric illness is anorexia. Of course, people with bipolar and schizophrenia, these are not good candidates because of the propensity for exacerbating psychosis or manic episodes. But, you know, I think we are heading into really interesting times. And a year or two ago, I would have thought this isn't going to make it through the shoot. Something's going to happen and the whole thing's going to fall apart. I think it was the event that we were both at the veteran solutions event on Coronado Island. It's incredible group that you're

Starting point is 02:49:57 associated with. And we have common friends in from the special operations community who are doing these Iboga DMmt combined sessions out of country and then working with nolan williams to look at how the brain changes and we saw governor rick perry there yeah a pretty right-wing guy well yeah i interviewed rick and rick yeah and as far apart politically as you can be who had the the uh who stood up there and said in front of a room full of special operators that he'd been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And I thought, wow, if he doesn't get killed in this room, he's going to survive forever.

Starting point is 02:50:31 In other words, polar extremes politically, standing there talking about psychedelics and their value for treatment of intractable depression, trauma, offsetting the certain amount of suicide risk in many individuals, talking about, I think I heard Rick Perry say the words heart medicine. I almost fell out of my chair. I mean, this is super exciting. And it's super exciting because the only way to describe it is the way that Paul Conti sometimes describes things. Like there are certain things for which there's a lot of work, a lot of potential hazard,

Starting point is 02:51:06 but that done properly. And he wasn't referring to psychedelics when he said this, but this particular, but like there's so much goodness that could come out of this. The amount of goodness that could come out of it. Everyone having access to great medical care therapy and potentially psychedelic therapies. I mean, just imagine like the magnitude of the world change.

Starting point is 02:51:23 Like that's the kind of stuff that gets chills running up my spine. And you just think, well, gosh, but the scale of that problem is just too big legally, financially, but enough has happened now that at least some of that in terms of psychedelics could very well happen. And again, to clarify what Paul Conti wasn't talking about psychedelics. He's just has this occasionally he'll say something. We're doing a series with him and on mental health. And occasionally he'll say something like about, you know, certain things are just goodness, you know, and I love the sound of that because it sounds, there's something so wholesome about it, but, but so real, I mean, waking up and feeling good enough to pursue the basic events of the day with some hardship, of course, from time to time,

Starting point is 02:52:02 good enough to set a goal and fail and then try again, you know, good enough to like have a rough run through a relationship or, or a hard family life or lose all your money and go bankrupt and come back. Like this is stuff of real life. And I think that there's so many so-called deaths of despair, and then there are 10 times more sort of lives of despair out there and i think this is the opportunity for real healing you know for lack of a better word high leverage very high leverage i'm excited to see where it goes and i would tell people also don't be shy about following the money in the sense that there will be every possible attempt to contort and change psychedelic therapies to fit into existing healthcare. And I do think there's

Starting point is 02:52:55 upside to that, right? Not everyone is going to be able to afford whatever the costs may be to receive bespoke medical care with a session that lasts 18 hours or whatever it is, 12 hours, let's just say in the case of the sort of upper range for some people with LSD. However, if you see a company that's saying 5-MeO-DMT is the ticket because it's the businessman's psychedelic therapy because it lasts 15 minutes. Take a sniff test or two first. And also just because it's 15 minutes, earth time doesn't mean your experience 15 minutes. So just be cautious with that. The removal of psychedelic effects also makes it much more adaptable and plug

Starting point is 02:53:39 and play with current healthcare practitioners and things can be turned into maintenance doses. So if we look at- Or for kids. Or for kids, right? So you say if you take like generic ketamine, I'm not going to name too many names, but some of the slight molecular changes that have been made to create, say, maintenance doses with nasal sprays. I do think that, at least for me, and I may be old-fashioned, but I do think that

Starting point is 02:54:07 these compounds in relatively few sessions have the potential to induce plasticity, provide experiences that have, I'm not going to say, well, in some cases, curative capability or potential, but extremely high durability. We're talking on the order of years. So I think people should be skeptical of companies that aim to create maintenance drugs from these, although that could be applicable to certain populations that, say, may fit into exclusionary criteria because they can't take higher doses for risk of, say, psychosis, but they might be able to take very, very low doses along the lines of, say, a micro, but they might be able to take very, very low doses along the lines of, say, a microdose, which wouldn't impart the perhaps content experiences, but could have

Starting point is 02:54:51 some effects on type 2A, serotonin type 2A receptors, but intracellularly, which I was just reading about. I would recommend if people want to keep up to speed with these things, the microdose from UC Berkeley iskeley is fantastic that's sort of a news bulletin summary on a weekly basis if you want a good overview i think how to change your mind is a great place to start if you want to know how some psychotherapists have worked with these things i think an oldie but a goodie the healing journey by claudio naranjo i think is excellent even if you just buy it for the introduction i I think maps sells that. So a lot of good resources out there. Andrew, we've covered a lot of ground and it's so nice to spend time together. We're going to grab some dinner. Is there anything that you would like to add,

Starting point is 02:55:35 point people to any closing comments you'd like to make before we wrap up? No. At one point we had thought we might cover how to optimize a podcast and there I'm just going to point people to the great series that you did. I think it was one or two episodes. I did an episode with Chris Hutchins because he wanted to ask me a million questions about podcasting. And I said, you know what? I get asked this all the time. Let's just record a podcast and then I can point people to the podcast. Well, my whole team listened to it and talked about it and use it as kind of a checklist for whether or not we were doing things right. That was about a year ago and things are going well. So I'll just point people to that episode. Hopefully you can link to that episode because

Starting point is 02:56:15 it's really great. We thought, yes, yes. And oops, we better be doing that. I really just want to extend my gratitude for the work you've done in the past. I know I've mentioned it over and overnight. I'm sure some listeners are probably like, here he goes again, thanking Tim, but I would not be podcasting were not for you and Lex Friedman who gave me the like final nudge. And also I've just gleaned so much valuable knowledge from your books and your podcasts and learn so much from you. So again, for me, it's like pure delight to be sitting here having this conversation. I'm feel very honored and I'm really grateful to you and your team.

Starting point is 02:56:47 And I hope you'll come on the Huberman Lab podcast before long. Absolutely. I need to make a trip to SoCal. Thanks for saying all that. It really means a lot. And it has been a fucking blast to watch you just storm the front, man. It's really been fun to see the podcast do as well as it is done to see that then also lead into other types of snowball effects like providing funding

Starting point is 02:57:18 as i just learned for studies vis-a-vis the the premium option and keep it up, man. I am, I am certainly learning a lot and taking notes myself. You can see the notes in front of me. It may not be visible on video, but I've been taking notes through the whole conversation as I always do. And I listen to you talk, whether it's on your podcast or in person. So people can find you hubermanlab.com. We will link to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, but it is Huberman Lab on all of these platforms. And I encourage people to subscribe, check it out. Thank you, Andrew. And to everybody listening, we will have links to all sorts of things, including that light vest that we'll figure out in the show notes at Tim.blog.com. You can just search Andrew or

Starting point is 02:58:03 Huberman, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N, and all things will pop up. So until next time, just be a bit kinder than is necessary to other people and yourself. And pay attention to those fundamentals, those pillars. All good things come from paying attention to those checklists. And as always, thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again.

Starting point is 02:58:25 Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

Starting point is 02:58:46 that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday.

Starting point is 02:59:28 Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseum. I'm your host, Matt Levin. you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the PodCover's dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting. This helps. Based on your biometrics,

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Starting point is 03:00:42 all spelled out 8sleep.com slash Tim and save $250 on the 8sleep.com slash Tim, all spelled out 8sleep.com slash Tim and save $250 on the 8sleep pod cover. That's 8sleep.com slash Tim. 8sleep currently ships within the US, Canada and the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Tim to save $250 on the 8sleep pod cover. This episode is brought to you by Protect's Rest Supplement, a new take on getting deeper and more restorative sleep. I was introduced to this by former Navy SEAL Nick Norris, who has been on this podcast.

Starting point is 03:01:13 And as a mutual friend of ours put it to me, it's very annoying that Nick has no physical weaknesses. This is somebody who can climb like a spider. He has incredible abilities as a rock climber. He is incredibly strong and can also run ultra marathons. It's quite something to behold. And this is one of the tools that he uses. So protects rest supplement helps provide consistent restful sleep without any habit forming ingredients or groggy side effects. Simply add it to your last glass of water before bed and it goes to work. So I tried this after I mentioned to Nick that I was avoiding melatonin due to next day sluggishness and its possible effects on testicular function.

Starting point is 03:01:52 So I was trying to wean myself off of things like that. This rest cocktail has worked wonders and I've made it part of my sleep toolkit. It's literally on a counter about 20 feet from where I'm recording this right now. Pro tip number one, if you have trouble opening the packets, just use scissors. Don't make it hard. Pro tip number two, mix the packets with water. Do not skip that step and chug it alone. I've learned from experience. Rest has no added sugars, artificial sweeteners, or artificial ingredients. Protect is veteran owned and they make all of their products right here in the USA. And right now,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #660: Dr. Andrew Huberman — The Foundations of Physical and Mental Performance, Core Supplements, Sexual Health and Fertility, Sleep Optimization, Psychedelics, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #660: Dr. Andrew Huberman — The Foundations of Physical and Mental Performance, Core Supplements, Sexual Health and Fertility, Sleep Optimization, Psychedelics, and More

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