Modern Wisdom“This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,031 words- 0:00 – 7:43
The Cortisol Hack to Unlock Your Day
- CWChris Williamson
People of the UK and Ireland, if you are coming to see me on tour this October, I want to hear from you. I want to hear the problems you're dealing with, your most unhinged stories, and I'll be bringing some of you up on stage to talk about them. So if you're coming to see me live, go to chriswilliamson.live/stories and submit what you want me to talk about on stage. You might actually get to come and see me and look at everyone while we unpack what you've done with your life. chriswilliamson.live/stories. Lots of people deal with brain fog and low energy throughout the day. What's your advice for combating that?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I mean, it's funny. I'll probably end up saying this 20 times in today's conversation, but if I were to really... If I had two minutes with somebody and they said, "What's the thing I can do for my health?" I'd say make the first hour of your day high cortisol and the last hour, hour of your day low cortisol.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
High cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated mood, focus, and alertness all day long, allows you to buffer stress better, and it makes sure that your nighttime cortisol is going to be low.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
If you don't, you know, spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day, you're gonna have a high, flat cortisol curve. Not good. Makes you less resilient to stress, brain fog, less amenable to learning, and on and on. So then you just say, "Well, what can you do?" And we can make this very simple. Uh, bright light, especially from sunlight or 10,000 lux artificial light in the, especially in the first 30 minutes after waking. Hydration, caffeine, if you like caffeine, exercise in the first three hours of your day if you can, right? Some people can't. And then roll into your day. At night, in that final hour, you do everything you can to reverse that. You dim the lights, especially overhead lights, dim your screen. You could do the red light thing or the candlelight thing, you know. Limit caffeine, obviously. Exercise in the final hour before sleep only if that's the only time you can do it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Some people, that's the only time. Um, and actually eating in the first three hours of your day, even though I'm a fan of-- I personally fast in the first three hours of the day, but that actually can also spike cortisol. People say, "Why would eating spike cortisol?" Well, I mean, basically anything that you do that's sort of pro-arousal, that's about activity, is gonna spike cortisol. So bookending your day-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... with things that spike your cortisol at the beginning and lower your cortisol at the end is really, it, it really is the, if there is a cheat code to life... Now, why do I say to life? I mean, is it gonna make you completely stress resilient? No. Is it gonna make you a, um, able to learn anything you want with ease? No. But what it does is it sets you up for the best possible sleep, which makes you more alert the next day, of course. It also, it anchors this process that I haven't talked about before on any podcast, um, and frankly, that I didn't touch on directly in the book, um, which is so much of life is about balancing what we call bottom-up and top-down influences. Bottom-up influences would be, you know, um, you want the cookie, you're gonna just eat the cookie. You, um, you know you shouldn't be scrolling as much as you're scrolling, you just keep scrolling. That's, those are bottom-up influences. These are, um, impulses that are driven by hypothalamic and other deep brain structures.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Then we have, thankfully, we have top-down influences. This is your prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses. Okay, this is the two marshmallow test in kids, which by the way, a lot of people say was debunked. The debunk was debunked, by the way. Yeah. So, um, the ability to suppress action. It's what I taught my bulldog-pit mix, Strummer, the day I brought him home, and it's the basis of everything. You put a piece of food in front of him, he of course wants to take it, right? His prefrontal cortex isn't even online yet. And you take it away until he learns, and he learns the first day and never forgets that he has to wait until I say, "Okay, what are you doing there?" It's actually not about making him wait for a treat. It's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse, and that, that wicks out to every type of waiting. So you say, "Wait," or like, "See you later, I'm going to work," and then you come back and he's not freaking out. He can just... Now, he doesn't have to actively suppress the whole time, but the ability to suppress impulse. So much of life, the ability to learn and lean into just enough stress that you trigger learning, the ability to listen when you want to react, the ability to force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing that you don't wanna do, so much of that is top-down influences.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And basically being an effective human is about building up those circuits of top-down.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Now, do you have to do them in everything? This is a matter of debate. I think that people like Andy Stumpf, who I have tremendous respect for-
- CWChris Williamson
Friend of the show
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... um, it's just awesome. I've learned so much from him. I actually made some late, late stage additions to the book based on a conversation I had with him.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So he actually made... You know, very late in the game, I was like, "I need to..." My editors were like, "You can't do this anymore. Like, enough is enough." And I'm like, "I want it back or else I'm not signing off on the final draft-"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
"... to put in this." You know, A-Andy has a number of tools that are, that are really useful, but you know, he has this philosophy that he shares, which is throughout your day, when given the option between the easier thing and the harder thing, do the harder thing, that there's tremendous value in that. It's the make your bed thing. It's the-
- CWChris Williamson
Take the steps
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... replace the p- toilet paper roll is the example he gives in his book, Drownproof, which is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. He doesn't pay me to say this. It's just an awesome book. I recommend it to everybody. But these little things, like there's that piece of trash on the floor that's this big. Do I pick it up? Why would, you know, d-does... Is it about the trash? Does it really make that much of a difference in your life? No, but the action of going against that bottom-up influence of just ignoring the harder thing and going toward ease-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... more pleasure, less pain, even just avoiding subtle pain. The, there are two ways to build up these circuits. One is by forcing yourself to go, like, as we say with like writers always say, like ass to chair. Like, you know, it's just, you're just gonna like sweat blood until you get those 800 words a day out. The, there are advantages to that or doing the hard workout that you do not wanna do. There's also a building up of the same circuits, those top-down suppression of impulse through the little things all day long.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You probably need to do both, but I think that many of us nowadays who are exercising and doing health protocols, we absorb a lot of energy in order to get ourselves to those, some people more, some people less. And I've started doing these, you know, Stumpf type, uh, smaller things throughout the day. He does the big things, too, obviously, but those little things, what you find, what I find, is that they make it much easier to overcome the friction that comes from anything.
- CWChris Williamson
So exercise-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And so there's a really just like getting the reps in th- like, it doesn't... What it proves is that it's the circuit, it's not what you're doing. You're getting the reps into the circuit. It's kinda like Pavel Tsatsouline, the strength guy, it's like the grease the groove thing. Okay, you do two pull-ups every time you pass through, through the door.
- 7:43 – 18:48
Can You Actually Train Your Willpower?
- CWChris Williamson
Is there anything else that you would advise people to do for training willpower?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I mean, I think what Andy talks about in his book, and obviously he's not the first person to talk about this, but you know, that, that philosophy, like how you do one thing is how you do anything. That's a little bit vague for me. I like the way he describes it, which is these little micro sucks all day long.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Like, like, it happened to me the other day.
- CWChris Williamson
Trust Andy to call it micro sucks, dude.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
He's a man with a helicopter that's jumped out of a plane, like, 50,000 times
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... he holds two world records at wingsuiting.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I think he flew 36,000 feet or something like that. I mean, yeah, and I mean, there are a lot of badasses in the world, and in the Tier One operator sphere, and I know a number of those guys, that there are a lot of badasses, obviously. What's impressive to me is somebody who has the intelligence and the communication skills to be able to share the things that are relevant to everybody in a way that's relevant to everybody. Um, he's also from Santa Cruz, which is a cool town. It's right over the hill from where I grew up, and, like, the fact that somebody like that came from Santa Cruz is kind of a hometown joke, which is a pretty...
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
There's only two reasons to go to Santa Cruz if you're a guy in your teens or 20s or 30s. You go to the, go to the boardwalk to meet girls, or you go to fight. People in Santa Cruz, it was like they, you'd always see fights in your... So I always thought of Santa Cruz as, people think of it as this hippie town. I always thought of it as kind of a, kind of a, there's a rougher side of Santa Cruz. And then I hear about, you know, Andy's from Santa Cruz, I'm like, that makes no sense whatsoever. But, you know, he took all of that kind of local environment, sounds like he had a g- good upbringing. He talks fondly about his parents, which is cool, and put it to some, uh, really impressive feats, and can communicate what, what the exports from that, those experiences are. So, you know, I mean, how many of us in our daily life need to, like, shoot, move, and communicate? You know, like the, the macronutrients of, you know, operators. I mean, some people, yes, but most of us, no. So to me, that's one way. The other way is obviously to do your workouts and, you know, I, I'm a big believer in asking yourself, what am I genuinely curious about learning, and where's the fear point for me? What is kind of... why am I shying away from learning about something 'cause it, for fear of, like, poor performance? And then that's the thing you should lean into. You have to be curious about something-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... unless you're in school where you have to learn a subject. So that's another way, like pushing yourself to learn cognitively. And then to me, I think that a, a big other part of this top-down training is just the way that we approach life. Like, you know, I think there are two reasons to do hard things. Um, Rogan and I were talking about this yesterday. One reason is because it m- makes you better at doing hard things. The other reason is it allows you to access more awareness of the beautiful things in life. I mean, there's so much dog shit floating around on the internet and anger, and we, you and I talked about this. There's so many barbed wire drama things that, I mean, if I went around, you know, posting every opinion that I reflexively have about some of the, like, nonsense antics that I see online or the crazy documentaries that are coming out and like-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep, yep
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... when, and, you know, you get to a certain point in life, and you tend to be one to six degrees of separation from pretty much anything you see online.
- CWChris Williamson
All the big problems.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
As much as you would like to not think, and you go, "Oh, I know someone who knows someone who knows that person. I met that person once in a party," got a eerie feeling.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I won't say who that's about, but that was a real experience. You know, you can go down that rabbit hole. So much of being effective is going nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. And I always just take myself back to high school. There were only really three or four reasons to actually be at, in high school. There's, like, to learn, right, from teachers and from your peers and in class. That's a legitimate reason to go to school. You know, there were social reasons. Um, there were all sorts of observations that I had, like one that is still salient for me, I'll share in a moment, that you can learn a lot about people in life.
- CWChris Williamson
Human behavior.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I, I have a, I have a p- a friend who's a professor at Stanford who says he, he, unfortunately he calls me Andy. It's really annoying. And he's-
- CWChris Williamson
You don't like Andy?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
No. No, no, no. No. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
I think this guy's just persisted [laughs] .
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Well, so what happened was-
- CWChris Williamson
Dude
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... what happened was-
- CWChris Williamson
It's kind of a power move
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... I lost a coin flip to another Andrew, like, in the third grade. And-
- 18:48 – 31:14
The Hidden Formula for Better Learning and Focus
- CWChris Williamson
Exactly. Uh, going back to the, the brain, what's your best advice for improving memory and focus? People understand brain fog's a thing, I'm struggling with that, I have lulls with energy throughout the day.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And now you want me to actually answer the question?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, that'd be great.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
No, I'm just kidding. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Whenever you want.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So, okay. So brain fog is not a specific thing, it's an inability to focus. Let's get a couple of, um, core principles down. People with severe clinical grade ADHD can focus if they're doing something they really like.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Tells you something. It means the dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, we call these the catecholamine systems of the brain and body that are involved in many things, but focus am- among them, are there, they're functional, but the threshold to access them is too high. Okay, what does that mean? What it means is that people can learn to focus and they can get assistance in doing that by pushing on one of two ends or both. One is to ramp up the level of those chemicals. That's what things like Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, and so on do.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
A study this last year out of, uh, Washington University in St. Louis, sort of the Harvard of the Midwest, if you will, although I think that's unfair to the Midwest, uh, maybe we call Harvard the, the, uh, Wash U of the East-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... um, showed that when you compare r- the attention-improving effects of Ritalin to a great night's sleep, they're f- they're effectively equal. Hmm. Some of these stimulants we know blunt... stunt growth, excuse me. They stunt growth. We, we know this.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay? They limit, they limit ultimate height, they reduce sleep, so they're circumventing a problem. So there's a new idea, which is that maybe lower dosages of these, these medicines combined with better sleep would be as effective a treatment. A lot of parents are erring that way. A lot of adults are erring that way, too. That said, some of these medications can be useful in e- in extreme cases. If somebody wants to learn, let's just say if you wanna learn, you wanna focus and get rid of brain fog, you wanna learn, it's, uh, here, here are the key steps, and I review some more of this in the book, but I'm... D- during today's conversation, and always, I'm gonna try and reference the book only and if people want more information. I'm just gonna try and give people the information. I, I, if people want the book, they can, they can get it, but I don't wanna like cloak the information.
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone needs to go and buy the book.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
[laughs] With that, thanks, uh, thanks for your support of the book. I did... There is a lot of... You'll get-
- CWChris Williamson
You fucking bled for this thing, dude. I watched you.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, I definitely bled.
- CWChris Williamson
I watched you basically-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I definitely... Eight years
- CWChris Williamson
... you glanced off the bottom of insanity in order to be able to put this. Then the original word count was 120,000-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... and then you were forced to chop it down and-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It's basically seven short books with, uh, with a long intro, which is some story and context. Um, and I promise you can just navigate to a particular point in the book and understand what's going on, get the tool, and go. You can learn the science or not get the science. You can take the story and read it or not read it. But I figure leave it all on the mat. Look, I'm 51 next, this, later this month. Like I don't know if I'll make it to 52. I feel great. My biomarkers say I'm great, but you know, I mean, who knows? So I'm, I'm not living this life to try and, you know, soft pedal anything. I'm just going all in. So here are the steps to learning. You need to focus, obviously, to learn. To focus you need to be alert. To get alert there are many things you can do, and I talk about all of them in the book. There are foundational things like sleep, all right? That's gonna help you get alert and focused. But there are also things like exercise. We all hear that exercise makes our brain better, it makes us better at learning. Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons. One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. So, so in the four to six hours after exercise you are more alert and you can focus better, unless you exercise to exhaustion. If you have leg day for, you know, y- 10 sets of 10 on, on the squats followed by a bunch of hamstring work and et cetera, your brain's not gonna be g- so good at focusing. But, you know, 45 to 75 minutes of hard training, not taken to extreme, a bit like what we did this morning-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and that was a little bit on the lighter side, not just because we didn't have a whole lot of time. But you're gonna come out of that more alert because you have more adrenaline in your body, more norepinephrine being released in your brain, and more dopamine being released in your brain, and dopamine is a critical component for learning, okay? Focus then becomes easier to access, and in your focus, what are you focusing on? You need to focus on making errors through genuine attempts to do something, something physical, maybe a tennis serve or you're learning billiards, something cognitive, you're trying to learn a language. The error between what you c- currently do and what you're trying to do, the error, is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells need to change. It runs through a circuit, uh, involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close. If you can do something, there's no reason for your brain to change, and the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively. And those tag, literally chemically tag the synapses. I mean, there's some additional steps, but they tag those synapses so that then at night when you sleep, the synapses rearrange, and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
That's how it works. So a, a curiosity and willingness to learn gets you to the gate of learning. The making of errors through genuine attempts puts the key in and turns the key. The agitation is walking through that gate-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
-and then getting some sleep or maybe even, uh, you know, a day or two later, even if you don't sleep quite as well as you would like, just some time for the synapses to rearrange, that's the last piece. There's an additional piece that can reinforce it all, which is self-testing. If you wanna get good at something and stay good at it and continue to get better at it, you need to self-test. Mental self-testing is the best way to consolidate learning and learn faster. What do I mean by that? I don't mean visualization. I mean asking yourself... Like for me, if I want to make my memory better, generally speaking, I might think, "Okay, so that was, uh, September 11th 2001. Where was I exactly? What were some of the details?" Now, that might be a, something I might not want to think about, but if I were to say, "Okay, I'm gonna go back to my, um, you know, year one neuroscience graduate school training." Of course, I know what a synapse is. I know what neurons are. I know what astrocy- I know all this stuff. It's embedded so deeply in me, I can almost do it in my sleep. But then I think, "Yeah, that's right." Like what is the role of astrocytes? And then say, "Okay." 'Cause that's stuff that's relevant to me. When you hit the point where you can't remember something, you go and look it up. Boom, you've now closed that gap again, and it reinforces those synapses that were weakening.
- 31:14 – 39:33
What Are the Best Protocols to Manage Stress?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, talking about that, it seems like one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of people's lives is stress.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What are your best protocols for managing stress?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And I, I realize some people may have heard this from me like 35,000 times. Uh, morning sunlight, yes, but that physio-- Just do a long exhale. When you're stressed, do a long, deliberate exhale. It slows your heart rate down through a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad. People hear arrhythmia, it sounds bad. But we've all heard of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve collects sensory information from our viscera, which is nerd speak for your internal organs, so your stomach, your spleen, your liver. Sending that information up to your brain, unconsciously your brain is responding to that all the time.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
The vagus nerve also has a portion of it that goes from the brain to the heart and other organs, and there's one particular pathway that contacts and communicates with the su- sinoatrial node of your heart.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And it slows your heart rate down when you exhale. And the reason is, as you inhale and exhale, the space available for your heart changes. So when you... At, at some point, your heart is a little bit smaller, right, during your breathing, and the volume of blood that's in there moves more quickly, so your brain sends a signal through this vagus nerve pathway to slow your heart rate down.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So when you exhale [exhales] deliberately, this is the key, deliberately, I don't think I've ever described it this way, you slow your heart rate down significantly, you offload carbon dioxide, and your level of autonomic arousal, meaning sympathetic alert versus parasympathetic calm, balances. It tips more towards parasympathetic calm.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Im-immediately. It's the m- fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. Better if you can do two big inhales first [inhales and exhales] and then exhale all the way till lungs empty. That's the so-called physiological sigh discovered in the 1930s.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Not by shamans, not by breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set, set of neurons in the parafacial nucleus of your brain stem that capture the activity of this vagal pathway and slow your heart rate down. But the beauty of this mechanism is it also increases what's called HRV. The bi-- Most people know, "I want higher HRV. How do I do that? Well, I train VO2 max. I do some high intensity interval training." Great. "I do some long distance endurance training, lower intensity." Great. You have higher VO2 max. What is higher HRV? Heart rate variability reflects the number of times throughout the day and night that this pathway, this pathway in the vagus, signals your sinoatrial node to slow your heart rate down.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
In fact, you can increase your HRV pretty significantly if you just do 10 deliberate exhales throughout your day. And then at night, look at your HRV. It will be significantly elevated.
- CWChris Williamson
This is why I spoke about this last time. This is why I need to get you one of those om.health lamp things for resonance breathing. We talked about this previously.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So you... It's an algorithm. It's a stone on the top of this lamp. I think they're about to launch this month, this om.health. Um, you... stone on the top of the lamp. You... it vibrates. You breathe in time with the stone. It's got a hundred hertz, uh, sensor in it, so it's detecting your HRV all the time. And as it vibrates up and down, you breathe in time with it, and it modulates to maximize the arrhythmia. And if you were to see it, you would be swinging from 61 to 72 to 62-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
That's awesome
- CWChris Williamson
... to 70.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
That's awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
So like 60 to 60 to 72.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
That's awesome. That's awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
And it is so fucking cool. And the, the sensation of doing that, if no one's ever done resonant breathing before, it is... Like after about three minutes, it almost feels like you've had a drink. It almost feels like you're a little bit drunk. It's very, very im-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
When you get it... And the guy, Jay Wildes, who's the main science dude behind it, he talks about precision with this, because you can get, uh, a resonance breathing that's not doing biofeedback, and the problem with that is it, everyone's resonance pattern is a little bit different.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone's resonance pattern.
- 39:33 – 43:01
The Optimal Mindset for Learning
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
some people... Now I'm skipping around a bit, but I wanna make sure I close a few hatches. Some people might say, "How alert and focused do you need to be to learn?" We rarely talk about this. Like one thing I really emphasize in the book is like people talk about be present. I give a tool that explains exactly how to be present.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Tell me.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay. So we'll talk about that. But how alert do you need to be in order to foc- focus and learn? What, what's the state of mind? Alert and calm. What is that? 'Cause that might mean something different to you than it means to me. How do you stay there? Okay. Uh, have you ever played that game Hot Hands where, you know, I put my hands on top of yours? Wouldn't that be nice?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I put my hands on top of yours.
- CWChris Williamson
That's what we did all morning.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
That's literally... That we didn't go to the gym. We just held hands.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I put my hands on top of yours and we play a game where you're gonna flip your hands over and you try and smack my hands.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay? And I'm gonna try and pull them out of your way, and you're younger than I am so you think you have faster reflexes, but you don't. No, I'm just kidding. You probably do. You're the person whose hands are on, on top. So let's say my hands are on top and you're ready to flip your hands over and tag me. You're the person with hands on top and you're in that ready anticipation of what's gonna happen next. That's the state of mind for optimal learning.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
That's the state of mind you wanna be in. So when you sit down to read something and you're like, "I read that whole page and I didn't learn anything," of course you didn't because your brain was... You're running four or five different circuits at once. In order to really turn on focus, you need to turn off a bunch of other circuits that are... or you need to lower the activity in those other circuits. You can't be thinking about at the same time, "Okay, what's the, how do my feet feel? How's, what's my heartbeat? What's going on online?"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
"What's my girlfriend thinking? What is she..." You know, no. You need to be focused. What is focus? Focus is obviously in a tunnel, but then how much alertness? I don't think anyone's ever described it before, but when you look at levels of arousal in a game like Hot Hands, and believe it or not there's some equivalent data on this or data on the equivalent sort of thing. When you're waiting for a timed trial and you're waiting for something to happen and you have to react quickly, that's the state of mind you wanna be in to learn something that's hard for you but beneficial for you.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Period, end of story. So hopefully that'll help people kind of find that mental groove, and then as you learn if you find you're getting too stressed, that doesn't all- that brings down reaction time. It actually... You, you start making false positive. You start-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... moving your hands away before the person even does anything. Okay. So- Hopefully that will help people understand the level of attention and why it's so tiring after about 90 minutes.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And you're like, "Ugh, okay, I need to take a break."
- CWChris Williamson
Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline. And eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli, 'cause they've just dropped the price, and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM
- 43:01 – 53:48
Is Presence the Secret to Happiness?
- CWChris Williamson
at checkout. What about presence? How can people be more present?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay, so this one really surprised me. So the final chapter of the book is about personal development, okay? Um, I was gonna do a chapter about relationships, but for various reasons I felt like that wasn't appropriate. Then I thought about relationship to self, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird because what is relationship to self?" It's too squishy a, a theme. Thought like personal development. Step back and start asking questions about... First acknowledge, step back and acknowledge there's a lot out there about how to get through trauma. But what are the unifying themes, and can I put a structure on those themes that helps people navigate all of that? What's the business of having a great life? So we talk about that. We hear be present. There's this massive study out of Harvard a few years ago that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. I'm sure you're familiar with the data. You ping people throughout the day, you ask them what they're doing and how present they are to it. Turns out happiness is really about being present, having your attention, what's called present tethered awareness. You're focused on what's happening now, even if it's unpleasant. People report that as being much happier on average than if their mind is someplace else. Daydreaming has its place, but daydreaming is usually mind wandering to bad things, things of past, things of future, and we're just not present.
- CWChris Williamson
Distraction is literally unhappiness.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yes. Yes. And the converse is also true, that focusing on what you're doing is a great way to build up your mental health. So then I started asking, 'cause I'm a biologist, not a psychologist, what the hell is presence? Does it mean, um, anchoring my visual attention? What... How do I be present? 'Cause otherwise it's just a bumper sticker, and otherwise... I-- look, I love psychologists. They have these beautiful studies that discover phenomena. But then it's like if you're gonna say, like, fall asleep, what is falling asleep? And we can talk about that. What is being present, okay? So be here now. I think Ram Dass said that. Great. Be here now. How? Turns out that if we step back and we just say, "Okay, what does the brain do?" Don't worry, this won't turn into a whole lecture. What does the brain do? The brain takes physical phenomenon in our environment, photons of light, sound waves, mechanical pressure, chemicals through the nose and mouth, translates those from sensation to perception. Cool. Then we also can remember things, predict things. It's basically what the brain does, and it can change itself. So that's neuroscience in a nutshell. How do we move our brain from thinking about the future and the past to what's happening now? Okay, so that means perceptions about what's only in our immediate physical environment. It means not thinking, not doing, not planning, but asking questions about the immediate physical environment. So we can do this just n- right now, and you can do this anytime you want to be more present. And I wanna just preface this by saying what I'm about to describe is not the endpoint. It's the way to get into the present. But what you do next is critically important too. So first you ask trivial questions about your immediate environment that can only be answered accurately by focusing on the present. So for instance, uh, what does it smell like in here right now? Like, like I'm not getting much for me, but... Okay. Um, what is, uh, like how many cans are on this table? One, two, three. There's a couple other vessels. Four cans. Find it. Okay. All right. Tr- answering two or three trivial questions, seemingly trivial questions about your present environment. How many people are in line in front of me? How loud are the kids screaming in the backseat? Is it louder or softer than last time? Things like that bring our mind toward, obviously, perception of the present. Duh. There's nothing, you know, profound about that. But it's what they take our mind away from that's critically important. The brain... There's a whole section on thinking. What is thinking? The brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states, which is nerd speak for if I take a ball bearing and I put it on a s- on a plate, it essentially can move in any direction. And there's some details related to the smoothness of the bearing and the plate, et cetera. But if I put a little groove on that plate and I tilt the plate slightly, it obviously will go toward the groove. It'll get into the groove. And then if I turn that groove into a, I make it more concave and eventually a trench, the ball bearing stays there. That's how your brain works. The more that you cede a thought, the more that you cede a perception, the more that brain circuits are devoted to things related to that thought or perception. So when you want to be present, something that we know from excellent data of this large study at, at Harvard, but subsequent studies as well, is so critical for happiness. The way to practice that is to learn t- from taking your mind from thinking and doing and remembering about things of past and future to just anchoring your perception to the present. It doesn't require meditating Meditation is one form of that. What are, what are we doing when we meditate? We close our eyes, we focus on our breathing. That's here now. And we focus on the, quote-unquote, third eye center or whatever. But that's actually interoception. It's focusing on our internal bodily state, which is not that great, frankly, if you look at the data for being present in a happy way. Most people who are overly focused on their internal state in the present-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... are like, "My heart rate is increasing. My heart rate's too low. I'm sweating. I'm uncomfortable." You start thinking about the fact that like your, your, you know, your boxers are like pulled up on one si- one leg. You know, they, th- that's not the way to get present and calm and aware. The way to get present, calm, and aware and be able to move forward from that in a, in the best way is to ask questions about your immediate physical environment. Once you do that, remember, that's just the first step. The second step is to use that heightened level of awareness to ask yourself, "What do I wanna d- what do I actually want to do next? What do I wanna say next? What do I wanna think about next?" This is the way that you take control-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... of your thoughts.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And I won't go into all the detail now, but thoughts have this way they seed each other. So I think we've done this thing about the cat, right? I think we did that previously. We say like, you know, uh, think of a cat. Um, okay, you know, tell me about it. People say, "Well, it has soft, it's this color, it's this, that." You're starting to recruit more and more neural machinery toward the thought about this trivial thing that we call a s- a, a seed idea, which is the cat. But if you just let your brain run a r- like through the tributaries of its like own choices, you end up in a pretty unhappy place.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So the key to being a high agency, happy person, it turns out, is being able to control your thinking and bring it back to the present, but then you don't just stay there thinking about your breathing. That's like kind of sociopathic, right? It's weird. It's like, it's just weird. You ask questions about your immediate environment, and then you pivot into the person that you want to be in terms of action and thinking and speaking.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Or maybe silence is called for. And so none of this is psychology. This is all 100% neuroscience. I get into the underlying mechanisms, and it fully supports everything that I just described f- I should say, is fully supported by the work that shows that people who have heightened levels of activity in the so-called default mode network, this is the network of activity that just takes place when you're doing essentially nothing-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... are more depressed. Too much activity in the default mode network, yes, some is associated with creativity, but usually elevated levels of activity in the default mode network are what you find in depressed people because their brain is just kind of all over the place and they feel discombobulated.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Unless we're in sleep, we need to organize our internal landscape. The problem is most people hear, "You need to organize your internal landscape," and they think, "Oh, you have to get up in the morning, do 10 breaths of meditation, get your light..." And they think about it as rigidity. I'm talking about now and throughout the book, it's all about the things that set you up to lean into life so that you're mo- reflexively more effective. You're reflexively happy, you're reflexively more adaptive, you're reflexively more present. And I think this is where the overoptimization conversation is relevant. None of these practices are an end in and of themselves, right? I mean, I think nowadays because people go to the gym and they get like the a- the aesthetic effect they want, they think like, oh, you go to the gym to do that. I go to the gym so that I can sprint for the plane, open the pickle jar, h- move all the boxes on moving day up and down the stairs and feel great, tired but great at the end of the day. And I like being strong for life. I like having endurance so I can go hiking in Yosemite. If we go, "Let's go tomorrow," we're going and carrying 80-pound packs and we do it tomorrow, and yeah, it hurts a little bit, but like in a good way. And you can sprint for the plane and not cough up a lung. You can... You know, there's a section on mobility, which is, you know, four trivial mobility exercises. You know, get your knee behind your glutes once a day, squat down to kind of bend and look up at the ceiling, like to a right angle and be able to look up on both sides, identify any, you know, kind of mismatches on either side and work through those. That's so I can like lean down and grab things and move. So I can reach and grab things like... You threw me the protein drink out there. I just, for the record, I caught it.
- CWChris Williamson
You did catch it.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I, I'm not so proud of that. I'm just pissed at your camera guy will probably wait until I drop it and then film that one.
- CWChris Williamson
It's the one thing that you didn't catch.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So for the rec- They're, they're running a diabolical scheme here-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... at, uh, at Modern Wisdom where they wait for you to F up and then they film it, but when you get it right [chuckles] No, I'm just kidding.
- CWChris Williamson
No one's like capturing it.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I'm, I'm just kidding. Actually, I, I don't care about... I'm not a... Obviously, my hand-eye coordination, um, is not something I, I'm like really concerned about, but, um, nor do I boast about. But the point being that it's all about being able to move through life with confidence and agency and, and awareness and sensitivity to what you need to be sensitive to and being, and saying pff to the things that you need to say pff to. That's a really good life. It's not about the tools, it's about what the tools open up for you.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think a lot of people have an issue with the overoptimization thing because it feels like more homework. They're already overwhelmed. They're already working hard. The sort of people that read your book and listen to your podcast and are fans of Modern Wisdom, they're already contorting themselves into a pretzel trying to get more out of their day. They've already got standards that are so impossibly high that they can't meet them. And now when they sometimes hear people saying, "You need to do this and do this and do this and this," they feel like they're overwhelmed.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
And the difference being, um, you can make yourself fragile if your entire performance and your whole life is predicated on this kind of rain dance ritual that you are only able to do the stuff if you have had this like weird two hours-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Totally
- 53:48 – 58:47
Why Men Reevaluate Everything in Their Late 20s
- CWChris Williamson
I think, at least from my experience, periodizing your life is one of the best ways to think about this. And a lot of people, especially toward the end of their 20s, especially a lot of guys, go through this manopause. They go through this period where they realize that all of the strategies, tools, habits, routines, modes of getting recognition and, and, and, and, you know, success from the people around them, they've stopped working and they want to become something better. It's kind of like a second adolescence. It's actually a more important adolescence, I think, than the one-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... from, you know, 13 to kind of like 17.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
And they... Okay, what sort of person, what sort of man do I want to become-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... in this world? I don't know. Maybe women go through it too, but, but I, I, I know that I see it in a lot of guys, especially dudes that are a little bit more deep thinkers, and maybe they played the game in their 20s. They were successful, perhaps, maybe at playing the game. This game-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
What, which game are you referring to?
- CWChris Williamson
Like the social norms game.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm going to like, you know, contort myself or like chameleon a little bit.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm not gonna bring up quite what I think or what I mean or my, my unique interests.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Which, well, that can be adaptive, too. I mean, especially in the age of camera phones. I mean, when I grew up, you say something outrageous at a party-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... just like, you know, not offensive, but just outrageous, and it may land, it might not land, but you don't worry that it's gonna land everywhere.
- CWChris Williamson
It's not concretized on the internet for the rest of time.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You know? Yeah. I mean, I, I... And this is not just for public-facing people. I mean, I feel like, um, you're probably a great dancer, but, you know, I think like a lot of people aren't, are not, right?
- CWChris Williamson
I don't dance.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
A lot of men in particular are not. Um, and you know, you like to be able to like go to a wedding and dance and have fun and not think about how that's gonna show up.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Is someone gonna mock me for this video? So anyway, you know, guys get, get to this period and they think, "What sort of a person am I going to be?" And that to me, and for me, and for a lot of my friends as well, I needed to basically bundle together quite a lot of locking... I needed to lock the fuck in. I needed to lock in for an extended period of time.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And from the outside, that might look like, uh, an over-reliance on protocols and self-experimentation and optimizing and doing things like that. But what they don't see when they look at somebody that's going through that period is I was basically paying a debt that I had slowly accumulated over a decade and a half of running nightclubs. Like I will go toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone for degenerate behavior in my 20s, right? I ran more parties, did more of the things that you're not supposed to do in my 20s than almost anyone else. I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs. I attended a thousand parties, right?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
A thousand parties.
- CWChris Williamson
A thousand parties. That's how many we ran. We had a million-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
My 20s were very different than you.
- CWChris Williamson
We had a million, we had a milli- million lifetime entries. Yeah, you just-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Had a great time, but very different venues. Wow
- CWChris Williamson
... you just went to 500. Um, so I'm like, I've served my time, and then I needed to... I wanted to become somebody that was a little bit more well-rounded, that understood himself, that had a great connect, ba, ba, ba, all of those things. And I was like, okay, so if you look at m- me from 28 to 32, 33 in isolation, it actually looks like probably quite a fragile, um, highly strung life where I've got this elaborate morning routine that's going on for a couple of hours, and I'm like getting up and getting sunlight in my eyes before it's cool, and doing the lateral flow eye movement-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, yeah
- 58:47 – 1:15:41
How to Make Sense of Life’s Contradictions
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I came on this podcast 'cause I was excited to talk to you, and yes, I'm out on the book thing, but I like learning from you. So can I just like take in what you said for a sec?
- CWChris Williamson
Hit me.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, 'cause I'm happy to share what I know, but I wanna, I wanna think about this because I always learn with you. So one thing that you're so excellent at, and that I'm trying to do more of by way of example from you, is um, you are very good at spotting, um, contradictions and, as I said earlier, trying to... You know, like clashes and contradictions and trying to export something of value, like a new direction from that. So, you know, I will say, and I, I acknowledge you in the book for many reasons, by the way. Um, just, you know, w- we get these conflicting messages inside of any space, okay? So, um, you have so much within you. If you do the right things, you can access these things.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay. Um, if you do all these things, you're actually a weaker version of yourself because if you don't do those, not doing the hard thing now becomes the hard thing. [chuckles]
- CWChris Williamson
Bingo.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I mean, Hell Week is a week for a reason. It's not Hell Year. Although- Talking to people who are instructors in SEAL training and this kind... I mean, it, it, I do think they are, um, identifying people that are, that have something different in them as opposed to building that up. I think they build it up in those people, but I think it, that filter is really unique. I think for the rest of us, um, you know, I don't... You'd probably make it through. But for the rest of us, um, the, the real question I think is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions that are out there and put a structure on them? Forgive me for going slow here, but for once- No, no, no, no, no, no ... I'm, I'm speaking slow enough Stop mapping out. Okay. So years ago when I was a graduate student, uh, a guy who is really a luminary in the field of neuroendocrinology said to me, he said, "You know, um, it's rarely the people who make like the key discoveries that go on to be associated with, um, the great findings of a field." I go, "How can that possibly be?" And he said, "It's almost always people that are in that field or educate themselves on that field that put a structure on it." And he said, "This is why it's important to publish research papers, but also regularly publish reviews." And I always made it a point for about every three research papers I published to publish one high quality review, not some like, you know, like yellow ribbon journal, you know, um, review, 'cause you can publish a review anywhere, but like real compendiums of where the, the knowledge is now. Like I took those very, very seriously, like annual reviews and so forth very seriously. And why? Because they help you organize your mind around what's happening, and they help other people do that too, because most people aren't gonna take the time to do it. In the health and optimization space now, there's so many tools, right? So what we need and what I try and highlight in the book are principles. Yep. High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol, means high nighttime melatonin- Yep ... means great sleep, means better days, and so on and so forth. You're, you're essentially got the gears of the system linking together with that. Understand that, and then, yes, it's true, bright light is the best way to sp- spike your morning cortisol, but exercise is pretty effective too. Sometimes you don't have access to either, sometimes you have access to both. Mm-hmm. Sometimes you're on a plane, you can't... Okay. But you can start doing other things to nudge the system or keep the system online when you have 30 seconds. You also understand that if you miss a day or two, you're okay. Yep. Because you've set up the system through good behaviors going into it. So you don't have to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears 'cause you're on a plane and they don't have any caffeinated coffee, and you can't do your air squats, and like, I mean, come on. Yep. No one wants to be that guy. It's fragility. N- exactly. So you're, you... Once you understand a bit of the principles that organize the mechanisms, you're in a great position to be truly strong of mind and body because you can organize information. And the same thing is true, like in chapter seven of the book on personal development, I s- took a step back and I said, "What are the unifying features of all the trauma therapies? What are the unifying features of how to have a great life?" Let's just start with how to have a great life. James Hollis came on my podcast, 84 years old, surprised the shit out of me when he said, "Here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are shut up." That's the first one. I go, "Shut up?" And he goes, "Yeah. Someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you got something to be grateful for." Mm-hmm. Like, well, I didn't really expect that from him. You know? He's like this 85-year-old Jungian analyst. He talks about the unconscious mind. He goes, "Shut up. Your day should start with, 'Huberman, shut up.' Whatever's got you bothered, shut up. You got it better than somebody." It's interesting. Okay. I actually wish someone had said that to you earlier- Yeah ... but that's okay. Thank you. Yeah. [laughs] Um, second... [laughs] You can keep this in. [laughs] Next- It's a continuation of training ... next he said, "Chris Williamson, go fuck yourself." Yeah, that's true. [laughs] Sorry. No. First is shut up. Yep. Second is suit up. What is suit up? Suit up is you have a role f- to fulfill each day for other people and for yourself and for the world. Suit up is get prepared. Shower, organize your room. We've heard this stuff from Jordan and from other people, but get your act together so that you can then do the third thing effectively, which is show up. Go find a role in life and fulfill it. It might not be the role you fulfill your entire life, but if it's a summer camp counselor, if it's a babysitter, if it's a, a nanny, if it's a firefighter, if it's... Whatever you, you are doing at some point in your life, you, in order to have confidence and be a healthy, happy person, you need to fulfill roles for society, meaning for people in your life, not just for you. You have to be in service. Now, some people might think, "Well, I wanna make as much money in the world as possible." So that's not me, but a lot of people feel that way. Great. To do what? Go fulfill that role. So get dressed properly. Do those things. It sounds so basic, right? So shut up is about gratitude. Suit up is about prepare and practice. Don't show up... You know, don't... For me, I delayed the publication of the book three times. Why? 'Cause I want the book to be something I'm truly proud of and that people will feel that they were honored as smart people who deserve quality information, period, end of story. And I was willing to tell the publisher and everyone else, "Look, I'm so, so sorry, but I'm going back in again and again and again." Eat the shame, because ultimately I had a higher value, which was that the book be e- of good to extreme value to anyone that, that, that read it- Mm-hmm ... or even just looked at a chapter, for instance. And then that last one of show up is actually go do the work, like chop wood, carry water. Like no one gives a shit that you don't wanna do it today, just do it. Yep. Great confidence comes from those. But then he said the fourth thing, the pitfall, is that when we get too much into role, playing these roles and doing these things, we, we don't often enough... Or ex- excuse me, many people end up down a road that they don't ... really want to be on. And everyone fears that, so he said the solution to this is very simple. Once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus response. You either meditate or just breathe, you draw, you listen to music, you don't look at your phone, you don't think about your role in the world, and all you do is you try and listen to, and it sounds real squishy, but when it's next to shut up, suit up, show up, I feel comfortable saying it, which is you ask yourself like, "What is my deeper wish, my heart's desire? What do I need to be focusing on now? Maybe I have enough career, enough money, enough, enough, uh, whatever, you know, colleague respect." It's either maybe now it's time to, uh, focus more on relationships. Maybe it's time to focus less on one's role as a mother or father, not completely, but focus more on an artistic creative side that if you don't satisfy you're not gonna feel like you had a good life. So personal development, if you look at those bins, it's not about shut up, suit up, show up and do this internal practice of getting out of stimulus response. It's... That's just one example. You look out across the landscape of personal development and almost everything slots into one or two, but usually just one of those. Entire books are about the first one or just the, the last one or two of the, two of the four. And I go, "That's very satisfying to me," because as my colleague said, putting a structure on things is, is very helpful because it helps us navigate without feeling like there's all this information. Wait, I'm supposed to journal and I'm supposed to do therapy, and maybe psychedelics, maybe not, and I'm supposed to have social connection and, and like pretty soon you're like, "When am I supposed to do the morning sunlight thing?" It's a lot. So the idea is that you, you understand the framework, and then when it comes to the trauma piece for unlearning, right? Like there's a tremendous amount of information in the book on how to focus and learn better. But then also, what about unlearning? Mm-hmm. All of getting over bad stuff is four steps. The process is four steps. The first thing, you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore. You can't suppress it. What are you suppressing? You need to acknowledge this happened, this sucks. Two, the second step is you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this. There are entire books and workshops written around breathing into, psychedelicing into, talking into, hugging into, shaking into- Yep ... feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened or things. But that's not where it stops. People often just end there. The next piece is feeling calmer, even slightly and more peaceful around the accurate, detailed memory of the thing. You're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing. You can't just live in the feel your feelings. We have an entire generation of people and collection of people online who are only there, and they wonder why they're still there. At the mercy of their feelings. The... They're at the mercy of their feelings, but also they're not effective in the world. They're not effecting change. They think they are, but they're not effecting change. This is actually why I think they hate... One of the many reasons why successful people are often hated, because they're moving along. They're like... I feel like sometimes online I look and I'm like, "You remind me of those kids when I would go home," 'cause I left, I went to college then came back, and that scared the shit out of me. Mm-hmm. 'Cause I was like, "Oh my God, you guys could write a textbook on how to become a, like a world-class loser." And some of them weren't like drugging out or anything. It was just like, "You guys are still talking about stuff that..." Well, today I talked about stuff that happened in high school that was helpful for me. Mm-hmm. But you guys are like stuck. It's like these people that hang out in the parking lot of bars for years and years talking about this thing. I mean, it's, it's the saddest thing in the world. And men do it one way, women do it another way. It's this fixation on the things that happened that we feel wronged about, and we all have them, right? And granted, some people were genuinely wronged. That's not the point here. It's not whether they were wronged or not, it's that they're stuck there. And the third piece is about the uncoupling, and then the fourth piece is what we kinda think of as the magic of life, where people take the hard thing and the experience and their journey of moving through it, and they transmute it into something of beauty and goodness for the world. Mm-hmm. These are the people that go and talk at bereavement workshops, talk to people who've lost a child, talk to people, um, who have experienced horrible things, talk to... Maybe they even just plant a flower and put it in the windowsill, and every morning they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience and the beauty that's there representing it. A small detail, right? A small detail in their life. They've transmuted the pain. But you can't just go, "Oh, you know what? You had this horrible thing happen. You know, plant a flower." Mm-hmm. "Put it in the windowsill and think about how beautiful it is." You can't take somebody who's struggling in number one or two- Yep ... or three and put them there. So for me- Go back through those four for me. What's that? Go back through those four. Acknowledge the thing. Yep. Straight on exactly what happened or how many thi- you know, what is the thing that sucks, that hurts so much? Two, you have to, in a safe environment... This is why there's interest in clinical trials on MDMA because it's this empathogen, makes people feel, you know, love and safe, but you need... That's not the only way. I mean, there's therapy, there's journaling. I talk about this in... Talk about all the different approaches to each of these steps. That's the second step. You have to feel the feelings completely of the horrible thing that happened. The third thing is once you've done that enough, and we talk about what enough is, you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing that happened with less emotional load. The emotional load starts to peel back. And it's a hard step to get to, but once you get there, it's a process. It's not like you go in and you go, "Okay, today I'm gonna remember everything, but it's not gonna bother me at all." Little by little you start to uncouple the- It's like memory exposure therapy. Some people do EMDR. Yep. That's one way. Some people do hypnosis, some people do talk therapy. Pennebaker has people journal four times for fifteen minutes each about the horrible thing that happened. This takes them through steps two and three. 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, no more, no less. And by the fourth day, tens of thousands of data points now, not just individuals, but many, many papers, even if, uh, you know, manuscripts, scientific manuscripts. But even if you tear up the writing afterward, even if you delete the file, you find that people move through steps two and three to a significant degree.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And then the fourth step is not just letting it hover there as this thing that you got through, but fi- finding some way or ways, it can be many, of transmuting that entire experience, the thing that happened and the way you moved through it, into some point of beauty or contribution to your own wellbeing and to others' wellbeing. Could be you had a dog, and the dog represents every bit of your ability to love unconditionally and their ability to love unconditionally that represents the unconditional love you didn't get. Maybe it's, uh, someone who has suffered a horrible trauma is helping people who, who suffered similar traumas, or maybe it's some just symbol, right? I mean, you know, in a very Jungian way, it can just be a symbol of like maybe you have this paperweight and that symbol is the, the weight of your, your certainty that you made it through. And you just... You know, the, the human mind can assign symbols to, to experiences very easily, good or bad. So those are the four steps. And for me, in thinking about personal development, it was like, how do I look out on the entire landscape of all these books and all these podcasts and think, and, and science and think, what's the best way to move through? You acknowledge that process. Neuroplasticity is alert focus, agitation through genuine errors to get things right, reinforce through sleep and self-testing. Those are the steps. There's not a fifth step or a sixth step.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
There's not jump to step three and avoid steps one and two. So these days, a lot of my role in, in my public life is to educate about processes and when... And this all comes from my training in neuroscience. You don't teach people neurons fire action potentials. That's the first thing you teach them. Then you tell them how that happens, and once they understand how that happens and you get the action potential, they have embedded in their mind an understanding of when a neuron fires. If you have neuron fires, they're not thinking about all the steps, but it's all there. That's what we call true understanding. You have a nuanced, um, multi-level understanding of something. And I think that all too often in the optimization space, we say, "Hey, this red light's gonna give you better skin. It's gonna improve your mitochondria." And people of course, just want those effects. But if people are feeling overwhelmed, they should think, "Well, what's better, red light or GHK copper?" I would say, "Well, what's the best source of, of red light? It's the sun minus UV. When does that happen? When the sun is low in the sky. Boom. You got the best red light therapy-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... that you could ever get, minus UV for zero cost. Congratulations. You want a red light too? Cool. Be my guest. I own one. You might want one too, but just we're talking about long wavelength light minus UV, end of story. So it's not complicated, and I think the same is true in resistance training. Andy Galpin talks about this or exercise. There are only like five or six different adaptations. Better speed, better power, better, you know... I mean, you've added a seventh of like, like, you know, forearms, but for the rest of us, there are only six, and you can get that through CrossFit, you can get that through sets to failure. You can get more volume with near failure. Like once you understand something, you're in a position to make much better choices around it. And so my-- I'm actually wondering when to retire right now. I'm kind of thinking, "What's next?" And I have some ideas about where that's going, but I think
- 1:15:41 – 1:20:38
Do We Already Have the Tools to Be Healthy?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
we, in 2026, right, heading into 2027, I think we pretty well understand the principles of great mental health, physical health, and performance. There'll be more peptides, there'll be more devices. I think devices and pharmacology are really gonna change the game. AI's gonna change the game, but I think we're there.
- CWChris Williamson
The fundamental, the physics of the system.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It-- Pranayama breathing or Wim Hof breathing? Hmm. How do you wanna feel? More alert? Inhale emphasized breathing, passive exhales. You wanna feel calm? How should you do that? Exhale emphasized breathing, passive inhales.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
[inhales and exhales] Longer exhale relative to inhale, more calm. Why? We know all the mechanisms. So the naming, this, uh, and this probably scares some of my, you know, health colleagues, hopefully not, because no longer can people name things after themselves or give something a name that cloaks what you're trying to achieve. The reason I went Yoga Nidra: Non-Sleep Deep Rest-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and I, I have great respect for the yoga culture that developed this thousands of years ago, is non-sleep deep rest is the goal. What does it involve? Exhale emphasized breathing to slow the heart rate down, shifting the mind from thinking, doing, and f- and planning to pure sensation. Great. How do you do that? Present tethered awareness, long exhales, eyes closed. That gets you into a pseudo sleep that recovers some of your lost sleep.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Makes you better at sleeping at night, lowers cortisol, puts the brain into microstates of sleep, enhances learning. That's non-sleep deep rest in a nutshell. Now, why the book has to be so long, given I can just kind of cut it down to a nutshell, that's a different story. But principles are what allow a field to say, "You know what? We got it."
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Doesn't mean the stuff isn't important. Means we got it, we're moving on. We understand the action potential.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
We understand plasticity. We understand getting over trauma. The tools still need work, but we understand how to get to sleep. We understand how to be focused. We-- And so people, I think, I'm hoping will appreciate that we are here now. I didn't podcast and do all this for the last six, seven years so that I could be in the exact same place and regurgitate the same things.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I'm like, "Here you go. This is my thesis. This is my thesis. This is my graduate thesis." My graduate thesis, like, you know, p- some people say there's a little bit of like pigeon chesting, but I didn't publish like two papers in some b- you know, red, red ribbon journal. We published close to eight first author papers in awesome journals, some in apex journals. I could have graduated way earlier. I did it because I wanted to close a story in a field We didn't get everything, but I wanted to get to the point where that field didn't make sense to work on anymore.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It was like, "We're done. We did it." Like, like, "What are we doing?" Like, what... "I don't wanna stay in high school. I wanna graduate." So it's now time, this is my thesis. I'm done. I think it's, I believe it's of real value. I'm onto the next thing. And if people wanna quibble about the details, I'm all ears. I'm happy to talk about it, um, or even the big things. But it's not like I'm done, it's not important. It's like we got it. Let's move to the next level. And I want you to do this too. I talked to Lex the other day on the phone. You know, everyone's like, "Where's Lex? Haven't heard..." Lex is building up the next big move. I can't talk about it, but it's awesome. And I'm like, he's so brave, and I'm like, "F, yes." You're always on the next thing. You know, Rick's always on the next thing. You know, and it's so cool. Like, it's like we gotta keep going. We can't stay back there.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Can't stay back there. That's what happened in the 1960s and '70s is these people got, went down the rabbit holes. They took too many psychedelics thinking psychedelics were the answer, and a lot of them lost their minds. Or they did too much somatic therapy and they forgot that the mind, that actually you don't store emotions in the body. I'm sorry, folks, you store them in your brain, and the body represents them. Turns out we've now moved on. Body and brain are important.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So I think it's time we move to the next step.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 1:20:38 – 1:30:12
Is This the Ultimate Detox Protocol For Microplastics?
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a good test for microplastics, and what is the best detox protocol that you're aware of at the moment for microplastics?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Detox as opposed to limiting the ones coming in?
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, 'cause we know where they are, right? They're pretty much everywhere. Um, uh, but glass better than plastic and so on. Um, the data on sweating are decent, right? They're not gonna purge them completely.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
But they're, but they're pretty decent. Um, so sauna.
- CWChris Williamson
So sauna.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Sauna. Living in Texas, running outside. I mean, heat is heat, right? So, you know, I was kind of joking this morning on a press call. You know, if you're standing outside in Texas in the middle of the day, like, you're getting some deliberate heat exposure or non-deliberate heat exposure. It's the same. Heat is heat.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, so that definitely helps. You know, there's this idea that, uh, sulforaphane, which is in cruciferous vegetables, might be able to bind some of it and you can purge some of it.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that, uh, ar- arterosol? Is that what it's called?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I think it's sulforaphane. Um, you can take concentrated sulforaphane. You know, Rhonda Patrick-
- CWChris Williamson
That's the broccoli, broccoli, broccoli.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, Rhonda's very bullish on this. I, um, I don't take sulforaphane. Um, I do try and sauna-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... 'cause it has other benefits, a, a few times a week. Um, and I just think more and more companies that can their beverages are gonna start, you know, looking... A lot of canned beverages do and a lot of canned beverages don't have BPA-
- CWChris Williamson
Rhonda put me in touch with a company for Neutonic who, uh, have a different, uh, wrapper on the inside, 'cause all of these cans-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... it's not tin.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It's the plastic lining.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But there's a, a, an organic biodegradable, uh, liner that you can get, so we're looking into that. It's gonna take forever.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. I mean, the stuff is everywhere. There's, um, the particulate from tires. There's the clothing thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
In Europe actually-
- CWChris Williamson
Your dryer, whether your dryer's venting inside is like-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You can buy a better trap for, uh, some of the microfibers. I'll be honest, I don't, I don't do those things. Um, I'm conscious of trying to not put heated food in plastic.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Whenever I order-
- 1:30:12 – 1:34:18
The Devastating Toxin Exposure On 9/11
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
9/11, um, I'd been on the East Coast. So I'm 51 years old, so, um, I remember this r- very clearly. I'd been on the East Coast at a, an amazing place on the North Shore, Long Island, called Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. This is sort of summer camp for scientists where they go to learn molecular biology. You take courses, and it actually operates all year long as, uh, one of the premier laboratories in the world. Are you telling me there's something on my face?
- CWChris Williamson
No, no, no, no.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, okay.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm just gra- I'm just grinning about this fucking summer camp for nerds.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
It's all right.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, it was a great time. So I was a student in, there at Cold Spring Harbor. I was a, um, a TA, I was a, a t- educator, and I was a course director for, for many years. Um, and then I passed the course off onto, you know, people who were better equipped to do that at that time. Um, but we had gone to this course and then flown back, right? A number of us had flown back, and some people were still in the process of going back. So I, I remember that day very well. I also remember, uh, two years later, 'cause the course was every other year, going back to this course on, in Long Island, and there's this day off where half of the students would just recover from their hangovers. There was a lot of drinking back then, not so much at these courses anymore. But you... And took the Long Island Rail Road into the city and went to the 9/11 site. So it was a memorial/site because it was still, they were still excavating the site.
- CWChris Williamson
What date was this?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
What day?
- CWChris Williamson
Date.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, this would've been summer of... Okay, so two years after 9/11, so it'd be 2003.
- CWChris Williamson
And they still hadn't finished?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, no, no. I mean, this was a giant... I mean, I think it's hard for people to conceive. Like, you see the towers in the photos, and they're so huge, but the footprint of these towers was just enormous.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You know, multiple city blocks long in it, you know. And there was just, all there was was a, like a, you know, a, a wooden gate. You could walk around the site. There were pictures everywhere, obviously, and a lot of inscribings and some photos and things of that sort, and there were people working the site.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You know, construction workers working it. Many of them, no masks. You know, and then you've got all these tourists, you know, we were essentially tourists, um, reading the, the stuff on the wall, walking around. No doubt everyone was inhaling tons of whatever was in, in there, jet fuel, particulate, et cetera. But the people that got there first, I mean, I can't even imagine, um, what the firefighters and others were exposed to.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I did hear an interesting story that one of the companies that was housed in those buildings was led by somebody who had some former military training, do you know about this?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Who had been there for the first bomb, bombing of the, the World Trade Center-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm, mm-hmm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and had run drills for his entire company, insisted on drills going into it, and all but, I think, 11 of the, of the people in, for that company got out. So they were l- they would run these drills about how to, you know, s- single or double file out, out of the stairways. I don't know the partic- uh, the particulars of this. Um, but it turns out there were people who were very concerned about this going in for a number of years.
- CWChris Williamson
Who were so prepared that they were-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And that increased survival. Now, you don't, I don't know where they were re- you know, which, which level, et cetera, but I mean, that was a, that was a huge game changer. And yes, there were videos online at that time, um, so different 'cause there wasn't social media, of people, uh, some places in the world, you know, quote unquote, "celebrating." But I would say the vast majority of media that you saw, the vast majority of what was online was just people either in shock or, um, in, in anger-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and just-
- CWChris Williamson
And appalled
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and surprise. A, a lot of people in the United States at that time didn't know where Afghanistan was. They didn't, they didn't know what Afghanistan was.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- 1:34:18 – 1:43:12
How Dangerous Are Nicotine Pouches?
- CWChris Williamson
You mentioned nicotine earlier on.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm seeing pouches everywhere. What's your opinion on nicotine and pouches?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Same... Look, I consume caffeine every day. I love caffeine. Nicotine is sort of similar, although n- caffeine is safer obviously. It can even improve health. Nicotine will definitely make you feel alert and calm, unlike other stimulants, which is a very unique state that's great for learning, right? Sets you up for learning. Doesn't let you learn, but it... So, excuse me, doesn't make you learn, but it lets you learn. Raises blood pressure, highly addictive, and, and here's the thing people don't realize, if you take three to six milligram pouches multiple times per day, it's not gonna have a cognitive enhancing effect. It's just rescuing the deficit from nicotine withdrawal.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Like, if you don't drink the caffeine for two days, you're not gonna feel good. You drink caffeine, you'll feel good. It's bringing you back to baseline.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay? So if you want nicotine to be a performance aid, you use it occasionally, meaning-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... you know, three to six milligrams once or twice, total twice per week maximum.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
But how many people do you know that are taking-
- CWChris Williamson
To not develop a dependency
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... or just not do it very often, and then it does something. I mean, this is how I feel about a lot of energy drinks. I love them, but I'll take them when I really wanna dial in, really wanna... Like, I, I schlep last night, but not quite as much as I would've liked. I'm, like, time shifted and, and so on. Um, so this morning I drank one of yours and one of, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Derek's
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... Derek's.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, and that's a lot.
- CWChris Williamson
The old, the old, the old twin turbo.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, very good.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
The twin turbo and, and that's a lot, but you know, I, I thought we had a pretty good workout.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you performed well.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, the previous, uh, mode of delivery was smoking, and then we moved on to vaping pretty quickly, and vaping became massive.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Like, talk about the history of this. Humans have found a way to get their nicotine.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Smoking, eh, causes cancer. Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, not good.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Dipping, snuffing, eh, not good, cancers. Okay, oral nicotine... Oh, vaping, eh. Turns out it's not good for us. Really not good. The chemicals associated with it, probably a bit safer than smoking But this is really wild. The behavioral data say because you can do it anywhere pretty much, people are doing far more of it. They're taking in far more nicotine and they're coming now having issues, lung issues and issues related to nicotine withdrawal.
- 1:43:12 – 1:44:41
The Spiciest Protocols That Didn’t Make the Book
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
you.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the spiciest protocols that you weren't able to put in the book? What was the stuff that you wish that you could have-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay
- CWChris Williamson
... got clearance on?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Right. So the book is everything I'm certain about, that we understand the mechanisms for, and that I know work, not just because I experienced that, but because many, many people have, and we have great data to support it. Like, everything's substantiated. There's only one protocol that's a little bit out there, and I said, "This is kind of out there. We have a little bit of data, not a, not a ton, but here's, here's why I'm including it, and I think you might wanna try this 'cause it can really help you fall asleep when we talk about this." Um, but we know w- why it ought to work. Um, I don't talk about psychedelics, although I do fit them into a framework along plasticity and learning, and so they make sense of when they might, might be the appropriate tool. I don't talk about hormone therapies, and I don't talk about peptides.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
In part because the data are still coming, and also because there'll likely be a second book. Although, you know, if you write a book like this long with, you know, thousands of references and, you know, it, it can damage relationships in your life. [chuckles] People have been super understanding. This book basically acted as a filter in my, in my own life for like who really loves me. [chuckles]
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So, um, but look, it's big, but it also operates as a doorstop.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
A weapon.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I was gonna say.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
If you're feeling not quite tall enough at the table, you can sit on it at Thanksgiving.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep, yep. Yep, very good.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And um, and as I joke, if nothing else, it'll cure insomnia.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm, very nice. Okay.
- 1:44:41 – 1:55:21
Can These Protocols Be Scientifically Proven?
- CWChris Williamson
What are some protocols that you fully believe in but you can't scientifically prove?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Ooh. That's really good. Um, okay. Yeah. Let's just be blunt here. Um, but these would be things that aren't in the, in the book, right? Okay, 'cause everything there is substantiated, uh, by mechanism and description. Um, so I've had some wild experiences with a couple of peptides that most people-- some people have heard about. Um, you know, I don't have shoulder pain. I've never had shoulder pain. But about three, four months ago, I made the decision. I was like, "You know, I should start doing some heavy pressing again." I, I do my dips, I do my overhead presses. I should start doing some like... I don't like flat benching, so I do some low incline pressing. And after about three months, two, three months, I started getting some shoulder pains. I started doing some external rotation work, doing... I'm like, "This thing isn't going away. Like, what is this? Maybe I need to back off." And it's like, you know what? Like, it's pretty bad. I'm gonna just put two injections of BPC in there. So two injections of maybe 100 or 200 micrograms, tiny amounts, right? Um, gone. History. Can't find the pain. It's gone. Now, is it placebo? I don't know. Maybe it is. I mean, I knew what I was injecting. A better experiment would've been somebody, you know, traded out pl- uh, saline, and I go, "Oh, my..." You know? That didn't happen. Um, that's pretty incredible. The animal data are really impressive, and I know a number of people with pets, dogs in particular, who've been injecting their animals with BPC 'cause their dogs are getting older.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Uh, I don't wanna name names here 'cause it's... I haven't cleared it with them. But, um, they have dogs that either had spinal strokes or just aged and were limping and not doing well, and they asked, you know, "Does this stuff work in animals?" I'm like, "All the data are on animals." [chuckles]
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You know? Um, so mouse and rat owners, like your, your mice and rats will live-
- CWChris Williamson
If you rupture the attendant, the, the Achilles tendon.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Exactly, 'cause there are a lot of data on that. Um, but I know a lot of people now, um, injecting their dogs, aged dogs, and saying, "Oh my goodness, this is crazy." Like, they're more mobile, et cetera. And it's hard to give the placebo argument there. I mean, you could say that the owners are doing other things, like they're also massaging-
- CWChris Williamson
Pet
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... a bit more care. They didn't do the saline control, you know? But kinda hard to explain it away.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
So-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So the other one is pinealon. Um, pinealon is, ironically, is a peptide that doesn't come from the pineal, comes from brain tissue. Epitalon comes from the pineal. Who names this stuff? It's like, it's insane. But, um, I've experimented with pinealon every third or fourth night, taking about, about a, you know, uh, tenth of an IU. And, um, in those nights, those nights I get anywhere from two and a half to three hours of REM sleep. That's a lot of REM sleep inside of six to seven hours. Inside of six hours, you're kind of cheating the system because like, wow, I... Like normally I'd have to get into my last third of sleep, which for me is seven or eight hours, in order to, um, total, in order to get that REM enriched phase, which always comes at the end of the night. But what's h- what's so wild is that on the subsequent nights, I also experience this massive REM increase.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
So it's... I've cut that back to doing it once a week or at once every ten days and still getting the same effect. The only downside for me is that the next day I can feel not foggy, but I feel like it's harder to become fully alert.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I can still focus, but, you know.
- CWChris Williamson
A little bit of sleep inertia maybe.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And I know people who are taking it in the daytime because they like being in this kind of shallow plane of sleep-wake-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... for cognitive work. That's not me. But, um, you know, there's talk about... I don't... You know, well, I mean, rumors, whatever. There's talk about people at tech companies who are like, "Oh yeah, if you're gonna do something for, you know, 12 hours that's like really laborious, maybe this is good." I don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Mm.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, so that's been interesting. Um- You know, I think there's a lot of excitement nowadays about growth hormone secretagogues, things like tesamorelin, upramorelin-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... CJC. I'm not a fan. They've always nuked my REM sleep. They've always spiked my PSA. I, I just, for me, they don't, they don't tend to work. Um, I am curious about, but I, I don't think I'm old enough yet to really embark on a, um, somatotope growth hormone experiment, but the clinical trial, like exploring low-dose growth hormone for people-
- CWChris Williamson
That would be exogenous, right? Somatotope
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... that would be exogenous.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Um, that's intriguing to me, but there, there are data.
- 1:55:21 – 2:03:25
Are Golden Retrievers the Ultimate Life Hack?
- CWChris Williamson
... w- what-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Well, how do you respond when people say, um, they go, "Oh my goodness," like, "Here you are looking for this next thing and the thing you can do," and they, uh, and they just say, "Chris, what you really need to do is just get married and have a couple kids"-
- CWChris Williamson
I agree
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... and that will be the psychedelic experience.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I, I agree.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I say yes, plus, plus two golden retrievers. I agree, and I say yes. But they're not, uh, preaching to the choir.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You said two girls and retrievers?
- CWChris Williamson
Golden retrievers.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Golden retrievers.
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, I... That's a Freudian slip from you.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
No, it's a Freudian slip from you.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I said fucking golden retriever. People can rewind the tape. Uh, yeah, I, I completely agree. I completely, I completely agree on that, and, um, I, I've said this before. Like, I'm the most ardent guy-without-kids supporter and ambassador for guys just starting a fucking family, and, and it's not for me to say, "Hey, I want you to stop your ambition," and the same for women, too. Like, you stop your socioeconomic climb and doing all this stuff. Just like so many of the things that I see people doing, you, you know, young people and people that are getting into more middle age are like surrogate families. It's like the, the business that you're building-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... the fervor with which you're going after this political party or this new sort of social campaign or this, like, obsessive g- uh, hobby that you've got or, you know, trying to become wealthy or whatever. A lot of that to me looks and feels like this is the energy that you would be putting-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... into a family, especially the existential energy that you've got, and I'm like, uh-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm
- CWChris Williamson
... I, I think a lot of your, "I don't really know what my purpose is. I don't feel like-"
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... "I'm contributing more b- largely to the world," all of these questions that people have, like, "Why am I here?" It's like, well, a lot of this I think has kind of been solved throughout time, which is like you, you do the golden retriever thing and the family thing. Like, golden retrievers do come first. That is an important caveat for me. Um-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Interesting choice of breed.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, dude, I just want an animal that can't... Th- th- there is no danger of it competing with me cognitively, so I want something that's both cuddly and stupid. Uh, so I would-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Golden retrievers are not all stupid
- CWChris Williamson
... I'm gonna br-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
They're-
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna try and find a breed of golden retriever which is particularly fluffy and stupid.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Just find a dog with a really flat head and you're halfway there.
- CWChris Williamson
A single-digit IQ golden retriever would be lovely for me.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I mean, if you think about the mastiff breeds, they're all very sweet, and they have flat heads, and they look at you like, you know?
- 2:03:25 – 2:09:20
Why Being Admired by Your Heroes Hits Different
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I've been asking you the questions. This feels good. I, I didn't tell you that the last page of the book is where I do therapy on you. No, I'm just kidding. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck. Jesus Christ
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... no, but can I, can I read my acknowledgement to you?
- CWChris Williamson
Absolutely.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
'Cause I, I, I-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. I didn't even, I didn't even get to that bit.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh.
- CWChris Williamson
Wherever the fuck it is.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. I, I acknowledge you, uh, here. Um, [humming] eh, uh, here we go. So it's brief because the acknowledgments are-
- CWChris Williamson
Five pages long [chuckles]
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I think there's eight pages long of it. But I figure if you're gonna do something, you just do it, so I just put a bunch of names. Um, I put you, uh, Chris Williamson, for your friendship and for breathing so much life into the podcast and what I refer to as the everyone sphere, because I don't think you're about the manosphere, I think you're about the human sphere, but human sphere sounded weird, so I said everyone sphere. So, uh, I, I mean it. You breathe so much life into this thing. Like, I remember first seeing you online and then you on Rogan and I was, you know, and I'm not a skeptic, I always want the best, and I thought, "Well, who is this guy with this British accent?" And like, so, you know, and, "Why are the women in my life asking me if he's single?" [chuckles] Um, and um, and I go, "Well, this guy is really smart. He's really nuanced, and he seems like a really cool guy." And you totally exceeded expectations on all those things.
- CWChris Williamson
Thanks.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And it's awesome to just see what you're doing. And also, day or night, you're available for an emergency or, or an adventure call.
- CWChris Williamson
That, that is true.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You'll get to the gym early on jet lag. You'll, um... And you've been super honest and vulnerable in your online and in our, in y- that career and relationship with your audience, but also just one-on-one. Uh, you know, there, um, for anyone that wonders, Chris is who he appears to be on the internet, which is really-
- CWChris Williamson
For better or for worse, yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
No, for better, man. For better. For better. Like, it's a, it's an honor to have you as a friend.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you too, man.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
You're a great friend, and I, I feel very blessed.
- CWChris Williamson
It, uh, it is, it is really cool. You know, I, I, I think one of the almost inarguable great parts of life is becoming respected and admired by people that you respect and admire.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, it's one of the coolest things that you can do. And my back is also hurting, so I'm trying to self-massage at the same time.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It is hurting.
- CWChris Williamson
We did neck training this morning.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
We did a few face pulls.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. This is sounding terrible. We-- Jeff Cavalier has an exercise called face pulls. [chuckles]
- CWChris Williamson
Face pulls. We did that some-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
But we did some neck training because, uh, as we both know, having a, the wrong head placed, uh, like a-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- 2:09:20 – 2:25:53
VO2 Max vs Zone 2: Which Matters More?
- CWChris Williamson
Speaking of engine, I texted you about this last week. What is happening with the VO2 max versus Zone 2 debate? Because when I was thinking more deeply about, like, I'm getting a little bit older, I should pay, pay attention to my cardio, respiratory fitness, and stuff like that, low and slow was like everything that was sexy.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, yeah. You sent me that Jeffrey Dahmer video.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you... It wasn't a fucking Jeffrey Dahmer video.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
He sent me a video of a guy talking about this. It was a very good video, and my first thought was the guy looks like Jeffrey Dahmer, which made it a little hard to listen, to watch. So I just sent it to you.
- CWChris Williamson
You could've just listened and said. That would've been good. What's happening with VO2 max versus Zone 2 debate at the moment in your opinion? 'Cause for a long time it was focused exclusively on low and slow. Now it seems like the VO2 more high intensity Norwegian 4x4 is increasingly important.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I think the word to delete there is exclusively. I think my read of the data is you need some volume of cardio training, uh, to get that, quote-unquote, "aerobic base" that can be very beneficial. I mean, the, the sorts of adaptations that come from doing 45 to 60 minutes of, of long and slow, we're not talking walking, but Zone 2, 3-ish. I don't ever think of about Zone 2. I think about upper Zone 2, Zone 3, around there, where you just barely can continue without... You know, you could tr- if you tried to speak you would, you would have to pause a few times, as opposed to just super easy. I mean, you are getting build up of more capillary networks, um, you know, which has a lot of positive downstream consequences. You're getting all sorts of enrichment of the mitochondrial system and the car- and genuine enrichment of the cardiovascular system. But I think doing that once a week, so I make it a point to do a long slow jog, so 45 to 60 minutes or so once a week. Or a ruck for... Usually if I hike I'm going for longer than an hour, um, with some weight or something like that. It's often social with somebody. Um, and then once a week I'll do the "I feel like I'm gonna die" HIIT workout, which for me is the Airdyne bike.
- CWChris Williamson
It's the best. I thought the best.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
20 on, 10 off, eight rounds, and by the seventh round you're just, like, cursing everybody and yourself, and you get off that thing, you feel so good. You probably cough a few times 'cause you're just, like, breathing that hard. And I actually just, I do the crude measurement of heart rate, like 220 minus my age, and then figure out, like, what my heart rate is a perce- a percentage of that max heart rate, right? So you would get max... So I'll hit, like, 85, 90% of-
- CWChris Williamson
Are you wearing a chest strap for some reason?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I don't. So I talk about this in the book, like-
- CWChris Williamson
You're not fucking fingering your heart rate, are you?
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
To y- your choice of language, man.
- CWChris Williamson
No.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Um, you with your, your, your-
- CWChris Williamson
Britishisms
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
... look, I get it. You want two wives and a golden retriever, you said that, and you're fingering your heart rate. I just put my fingers on my neck and record my pulse or I just... and I'm looking at a stopwatch.
- CWChris Williamson
It's so absurdly low tech.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And I do that for 30 seconds, and then I double it, and I'm probably off by, you know, plus or, or minus, you know, five beats. But I'm, you know, in the ballpark. And-
- CWChris Williamson
You're like fucking Schrödinger's podcaster. You're someone who is both very forward-thinking, like technologically prepared, e- excited about AI, and also using like a fucking sundial and your fingers to work out what your-
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
It's so funny. I, I... my girlfriend had a birthday recently and she, we w- we, I got her this, like, compass sundial, which is so cool. I love primitive and very advanced tools.
- CWChris Williamson
And I look at you, I do think primitive and advanced.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, primitive and adv- thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. [laughs]
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
I bookend... Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
That's true.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
And not a lot in the middle.
- CWChris Williamson
You're the barbell. You are the barbell of a human. Yeah.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Thank you. Actually, I, I, I'll, I'll take that. Uh, there's a, a, a great song called "Streetwise Professor" that I love, um, which was referring to somebody else. Um, but, uh, um, yeah, sort of like a barbarian, um, uh, intellectual type.
- CWChris Williamson
Slightly elevated.
- AHDr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Yeah, something like that.
Episode duration: 2:32:35
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Transcript of episode 8son5OkbC90
